William Carlos Williams by Paul Mariani

Author:Paul Mariani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595347657
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2015-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

1941: With the New Year Laughlin brought out a slim pamphlet of Williams’ poems in his Poet of the Month Series. It was sixteen pages long and Williams called it The Broken Span, much of it a selection of work already published in the Collected Poems but containing in addition fifteen “details” from “For the Poem Patterson,” with two t’s. He prefaced the details with lines that tentatively linked them as parts of a long love poem:

A man like a city and a woman like a flower—

who are in love. Two women. Three women. Innumerable

women, each like a flower. But only one man—like a city.

By 1941, then, as Williams would tell Edith Heal sixteen years later, the idea for Paterson “was there, expressed in the . . . lines that are used word for word, though spaced somewhat differently, in the first few pages of Paterson 1.”89 Most of the details had been lifted from the “Parody,” but Williams was beginning to find a way to hold his discrete fragments together. What he called on was his unashamed love of women and the dialectic generated by his intensely erotic desire to possess his world as a man might possess a woman. “A woman’s eyes / a woman’s / thighs and a man’s/straight look,” he had written in his “St. Valentine.” Such love had the power to stand up to the very death of cities, rotting like so many “pig-sties.”

He was also writing his play Many Loves, that winter and spring, taking some of the one-acters he had written for a local Rutherford drama group in 1939 and combining them with a framing device written in verse. That frame employed a director, a homosexual backer, and an actress in an interplay of tensions that Williams would use again in Paterson 4, as he played with the idea of the virgin language and an etiolated, narcissistic homoerotic tradition. What he was after in Many Loves in each of the three one-acters incorporated into the play was a sympathetic portrait of the woman and the failure of communication between the sexes. He worked with the themes of infidelity and lesbianism in the plays, as well as with the problem of presenting a viable verse form written in the American idiom. Moreover, he employed a Pirandello-like frame to link each of his discrete scenes. Like T. S. Eliot, Williams presented scenes that echoed the Greek tragedies but without so much as allowing anything like a classical allusion to disrupt the scenes that had been culled from his own experiences as a physician.

He also gave several lectures that winter and spring. On February 5 he lectured at Harvard on the topic “The Basis of Poetic Form,” at Theodore Spencer’s invitation, and there he attacked the language of university discourse as static, reactionary, and anemic. At the same time, Williams also stressed the need to incorporate into the poetry of his time the American vernacular, the language as it was actually used in homes and factories, garages and shipyards.

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