Nada’s Bad Binaries

or

Williams as Satyr?

David Hess! writes in from the city of drive-thru weddings…

Dear Nada,

I’ve been enjoying your discussion on the question of ornament, especially since I just finished reading Modernism, Medicine & William Carlos Williams by T. Hugh Crawford (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), which analyzes the “cleanliness/contact paradox” that runs like a fault line throughout WCW’s work. Crawford argues that “Williams’s poetic sensibility is permeated by a clinical sensibility: in essence, much of his writing is what Marie Boroff calls a practice of the ‘diagnostic eye’. Williams’s epistemology demands the exploration of the fetters to the clear apprehension of truth or objective clarity, and consequently it roots him in a deep historical tradition of medicine – the dialectical play between direct apprehension of the thing and the broader enframing of that data in a rational or theoretical field”(31). But this modernist desire to get words and objects “clean” – resulting in the dry masculine austerity you oppose to a carnivalesque feminine ornamentality — is countered by an almost sexual, satyr-like desire to be in touch with them. For Williams, visiting sick patients, being among members of the working classes and hearing their complaints and stories, was a source of excitement, not to mention poetry. Thus, “Williams attacked the academy because it tried to defend the English language from American and immigrant infection. Part of his motive is a sense that language (meaning) exists as it is used in a local context and cannot be owned. Its pristine purity cannot be protected behind the battlements of academic buildings”(82).

I think Williams’s prose, in general, displays as much descriptive richness and energy as the Rabelais passage you quote, if not on a noun level, at least on a verbal level – though I’d hesitate to call it ornamental (even as Williams speaks of the imagination’s role in embellishing daily life). Also, an argument, I think, could be made for the ironically ornamental quality of Pound’s poetry, especially The Cantos, with its treasure chest of historical facts and tidbits (I almost want to say gossip). In the Loy-pigeons poem you reprinted I detect lots of artifice but no ornament or decoration, which is to say no superfluous, digressive material. The poetry of Marianne Moore seems clean, as it did to Williams, but decorative, which is to say more oriented to relations between surfaces than depths. Coolidge, whose work ranges from minimal to maximal, is almost certainly ornamental, but I wouldn’t call it carnivalesque. Like much of Barbara Guest’s work, it comes across as pretty austere. Lush in a linguistic sense; dry in a human or emotive sense. So, basically, I disagree with the binary you construct between strict masculine form and free feminine ornament. One is always involved in the other.

Tidbits:

I read “An Andalusian Alphabet” – how strange that my interest in a more back-to-basics poem found its target in the emotionally direct and terse lyrics Lorca looks at in his essays on the deep song.

Alan Davies substitutes the word ‘glitter’ for ornament in his letter. I’d want to substitute the word ‘whimsy’ for both of them. You all NY-schoolers, right?

No, textuality is not dead. What seems to be gone from the discussion is the idea of a critique being the locus of avant-garde practice. If someone would pay me, I’d like to write an essay on “The Aestheticist Turn,” as the logical outcome and reaction against the politicization of language by the language poets. To paraphrase Steve Evans, what is the ‘shared conceptual horizon’ that presents itself now, after the turn to language? Nature? The ‘human’? Pleasure? The ‘mind’? Nope. Blogs.