William Carlos Williams is a poet of place. I wouldn’t say he was interested in environment — that’s too broad a word — or in a place as big as a nation, if that meant trying to form an identity as an American, as opposed to a European. Williams practiced medicine in what was then a small town 20 miles outside of New York City. Rutherford, N.J. is a place, and Williams described it in the language that grew out of that place.
I’ve come to think that one of the great questions to ask about poets is what they make of peasants, using that word in its ancient sense: the people who live in a place and who seem to be a permanent part of it.
If you are an Eliot or a Pound, you might be horrified by the ordinary folk and flee to Europe, where more cultivated souls exist. Williams stayed put and listened to the rubato in the speech of his neighbors.
What do I know of rubato?
I didn’t hear it until Charles Tomlinson, an English poet who was also a penetrating critic of poetry, pointed it out. Tomlinson edited and wrote the introduction to Williams’s Selected Poems. He talks about how Williams was marked by his place, his locality, his “earth-bound track.” Early in the essay, Tomlinson quotes Williams:
The only universal is the local as savages, artists and — to a lesser extent — peasants know.
Tomlinson appreciated his own place. He had a cottage in Gloucestershire. When Michael Schmidt, another poet and critic, wrote Tomlinson’s obituary, he mentioned Tomlinson’s admiration for Williams. Schmidt quoted Tomlinson:
I liked his ability to deal with phenomena unegotistically — a piece of paper blowing across the street, a yellow chimney emitting smoke, all the miscellany and detritus of what just lies around.”
I think that’s what being local, being part of a place, means.
Two notes: I am thinking about Williams because he was born on this date in 1883. I am thinking about Tomlinson because Michael Leddy, who posts at Orange Crate Art, was kind enough to point the way.
• Sources: William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson; New York: New Directions Books, 1985.
Michael Schmidt, “Charles Tomlinson obituary”; The Guardian, Aug. 27, 2015.
Orange Crate Art is at https://mleddy.blogspot.com
That’s a great Selected -- with a poet-editor much more attuned to WCW’s endeavor than Randall Jarrell, who did the first Selected.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Michael. You were right about Tomlinson's edition. Thanks for telling me about him.
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