Tag Archives: William Carlos Williams

Industrial Pastoral

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I'm (re)reading William Carlos Williams' long poem, epic poem, Paterson. Williams' poem has many dimensions, many voices, many perspectives, many types of content. It is, among other things, an homage to Paterson, New Jersey, to the Passaic Falls, to the location, its history and its people. There are historical documents, contemporary letters, transcripts of conversations, narrative interludes, and lyric reflections. I've loved this poem for fifty years, although I haven't read it for awhile. Rereading shows me how delightful, how challenging, how rewarding it is.

Williams' original design divided the poem into four books, with a kind of consistent pattern, flow, to them, following the Passaic River, following the life of Noah Faitoute Paterson, his alter ego and voice in the poem. Williams shows profound concern for poor and working people, narrating in Book II, an "Sunday in the Park," complete with young lovers and an evangelist.

On the first page of the Preface to Paterson, Williams defines his method:

To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general,
rolling up the sum by defective means —

Williams' best-known definition of his method is also early in Paterson:

— Say it, no ideas but in things —

Williams' poetry is empirical, a "return to the thing itself." This is not to say that his poetry lacks ideas or abstractions, just to say that he expresses the general through the particular, always a good plan for a poet. If you've not read Williams' work, I strongly recommend that you do. If you have read him, I recommend a return to his pages. Even if your first contact with Williams' writing wasn't satisfactory, further acquaintance may well open new vistas to you.

Documentary Poetry

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This post is an sibling of the post on The Poetry of Notation. It also connects with previous comments on Ezra Pound's ideogrammic method. Documentary poetry is exactly what it sounds like: poetry that uses contemporary or historical documents as its basis. Philip Metres has an excellent article, "From Reznikoff to Public Enemy: the Poet as Journalist, Historian, Agitator," on the Poetry Foundation's Web site. Metre gives links to examples. Especially significant are those from Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, poems based on court records.

Documentary poetry connections with the poetry of notation by taking "found" and observed materials and working them into a poem. The poetry of notation is more immediate to the poet's personal life; the documentary poem is more social, political, historical. It's especially significant that Philip Metre mentions the rap group, "Public Enemy," in his title, and gives Bob Dylan's "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" as an example.

I'm not going to replicate Metre's links here; he provides a rich network of poets and examples. If you follow them, you will, in the way of the Internet, find yourself lead on to other sites, writers, and aspects of the topic.

One of my long-time favorite poets, William Carlos Williams, wrote poetry both of notation and documentation. His long poem, Paterson, includes both. The Poetry Foundation has a good, somewhat lengthy, overview of Williams' life and work.

Consider this post to be an informal, undated challenge to try your hand at ghazals using documentation or notation and submit them to The Ghazal Page. As Williams would say, "What do you have to lose?"

The Poetry of Notation

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I've just published a page on this blog with the title, "The Poetry of Notation." It presents a fairly simple idea about a possibility for poetry. It discusses some of the poetics of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson and offers some suggestions and questions about how these ideas apply to writing ghazals in English.

For the record, I have been strongly influenced by Ezra Pound's poetry and poetics, as well as those of Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams. I read Pound and Williams much more often than Olson now. I did work with Olson's ideas of projective verse or composition by field. 

Writing this page suggested some further possibilities that I hope to pursue soon in posts or pages. While there's nothing especially original about the ideas in "The Poetry of Notation," I think the phrase is original and I find the idea exciting. Perhaps you will also.