Category Archives: Poetry and Poetics

Cruzando Fronteras

One of my projects this year has been organizing the tenth Biennial Conference of the Williams Carlos Williams Society at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez February 15–17 2024. The Biennial will focus on Williams’s Hispanic heritage, his indebtedness to the traditions of Puerto Rican, Peninsular and Colonial Spanish literatures, as well as issues of borders and translation in the broadest sense—linguistic, geographic, cultural—as well as Williams and the medical humanities, health, and culture.

Our keynote speakers will be Marta Aponte Alsina, author of La Muerte Feliz de William Carlos Williams, and Julio Marzan, author of The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams. The conference, free and open to the public, will include participation from local artists and writers, poetry readings in Spanish and English, as well as a tour of the city of Mayagüez—the birthplace of Williams’s mother, Raquel Héléna Rose Hoheb Williams, and the site of his uncle and namesake Carlos Hoheb’s medical practice.

I am grateful to the English and Humanities faculty at UPRM for their interest in Williams, and their many contributions to the planning process.

Perspective and Incongruity

Tending to the Imagination: Perspective and Incongruity in William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke

This talk is a process piece that appears on the Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society web page. I am including the presentation here to make visible (and to archive) the intellectual process that contributed to the 1997 essay I published in the William Carlos Williams Review, “‘no confusion—only difficulties’: William Carlos Williams’s Poetics of Apposition.” In addition, the argument about apposition in this talk is cited and discussed by Karen M. Cardazo in her article “Essaying Democracy: The Post/Modern Intertexts of Kingston, Rodriguez, and Williams” in the William Carlos Williams Review 27.1 (Spring 2007).

Mark C. Long

Presented at the Modern Language Association Conference
Toronto, December 1997

My purpose is to compare an approach to interpretation shared by Kenneth Burke and William Carlos Williams. The approach seeks an alternative to reductive oppositional strategies that are, as Burke puts it, “so ably suited to convincing the convinced, and so thoroughly unsuited to anything else” (qtd. in Crusius 358). I begin with Burke’s hypothesis that there are no descriptions of “reality” independent of perspective. Next, I focus on Burke’s diagnosis of commonplace “solutions” to relativism and pluralism and his alternative strategy of “perspective by incongruity.” I then draw on Williams to extend Burke’s insight that oppositional strategies limit the mind’s capacity to explore a wider range of interpretive choices when establishing a particular set of relations with the external world. My particular interest is what I have come to call Williams’s creative principle of apposition, an interpretive strategy that provides a means of modifying and enlarging viewpoints that would otherwise be determined by the less supple oppositional strategies Burke critiques.

I

In Permanence and Change Burke observes that the universe “would appear to be something like a cheese; it can be sliced in an infinite number of ways–and when one has found his pattern of slicing, he finds that other men’s slices fall in the wrong places” (103). I take Burke’s first point to be that the possibility of infinite slicing patterns is a felicitous condition for the human tendency to hit upon serviceable patterns of slicing. On the assumption that the purpose of our verbal acts is to effect “practical simplifications” of “reality,” Burke argues that these simplifications are the product of linguistic associations that are prior to our observations; he demonstrates, further, how these “conclusions” are built into our daily practices–how they actively determine the selection and organization of data which constitute our observations. Anticipating Kuhn’s insight into the ways patterns of inquiry determine relevant questions and problems, Burke concludes, “Not only does the nature of our terms effect the nature of our observations . . . but many of the ‘observations’ are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made–so that much of what we presume to be observations about the world may be no more than the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms” (PC 46)

Permanence and Change examines not just how well our hermeneutic frames provide us with terms for ordering our world but how well these frames of acceptance can be extended to new situations. “Language,” Burke explains, “is implicitly analogical inasmuch as we constantly apply the same terms to many different situations whereas no two situations are the same in detail” (Pre/Text 333). The impulse to extend one’s classifications into new regions of inference is carried out by hitting upon “analogical extensions, or linguistic inventions, not sanctioned by the previous usages of [one’s] group” (PC 103). Thus we have no choice but to “over-simplify a given event when we characterize it from the standpoint of a given interest–and we attempt to invent a similar characterization for other events by analogy” (107).

I take Burke’s second point to be that serviceable patterns of slicing lead to missing other available patterns and to ruling out the efficacy of these alternative patterns.1 The problem is that workable explanations obtain the utmost importance in a world in which, Burke explains, “Certainties will arise, impelling men to new intolerances” (CS 113). It follows that “any terminology is suspect to the extent that it does not allow the progressive criticism of itself” (ROR303). Indeed, any argument by analogy is highly susceptible to error when “a similarity is taken as evidence of an identity‘” (97). Burke calls on Thorstein Veblen’s term “trained incapacity” to suggest a central mechanism for our interpretive errors–for although our associations with the word training “naturally suggest capacity rather than incapacity” there are good reasons to think otherwise (91). In other words, if one adopts measures in keeping with one’s experiences and training, then “the very soundness of this training may lead [one] to adopt the wrong measures” (10). Or as Burke aphoristically puts it, “People may be unfitted by being fit in an unfit fitness.”

The analytical technique “perspective by incongruity” is Burke’s term for the attempt to transform the limits of trained incapacities into a virtue–of making a way of not seeing into a way of seeing. Burke develops the term “perspective by incongruity” in reference to the stylistic principle of Nietzsche that invokes metaphor to stress “a kind of vision got by seeing one order in terms of another” (CS 216). Burke adds that although Nietzsche exemplified the procedure, it was Bergson who came nearest to making incongruity a system by proposing to deliberately cultivate contradictory concepts (PC 94). In brief, a perspective by incongruity is a “deliberate misfit”; it “appeals by exemplifying relationships between objects which our customary rational vocabulary has ignored” (90).

The difficulty we might have accepting the concept perspective by incongruity is our habit of listening to the universe and awaiting what it will prove to us. We compound this problem, Burke adds, as “we have psychotically made the corresponding readjustment of assuming that the universe itself will abide by our rules of discussion and give us its revelations in a cogent manner” (99).2 Burke’s explication of (and antidote to) this form of psychosis is worth considering. When the primordial impulse to believe that our relation to the world is (or should be) one of knowing comes into conflict with the recalcitrance of that which we presume to know3 we habitually seek refuge in the idea that our knowledge is certain. Burke argues that we need to abandon this habit. However, there are three interpretive strategies (or frames) that all too easily prevent us from doing so. The first strategy–the absolutist or polemical frame–rejects or rules out certain positions to support its own defense of the correct or true position; the second strategy, the euphemistic frame, seeks to cure material problems by proffering a supernatural scheme that “hides or covers up or misnames the real ills of life in society and promises a better life in the next world” (Rueckert 118); the third strategy, the debunking frame, as Burke explains, “discerns an evil. [It] wants to eradicate this evil. And [it] wants to do a thorough job of it. Hence, in order to be sure [it] is thorough enough, [it] becomes too thorough” (Philosophy 147).

Working within a closed system, each strategy eliminates possibilities, “whether the doctrine is religious, political, ethnic, or philosophical” (Rueckert 119). William Rueckert has reminded us that the debunker and polemicist have always been Burke’s real enemies “because the first simply destroys without offering constructive or creative alternatives; and the second tends to eliminate freedom of thought and action” (119). My interest in Burke’s insight into the limits of the euphemistic, polemical and debunking frames is his conclusion that we must do more than simply acknowledge relativism: “We must erect coordinates atop it, not beneath it” (ATH 229). Such Burkean coordinates would acknowledge that “relativism cannot be eliminated by the simple legislative decrees of secular prayer (as when one tries to exorcise it by verbally denying its presence)” (229). The coordinates would “make one at home in the complexities of relativism, whereas one now tends to be bewildered by relativism” (ATH 229).

II

The conceptual migration from bewilderment to feeling at home in the face of the relativism of thought and perception is predicated of abandoning the assumption that a failure to establish for certain a knowing of the world is a failure of knowledge.4 By way of transition, let me suggest that the philosopher in Burke and the poet in Williams agree that we necessarily limit our freedom of perceptual and cognitive association by invoking a rigid conceptual framework, problem, or set of questions; let me suggest, too, that Burke and Williams help us to see the ways ready-made conceptual contrasts repeat a structural cycle of establishing authority through conflict; and let me suggest, finally, that both Burke and Williams reject a form of criticism that merely seeks to confirm its pre-existing structure.5

Williams’s principle of apposition constructs a generative alternative to the cyclical struggle of dominance and negation endemic to the ideology of opposition. He suggests , further, that if we do not limit our inquiries to the skeptical hypothesis of indeterminacy and inexplicability, then we can more effectively resist the conceptual habits which enforce limits on the imagination, on thinking, and thus on our continuing efforts to come to terms with the world. Thus Williams sees the project of poetry and poetics as not seeking answers or truths or consensus but rather as a way of modifying and enlarging viewpoints to these possible ends.

Williams first articulates the principle of apposition in Spring and All. His general argument is that habitual formulations of thought and static forms of knowledge merely project themselves on reality–using it, appropriating it, opposing it. Williams rejects the quest for immediate contact with the world by insisting that our relations with nature are mediate rather than immediate. This distinction is exemplified in a deceptive passage from Williams’s Spring and All.

Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency–but because it possesses the quality of independent existence, of reality which we feel in ourselves. It is not opposed to art butapposed to it.” (I 121; my emphasis)

The “quality of independent existence” repeats Williams’s contention earlier in Spring and All that there is “a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of his immediate contact with the world” (88). “Such a realization,” Williams goes on to insist “shows us the falseness of attempting to ‘copy’ nature” (I 107). He underscores “the falseness of attempting to copy nature” in a later letter to John Thirwall, in which he writes “The first thing you learn when you begin to learn anything about this earth is that you are eternally barred save the report of your senses from knowing anything about it” (SL 330). It follows that any attempt to “recover immediacy” (the “reality which we feel in ourselves”) will be no more or less than a “covering over,” another fixed or inert truth claim–or, in Williams’s words, another “dangerous lie.” Williams concludes, “Measure serves for us as the key: we can measure between objects, therefore, we know that they exist” (SL 330).

It is important to italicize the terms opposed and apposed for the distinction is exemplified in Williams’s later works. In each of these instances Williams points out that any alternative to interpretive positions which seek to control and dominate a field of inquiry must necessarily guide us to consider not only the adequacies but the inadequacies of our past and present measures of self and world. One such field of inquiry in Williams is historiography. In the American Grain is driven by the desire that we can reestablish a “ground” by breaking through “a dead layer” to see a “strange New World.” On the one hand, the inquirer must “have the feet of his understanding on the ground, his ground, the ground, the only ground that he knows, which is under his feet. . . . This want, in America, can only be filled by knowledge, a poetic knowledge, of that ground” (213).6There is no question that the ground will be established; only this passage suggests the difficulty of reconstructing history given the “dead layers” of accepted readings.

The apposite strategy is especially evident in In the American Grain. Recall that Williams begins with the observation that the material ground of history has become , under successive interpretations, “nameless under an old misappellation” (v).7 Williams then challenges the received versions of America: “History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery” (IAG 39). Finally, he points to the interpretive paradox of reading history.

What can we do? Facts remain but what is the truth? We can begin by saying: No opinion can be trusted; even the fact may be nothing but a printer’s error; but if a verdict be unanimous, it is sure to be a wrong one, a crude rush of the herd which has carried its object before it like a helpless condoning image. If we cannot make a man live again when he is gone, it is boorish to imprison him dead within some narrow definition, when, were he in his shoes before us, we could not do it. It’s lies, such history, and dangerous. Just there may lie our one hope for the future, beneath that stone of prejudice. (190)

With the words “just there” Williams suggests why there is no valid reason to say that we cannot know something, despite the difficulties of being certain about such knowledge in any particular case. This theoretical insights may be modest; but it cautions us against, in the words of Wlad Godzich, the ideological moment of the understanding: “The danger for the understanding is not so much the error of fact that methodologists are so concerned with, but with the isolation of thoughts and ideas and their conversion into autonomous objects of knowledge independent of their productive ground” (156). Indeed, it is at this moment of reification, Williams insists throughout Spring and All, that we lose the “productive ground”–that the “no” obscures “the common thing which is anonymously about us” (I 101).

The principle of apposition is evident in the essay “The American Background” as well. The essay is essentially concerned with the “the new spectacle and new conditions” experienced by those who sought to make a new culture in America. Here is how Williams describes the scene:

They found that they had not only left England but that they had arrived somewhere else: at a place whose pressing reality demanded not only a tremendous bodily devotion but as well, the more importunately, great powers of adaptability, a complete reconstruction of their most intimate cultural make-up, to accord with the new conditions. The most hesitated and turned back in their hearts at the first glance. (SE 134)

Here Williams recounts how difficult it is to enumerate a relation to new conditions. Many of the immigrants from England, Williams explains, had no ability to access what they “had never in their lives encountered.” Strange and difficult, “the new continent induced a torsion in the spirits of the new settlers, tearing them between the old and the new” (134). One tendency was to look back to Europe, to confirm old frames of reference; the other tendency was to look forward, to make new ones.

The polarity between the old and the new was in no way satisfactory for the colonists. The residual primary culture produced the “exorbitant excesses” and “colossal appetite” of the colonial ascendancy. Williams writes, “Incredible, fairy-tale-like, even offensively perverse as it may seem, it is the fear, the cowardice, the inability before the new, which in America whipped the destructive false current on like a forest fire” (SE 152). As a consequence of such “fear” and “cowardice,” the ascendancy of the secondary culture “secure in wealth, was gained not without results that were ludicrous as well as tragic.” But the opposition between the old and the new also suggests something deeper , “a relation to the immediate conditions of the matter in hand, and a determination to assert them in opposition to all intermediate authority” (143).8 Thus Williams at once dramatizes the assertive power of determination or conviction to oppose “all intermediate authority” at the same time he reserves “a relation to the immediate conditions” as the prior condition–the apposite condition–from which “to appraise the real through the maze of cut-off and imposed culture from Europe.”

III

In the larger project from which this essay is drawn, the concept of apposition links Williams’s poetics with his commitment to poetry as a specific form of cultural practice. In each of the examples I have given, the function of apposition can be understood in the grammatical sense of placing one substantive alongside another substantive–that is, to attribute or to complement something. Similarly, in its rhetorical sense, apposition adds a parallel word or expression by way of description, explanation, or illustration. In the broader domain of cultural practices Williams helps us to see how conceptual and interpretive strategies that depend upon opposition are conditioned to replace one version of cultural homogeneity with another.

Thus Williams cautions that oppositional critique of “history” or “culture” is too often rooted in not simply the desire for certainty but the dangerous assumption that we are already competent to understand the ground words such as history and culture represent. And Williams is well aware how such assumptions are more likely than not to lead to successive attempts to authorize a version of the past at the expense of some other version. On the contrary, Williams’s strategy ofapposition invites discontinuity and transformation, revision and reconstruction. The reorientation from the indeterminacy of reality to the partiality of our determinate judgments about that reality is the precondition for the strategy of apposition–a deconstructive and reconstructive moment of grounding the “truth” or “reality” on which “new” historical and cultural judgments are made.

The apposite stance leaves room for the power of the imagination to lead us to other ways of going on, rather than simply calling existing interpretations into question. Insisting on an alternative to critical discourses that seek to control and dominate a field of inquiry, then, Williams provides a method of considering more fully the adequacies and inadequacies of our past and present measures of self and world. The creative principle of apposition encourages a provisional interpretive position more open to possible reconfigurations of experience; and because it requires a course of inquiry into the consequences of the hypothetical situation that it suggestsmight be, apposition provides a potentially wider range of possible problems or questions to emerge prior to the deduction that something must be.

My case is that the apposite stance provides an interpretive strategy that abandons the desire for immediate contact for the more difficult task of constructing mediate relations. Hence Williams will say that “the new and the real, hard to come at, are synonymous” (143). Of course Williams, with Burke, is well aware of the difficulties people will have accepting such an interpretive strategy, as “the tendency of the race [is] to resist change violently” (143). As Williams reminds us, the conservative tendency of the mind is equivalent to the atrophy of the mind’s imaginative potential, as the mind is “lost in the confusion” which surrounds us and confines us to our predictable (as well as predictive) measures of the world. “So what can we do but retreat to some ‘standard’ which we have known in the past and say to ourselves, Beyond this standard you shall not go!” (SL 330-31).

Williams, with Burke, insists on a model of inquiry that is provisional, improvisational, resolutely hypothetical. Thomas Whitaker has shown us how history becomes less a result than a process in Williams’s poetics, less a will to completion than a continuing desire to reform the self and its relation to its historical ground (79). Burke and Williams make a similar case for methods in the arts and cultural criticism: our methods must not be ready-made, but rather we must be ready to remake our most enabling convictions and commitments. In a formulation that may at first appear counterintuitive, then, the continuity of method—by definition a way, or path of transit—is maintained by reducing the absolute to the contingent, the systematic to the messy aggregate of human knowledge. The logic of apposition is thus rooted in the incentive to return—to reread, to reinterpret—and to thereby reintegrate the self in our poetic restagings of history.

Notes

1. Attitudes Toward History extends this second point to the comic frame of acceptance and the necessary lesson of humility (41). If every person is “necessarily mistaken,” Burke asks, there is reason to believe not only that “all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools” but that “every insight contains its own special type of blindness” (41). Burke rephrases the point in his 1965 essay “Terministic Screens”: “if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must also serve as adeflection of reality” (Language 45).

2. The psychosis of the “culture wars” during the 1980s is the most immediate example of the kind of rhetorical drama produced when the assumptions underlying a term like relativism is given more than a passing look.

3. For an insightful summary of this problem, particularly in reference to Kant, see Stanley Cavell,The Senses of Walden. New York: Viking, 1972. For Cavell, the answer “does not consist in denying the conclusion of skepticism but in reconceiving its truth” (133).

4. But because systems of orientation do function according to Burke’s principle of entelechy the heuristic value of “depriving yourself of familiarity,” or of adopting a planned incongruity, must be “inclusive of error” (ATH 121-22). For “in periods of firmly established meanings, one does not study them, one uses them: one frames his acts in accordance with them” (162). But an interpretation can be wrong because the very concept of point of view introduces the possibility of error; and wherever there is the possibility of a wrong interpretation there is also the possibility of a right one: “the freedom to err argues a freedom to be right” (257).

5. My reading of Burke is deliberately in dissent from Burke’s enlistment by Frank Lentricchia in his 1982 book Criticism and Social Change. In fact I would like to begin extricating Burke from Lentricchia’s frame by urging you to consider the way William Carlos Williams shows us the problems with Lentricchia’s oppositonal criticism. Lentricchia argues that criticism is not only the production of power but that the literary intellectual should embrace the political work of social change (11). Lentricchia’s provocation, however, in retrospect, deserves close attention, especially his assumption that the intellectual has at his or her disposal “an intimate understanding of the mechanisms of culture” (7). So much so, that Lentricchia exclaims, “We know how culture works” and “we know, or should know, that culture does do work.” One can readily explain this rhetorical claim by situating it historically, in the early 1980s, and contextually, in a department of literature. But to use Burke to support such a project is to eviscerate Burke’s project of its greatest strength. Of course we can begin by agreeing with Lentricchia: oppositional criticism is functional; in fact, a closer reading of the implications of Lentricchia’s book demonstrate the way the oppositional frame is too functional, as it limits criticism to the distinct possibilities (it is political) of a situation rather than the indistinct possibilities to which Burke was ever attuned. In brief, to say that culture is self-evident one must assume that one is always already competent to understand it–an assumption that is “both theoretically false and usually ethnocentric” (Berlant 7).

6. Williams does not accept the metaphysical position that there must be an incognizable reality. Williams does, however, accept the possibility of the real. Hilary Putnam points out that such a philosophical position is “not a view in which the mind makes up the world (or makes it up subject to constraints imposed by ‘methodological canons’ and mind-independent ‘sense-data’). If one must use metaphorical language, then let the metaphor be this: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.” Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle: Open Court,1987), 1.

7. For the most developed consideration of the distinctive historiographical significance of In the American Grain, see Bryce Conrad, Refiguring America: A Study of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990). An excellent account of Williams’s method for literary and cultural theory is found in Vera M. Kutzinski, Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolas Guillen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1987). For Kutzinski, these three authors offer experiments “in disorder that ultimately reveal a kinship much more significant than the genealogies they destroy: an order, and idea of order, that is based on the knowledge that, no matter what our ethnic or national origins, we are all, as Octavio Paz put it, ‘living on the margin because there is no longer any center’” (qtd. in Kutzinski 248).

8. These remarks on the distinctive necessity of an apposite strategy are consistent with the logic of apposition Williams articulated nearly ten years earlier in In the American Grain. Williams summarizes his thesis concerning the difficulties of America’s settlement at the outset of the essay: “Thus two cultural elements were left battling for supremacy, one looking toward Europe, necessitous but retrograde in its tendency–though not wholly so by any means–and the other forward-looking but under a shadow from the first. They constituted two great bands of effort, which it would take a Titan to bring together and weld into one again. Throughout the present chapter, the terms native and borrowed, related and unrelated, primary and secondary, will be used interchangeably to designate these two opposed split-offs from the cultural force, and occasionally, in the same vein, true and false” (SE I35).

Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren. “Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies.” ADE Bulletin 117 (Fall 1997): 4-9.

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. Third ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

—. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.

—. “In Haste.” Pre/Text 6.3-4 (1985): 329-77.

—. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U of California P,1968.

—. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Third ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

—. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.

—. The Rhetoric of Religion. Berkeley: U of California P,1970.

Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. New York: Viking,1972.

Conrad, Bryce. Refiguring America: A Study of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. Urbana: U of Illinois P,1990.

Crusius, Timothy. “Kenneth Burke’s Auscultation: A `De-construction’ of Marxist Dialectic and Rhetoric.” Rhetorica 6.4 (Autumn 1988): 355-79.

Godzich, Wlad. The Culture of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.

Kutzinski, Vera M. Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolas Guillen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1987.

Lentricchia, Frank. Criticism and Social Change. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Putnam, Hilary. The Many Faces of Realism. LaSalle: Open Court, 1987.

Rueckert, William. Encounters with Kenneth Burke. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Thirwall, John C., ed. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1957.

Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. New York: Twayne, 1968.

Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations. Ed. Webster Schott. New York: New Directions, 1970.

—. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1956.

—. Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1969.

—. The Embodiment of Knowledge. Ed. Ron Loewinsohn. New York: New Directions, 1974.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of William Carlos Williams

It has been a joy and a professional privilege to work with colleagues editing books for teachers. With Fred Waage and Laird Christensen, I co-edited Teaching North American Environmental Literature (2008) and, with Sean Meehan, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2018). Both volumes appeared in the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching series. I am now beginning work on a volume for the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature: “Approaches to Teaching the Works of William Carlos William­s.”

The collection will offer secondary and post-secondary teachers, graduate students, and independent scholars, a resource for teaching a poet whose work is widely regarded as among the most innovative and influential of the twentieth century. This is the perfect time for such a volume: Williams’s commitment to the poor and the working class as well as his own multicultural and multilingual background, alongside his democratic insistence on ordinary language and experience as poetic, speak to our current time, just as his poetic innovations have spoken and remained relevant to poets of various schools who have claimed Williams as their main influence.

Although Williams is among the most recognizable twentieth-century American poets, he is often the most difficult to teach. The challenge of teaching Williams is not that his poems are difficult or inaccessible. Rather most readers in secondary school English, undergraduate surveys of twentieth-century American literature, literary Modernism, or American poetry and poetics come to know Williams as the author of a few short lyrics––among them “The Red Wheelbarrow,” the “plums poem,” “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital,” and “This is Just to Say.”­­ The volume will feature materials and courses for introducing these well-known works alongside the less-known but widely-influential lyric poems, the early experimental work, including Kora in Hell and Spring and All, the book-length poem Paterson, the translations of Spanish and Latin American verse, and Williams’s wide-ranging and provocative fiction and nonfiction.

The “Materials” section will introduce Williams’s writing and related resources. Our introduction will introduce the standard editions published by New Directions Press: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909–1939 (1986); The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II, 1939–1962 (1988); Paterson (1992); and By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959 (2011). We will survey the fiction, short stories, and experimental writing, including the works collected in The Selected Essays (1954) and Imaginations (1970), as well as the book-length study of American history and culture In the American Grain (1925). A biographical sketch will situate Williams’s creative work in relation to his multiethnic background as well as his life-long medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey. We will provide a pedagogically-oriented overview of the secondary commentary as well, including the extant biographical resources, bibliographies of secondary materials, and major studies of Williams’s modern poetry and poetics.

We will also offer teachers materials that document the resurgence of Williams’s presence in the modern poetic tradition around the world––from Julio Marzan’s The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams (1994) to Jonathan Cohen’s collection of Williams’s translations in By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959 (2011), as well as scholarship in both the “Materials” and “Approaches” sections, more broadly, to elaborate Williams’s Latinx heritage, his indebtedness to the traditions of Peninsular and Colonial Spanish literature, and current literary criticism and theory on the relations of culture, power, and aesthetics in the Caribbean that engage with Williams’s legacy. The “Approaches” section, moreover, will (re)situate Williams’s distinctive modernism around issues of linguistic, geographic, and cultural translation as well as creative writers. We will also compile the available and reliable web-based materials—including the recently completed open-access digital concordance to the poems in the Williams corpus.

The “Approaches” section will also introduce readers to the life and work of the small-town doctor who published more than forty books of poetry and prose and who irreversibly shaped the arc of poetry and poetics during the twentieth century. We plan to include essays on teaching Williams as an avant-garde writer in the early modernist period during and after World War 1 using Al Que Quire! (1917), Spring and All (1923), and The Wedge (1944). And we envision essays on the complex literary and cultural politics of Williams’s reception as a poet through the late 1950s and 1960s, and approaches to the work in the later period that encompasses the publication of Paterson (1946–1951), Collected Later Poems (1950), Collected Early Poems (1951), Make Light of It: Collected Stories (1950), the Autobiography (1951), Selected Essays (1954), The Desert Music (1954),  Journey to Love (1955), and Pictures from Brueghel (1962).

Williams was a tireless supporter and mentor of younger poets, and teachers will find new ways to include in their courses on modernism his reviews and early essays on the writing of Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, H.D., and Marianne Moore, and his promotion of the work of numerous individual poets, including Allen Ginsberg (writing the introduction to the City Lights edition of Howl); Muriel Rukeyser, a feminist poet affiliated with the Popular Left Front; and Amiri Baraka, who described Williams as the “common denominator” of the New American Poetry and the poet who had taught him “how to write in my own language—how to write the way I speak rather than the way I think a poem ought to be written.”

We will include an essay on Williams’s editorial and creative contributions to both prominent and peripheral little magazines (Others, Contact, Origin, Black Mountain Review, Yugen) and a teacher-oriented approach to his poetics in relation to the aesthetics of high-Modernism and the New Criticism. For with his college friend Ezra Pound, Williams provided a foundation for the “schools” of poetry Donald Allen identified in The New American Poetry (1960): Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and New York; and he collaborated with Louis Zukofsky to promote “Objectivist” poetics and the poems of Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Carl Rakowski, Charles Reznikoff, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, and Denise Levertov. One reason Williams remains a singular presence among modernist poets is his dedication to vernacular forms of expression in local environments and, more specifically, his poetic engagement with the working-class lives he encountered through his medical practice. The publication of Imaginations (New Directions 1970), moreover, provided creative inspiration for “Language Poetry,” (what Ron Silliman has called “third-phase objectivism”) that began in the 1930s and was reanimated by Silliman and other poets, such as Bob Perelman, Bob Grenier, and Charles Bernstein, as well as taken up by feminist experimental writers, including Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Alice Notley, Lyn Hejinian, and Rae Armantrout (a student of Levertov).

The “Approaches” section will include essays that address the ways that Williams was entangled in American history and identity, engaged with the inheritance of European literary and cultural traditions, and concerned with the transnational and multilingual dimensions of language and literature. To this end, we are committed to providing teachers access to approaches and materials for engaging with Williams’s preoccupation with cultural identity and the challenging questions associated with literary inheritance, including the patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions in his work, the cross-cultural complexities of his hemispheric interest in the literary and cultural history of the Americas, and his Puerto Rican heritage. (His mother, Helena Hoheb, was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico). An essay on Williams as a translator of Spanish and Latin American poets will provide teachers with resources for teaching Williams in relation to such poets as Cuba’s Eugenio Florit, Chile’s Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra, Ecuador’s Jorge Carrera Andrade, Costa Rica’s Eunice Odio, Nicaragua’s Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, Argentina’s Silvina Ocampo, Uruguay’s Álvaro Figueredo, Mexico’s Octavio Paz and Ali Chumacero, and the Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos.

In addition to the poems, we will provide teachers with pedagogical approaches to teaching Williams as a prose writer: the short stories, novels, plays, autobiographical writing, and essays on poetry and the arts—including his contributions to the genre of the literary essay; the literary-historical method of book–length studyIn the American Grain (1925); the novels and short stories, such as A Voyage to Pagany (1928), White Mule (1937), and Life along the Passaic River (1938); and The Doctor Stories (1984).We will offer approaches to teaching the book-length poem Paterson, including in relation to urban planning and local environments; an essay on Williams and the visual arts, exploring his relationships with Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Alfred Stieglitz, and Charles Sheeler; an essay that provides insight into working with the biographical materials; and an essay on studying Williams’s literary and cultural relations and legacies, for instance, his reflections on education in his essays and philosophical fragments written in the late 1920s, and published posthumously in 1974, The Embodiment of Knowledge. Finally, the volume will feature approaches to teaching Williams using tools from the Digital Humanities that use mapping technologies and hypertextual online annotations to collaborate with students in shared projects that use data processes and new media to re-investigate Williams’s work.

I am fortunate to be working with an amazing editorial team for the volume, talented collaborators and inspiring colleagues, who share my passion for teaching as well as writing about Williams. What is more, each of us teach and study Williams at institutions with different missions and students served, and our institutional and scholarly locations will strengthen the development of the volume. One of my co-editors is Daniel Burke, immediate past president of the William Carlos Williams Society, recently organized the biennial conference of the Society in Chicago with support from his home institution, Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago, the Poetry Foundation, and the University of Chicago. The other co-editor, Elin Käck, who teaches at Sweden’s Linköping University, is currently Vice-President of the Society, who recently chaired an MLA session celebrating the centennial of Williams’s Spring and All, and who brings her perspective and scholarship on Williams and ideas of tradition and Europe in modernism and American poetry.

The MLA is currently inviting interested teachers and scholars to take a survey and to submit proposals for the new volume on teaching the works of William Carlos Williams. Survey responses and proposals are due 1 June.

Teaching the Prose of William Carlos Williams

For many teachers, particularly those less familiar with modernist writing, Williams’ prose is, to quote a 1966 assessment by A. Kingsely Weatherhead, “to a great extent, hit or miss. There are on the one hand the brilliant perceptions” and there are on the other hand, he writes, “the kind of floundering around, the compulsive repetition with variations of a word that has a kind of numinous appeal to him, found for example in ” The Poem as a Field of Action'” (SE pp. 280-291), where he doesn’t rightly know what he’s about at all.” In 1969, however, Linda Welshimer Wagner articulated a more sympathetic approach, calling attention to Williams’ improvisational prose style. “The personal and “idiomatic quality” of Williams’ prose—including his essays, The Great American Novel, the Autobiography, and the letters—present the reader with a difficulty. “Instead of logic,” Wagner concludes, Williams gives us truly personal improvisation.” The example she gives is from Marianne Moore:

Surely there is no poetry so active as that of today, so unbound, so dangerous to the mass of mediocrity, if one should understand it, so fleet, hard to capture, so delightful to pursue. It is clarifying in its movements as a wild animal whose walk corrects that of men.

For Wagner, the numerous qualifying phrases and the esoteric simile illustrate some of Williams’ weakest stylistic practices. The control he achieves in much of his fiction is less evident when the poet himself speaks. Williams’ painful honesty, his groping, sometimes obscures rational progression, but never the effect of genuine speech—terse, emotional, stubborn, perceptive (140). I want to suggest, more specifically, that the moments where we miss rational progression are the moments when the literary qualities of Williams’ prose are most acute. “There is no confusion—only difficulties” Williams admonishes in Spring and All. To follow improvisational moments in any form of experimental art is to follow the mind recognizing itself as it intervenes in the familiar.

My claim in this essay is that there may be no more productive space for the practice of literary and cultural studies than the prose writings of William Carlos Williams. In the undergraduate classroom, in particular, Williams’ prose invites students to wrestle with practical questions about reading, thinking, and writing. His prose is alive with the theoretical questions that arise in practice as well: questions about linguistic forms, language and thought, the relations between ourselves and the world.

The pedagogical value of Williams’ prose follows from my recognition that my most productive experiences as a teacher have roots in what I have learned from Williams and what Williams has made possible for my students. In first-year writing courses, general education humanities electives, historical or thematic surveys in the major, or project-based work in upper-level courses, Williams has proven a generous, challenging, and provocative companion. For the students I teach at a public liberal arts institution—with over forty percent who are the first in their families to attend college—Williams’ generous and vital commentaries on reading, thinking, and writing have been extraordinarily useful in both English and general studies courses.

There are places to go when considering Williams’ pedagogical values and strategies. But “(A Sketch for) the Beginnings of an American Education” is perhaps the most instructive place to begin. The sketch, near the end of The Embodiment of Knowledge, is a provocation. “A good beginning,” Williams insists, “would be to abolish in American schools (at least) all English departments and to establish in [their] place the department of Language” (EK 146). The fault with education, Williams will say in the section “The Beginnings of an American Education,” is not the students at all “but with those to whom it has been asked to look: to its elders, the leaders, the professors. . .” (3). Anyone who has become weary of general comments by teachers about the poor preparation or skills of their students, or who, like me, has found a response that goes something like “the problem with student writing is not the students,” will understand what Williams is getting at here.

The department of Language that Williams might envision follow from the examples he provides of what we might today call “student-centered” learning, or pedagogical methods organized around promoting student agency. In the department of Language professors would be less concerned with disciplinary knowledge or skills and inclined toward the approach to language in Gregory Ulmer, Nancy Comley, and Robert Scholes’ Textbook: An Introduction to Literary Language—a reader that, as it happens, includes in the section on narrative Williams’ “The Use of Force.” First published in 1988, and revised and expanded in 1995 and 2001, Textbook opens with a letter to the student

As you enter this book you will find all kinds of texts: some are usually called ‘literary’ and some are not. This mixture is essential to our method. We do not want to offer you a collection of ‘master’ works that ask for your passive submission, but a set of texts that you can work and play with, increasing your own understanding of fundamental textual processes and your own ability to use the written word. We hope to help you feel more at home in the house of language, and we are confident that a better command of written language will contribute to a better life.

This emphasis on texts—poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, fragments and more completed work—and the invitation for students to play with language and become more aware of textual processes aligns well with Williams’ department of Language.

The department of Language Williams might envision can be further imagined through a comment on the practice of modern writing in “The Modern Primer,” in which Williams asks “What is meaning of Gertrude Stein’s work?” His answer—“Language is made up of words, the spaces between words and their configuration” (17)—offers a useful reminder when a classroom of students engaged in a close reading of a text laments that if only they could read “between the lines” or “more deeply.” It is useful because these metaphors imprison students in a misconception. For when one actually reads between lines one finds white space. Similarly, when one reads “deeply” one lands on the next page. Williams’ prose writings offer touchstone sentences that demystify the ways people trained in the humanities engage with texts. Furthermore, in “The Embodiment of Knowledge etc.,” Williams observes that “The basis of all bad reasoning is in the beginning” (41) and of the necessity “to conceive clearly the materials of our thought” (42). The focus on language must also address the challenge of students who appear to have learned in their English classes that meaning is something that can be found in words—students who have essentially ceded the active process of making meaning to the authority or the commonplace understandings that replace the experience of reading with the conclusions of other readers.

The essays in The Embodiment of Knowledge are rooted in a tradition of thinking about education and institutions that runs from Emerson through Dewey to the robust scholarship of teaching and learning that circulates mostly in the pedagogical domains of rhetoric and composition. Ron Loewinsohn’s introductory essay to The Embodiment of Knowledge provides a summary of these roots. “Implicit in Williams’ notion of the reader as the center of the writing in his own present as he reads,” Loewinsohn writes, “is the assumption that discovery is a process, that education and knowledge are on-going activities in which we create ourselves from day to day” (xii). Across the early and late prose writings—and of course in the poetry and poetics—one finds this broadly humanistic understanding of attention to engaged inquiry, an active imagination, and self determination. Williams’ prose is useful as we learn to empower students—encouraging them to become more aware of their place in the developmental arc of late adolescence and supporting them as they struggle with authority, perspective, and autonomy.

At the same time, Williams’ concern with language, history, and culture, as Brian Bremen has demonstrated, comprise a “cultural diagnostics” that, in Bremen’s description, is surprisingly congruent with the literary and cultural work we routinely ask of our students. Williams prose writings, in particular, offers students clear insight into the purpose of humanistic study. Bremen notes that Williams’ poetics embrace ideas about literature, history, medicine, gender relations, and politics. And Bryce Conrad, especially in his 1990 book Refiguring America: A Study of In the American Grain, offers teachers an incisive description of William’s historiographical method—what Conrad calls Williams’ “open” history focused on the active process of making historical knowledge.

What does this active process of making historical knowledge look like in an undergraduate classroom? Reading and reflecting on literary and cultural history with Williams, in a course I taught in American Studies and Women’s Studies, a student decided to write about the book, In the American Grain, and two essays, Williams’ 1934 “The American Background: America and Alfred Stieglitz” and Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as (Re)Vision” that was published in a 1972 issue of College English dedicated to Women, Writing and Teaching.

The student quoted Rich’s description of awakening that opens the essay—”It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful”— and found in Williams’ description and critique of history a method not unlike Rich’s material and feminist critique. The student argued that both Williams and Rich insist that we examine, in Rich’s words, “how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see-and therefore live-afresh.” The modernist William and the feminist Rich share an imperative for what Rich describes as “re-vision”: “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction-is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

This example, and there are innumerable others, have shown me some of the ways Williams’ prose writing enter the minds of and inspire our students. Most recently, I have taught Williams in the tradition of the essay from Montaigne—discovering that Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, in fact, include Williams’ “An Essay on Virginia” in their sourcebook Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. (It is one of four selections from the 1920s, Williams appears between Virginia Woolf and Hilaire Belloc.) In an essay on the text, Stuckey- French reminds his reader that “the genteel essay was under siege by 1925, but it was not clear what would replace it” (105), For Williams, Stuckey- French argues, “the debate over the future of America and the future of the essay were linked by the question of form, for he believed that the transformation of American culture rested on the transformation of the forms of that culture” (98). Stuckey-French points out that Williams “was unique among American modernists in his decision to write an essay on the essay” (100), arguing that “Williams develops and demonstrates his theory of the essay, arguing that the formless form of the essay mirrors the form of American democracy, which rests on an unresolvable tension between individualism and conformity” (97).

Williams is exquisitely aware of the need to imagine ways of writing beyond cultural and discursive commonplaces. And his prose writings unsettle distinctions between the personal and the academic, between lived experience and the thinking of others. As Loewinsohn writes in his introduction to The Embodiment of Knowledge, “Implicit in Williams’ notion of the reader as the center of the writing in his own present as he reads is the assumption that discovery is a process, that education and knowledge are ongoing activities in which we create ourselves from day-to-day” (xii). Williams notion is that when students learn the pleasures of experiencing higher standards than what they are used to, they become aware of these standards and enlarge their own sense of what can be done.

Works Cited

Conrad, Bryce. Refiguring America: A Study of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Cardozo, Karen M. “Essaying Democracy: The Post/Modern Intertexts of Kingston, Rodriguez, and Williams.” William Carlos Williams Review 27.1 (Spring 2007): 1–23

Kinnahan, Linda. Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Moore, Daniel. “Trauma and “The Use of Force”.” William Carlos Williams Review. 29.2 (2009): 161–175. Project Muse

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as (Re)Vision.” College English 34.1. Women, Writing and Teaching (October 1972): 18–30

Stuckey-French, Ned. “‘An Essay on Virginia’: William Carlos Williams and the Modern(ist) Essay.” American Literature 70.1 (1998): 97–130.

 Wagner, Linda Welshimer. “The Unity of His Art.” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 2.1. Poetic Theory/Poetic Practice (1969): 136–144.

Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. “William Carlos Williams: Prose, Form, and Measure.” ELH 33.1 (1966): 118–131

In Memory

(Published on the web site of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment,) In Memoriam: Mary Oliver, 1935–2019

By Mark C. Long, Keene State College

The poet Mary Oliver passed away on January 17, 2019. An honorary member of our association, Oliver published over thirty books of poetry and prose that brought the concerns of ASLE to more readers than any other poet of her generation.

Oliver published her first book, No Voyage and Other Poems, in 1963. Over the next fifty years, Oliver offered us new ways to think about the gift of human life and the fragile beauty of the more-than-human world. As the poems kept coming, Oliver rekindled the uses of poetry in our culture—in lyrics, sequences, a book-length poem, prose poems, and essays. And her audience kept expanding, too, her book sales, running into the millions, reminding us of the singular power of her distinctive voice.

Oliver’s life and work are at once inspiration and provocation—most acutely to those of us preoccupied with environmental concern, equity, and justice. How does our thinking and writing, our art and our activism, reach the audiences who most need us? How do we live convincing lives for those who need to be inspired? “Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do,” Oliver reminded us. “Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.”

Although Oliver once stood in that water, and found her way upstream, her generous provocations are for us—whether we find ourselves in a stream or on a city sidewalk. Her belief that we can learn to love the world came from Walt Whitman, she told us, for his “message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he advocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe.”

This potential for goodness in a world that appears otherwise is the heartbeat of Oliver’s advocacy. It is no wonder, then, that Oliver’s poems come into our lives across experiences, generations, and occasions—as children, adolescents, young adults, middle-age and older adults, in schools and libraries, family and community gatherings, and places of worship.

She prodded us to be in the world—with awareness, imagination, compassion, and agency. She excited our consciences and awakened our emotions. And she offered those of us more familiar with thinking about poems something less familiar: an invitation to think with poems that wrestle with our commonplaces about the world, honestly and openly, to guide us into the material and spiritual condition of our lives.

“Here is a story / to break your heart. / Are you willing? With these lines Oliver begins the poem “Lead,” a story of loons dying in the harbor “of nothing we could see,” a poem that ends with the story she has been sharing with us for over fifty years:


I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

 __________________________________________________________________

An informal gathering to honor the literary and cultural contributions of the poet Mary Oliver will be held from 12:15-1:15 pm on June 28, 2019 during the 2019 ASLE Conference. The reading will take place in the T. Elliot Weier Redwood Grove located in the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. Participants are invited to read one of Oliver’s poems, or a selection from her prose. Brief comments on Oliver’s work are also welcome. If you plan to attend this event, please RSVP Mark C. Long at mlong@keene.edu.

In Medias Res

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“Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1850)

A couple of years ago my friend Tony, a retired colleague, mentioned a singer and songwriter, Greg Brown, who he thought I would be interested to know. Tony told me that in “Two Little Feet” Brown sings of a writer I began reading in my late teens, John Muir. When I followed up on his suggestion, I heard Brown singing these words:

John Muir walked away into the mountains
In his old overcoat a crust of bread in his pocket
We have no knowledge and so we have stuff and
Stuff with no knowledge is never enough to get you there
It just won’t get you there

Then this fall a student coming to terms with the work of Gary Snyder titled one of her essays, Tumble us Like Scree. Well, I first thought, scree is the name for an unpredictable and shifting surface where I have spent a good deal of time and where I am quite comfortable. Because Anna included in her blog post an embedded link to You Tube I was able to locate the phrase in the lyrics of Greg Brown’s Two Little Feet: 

Tumble us like scree let us holler out our freedom like a wolf across a valley like a kid lost in a game
No time no name gonna miss that plane again

We were reading Gary Snyder’s 1974 book Turtle Island. Anna started by saying that “the distinction between the ‘natural’ and ‘human’ worlds is complex.” She then added, “It is often completely accepted that humans exist above the rest of the world. People do not question the hierarchy of being. Gary Snyder’s book, Turtle Island, addresses that distinction as one that is a complete social construct.”

So far so good, I most likely thought to myself. For one of organizing ideas in Turtle Island is that we are a part of the natural world. “We are it— / it sings through us” is Snyder’s way of explanation in lines from the poem “By Frazier Creek Falls.” Nature is not a place we visit. It is home. What Anna noticed was that he exemplifies this message in The Bath, a poem that she describes as “a description of an inherent, instinctive act that spans species–bathing.” She adds, “Most animals bathe their young, and that is exactly what this family is doing. He and his wife are cleaning their son, taking care of him in the most primal of ways.”

Already anticipating Snyder’s essays in The Practice of the Wild that we would read together later in the semester, Anna pointed out that “Snyder always comes back to the body.” This is because, she writes, “the body is the best way to see that humans are natural. Our discomfort with sex, nakedness, and our general relationships with our bodies come from this idea that we are somehow removed from the natural world. A body is a constant, physical reminder that we are a part of the rest of the earth.” Even better, I most likely thought as I read these words.

But then the essay gets really interesting. The full post lives on Anna’s blog. But I will quote from it here as I am not sure that her course blog will remain active once she moves on from college:

In the poem “The Bath,” the fifth stanza reads,

Or me within her,
Or him emerging,
this is our body

These lines are so simple, and yet they encompass a human being’s physical relationship with the world and with her own body. These three lines–the act of sex, the birth of a child, the acceptance of a physical place in the universe–are incredibly written. The simplicity of Snyder’s writing is an insightful nod to the obviousness of our relationship with our earth and all the rest who live here. He can make a hugely profound statement just with three lines. It is the circle of life shown through the female body. It is two bodies becoming one and creating another. This is one of the most natural actions that exists–reproduction as a connection between us and the rest of the world.

These are sensitive and insightful comments—the kind of comments that remind us why we read poems. She continues:

Snyder describes bathing his son, “through and around the globes and curves of his body.” I have to admit that when I first read this poem, all the vivid description of the body of the child and his mother definitely took me off guard and left me feeling uncomfortable. However, after talking over the poem in class and thinking a lot more about it, it has come to be one of my favorite poems in the book. I think that moving past that discomfort is the point of this writing. The only reason that this blatant description of naked bodies makes us uncomfortable is because of society’s collective decision that we are not animals. This delusion that we are not only so far removed from, but that we are better than the non-human world does not allow us to see ourselves for what we really are–animals with bodies. We stigmatize anything that connects us to nature, especially our own bodies.

In this series of disclosures is a lesson in self-awareness and recognition that leads to a deeper awareness: that the sexual language of the poem is in no way gratuitous but an essential part of a whole. The commentary continues:

The last stanza in this poem reads,

This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water
hugging babies, kissing bellies,

Laughing on the Great Earth

Come out from the bath.

These last few words of Snyder’s writing tie up the poem with a blatant connection to the earth. In the first two lines of this stanza he combines a natural element with a human action. He writes of sitting next to a fire and consuming water. By making these active statements about fire and water, Snyder smoothly connects people with the earth itself. Then he moves on to more active statements, this time about human bodies. This transition makes it clear that there is no existential difference between us and the elements–we all exist in this world. He invites us to ‘come out’ and see what he sees.

The repetition of the question, “is this our body?” and of the answer “this is our body” echo Snyder’s commentary on our connections with our physicality. By repeating these lines throughout the physical description of the naked act of bathing, he addresses the fact that this poem is probably making the reader uncomfortable. He knows that it will, but by asking the question of whether or not this is our body, he draws the reader into the issue. Everyone who will ever read this poem will be able to connect with it on a physical level because we all have bodies. We are all made up of matter and atoms. We all exist in the same world no matter how much we may have convinced ourselves that we do not.

The most rewarding part of this pedagogical story is that the story does not stop here. For in the upper-level class I am teaching this semester I have the privilege to once again be working with Anna. And in a recent essay she returned to that moment when she was coming to terms with the poem “The Bath.”

She is retelling of the story of picking up Turtle Island as she is commenting on Snyder’s presence in The Practice of the Wild:

At first, it confused me. Before reading any of his essays, I delved into the poetry in his book of collected works, Turtle Island. His poem, The Bath, was my introduction to the voice of Gary Snyder.

Honestly, it was a little shocking. Because of how strong and strange of a reaction I had to reading it, I decided to write an essay on that very poem. I was so utterly confused about how I felt about the poem that I remember reading it aloud to one of my friends. She was not a fan. I reached the end of the second stanza, a line which reads, “the space between the thighs I reach through, cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind, soapy tickle,” and she told me to stop. I believe her exact response was something like, “that is some freaky shit.”

Well, it is some “freaky shit.” But the route from confusion and discomfort–from sharing to the description of the lines of the poem as “some freaky shit”–leads to another place:

The more I thought about his words and the distinct choice to include a vivid description of bodies, the more I realized that it was my own, personal bias that was creating this block between me and the poem. As I read it again and again, each time trying to distance myself from my gut reaction, the more I began to like the poem. I could hear Snyder talking and I came closer to understanding what he was saying. The key part of this poem is the line, “this is our body.” Throughout most of his writing, poems or prose, he is concerned with the divide between human beings and ‘nature’–our own nature, the idea of the ‘wild’ that we are so removed from.

The story might have ended here. But last week we discussed this piece of writing in a workshop on the essay in my upper-level seminar this semester. We were talking about writing on the open web, and I said that “open access to your writing can bring to the surface insights we might not otherwise see: for reading a writer thinking with (in this case, a poem) can help us move through the process of learning together.” One example of collaboration, I went on to say, is

Anna’s thinking in her post Connections. What I value are connections she is making, the chronicle of her developing understanding (of the writing of Gary Snyder), and her sharing this story in a draft version of her essay. Her essay makes visible for us dimensions of collaboration. In fact, when I read her piece, I found myself collaborating with her on what turned into the most recent Teacher Talk page post called The Generosity of Art. 

And so here we are, in media res. I am writing about myself writing about a student who is writing about her own writing on the writing of Gary Snyder—and you are reading the words she has written, the words I have written about her words, and the writing about the words about words.

Where do we go from here?

Photo credits: Mark C. Long

Extravagance and Possibility

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Mark C. Long. Upstream: Selected Essays. By Mary Oliver. New York: Penguin, 2016. Cloth. $26.00 and Felicity. By Mary Oliver. New York: Penguin, 2016. 81 pp. Cloth. $24.95. Published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2017)

A child went forth in Mary Oliver’s new book of essays, Upstream. The child was alone in the woods. She was wandering upstream, away from difficulties, the “sorrow and mischance and rage” (14) around her that she felt deeply but was powerless to change. One day the little girl walked the wrong way, and was lost, but was “slopping along happily in the stream’s coolness. So maybe it was the right way after all,” Oliver surmises. “If this was lost, let us all be lost always. The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats; pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again” (5). And, as this child went forth, her heart opened, and opened again, in the world of books. She read by day and into the night. She built bookshelves. She thought “about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes” (15). And she took solace in friendship among writers. “I never met any of my friends, of course, in a usual way—they were strangers, and lived only in their writings,” she admits. “But if they were only shadow-companions, still they were constant, and powerful, and amazing” (9), Oliver writes, in the essay, “My Friend Walt Whitman.” These writers, she admits, “changed the world” (9).

From these childhood experiences is fashioned a lesson to share, “that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart” (14-15). Drawing on the earlier collections Blue Pastures, Winter Hours, and Long Life, Oliver gathers essays on some of the writers who made a difference. She recalls the moral purpose of Emerson, who refused to turn away from the world; Wordsworth’s praise of both the beauty and the strangeness of the world; Poe’s rushing forward with the “wild courage of despair”; and Whitman’s unshakeable, egalitarian belief in an “existence in which man’s inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged” (100). For Oliver, the books of these authors are alive with extravagance and possibility, “the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self–quarrels, his own predicament” (68-69).

The poems collected in Felicity are songs of extravagance and possibility— and their opinions and persuasions have designs on the reader. The title of the first section, “The Journey,” and the epigraph from Rumi, “You broke the cage and flew,” suggest what will follow. In “The World I Live In,” Oliver writes, “I have refused to live / locked in the orderly house of / reasons and proofs. / The world I live in and believe in / is wider than that” (11). In “Leaves and Blossoms along the Way,” Oliver challenges her readers to live and believe in this wider world. “To understand many things you must reach out / of your own condition,” she insists (18). And in the final line of “Whistling Swans” Oliver explains to her readers her hope that in reaching out a person can become open to a world of possibilities beyond the self: “So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly. / Take from it what you can” (29). These poems, like so many Oliver has shared with her readers over the years, offer invitations, or opportunities, to reach beyond the self, wherever one might happen to be.

The sequence of lyric poems in the second section of Felicity traces the “invisible / and powerful and uncontrollable /and beautiful and possibly even /unsuitable” experiences we call love. This section, entitled “Love,” opens with an epigraph from Rumi. “Someone who does not run / toward the allure of love / walks a road where nothing lives” (41). In the poem “The First Day,” Oliver recalls the “warm sting of possibility,” the opening of the heart, “the spreading warmth of joy” (45). In “No, I’d Never Been to This Country,” she acknowledges the risk and embraces the commitment we undertake in loving another person: “I didn’t know where the roads / would lead me. No, I didn’t intend to turn back” (49). A group of short poems celebrates a life moving along its journey and the discovery, in its unfolding, of abiding happiness. “Everything that was broken has / forgotten its brokenness,” she explains (61). And “Pond,” a sunny-summer-August-day poem, concludes with the lines, “All my life I have been able to feel this happiness, / except whatever was not happiness, / which I also remember. / Each of us wears a shadow” (67). The poems at once acknowledge the weight of our inescapable shadows, our “self-quarrels and predicaments,” and the beautiful and mysterious ways love enters into, and shapes, our lives.

Like much of Oliver’s work, Upstream and Felicity explore the challenges and opportunities we face amidst transformation and change. In the essay of gratitude that concludes Upstream, “Provincetown,” Oliver celebrates the “perfect sufficiency,” the sweetness and simplicity of the place she would call home for fifty years. At the same time, she describes “the terrible change,” the “slow but harsh” transformation of her beloved home. “The tourist business was in,” she adds, and the town “became a place to live for a while, and to spend money. Not so much in which to live a life” (174). What Oliver makes of these changes is neither bitter nor sentimental. “This town had to find another way to live,” she decides. “It was just, well, different” (175).

And so it goes—I guess. The world changes. You change. You make your way the best you can. You use the resources you have. What I can say, with more confidence, is that one of those resources, as these books once again remind us, is the writing of Mary Oliver.

Advance Access publication March 31, 2017doi:10.1093/isle/isx017
VC The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved.
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