"Is it poetry?"
In 1957, One of America's most singular journalists, Mike Wallace, pulled out a poem and confronted William Carlos Williams in person. Wallace's example is a classic Williams poem—"Two pheasants/Two wild ducks/One from the Pacific Ocean/Big crab fished out for twenty-four hours/and two from Denmark/Fresh Frozen/Trout..."—a list of words that may appear on any family's refrigerator but rarely appear. William Carlos Williams explains that it is a shopping list, but if it is processed rhythmically so that the reader ignores the actual meaning of these words, then it is a poem. In other words, the everyday subject is erased from its original meaning after irregular poetry treatment, and a "meaning" is turned into a "meaning".
If there is anything bad about Williams's poetic concept, it is that he may have opened the precedent of "segmentation", and today, many people on the Internet have joked that the so-called writing poetry is just segmentation, and ordinary sentences can be broken and blank in inexplicable places to complete a work that looks like poetry. This is true, but it is not all right, it is a little bit of poetry processing, through the change of segmentation and rhythm, to complete the irregular treatment of poetry to reality a little effect. However, the clumsy "segmentation" does not reach the core of the effect at all, the meaning of the original sentence does not change in any way after the rhythm change, and the good poetry, through irregular reorganization, can make the ordinary sentences and words point to more meanings, it seems to tell more, but it is difficult for a while to concretely transform more of what the poem tells. After abandoning the shell of realistic meaning, the sentence changes from the real world to a composition of the sentence itself, that is, the world of poetry.
Williams, born in 1883, was the one who brought this idea into the world of poetry. As a child, he never imagined that he would engage in literature in the future, and on the contrary, in the eyes of Williams, who loved baseball and long-distance running, literature was a boring thing, and it is no wonder that the poetry he and all people could read at that time was almost the kind of poetry that used Europe as the ultimate metaphor, and poets used complex imagery and classic mythology to make poetry into a text that required a great deal of knowledge other than sensitivity and intuition to understand. Suffering from a heart attack, Williams was forced to give up his dream of becoming an athlete, and he lay in bed reading a lot of poetry and began to write poetry, trying to imitate Keats and Whitman, only the small, introverted short poems that he inadvertently wrote remained to this day. Gradually, he began to define his poetic ideas. As an adult, Williams, who was also an obstetrician-gynecologist, pediatrician and general practitioner, wrote poetry in between jobs — like the protagonist of Jarmusch's film Patterson who wrote poetry between bus rides. He could not tolerate Eliot's academic poetry, and he wanted to liberate poetry for all. What is a poem? It is a vague and difficult question to define, but in this vague waters Williams has left behind a series of clear buoys, and in his poems, and in his body, all the sentences that flow become poems that emerge in everyday reality and eventually point to another world beyond the meaning of life. (Introduction: Miyako)
This article is from B02-B03 of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's April 22 feature "William Carlos Williams: What is a Poem".
"Theme" B01 丨 William Carlos Williams: What is a poem
"Theme" B02-B03 丨Williams: "Theme" with flawed means
B04-B05 丨Paterson New content, new language, new rhythm, new form
"Social Science" B06-B07丨 What does the drama of the Beijing rickshaw puller illustrate?
"Interview" B08 丨 Bao Huiyi: All the aura appears in the fragment of the spirit empty
Written by 丨 Lingyue
In the first half of the 20th century, the American poetry world recognized five great poets — Frost, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams— and for Chinese readers, the most ambiguous face is clearly Williams, although he is two years older than Pound and five years older than Eliot (Williams was born in 1883, Pound was born in 1885, and Elliott was born in 1888), but in the senses, Williams seems to be a poet of a later generation than Pound and Eliot. Naturally, this has a lot to do with the late ripening of Williams's poetry and the belated recognition of him. When Eliot became famous in the early 1920s with The Wasteland and Pound with Hugh Selwy Moberley, Williams could only publish sporadically in poetry magazines such as Sundial and Other, and the important poetry collection Spring and Everything published in 1923 had only 324 copies, and most of them were not sold. At the end of the 1940s, williams published his most important long poem " Patterson " ( published in four volumes in 1946 , 1948 , 1949 and 1951 ) , Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "Four Quartets" in 1948, and thus entered the ranks of classic poets early.
Correspondingly, Chinese translations of Williams's poems have also appeared late in China, and in addition to a few of his short poems that can be seen in several American anthologies in the 1980s and 1990s, the first comprehensive Selected Poems of Williams was published in March 2015 (translated by Fu Hao, Shanghai Translation Publishing House). This year, Williams ushered in his most important appearance in Chinese, following the publication of the second translation of Williams's selected poems "Red Trolley" (translated by Li Hui) in January, CITIC Publishing House and Yazhong Culture recently launched the full translation of Williams's long poem "Patterson" (translated by Lian Hansheng), it is conceivable that after Williams led the trend of poetry in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, it is inevitable that these late Chinese translations will bring new inspiration to Chinese poets and readers.
Tit-for-tat "poetry competition"
In the decades-long "poetry contest" with Pound and Eliot, Williams has been a catcher and is often indignant about it. In a variety of American literary histories, Williams has been quoted in his Autobiography (published in 1951) as a striking assessment of the First 20 years of English poetry of the 20th century:
It was 20 years before the catastrophe of our literary world. This catastrophe is the T· The advent of S. Elliot's The Wasteland. We were once full of enthusiasm, and we once had a core and a driving force that moved us forward towards the theme of discovering the fundamental dynamics of the local state and the basic principles of all art. Under the impact of Elliot's genius, our work faltered and came to a standstill. His genius brought poetry back to academic fashion. We don't know how to respond to Him.
Elliot.
Indeed, Williams slowly developed his own poetic style in constant competition with the European poetic current advocated by Pound and Eliot. At first, Williams was left behind in the competition, and Eliot's poetry of genius (Eliot's genius, even Williams had to admit) quickly became a hot figure in English poetry, and Williams's old friend and Classmate of the University of Pennsylvania, Pound, was the guardian, editor, and fanatical propagandist of Eliot's poetry, which undoubtedly added a little vinegar to Williams's hostility to Eliot. Beginning with the publication of The Wasteland in 1922, criticism of Eliot was occasionally revealed in Williams's pen. In contrast, the tone of the Autobiography intended for publication is restrained, while in a private correspondence with Pound, Williams is full of fire, which is a fragment of a 1939 letter to Pound:
I love Elliott's verse, but I want to remind you that it looks good simply because it's a patchwork. Maybe I'm not right, but any writer in the world today is worthy of my trust more than that bastard. Even if he could write, to me, it would be like walking into church. I just feel unhappy in my eyes.
This kind of radical remark is astonishing, and although the tone of the correspondence between pound and Williams, two old friends, is often this mutual ridicule and joke, as a reader, especially as a reader who likes Eliot's poetry and literary theory, it will feel that this attack is ungraceful. On the other hand, we do not see where Elliot spoke of Williams, naturally, this is a definite attitude, and it is an indirect expression of disdain for Williams with Elliott's usual graceful gesture. Standard, the most important journal edited by Elliott, never published Williams' poetry, and in 1923 Williams submitted an essay he wrote about Marianne Moore to Standard, but in the end there was no news, and Elliott never even said whether he had read it. From my personal point of view, reducing the development of poetry to some kind of "line" struggle is somewhat utilitarian, and ultimately comes at the expense of weakening the charm of poetry itself.
Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, by William Carlos Williams, translator: Fu Hao, edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, March 2015
Williams's emphasis on poetry is based on American English and dialects, writing poetry with American themes, emphasizing the locality of American poetry, and thus distinguishing it from poetry writing strategies that seek resources from the European literary tradition. This advocacy of locality is epitomized in Williams' review article Edgar Allan Poe. In Williams's view, Poe was an outstanding poet whose literary distinction was directly reflected in his original poet, rooting truth in the "soil"—in Williams's own words, in "the times" and "localities." The word "native" appears as many as 15 times in this short article, and this does not include words with similar meanings to "locality", such as "place", "land", "spirit of the people", and so on. Williams believes that the implication of Poe's poetry theory and practice is that the novelty and originality of American poetry must originate from the native nature of the United States. Williams believed that place was all that American poets had, nowhere else, no other experience, so poetry should celebrate what exists and happens to them. Later, in patterson's publication notes, Williams, borrowing from John Dewey, emphasized this point again: "The local is universal, and all art is based on it." ”
Realistically, when Williams spoke out in search of America's poetic gods, his own work was not yet sufficiently convincing, which also drew Pound's criticism of his split-headed face in his letters:
United States? You utterly foreigner (Williams is a first-generation American whose parents are immigrants, and Pound, Eliot, including Stevens are all fourth-generation Americans) know a fart about this place! Your father had just landed on a side, and you had never been to the west of upper Dabby or the Montjolk Bend (the name of a place in the western United States).
H. Lee, who was blowing the prairie wind in his shirt, D or that masculine Sandberg, would think you, the frail Easterner, are really Americans? It's incredible!!!!!
What saves your work is dullness, don't forget. Dullness is not american character.
"Pisa Poems", by Ezra Pound, translator: Huang Yunte, edition: Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, January 2017
Although Williams and Pound often exchanged words in their correspondence, Williams was acutely aware of Pound's significance to himself, writing: "Getting to know Pound before and after is like pre-anthonymity and post-annunciation." Pound was enthusiastic and helpful, and his old friend Williams was naturally no exception, and many of Williams's works were published or published in some literary journals in Europe because of Pound's strong recommendation, and Williams's most important young poet after middle age, Zhukovsky, was also introduced to him by Pound. But for Williams' early works, Pound apparently believes that there are still flaws, and there is still a gap compared with Eliot's long poems with a solemn style. Pound's sarcasm about Williams' emphasis on locality also reveals that Pound pays more attention to the completion of the work than to the correctness of the writing strategy. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of the famous American poetry magazine Poetry Magazine in the first half of the 20th century, Pound made it very clear:
Are you going to support American poetry or poetry? The latter is more important, but it is important that the United States promote the development of American poetry, provided that American poetry is not blind to art. The glory of any nation lies in the creation of art that can be exported outwards without dishonoring the glory of its ancestors.
Abandon the extreme observation of metaphors
Of course, it is not surprising that Pound has such thoughts in the broader context, because the three of them—Pound, Eliot, and Williams—are, after all, poets in the same trench of modernist poetry. Although Williams deliberately exaggerated the difference between himself and Eliot due to competitive reasons or because of strategic considerations, Pound and Eliot also appeared in front of the world as new poets who sought innovation in the English poetry scene in the early 20th century. Modernist poetry is essentially "innovative" in its own right, and it is obviously inaccurate to think of Eliot's scenes of everyday life in London in Prufolock's Love Songs and The Wasteland, and Pound's description of his own tragic situation in Pisa' Pisa. Both Pound and Eliot were well-read poets, and they were also good at finding creative resources from classical poets, such as Eliot, who learned a lot from dante and the Works of English Metaphysical poets, while Pound drew nourishment from the Provencal bards and Vivians.
Williams didn't root his poetry as deeply, but he also had its own roots, and that was the tradition of Emerson and Whitman—a relatively late but more open tradition, a more all-encompassing attempt. That is, Williams went further in his quest for poetic innovation. Let's take Williams' short poem "The Red Trolley," which was selected as the most selected poem of all kinds, as an example:
So much
Depends on
A red car
handcart
Bright and sparkling
rainwater
In a few white chickens
On the side (translated by Li Hui)
This poem is generally considered to be a masterpiece of williams' Imagism period, but typical Imagist poetry usually pursues more associations and more symbolism in imagery, such as Pound's famous "Subway Station":
The flashes of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on wet black trunks. (Translated by Zhao Yiheng)
Contrasting the two, it is not difficult to find that Pound still uses a metaphor to highlight the vividness of the imagery, which is still a more traditional writing path, and Williams's red trolley is itself in the poem, Williams only intuitively describes what he sees in words, and in the process, Williams abandons the main food on which traditional poetry depends - metaphor. It is an extreme observation, and the poet is infinitely close to the observed object, extremely focused, not allowing the exuberant associations in the mind to distort the line of sight of observation.
Ezra Pound.
Much of Williams's poems depict insignificant, insignificant scenes of everyday life, such as broken glass shards, eels in the sea, plants growing by the kitchen gutter, fruit plates on the table, motorized barges by the river, and so on. It is precisely because Williams stubbornly cultivates the land of the usual "non-poetic" that his poems, while not flattering (because they are far removed from the poetic imagery and scenes that the reader is accustomed to), on the other hand these "non-poetic" textures insulate his poems from clichés.
If the break with traditional poetry was the first driving force behind Williams' poetic innovation, the extremely active modern art movement of the first half of the 20th century brought a completely different inspiration to his poetic creation. Williams has a deep relationship with art, his mother once went to Paris to study painting, his mother's interest obviously affected him, he and his brother have been practicing painting since childhood, Williams's dream when he was young is to become a painter, for which he once recalled in his later years: "I have a strong tendency to be a painter all my life. If the circumstances were different, I'd rather be a painter than toss around with these damn words. I never really thought of myself as a poet, but I knew I had to be an artist anyway, and being a poet was the arrangement of life. It is inevitable that this confession after the success of the achievement is a little arrogant, but it can also be seen from Williams's love of art. Art, in turn, did have an extremely important influence on his poetic creation.
Looking at the history of modern Western poetry, we will find that the poets who are closely associated with artists are usually poets with a strong sense of innovation, such as Baudelaire to Romantic painters, Apollinaire to Cubist painters, Ashbery and O'Hara to Abstract Expressionist painters. The reason may be that after entering the 20th century, art has indeed gone farther than poetry in terms of innovation and change, and the potential reason may be that as a material for poetry, the text, because of the meaning it inevitably carries, when poets strive for innovation, they unjustifiably put a shackle on poetry, and the materials used by artists - colors, lines and later readymades - have a neutral and absolutely objective nature, which makes artists more comfortable in using these materials, so they will go further accordingly. His artistic concept has become more radical. In other words, the poet's peculiar inertia adds difficulty to innovation (and conversely, this trait may also be a protection so that poetry does not easily become a label for innovation). Therefore, from the perspective of the history of art and poetry in the 20th century, the innovation of art usually precedes poetry, but poets who are close to artists and strive to incorporate artistic concepts in poetry writing are usually the most experimental.
"Red Trolley", by William Carlos Williams, translated by Li Hui, version: Lucida Mingmu| Beijing United Publishing Company, January 2022
On the other hand, Williams's use of improvisation, or his tried-and-true depiction of quickly focused on the foreground, is also related to his busy life, not to mention that Williams was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and literature and art were naturally Williams's dream when he was young, but for the sake of livelihood, Williams studied medicine and became a pediatrician after graduating from college, and it is said that he delivered thousands of babies in his lifetime. In this respect, he, like Chekhov, another famous physician writer, had a sense of compassion for all sentient beings, and was very devoted to his work as a physician Williams, which made it impossible for him to have a large chunk of time to engage in literary creation. Williams often saw stitches and needles, and on the way to the clinic, he suddenly parked his car on the side of the road and scribbled a few lines of inspiration-driven poems on the medicine list. During the clinic breaks, he would also crackle down poems with a typewriter hidden in the office until someone came to see him again. Of course, more of his poems were done at night, and although he was tired from a day's work as a doctor, he always had to write for a while when he returned home and went to the attic studio, and the exhaustion made his consciousness ethereal, but it helped him to plunge into the subconscious and try to salvage out seaweed, garbage, or pearls. This fragmented approach to writing fits precisely with his poetic conception of a momentary impression and a few words of inspiration captured by spontaneous improvisation.
Williams represents a different translation of poetry
《The Red Wheelbarrow》
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
"Red Trolley" (translated by Li Wenjun)
How interesting to see
That red trolley
The rain shimmered with rain
Next to a flock of white chicks
"Red Unicycle" (translated by Fu Hao)
Many are taken
It depends
A red solo
Wheelers
The rain was pouring
Shiny
Next to that group
White chicken
"Red Trolley" (translated by Li Hui)
So much
Depends on
A red car
handcart
Bright and sparkling
rainwater
In a few white chickens
Side
"Patterson" that completed the "long-cherished wish of the masterpiece"
After Spring and Everything, Williams published The Martyrs and Others of the Early Years (1935), Adam, Eve, and the City (1936), The Broken Leap (1941), and The Wedge (1944). These collections of poems are an extension of williams's early path of poetry intertwined with imageism, surrealism, and Dadaism, and are a reinforcement of his established personal poetic style. However, as he grew older, Williams also became a little anxious, and for decades, he always regarded pound and Elliot as a competitor in writing, although Elliot had established himself in the history of poetry with the long poem "The Wasteland", and Williams's old friend Pound also published his huge "Poems" since the 1920s, and Williams paid close attention to the progress of "Poetry" and commented on some of the "Poetry". At the same time, Williams apparently realized that in order to compete with Pound and Eliot, he still lacked a large number of poems that could compete with the Wasteland and The Poetry. James Langflin, the founder of New Directions, an important publisher of American poetry (like the British Faber and Faber presses), had a sharp eye, and as soon as the publishing house opened, he kept an eye on Williams and Pound, constantly publishing various works of these two poets. Long flynn once thought that a very important reason why Williams moved to write Patterson was to compete with Pound, in other words, he also had to write a voluminous epic masterpiece, so that his name could be engraved more deeply on the pages of the history of poetry.
Williams.
Inspired by a medium-length poem of the same name published in the poetry journal Sundial in 1926, the protagonist, Mr. Patterson, appears as a "great philosopher" for his "savage and feminine" ideas and music, but these ideas have been dusted in his imagination for many years. In middle age, williams was busy with the doctor's work, and many smaller writing projects prioritized his energy, and he did not have more time to further think and advance the writing of Patterson, but the idea of creating a huge work has always haunted him. To further conceive, Williams archived Patterson's materials to ensure they were not lost in pending documents. In a 1936 letter to Pound, he also referred to the planned long poem: "Then there was this great work I had always wanted to write: the poem Patterson. Gosh, how much I want to get it done, all these years I've been trying to do it in some form..."
But it took Williams another ten years to find the right form, which means he spent twenty years preparing for Patterson. One efficient and practical approach Williams came up with was to divide each book into three parts so that he could scan on a smaller scale, section by section, focusing on a single subject, like a bee picking pollen on a flower. He can think slowly about adjacent chapters that are similar to this topic, or he can turn to a very different subject. In this way, in a long poem, Williams can maintain a certain sense of jumping freshness, avoiding the lengthy transitions that make the whole poem drag out—a difficult problem for long poem writing. Of course, in this process, the core technique used in "Wasteland" and "Poetry",-text collage—also gave Williams a lot of inspiration. Many commentators have correctly pointed out that although Williams had been harsh on Eliot for almost a lifetime, and his dispute with Pound lasted for decades, in the end, when he created his most important collection of poems, he skillfully used the first two best methods of text collage as a basic technique for structuring Patterson. This reminds us of the saying that hate is love, and that Williams would not have been guilty of criticizing Eliot for decades.
Original manuscript of Williams' poetry.
But in terms of specific collage content, the difference between the three poets is obvious. The text collage of "Wasteland" and "Poetry Chapter" spans a much larger span, and in a small space of more than four hundred lines, "Wasteland" forcibly collages scenes of completely different natures such as scenes of everyday life in London, early anthropological rituals, and the legend of the Holy Grail, thus creating a great deal of tension, making this not very long poem a metaphor for the decline of Western culture. The Psalms deal primarily with history, and many historical figures—such as Maratesta, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, etc.—become central figures in many chapters, and accordingly, the different historical stages are collaged in the Psalms. Another collage of poems is collage in different languages, and Pound uses many languages in the poems — English, French, Italian, Latin, and even Chinese and Japanese — and his purpose is obviously not to show off, but to create tension between different languages in the collage process. Williams is certainly no stranger to collage, and in "Spring and Everything", he uses this dadaist artist's good way to intersperse verses and prose with each other, but in "Patterson", Williams collages the text to almost the extreme, the prose is followed by verses, and the dry poem is mixed with a laundry list. Williams did his best to collage and juxtapose various forms of lyric poems in Patterson, directly quoting a variety of prose material—including historical documents, personal letters, transcripts of conversations, and even shopping lists. If Eliot and Pound still look for collage materials in traditional classical poetry, Williams expands his vision to all linguistic materials, or more precisely, focuses more on everyday mundane linguistic materials, which makes patterson have a tiger-like vitality, an enviable vitality. Indeed, after writing Patterson, Williams no longer needed to envy or envy any other poet.
The author | Lingyue
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