Lesley University
January, 2005
Writing out of Hell:
The Practice of William Carlos
Williams and the Opening of the Field
In the summer of 1957 William Carlos Williams wrote a piece for The American Scholar called “Faiths for a Complex World.” In it he said “My life is a constant watching of the field.” It had been his daily business, according to Paul Mariani. He scanned “every newspaper, every journal, every letter for hints as to what was going on in the world of events” (Mariani 732).
By 1957, his medical practice was curtailed
by health issues, but the spontaneous writing style he developed out of
necessity, was firmly entrenched. He articulated this as early as 1923 in “Spring
and All” when he said: “Most of my life has been lived in hell, a hell of
repression lit by flashes of inspiration when a poem such as this or that would
appear” (Williams CP 203).
The 1950 publication of Charles Olson’s seminal
essay “Projective Verse” gave Williams (and Ezra Pound) credit for being the
only American poets writing from an open stance. Olson also called this
stance toward poem-making “composition by field” and Robert Duncan was to
follow shortly with The Opening of the Field by 1960.
Williams was there first. The field as
applied to poetry was Williams’ life-long concern, though he said he was
looking for a new measure, which, as Mariani suggested “took on the
dimensions of myth with him” (Mariani 438). His obsession with
the need to reinvent line is best summarized in
Without invention nothing is well
spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured,
according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the
necessity
will not matriculate: unless
there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness: without
invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the alder does not grow from
among
the hummocks margining the all
but spent channels of the old
swale,
the small foot-prints
of mice under the overhanging
tufts of the bunch-grass will not
appear: without invention
the line
will never again take on its
ancient
divisions when the word, a supple
word,
lived in
it, crumbled now to chalk (P
65).
Williams in 1938, by age 55, was intent on innovating and knew that Einstein’s advances in science (Relativity Theory), had implications for the new measure as well as for society and consciousness in general, as evidenced by the just-cited passage. The “variable foot” was Williams’ awkward attempt to name this method for breaking away from the inherited line and meter of European poetic forms and craft a way of structuring the poetic line based on the realities of life on the North American continent. The notion of referring to his efforts as a field came not too much later. As early as October 26, 1943, in a talk given at the New York Public Library, Williams stated that the war was the “first and only thing in the world today” and that poetry was not an escape from that reality but a “different sector of the field” (Mariani 483).
So what we see as we look back at Williams, besides the well-documented localism and the insistence on the American vernacular, are two other crucial aspects of his work rarely noticed: the notion of a spontaneous composing process and attention to structure utilizing the notion of the field.
Spontaneous Composition
Williams, perhaps out of necessity, developed a spontaneous writing style. He was a very busy doctor, delivering thousands of babies. You can imagine a patient in the waiting room while Williams gets a hit of inspiration and jots down this quick poem on the back of a prescription pad. After a couple of decades of doing this, the process is – if not perfected – at least polished to a certain degree. He taught himself how to recognize that poem welling up, perhaps with a starting phrase or image. He learned to trust that hit and go with it. The key is in the process with which he was creating – in the moment – the form and content. He was not as dedicated to that original take as Olson would be, but a harvesting of that quick burst is what Williams’ process was about. His escape from hell was undoubtedly that heightened state of consciousness the act of composing spontaneously gave him, which is why I have likened this to a hit. Certainly this escape was a respite from poor, sick patients, but more than that, it was reality heightened into a different, deeper state of consciousness that becomes addictive in the most positive sense of that word.
The Field
In the 1830s British scientist Michael Faraday began a series of experiments that would lead to 20th century field theory. Faraday first realized the importance of a field as a physical object, during his investigations into magnetism. He realized that electric and magnetic fields are not only fields of force which dictate the motion of particles, but also have independent physical reality because they carry energy. In physics, a field is an assignment of a quantity to every point in space. Other work in field theory has Rupert Sheldrake proposing morphogenetic (or morphic) field theory, a hypothetical biological (and potentially social) equivalent to an electromagnetic field that operates to shape the exact form of a living thing, and may also shape its behavior and coordination with other beings. Sheldrake takes his notions from his background in biology and points out that this refers to “the coming into being of form (from the Greek morphe = form + genesis = coming into being”) (Sheldrake 275). In fact, Sheldrake suggests, “Matter is no longer the fundamental reality, as it was for old-style materialism. Fields and energy are now more fundamental than matter. The ultimate particles of matter have become vibrations of energy within fields” (Sheldrake 4). David Hawkins has also contributed some interesting theories regarding fields of dominance. Hawkins calls them “attractor fields” (Hawkins 9) and gives us more validation for the power of composition by field. He says “Genius … seems to proceed from sudden revelation rather than conceptualization, but there is an unseen process involved. Although the genius’s mind may appear stalled, frustrated with the problem, what it is really doing is preparing the field (my emphasis). “There is a struggle with reason which leads, like a Zen Koan, to a rational impasse from which the only way forward is by a leap from a lower to a higher attractor energy pattern” (Hawkins 164). This may be described as a deepening of consciousness. Developing the courage to trust what looks non-linear puts the practitioner at the level of integrity, in Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness (Hawkins 52). In the introduction to The Wedge published in 1944, Williams put it this way “…each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.” (CLP 4).
Williams sensed on some level that his act of writing, in opposition to the war, and the impulse toward it, was larger than the idle rambling of a left-wing poet. He was working in a different sector of the same field and his work was creating its own field of resonance that would have an impact, and still does. One fine example of that is the poem “In Chains”:
When blackguards and murderers
undercover of those offices
accuse the world of those villainies
which they themselves invent to
torture us – we have no choice
but to bend to their designs,
buck them or be trampled while
our thoughts gnaw, snap and bite
within us helplessly – unless
we learn from that to avoid
being as they are, how love
will rise out of its ashes if
we water it, tie up the slender
stem and keep the image of its
lively flower chiseled upon our minds. (CLP 19)
Is it the linear notion of cause and effect Williams was hoping for, that is by writing a poem he could end a war? I doubt it. He was quite frustrated by the impulse of the academies, so I am sure he did not feel a poem was going to change the mind of the “scholars of war,” as his protégé Allen Ginsberg called them in his poem “Howl.” I am suggesting he had an understanding that his work had resonance beyond the immediate, first by suggesting that those who react by hating the war makers become no better than them and have lost. Those readers who are capable of comprehending this can act in accordance with the notion that to end war one must stop thinking with hate, or in the false “us versus them” mode.
Williams was
prescient if you value Hawkins view that fields “dominate human existence and
therefore define content, meaning and value, and serve as organizing energies
for widespread patterns of human behavior” (Hawkins 9). Certainly the Whiteheadian notion of events being influenced by past
events and influencing future events reinforces this notion of the power of the
poem as field, suggesting that the process-orientation of this kind of
composition taps into powerful energy (in one sense) outside of the poet. How
appropriate is the poem “In Chains” considering the acts of the Bush
Administration and the systematic torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison,
In addition to his
lifelong, perhaps mythic quest for this new measure, Williams also had an
obsessive contempt for the work of T.S. Eliot, especially his influential poem “The
Waste Land.” Among other things,
Williams felt the release of the poem “…wiped out our world as if an atom bomb
had been dropped upon it,” and that “Eliot had turned his back on reviving my
world,” away from a new art form “rooted in the locality which should give it
fruit” (AB 174). In an 2004 interview with Tibetan Dur
Bon Master Physician Christopher Hansard, he said of Eliot: “Eliot wrote out of
unconstrained fear. He always sought an outcome.”[1] It
was Eliot’s energetic field exuding fear to which Williams and later Olson were
reacting. In fact, Olson’s “The Kingfishers” was a deliberate effort to repugn
the hopelessness of “The Waste Land.”
Yet “The Waste Land”
was, and in many circles continues to be, an important poem. James Breslin in
his critical essay on Williams and the Whitman tradition says that
according to Williams,
“mental
activity in most people is conducted primarily at the level of ordinary consciousness
or the ego. The distinctive feature of such life is its tendency toward a rigid
conservatism, a fear of new experience, and a desire to operate safely and
fixedly within established categories. Locked within a system, cut off from
fresh experience by the desire for security, the ordinary man will be
emotionally and sensually starved; in a real sense, he will not even exist…Ironically
then, the person who seeks security uproots himself from the present moment,
the only thing that IS, and so he becomes a perpetual drifter. Because he is
impoverished, his activity will be incessant; but because he is dissociated
from the sources of life, his restless activity will be futile…his fear of the
new, thwarting the creative process of renewal, is self-destructive” (Breslin 158).
If that does not
peg the state of the modern, TV-fed, terrorized American consumer, I am not
sure what can. After all,
Later in life Williams was able to get vindication for his stance toward art from the Action Painting of the Abstract Expressionists, from Charles Olson, and from Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets, and increasingly, the academy, but the best vindication comes from creating a field of work that will continue to grow in radiance and inspire future generations of poets and readers. And if he is in hell, his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” suggests that hell at least has its scenery:
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in
hell.
(PFB 153)
WORKS
CITED:
Breslin, James. “William Carlos Williams
and the Whitman Tradition.” Literary
Criticism
and
Historical Understanding: Selected Papers from the English Institute,
Ed. Philip Damon.
Breslin, James. “Whitman and the Early Development of William Carlos Williams.”
PMLA
82.7 (Dec. 1967). 613-621.
Hansard, Christopher.
Personal Interview, July, 2004.
Hawkins, David Power
Vs. Force.
Mariani, Paul. William
Carlos Williams: A
Hill, 1981.
McClure, Michael. Three
Poems
Sheldrake, Rupert. The Sense of Being Stared At.
Williams, William
Carlos. The
Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. (AB) New
Willams,
William Carlos. Collected Poems, Volume I, 1909-1939 (CP) New
Willams,
William Carlos. Collected Later Poems Revised Ed. (CLP)
Directions,
1963
Williams, William Carlos.
Williams, William Carlos.
Pictures from Brueghel. (PFB).
1962.