If it works, break it.
I would become farts of flowers, farts of weeds, farts of trees,
bubbling farts of stagnant ponds.
Seoul. Chicago. Denver.
reader(s)
"So long as the sky is recognized as an association
is recognized in its function of accessory to vague words whose mean-
ing it is impossible to rediscover
its value can be nothing but mathematical certain limits of gravity and
density of air"
William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All
"If anything of moment results—so much the better. And so my the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it."
WC Williams, the opening lines from Spring and All.
…posted to make a note, to accompany this quote and this post on obeisance and abeyance…
"They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—"
from WC Williams’ poem, “Spring and All”
Thinking about this and the book of the same name and Paterson.
Each provide new possibilities, opportunities for a critique of culture in context with my current writing project and outlined in my last post about tradition and love, obeisance and abeyance.
I agree. That’s the first edit I made in the quote. It’s long and wonderfully funny. His poetry strips the reader naked. I like it. But I wanted to get to his point about the looking forward and looking backward. I like his affection for the here and now.
"
If anything of moment results—so much the better. And so much the more likely that no one will want to see it.
There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.
***
The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only in which I am at all interested.
***
To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination.
In fact, to return upon my theme for the time nearly all writing, up to the present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment. It has been always a search for “the beautiful illusion.” Very well. I am not in search of “the beautiful illusion.”
"William Carlos Williams slapping Wallace Stevens and his Noble ilk around in the introduction to his chaotic yet masterful dissertation in poetry and poetics, Spring and All.
Poetry rooted in moment. Doing what Holderlin said poets should do, exploring the difference between subject and object—differing.
