William Carlos Williams once wrote in a letter that he stepped in dog shit on a spring walk in 1921 and was overcome by a desire to learn about French literature. Spring and All, Williams' raving, dada-adjacent response to the interwar period, followed:
o meager times, so fat in everything imaginable ! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays — and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls— our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure ! Imagine the monster project of the moment : Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east) sparing none. Imagine the sensation it will cause. First we shall kill them and then they, us.
"Imagine the sensation it will cause" knows its own Americanism, all that ultimately became inscribed into decades of news cycles, with hair-sprayed, flack jacketed reporters gushing over the enthusiastic glow of bombs in the Baghdad night. Later, "Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place."
"Most of my life," writes Williams,""has been lived in a hell."
Kill, kill, writes Williams, as his poem destroys the world. Smiles, cars, and war: our monster project. American crassness oozes from the coming wound of the century that the United States subsequently named after itself.
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As children, many Americans met Williams through The Red Wheelbarrow. Our teachers instructed us to study its imagery. We were invited to write our own imitations. We might have understood that the poem was surrounded by absences – the "so much" that "depends" left carefully unstated, suggesting the social space surrounding the humility of an ordinary object of use. No one told us, as children, that this spare poem had been fished from the gnarly stew of prose and poetry that constitutes the 1923 book Spring and All. No one told us that before the wheelbarrow was glazed with rainwater that "children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth," or that there was, already, among "the pure products of America,"
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
It was as if someone had shown us, in an attempt to define "cinema," a clip of a family eating a wholesome Sunday dinner, never letting on that this was a scene from an apocalyptic film, and that the zombie invasion / deadly viral epidemic / nuclear holocaust was happening just outside the family's door.
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Spring and All came later for those of us who would be poets, often as a revelation. About the nature of poetry, we had been misled. It was published in France in 1923 in an edition of 300. No one in America, Williams said, would print it. He was forty, then, and TS Eliot had published The Waste Land the year prior, about which Williams writes:
…all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned into dust.
As a total work, the 1923 Spring and All was not available to general readers until 1970 when collected in Imaginations. Instead, Spring and All was the name given to the initial poem [beginning "On the road to the contagious hospital…"] and the following twenty six sections of verse extracted from this work and arranged as a lyric sequence, one which included The Red Wheelbarrow. This editorial decision was William's own.
The 1923 Spring and All begins with Williams' attempts to address the critics of modernist poetry, giving their objections voice: "Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent."
Williams pleads guilty, then sets off into an energetic over-performance of his guilty plea. William Carlos Williams destroys the world: a grimly gleeful, "creative" annihilation of every human, a "final and self-inflicted holocaust" brought about by the imagination:
"Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown thither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations. A marvelous serenity broken only by bird and wild beast calls reigns over the entire sphere"
Spring and All's apocalypse is a hyper-enactment of this anti-poetry, the so-called destructive tendencies that readers objected to in his modernist project. Those readers weren't exactly wrong – this poetry did not seek to repair the human soul, nor to offer it a respite, but instead to shake it as the world, too, was shaking. Williams understood:
"they mean that when I have suffered (provided I have not done so as yet) I too shall run for cover ; that I too shall seek refuge in fantasy. And mind you, I do not say that I will not. To decorate my age."
Perhaps Williams does, later, with his removals – "to decorate my age" – but in the 1923 Spring and All, poetry is not refuge or repair. This is poetry as an oppositional force, not a consoling or a compliant one. "I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life's inanity;" writes Williams in a near parody of Whitman, "the formality of its boredom ; the orthodoxy of its stupidity."
It is only after the world has been destroyed in its initial orgy of art and war and the earth has had sufficient sabbatical from frantic human activity, does spring arrive. Time itself is one of the poet's materials: the imagination is capacious enough to hold geologic time, with its eviscerations, evolution, and returns. When spring arrives, the grand prose dilation of Williams' apocalyptic time narrows into the precise lyric accounting of days. Springtime is an accrual of instances and juxtapositions — the greening of twigs, of opening of buds, of horny, defiant boy workers in the streets with stolen lilacs tucked in their caps.
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Spring and All and its (dis)contents: the disciplined spareness of its imagistic poems; the derangements of its prose (a mix of philosophy and nonsense, said Williams); its sweaty wrestling between the two; its impassioned – and often failing – attempt to explain itself; its holocausts, prophecies, and tendernesses. None of this happens in some smooth, clever, integrated way, but arrives in rough-hewn chunks, heaved together.
The lyric of Spring and All is that of the exoteric, public Williams – a folksy, seemingly apolitical doctor and a tidy, line-disciplined imagist. The esoteric Williams of the total work, however, is the one of the poets, cantankerous and wild, brimming with scandalizing difficulty and beauty, flagrant nastiness, bearing and expressing (however ambivalently and painfully) the prejudices of his age.
The Red Wheelbarrow does indeed also exist as some of us were once taught it as children, isolate and simple, precious in its humility, but this poem's existence as single, articulate instance does not negate the wheelbarrow as it also stands in the weird slew of history, violence, and time. So much depends on the red wheelbarrow as an emergent organism from Spring and All's thick matrix of murky wonder and bright rage.
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This exoteric/esoteric Williams is, I think, indicative of the nature of most contemporary poetry itself, in that the discrete object of the single poem halfway betrays, rather than ideally encapsulating, the work of any poet, for whom the work is often more ongoing, messy, antagonistic, unfinished. I am working now as a poetry editor picking out single "poems' for publication, so I am aware of the betrayals involved in the specimen approach demanded by the method of publication. On my own, I read as much as possible the works of my contemporaries as they are developed across years, complexioned by the changing moods and conditions of the world. Then, fully aware of the losses involved in the editorial project, I pin a single example of a single species onto a board for the consideration of readers. That specimen is never quite enough – often a mere invitation.
Poetry is as world-building as science fiction, I am always telling my students, and the richness of its experience as a reader often comes from immersion in and surrender to the poet's total work. For the casual reader, however, a single poem – or single book – might be all there is. There seems to be no way to get around this: a poem appears as a closed form in isolation, but in fact it exists as an ongoing and open form in the actuality of practice. The rewarding, complex projects of contemporary poets, often made of both verse and prose, sometimes of images, performance, experiment, criticism, and ritual, are so often held and judged in the page length example or single volume. A few words, then, are made to distill a lifetime of poetry, which is not impossible, of course – and I, like other poets, seek to make both the small and the large thing, an object and a world. But the specimen poem, in its way, is a deprivation of the ground of complexity and duration in which the poem figures.
That worlds are built by poetry is true. It is also not enough. Worlds are also, as Spring and All makes evident, annihilated. Poetry, too, radiates with violence, performs, at times, the theater of rage, of self-abolition. Poetry bears not just the soft imagination, but also the cruel one, the hard and the shitty. The existent world – the "unreal city" – realizes itself as real again in the face of this opposition, shakes, shifts, and amends.
Writes Williams:
Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science
depends for its reality — Poetry
The effect of this realization upon life will be the
emplacement of knowledge into a living current —
which it has always sought —
In other times — men counted it a tragedy to be
dislocated from sense — Today boys are sent with
dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts —broken,
bruised
few escape whole —slaughter. This is not civilization
but stupidity —
"Someone," writes Williams, "has written a poem." But, writes Williams later, "To hell with you and your poems."
Decades later, Adrienne Rich writes an essay – "Someone is writing a poem." I am not certain that Rich is responding to Williams in her essay, but it doesn't seem impossible that Spring and All was on her desk.
Williams writes about "the galvanic category" of imagination, "a force, an electricity or a medium, a place. It is immaterial which : for whether it is the condition of a place or a dynamization its effect is the same." Rich, too, writes of the magnetic force of words, the electrical currents of language, of poetry as an energetic counter-force to the brutalizing technologies of modernity:
"In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode."
The spectacles created by the means of what Rich calls "high technology” carry the messages of capitalist social relations: "that our conditions are inevitable, that randomness prevails, that the only possible response is passive absorption and identification."
Someone has written a poem, as Williams says, but also, as Rich says: "Someone is writing." The work goes on – the world, as ever, is unfinished. The apocalypse is being written and unwritten, each season an undoing, spring – and all – as yet, undone. There is something very tempting and necessary in Rich's account of poetry's stubborn counter response to the world, but there is also something incomplete and nearly self-congratulatory about it.
A poem (as "any" poem) is not merely a fungible unit of social "otherwise." If each poem were so genetically imbued with this quality of "lapse," had such a regularity in its rift-making social function, there would be little reason for poems to exist in their particularity, no need for them to do anything other than repeat the existent patterns and forms clearly recognizable in a historical period as poetry.
To think of a poem as such is to sentimentalize it: to replace the specificity of anything (say, a particular woman, with all the experience of one) with a glistening generality (a beloved grandmother, for example) often obscures the truth of the social relations which surround it (an older woman, left lonely and destitute in a patriarchal, productivity-deranged world, who her grandchildren reminisce about fondly and only remember to call three times a year.) This is sentimentality’s operation: stripping the complex and spiky particulars, leaving only the vacuous category.
But more than this misty-eyed error we can be tempted to make about poetry, that each instance of it is the same, it is often the case that poetry as such – that which most easily fulfills the set expectations of poetry – is that which, as Williams suggests, "decorates" the era. There is, and must be, a difference between the poem that "decorates" and those poems which seek to do anything but. Even as we are hungry for poetry's anti-spectacularizing force (a force I, like Rich, believe poetry possesses and believe the world needs), it is a mistake to think of poems with such ease, to mistake the potential of a poem's oppositional nature as an ongoing actualization of it. This is why, I suppose, the revelation of Spring and All after a childhood of Red Wheelbarrow was so startling: Someone (in hell) had written a poem.
Charles Demuth, detail from Spring, 1921