William Carlos Williams

My first published article was on WCW. A paper I wrote during the first quarter of Graduate School on the same poet (a different paper) argued that his poems were rhetorical speech acts of a certain urgency. I contrasted some poems with a fairly hectoring, didactic tone, ("Let me tell you, my townsfolk, how to do things right") with the implicit rhetoric of the poem "The Jungle." I was contesting the standard view that Williams just presented static, motionless visual images, a view that I had never agreed with even when I was 14-years old. It bugged the hell out of me that people read Williams in the Selected Poems rather than in the Collected.

I could still write this paper now. I remember the main points and even some of the bibliography I used. I remember going to the library and looking in the rare book room at the original periodical publication of "The Jungle." It was different! I felt like a a real scholar, knowing the poem had variants.

I think this paper might have been actually better than the one I published, which was written a year later.

[This pretty much duplicates another post I wrote a while back. Oh well.]

I'm not sure what I'm trying to get at with these graduate school papers. Maybe I'm trying to see how I should view my current graduate students, give myself a benchmark. Partly it's to see how much I remain obsessed with certain idea I was developing so many years ago.

"At Swim-Two-Birds and the Limits of Modernism" was for Prof. Guérard, turned in on March 12, 1982. He didn't like it very much, giving it an A- and complaining about my use of dead language and cliché (maybe I didn't have teh prose as much as I thought I did). My thesis that this modernist novel was a Bildungsroman that ends up rejecting modernist aestheticism. I think part of the problem was the Guérard didn't like Flann O'Brien very much. He didn't really engage with my argument much. Guérard gave Frank O'Hara a B+ for his memoir "Lament and Chastisement," so I shouldn't complain about the A-.

"Roland Barthes and the Time of Writing" was for Professor Pierre St.-Amand's class (now of Brown University). It is a short and well-written paper that examines the question of Barthes's criticism in relation to what Barthes really wants to be: a Proustian novelist. I analyze the preface to his critical essays and talk a bit about about Blanchot.

I wish I could say that I write better now. Sure, I would change a few sentences here and there, but I always had teh prose. I'd say the basic idea of this paper was valid but a little thin. That I can look at anything from this period of my life without shame is quite amazing. At some point I'll try to read the professor's marginal comments, written in a small cramped hand.

This was a good class, given in French (which limited my participation) just on Barthes. I turned the paper in on Dec. 7, 1983, so that would have been the fall quarter of 83, at the beginning of my third year.

Somewhat less vividly, I remember a paper I wrote also in my first semester in grad school, for a theory course taught by a pleasant but spacey Heideggerian named Halliburton. My paper had the dull title "Some Aspects of Translation." My argument was that the idea that translation was a paradigm for understanding was faulty, because translation presupposes understanding. At some point, you had to assume a level of direct understanding prior to the conversion of a message into some other, secondary language, or you would be stuck in a mise en abyme.

Halliburton liked my paper. Maria Damon was in that course, which was a disaster as far as the actual course itself. The professor didn't really do anything except sit there, so the inmates were running the asylum.

(Note: I just found my folder of these papers so I won't have to rely completely on memory. I'll probably find my 21-year old self both smarter and dumber than I expected.)

I still remember vividly one of the first papers I wrote in Graduate School, for Al Gelpi's imagism class, in the fall of 1981. My thesis was that WCW had been seen as a mostly descriptive poet, but that this was wrong. Williams's poems were urgent speech acts, rhetorical arguments, not static descriptions. I placed emphasis on the "I must tell you," or the "so much depends" rather than on the thing described.

The poem I chose to analyze was "The Jungle," which I can still recall: "It is not the still weight of the trees..." I talked about how most of the poem was actually the negation of a description, hence had a rhetorical force, since the reality being described was meant to be held in suspended animation. It was, essentially, a negated cliché, leading to the final conclusion of the poem: "a girl waiting, / shy, brown, soft eyed / to lead you / upstairs sir." I loved how the poem ended with the words of the girl, without quotation marks.

I am amazed that I still recall this so well. I could probably even re-write it now from memory. It wouldn't be the same sentences, but it would be the same argument. What was good about it, I think, is that I had found something about which the existing consensus was obviously and outrageously wrong, and explained persuasively why this was the case, and why my view was more interesting and fruitful. How did I come up with something like this? Probably from reading Williams for many years before I even got to grad school, and trusting my own view more than the irritating people who thought of him as the purveyor of boring, static descriptions. Trusting my own irritation.