March the 4th marks the date of the great poet William Carlos Williams‘ death
“On the morning of March 4, 1963, Flossie, his wife, tried to awaken Williams in his room at approximately 8:30 and found her husband, lifeless in bed, facing the wall. Her pediatrician son, Dr. Bill Williams, confirmed the finding, death at 79 attributed to “cerebrovascular thrombosis.”
We honor Williams both on the anniversary of his birth and on the anniversary of his death here on the Allen Ginsberg Project.
Today, Allen’s extended note on Williams for the 1983 volume – William Carlos Williams – Man and Poet (edited by Carroll Terrell) – it also appears in Allen’s Deliberate Prose – Selected Essays 1952-1995. The essay was actually written in the Fall of 1976
Williams in a World of Objects
Accuracy. Williams’ accuracy. The phrase “clamp your mind down on objects” is his. The phrase “No ideas but in things” is his. It means “no general ideas in your poetry”. Don’t put out amy abstract ideas about things, but present the things themselves that give you the ideas. Let’s try and understand what Williams is trying to say and then we’ll propose a different theory. Here are three lines from “Danse Russe” – “And the sun is a flame-white disc/in silken mists/above shining trees” – Now he is being very fair there. He just telling you what you can see. He’s not laying a trip on you about the sun in general.Here he puts your eyes on the sun in one specific kind of day so you can see it with your own eyes. He is saying, “just put down the details of the things you see in front of you”. If you can’t begin there, what good are any ideas.Begin with what the sense offers. If you can’t do that, you’ll have to go to astronomy.But astronomy is based on observations of some kind.
Suppose a dying man! If you can’t see the dying man in front of you , you can’t see what is wrong with your behavior towards him. Here is not a change of ideas, it’s a change of directive stance. Once understood, Williams’ phrase becomes a basic building block, for a system maybe, or a reference point for a complete system in itself or usable with other systems.But until the phrase (“no ideas but in things”) is understood in itself, there is no common ground to begin with. In the lines from the poem. what’s the one common ground we begin with? We’ve got the sun, an orange ball going down over the maple tree, or the sun just as we see it. How artfully can we describe what we see, so that it is common ground, where everybody is in the same place, so that one can use it like a reference point. It may be fictional but it is the common ground. If we don’t have any reference point in the physical world, then what have we got? Here’s one common reference point at least – everyone’s breathing, That’ s where Buddhism starts – at thane place and moves from there. Starts at one place that everybody can locate – the tip of the nose where everybody is breathing in and out. Start close to the nose. That is a reality where everybody is or can be – we must begin where we are.
Williams got into this because reality had become so confusing in the twentieth-century, and poetry had got so freaked out that it was strange – he didn’t know what poetry was! But he knew where his nose was and could begin there. He gave up all ideas (meaning abstractions) and started with things themselves.Naturally, everybody sees things differently – The word is not The Thing. The word “word”, a concept in itself, is an abstraction, an idea. The entire world is fictional.”Words themselves are ideas” – There is a little double-dealing in that phrase. But everyone can come down to the same place and begin there – the one place where everybody can be. There is only one place where everybody can be.
The question is, Where are we going to begin? (The answer is) let’s begin with what we can see in front of us. Williams was looking for a place where everybody could begin together in poetry because everything was new – a new continent, newly discovered, newly invaded with European ideas plastered all over it. He was trying to clean up the slate and start all over again.That’s why he wrote a book called In The American Grain, trying to reach American history, to see what fresh planet we’d come upon. “The natural object is always the adequate symbol’.That’s (Ezra) Pound‘s way of saying the same thing -“Don’t bother with abstractions”. In other words, no poetry but in “for instances”, no ideas but in things. He would say you could include feelings, but you’d have to deal with them as observed things and not get lost. It is very similar to the process of meditation – paying attention to the breaths, wandering of into a daydream, and then becoming unconscious of theming moving into the daydream, of the breaths, and then you could describe the thought you had but you no longer are obsessed by it, or lost in it. Don’t lose perspective. There is always the home base to touch back on. He’s saying let’s fill with our attention the things that other people can see and fill with their attention. Then we can both check our consciousness, one against another, and see where we are, like triangulating the stars.
Here’s two short poems
“Goodnight” – “In brilliant gas light/I turn the kitchen spigot/and watch the water plash/into the clean white sink,/ On the grooved drain-board/to one side is/a glass filled with parsley -/crisped green./ Waiting/for the water to freshen -/I glance at the spotless floor -/a pair of rubber sandals/lie side by side/under the wall-table/all is in order for the night/ Waiting, with a glass in my hand -/three girls in crimson satin/pass close before me on/the murmurous background of/the crowded opera -/it is memory playing the clown-/three vaue, meaningless girls/full of smells and/the rustling sounds of/cloth rubbing on cloth and/little slippers on carpet -/high-school French/spoken in a loud voice!/ Parsley in a glass,/still and shining,/brings me back. I take a drink/and yawn deliciously./I am ready for bed.” He brings us through the whole process. The mundaneness is interesting, to me, because it sees so clearly that it becomes crisp in meaning ,still and shining. The water glass suddenly isa totemic object. It becomes a symbol of itself, of his investment in his attention n that object – it, becomes a symbol of itself also. Because he sees it so clearly, he notices what about the object that shines, what’s particular about the object that could be written down in a word – he sees the object without association. That’s characteristic of visionary moments – you get supernatural visions by giving up supernatural visions, just looking at what’s in front of you. You are not superimposing another idea or another image on the image that’s already there. The poem “Thursday” shows that he really is a Buddhist:
“I have had my dream – like others –/ and it has come to nothing, so that/ I remain now carelessly/ with feet planted on the ground/ and look up at the sky –/ feeling my clothes about me,/ the weight of my body in my shoes,/ the rim of my hat,/ air passing in and out at my nose/ – and decide to dream no more.”
When I discovered this poem, I realize its thematic Buddhism. the practice we were doing and the pragmatic practice had intersected and there was a common ground. Williams had arrived at the same place that everybody else was studying and got there early and on his own – it reconfirmed my feelings that he was some kind of a saint of perception.
This is a beginning – to understand the basic principle and then extend it as we have to.Well, you can be mindful of generalizations if you are mindful of the particulars out of which you draw “No ideas but in facts!”
II
Williams is the clearest and simplest and most direct when trying to tie the mind down, to bring the imagination down to earth again and put all of his intensity and all his energy into seeing what’s actually there, what anybody can see in the light of day – no imagination except what he’s conscious of as daydreams while looking directly at people, cars, bushes, horses, maple trees, or Rutherford, New Jersey. He’s a doctor. Let’s start with a couple of his early sketches:
“Late For Summer Weather” – “He has on/an old light grey Fedora/She a black beret. He a dirty sweater/ She an ind blue coat/ That fits her tight/ Grey flapping pants/ Red skirt and/ broken down black pumps/ Fat. Lost. Ambling/ nowhere through/ the upper town they kick/ their way/through heaps/ of fallen maple leaves/ still green – and/ crisp as dollar bills.Nothing to do. Hot cha!”
“Proletarian Portrait” – “A big young bareheaded woman/in an apron Her hair slicked back standing/on the street/ One stockinged foot toeing/the sidewalkHer shoe in her hand. Looking/ intently into it/ She pulls out the paper insole/ to find the nail/ That has been hurting her”
Willams was a friend of (Charles) Reznikoff’s. They were practicing the same poetics together, trying to get it to boil down to the direct presentations of the object that they were writing about with no excess words. They composed their poems out of the elements of natural speech, their own speech, as heard on the porch or in talk over the kitchen table. Poetry that would be identical to token conversation that you could actually hear as regular conversation and not recognize in as poetry at all unless you suddenly dug that there was something going on, curiously sharp and freshthat was smart people talking
Here’s the doctor maybe out on a call:
“The Young Housewife”
At ten a.m. the young housewife/ moves about in negligee behind/ the wooden walls of her husband’s house./I pass solitary in my car. Then again she comes to the curb/to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands/shy, uncorseted, tucking in/stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf./ The noiseless wheels of my car/rush with a crackling sound over/ >dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
So what’s the use of being so flat and prosaic, Or what’s the purpose of trying to make poetry out of the objects seen under the aspect of ordinary minds ? Generally we don’t see ordinary objects at all. We are filled with daydream fantasies so that we don’t see what is in front of us. We are not aware of what is close to the nose, and we don’t even appreciate what everyday tables and chairs have to offer in terms of service for food or a place to sit, in terms of the centuries of maturing that it took to give us a place for the food. Zeroing in on actuality with the ordinary mind and avoiding any thought of heaven, illumination – giving up any attempt to manipulate the universe to make it better than it is, but instead coming down to earth and being willing to relate to what is actually here without trying to change the universe or alter it from the one we can see, smell, taste, touch, hear, and think about. Williams’ work as a poet is very similar to Zen Buddhist mindfulness practice, because it clamps the mind down on objects and brings the practitioner into direct relations with whatever he can find in front of him, without satisfying some ego ambition to have something more princely or less painful than what already is.
Williams was good friends with extraordinary people – Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore. They all knew each other at the University of Pennsylvania, I believe. But Williams was a square. He always thought Pound was a little cranky and crazy. Williams was kind of naive, square but inside he was such a humane man. Since he learned to deal with what was around him, he learned to sympathize, empathize. His growth was totally self-made, totally natural. He had the idea of going in that direction very early ands just kept working at it.He had the idea (about poetry) and thought about working on it, like going through medical school. Going through poetry and developing his focus was just like going through medical school.He deliberately stayed at Rutherford, New Jersey, and wrote poetry about the local landscape, using local language. He wanted to be a provincial from the point of view of really being there where he was, really knowing his ground. He wanted to know his roots, know who the iceman and fishman were know the housewife – he wanted to know his town – his whole body in a sense. A strange idea – he might have got it from some literary sources like Guy de Maupassant, (John) Keats might have given him some hints.
He was dealing with actual birth rather than literary birth, actual eyes, hair, etc. He was someone no different from ourselves, actually, someone you don’t have to worry about pulling a fast metaphysical trick on you and declaring another universe.That’s the whole point – dealing with this universe. And that was a fantastic discovery – that you can actually make poetry by dealing with the universe instead of creating another one