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Modernism the Morning After Perelman, Bob Modernism the Morning After Perelman, Bob Published by The University of Alabama Press Perelman, Bob. Modernism the Morning After. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2017. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51284 Access provided by University Of Pennsylvania (13 Aug 2018 16:15 GMT) 7 Familiar Williams “But that sounds just like my husband! . You mean to stand there and tell me that that’s a poem?’’—a teacher enrolled in a poetry workshop in the 1970s has just been introduced to what many readers will recognize as the erstwhile kitchen- table note William Carlos Williams scrawled to his wife, Flossie. It has become one of Williams’s most familiar poems. First, the confession: This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox (WCW I, 372) The sec ond stanza displays a bit of sympathy for the wronged party, who was “probably / saving” the plums “for breakfast.” The final stanza starts with a bare- bones apology: “Forgive me,” but then shifts to a recollection of the guilty plea- sure: “they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold.”1 The teacher’s reaction to the poem is a small moment situated well out side the circles of criti cal expertise, but it makes a telling emblem of the current situa- tion of Williams in the twenty- first century. The anecdote appears in an essay concerned with teaching poetry in the schools (Zavatsky); it involves a reader who is neither poet nor critic, and her reaction is out of sync with the standard criti cal histories. But this is appropriate for Williams, who himself was out of sync with the reigning paradigms of his day. He remains anomalous with regard to contemporary poetic expectations, though this is masked by his ubiquitous influence on poets and his presence in anthologies and on syllabi. In accounts of Ameri can poetry Williams is a basic marker of the development of mod- ernism, of the avant-ga rde, and of a democratic art of everyday speech. How- 70 • Chapter 7 ever, while he has become important to each of these literary chronologies, he fits awkwardly into them all. The imagery from one of his own typically off-t he- cuff critic al remarks can be applied to his current reception: “Forcing twentieth- century America into a sonnet—gosh, how I hate sonnets—is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs off to make him fit” (Wagner, 30). The teacher in our opening anecdote is not thinking in terms of literary- histori cal categories, but she is, in a way, reinventing them, reinscribed in a demo- cratic (unprofessional) context: to her, the poem seems scandalously unpoetic, simply a scrap of real life masquerading as art. Such a reaction could put us in mind of earlier, more notable shocks. Time magazine, reviewing The Waste Land (1922) in its initial issue, quoted the last eight lines as if they were self-e vident nonsense and concluded, “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax.”2 If we emphasize the origin of “This Is Just To Say” as a kitchen- table note, the closer parallel might be a Duchamp readymade, where a snow shovel, bottle rack, or, most famously and provocatively in the case of Fountain (1917), an upside- down urinal was exhibited as art. A strict chronological perspective would disallow such comparisons. The mini malism and undisguised everydayness of “This Is Just To Say” might, in 1970, have surprised a neophyte like the teacher, but even at its publication in 1934 it would have looked, to a knowledgeable reader of the day, merely “mod- ern” (unrhymed, unpunctuated vers libre). By 1970, the poem had become a lit- erary chestnut. Kenneth Koch’s affectionate parody, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams,” published ten years before in The New Ameri can Po- etry (1960), assumes the Williams poem as an obvious reference, otherwise Koch’s violent humor loses much of its bite: “We laughed at the hollyhocks together / and then I sprayed them with lye. / Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing” (Koch, 135). The poem is currently being used as a writing prompt for eighth- graders.3 Naive as the teacher’s reaction must seem from an informed perspective, it shows us a quality of Williams’s work that has affected its reception for many decades: its unstable mix of the ordinary and the new. If we attend carefully to what the teacher says—and Williams is the poet who has been crucial in show- ing how everyday speech can be a primary material for poetry—we will find more than some dim echo of avant- garde or modernist impacts. In fact, what first strikes her about the poem is its utter familiarity: “But that sounds just like my husband!” For her, the shock of the new arises reflexively from what we might term the shock of the familiar. In the pedagogical context in which the anecdote appears, the teacher is no longer a half century behind the times. Rather, she becomes a fig ure of the ex- pansive future of Williams’s work: her reaction in the 1970 workshop remains a teachable moment on the twenty-fir st- century website of the Academy of Ameri- Familiar Williams • 71 can Poets. A myriad of similar events has enabled Williams to outflank the larger reputations that, during his writing life, were always ahead of him. A laggard according to modernist calendars, Williams’s staying power is better measured in terms of social breadth rather than via tropes of aesthetic advance. It par- ticipates in multiple chronologies, making its relation to literary history labile. That “It Is Just To Say” can be a writing prompt for eighth- graders is not a sign of backwardness. Far from it: eighth- graders are not easy to reach. This does not make the work, in any sense, timeless. Often the ever-w idening gap of actual years is quite clear: as in the widely taught “The Young House- wife” (1916). The questions that poem raises about male voyeurism are vivid in the twenty- first century, but the following lines, which present the object of the doctor’s fantasy coming into actual view, also present a puzzle to the contempo- rary reader: “Then again she comes to the curb / to call the ice- man, fish- man, and stands / shy, uncorseted” (WCW I, 57). What were corsets, ice-m en, and fish- men at the moment the doctor-p oet was driving by? Many things, clearly; but contemporary readers will have only a fuzzy sense of them. Williams’s suc- cess in addressing his present with appropriate poetic quickness remains appar- ent, but it is also clear that the poem is a century old. The poetic horizon that Williams fto en evokes—a primal opposition between a young United States and an adult Europe, pitting a jejune chaos against a cul- ture of varied sophistication—is now a dated trope twice over, since it is prior to both Ameri can midcentury hegemony and the post- Vietnam phase of Ameri- can decline. And for all of Williams’s complaints about being stuck in New Jersey, we should remember that New York City was close, and that Williams kept up assiduously with the artists and poets, from Stieglitz and Duchamp to Pollock, Loy, Freytag- Loringhoven, and Ginsberg. In addition, as a doctor with a full- time general practice, he had access to a greater variety of people, classes, and types of events than any other Ameri can poet. One example: “The girl who comes to me breathless, staggering into my office, in her underwear a still living -in fant, making me lock her mother out of the room” (Autobiography, 361). This is not meant as a dramatic climax; it is mentioned as part of the daily routine. Williams’s combination of wide social experience and artistic sophistication is, in hindsight, remarkable. But the narrative that mattered to Williams involved a frustrating pursuit of those who, he felt, were ahead of him: Pound and Eliot, primarily—though Duchamp merits mention here as well. Late in life Williams said, “Before meet- ing Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D.” (IW, 5). From their meeting as teenagers, Pound—younger, confident, and knowledgeable—assumed the role of teacher, a pattern which was to continue for half a century. Williams soon saw through some of Pound’s intellectual pretentions: in Kora Williams outs Pound, so to speak, by quoting him as saying, “It is not necessary . to read everything in a 72 • Chapter 7 book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everyone I said so” (IM, 10). Nevertheless, Williams remained daunted. Three decades later inPaterson he quotes pedagogic letters that he was still receiving from Pound: “Read all the Gk tragedies in / Loeb.—plus Frobenius, plus Gesell” (138). Williams made irregular progress toward emancipating himself, declaring in one of his last poems, “To My Friend Ezra Pound” (1956), “Your English / is not specific enough / As a writer of poems you show yourself to be inept not to say / usurious” (WCW II, 434)—the last word a knowing thrust naming the cardinal sin in Pound’s po- etic politico- theology. Williams was not a fig ure like Eliot, Pound, or Duchamp, who could declare, authoritatively, what mattered and what did not. This authority was effected by their creative work but just as significantly by their criti cal dicta: Duchamp’s re- jection of what he termed “retinal art”; Pound’s division of poetry into melo- poeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia (Pound, ABC, 63); Eliot’s pronouncement that Joyce’s “mythical method” was something that “others must pursue after him” (Eliot, Selected Prose, 178–80), or that “poetry in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult” (65).
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