Enclosing Next To Nothing

Anarchy, like Communism, like Marxism, is one of those words that institutional power has poisoned for so many of us. That is to say, we cannot think of it without fearing it in some way: we might fear the idea of it, that is be afraid of what we think anarchy means if "unleashed" upon us, if Marxism means Pol Pot or Mao then we might as well just starve ourselves, or if Communism means Lenin or Stalin then, again, we must imagine our immediate murders, but perhaps we'd prefer this end rather than be forced to live through such a social order. But, let's think a little harder.

We might just argue that bad men make bad things happen by force. We might argue that "ideal" men make bad things happen by force. We might even argue simply that good men make bad things happen by force. And I suppose now there are two common denominators here that you've recognized. Men and Force (and by that I mean violence, but not just physical violence--coercion is often psychologically violent as well, and as an extreme we can point to forms of torture that are directed at the mind more than the body). (I think we might assert a real connection of anarchy to the female and so offer another reason a society dominated by men would want to disabuse us of exploring anarchy.)

Anarchy, Anarchism, is, I think, best characterized by a single tenet: that of eschewing force and coercion. I had written "opposing" here but think that, though true, it might indicate a "counter-force" and I am uneasy using "force."

Further, as a person who writes as a part of self-making, and who writes poetry in particular, I am an anarchist. Which is to say, I am seeking words to embody an openness. Poetry too is coercive, at least as an institutional practice. That is to say form is coercive...which is as much to say that history is coercive. But, let's be clear that it is the systematizing of history that is coercive; the systematizing of form that is coercive.

This (form) does not need to be considered always a negative. Form, at least in poetry, can help focus our thinking. If I have to put a word down that conforms to a rhyming pattern, or a syllable count, for example, then I am forced into a limit. This can prompt one to finding "the right" word.

But see how even as I wrote all of this I used words that really, if enlarged and placed in other contexts, become troubling. We might all believe that limitations and "narrow" or focused thinking are, or can be positive, yet, they seem to me more probably detrimental, at least where thinking is concerned.

Perhaps it is the insistence on form that becomes difficult; the insistence on form is an external pressure, but one that gets internalized in societies and thus becomes a propriety and thus a calcification of thought.

William Carlos Williams said once that Marianne Moore was always a poet. He didn't quite know what else to say about what she wrote, but he knew it was poetry. It might be difficult to understand the idea of Williams, a poet who eschewed form, other than the fact that poems were written on paper and to him really needed to "look" a particular way (that is, he applied a visual aesthetic which may be said to be less of an interference in his thinking than a "metered" or linguistically formal practice might have been), liking Moore's poetry as it seems to stand apart from his own constructions. Moore creates her poems often via "syllabics" and so applies a kind of self-imposed form. Which is to say that MM did not use traditional forms, she made up her own as a way to be "formal" but, we might say, her forms are anarchically free, or "open." Add to this the fact that she changed (revised) her poems constantly throughout her life often to the point of very nearly erasing them entirely.

We might see Williams as a poet of anarchy. Or an anarchical poet. (I think possibly that his contemporary Mina Loy might be a greater example, but I'm not quite, but almost, prepared to say that.)

What he offers in Kora in Hell and in Spring and All are discoveries of the anarchist in the artist. We could go back to Emerson for a "foundation" if only to assert a program to undermine foundations (and programs!): "I unsettle all things," and "I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim."

David Graeber (anarcho-anthropologist?), in his latest book, The Democracy Project, seems to make two primary further points about anarchism as an idea "in practice": it is an opening of a space that allows for, encourages, improvisation. And in that space flowers imagination.

Hence, poetry. Hence, the truly human.

And so too the Williams of Kora ("improvisations") and Spring and All ("the book of the imagination").

There's so much more to say, but I'm really just starting to feel my way into this. And surely I'll have to bring Melville's White Whale into it somehow along the way!

Let's close though with this from Williams (1938):

THE POOR

The anarchy of poverty
delights me , the old
yellow wooden house indented
among the new brick tenements

Or a cast iron balcony
with panels showing oak branches
in full leaf. It fits
the dress of the children

reflecting every stage and
custom of necessity-
Chimneys, roofs, fences of
Wood and metal in an unfenced

age and enclosing next to
nothing at all: the old man

in a sweater and soft black
hat who sweeps the sidewalk-

his own ten feet of it-
in a wind that fitfully

turning his corner has
overwhelmed the entire city

Let's say that with emphasis, "in an unfenced//age and enclosing next to/nothing at all..."

Take Your Medicine, Hold the Sugar

Here is another piece "defending" the poetry of Wallace Gould--this time by everyone's favorite Poet of House Calls, Billy Williams.  Note that The Little Review editor, Margaret Anderson, once again appends a note of antagonism saying,

Disagreeing with most of Dr. Williams's article, as with Marsden Hartley's last month, I shall try to carry forward this discussion in the September number; not that I wish to use Wallace Gould's poetry as a special point of debate, but that I am interested in "putting over" certain abstractions about art which most people in this country seem to look upon as unintelligible.

A Maker
by William Carlos Williams

It never fails to anger me when I have read ten paragraphs of hair-splitting argument in this or that modern paper of literary pretensions to come to the end and find it is a book boost. The trick seems to be to air a number of more or less pleasant fancies and then to refer casually at the end to a new book by Mr. Soandso.

I have a definite and constant determination to set up in his place the man whom I find to be a poet and to revile and beat down endemic critics such as the Louis Untermeyrs who leave their pock marks wherever they are given an inch of entry and who are opposed to my excellences. What if I do not succeed? What if I am wrong in my judgments? To the full of my power I intend to maintain my fight as long as I live. This is no time to quibble over nice merits or demerits.

Wallace Gould is an exquisite performer upon his instrument. By his instrument I mean his Maine. I have said my say against "the chance lovely singers" who pipe up and do conventional ditties in Wyoming or Texas or Delaware or Nebraska, taking in the ready scenery of the place, and whose poetry is judged to be excellent by the "connoisseurs" because it is so charming. Wallace Gould is not one of these. Yes, he sticks to what he sees, what he knows, but the quiet scorn of his music has set him free. He is free in form, since any other freedom for an artist does not exist, free to turn his emotion into the use he sees fit to put it to without a thread to bind it upon some sterile track.

If he is lovely in his portrayal of a landscape, always a pure Maine landscape, one had better be on his guard for that pigment is in the hands of a master. If you dare to praise him for his loveliness you will find out that he has perhaps turned you around in the dark and soon you are out of the house by the back way. The artist throughout everything is conscious and working at his images with unerring leisure and often with horrid intention. This is the thing that no tissue paper critic can stand. That an artist should be a man of power; that he should use a catbird to proclaim the death of the whole world; that he should be such a mean fellow as to befool the poor critic who has been trying so hard to explain things—

I am not writing of a book, though book there must be when a publisher shall have emerged; I am writing of certain manuscripts of Gould's which I had the good fortune to hold in my hands and read through and more especially to poems published in Others and the Little Review.

An artist of immaculate craft Gould is. But I have another reason for praising him. It is because he has stuck to what he knows for his songs. No artist cares a damn where a man comes from or how he comes by the knowledge of perceptive values he uses in his work. But to me there is an overwhelming satisfaction in feeling that a man can be a poet under any circumstances and that this has not removed him from his world but has fastened him upon it with such a deadly grip that he has transformed it in spite of itself.

It is for the poet to announce that no condition can change him, that be he American, Russian Chinese, Jew he is poet first, last and always. But one way of announcing this is to take anything, take the land at your feet and use it. It is as good material as another. It is no better but it is as good. In fact the material
is nothing. But to prove it is nothing one must no depend on special circumstance, one must use it.

It might one day become imperative for a man to write of some environment foreign to his own provided the use of his own had grown to be a fetish; but Gould's heroic battle, his determination to use nothing but his Maine, at least in the poems I speak of, gives me an additional sense of joy in his mastery.

Poetry is made by the hands of the poet out of nothing. This must be continually proclaimed. Not only must the assertion be made to a possible public but there must be a proclamation by the poet to himself which is far more important. Then for God's sake let us proclaim to ourselves that it isn't made out of the brains of Frenchmen, Englishmen or dead Greeks. Poetry is as fully at home in the woodsy brain of Wallace Gould as in another man's living in Teheran. I for one am inspired to feel the presence of so capable an artist north of me, a man full of quietness and love and bitterness and infinite bravery and pointed scorn for the world of jackasses.

I have nowhere said that Gould is a great poet. I wish I could find the material for making such an assertion. I don't know the man's range. I only begin to feel the depth of his intensity, but that he is a splendid artist I declare now as well as I am able.
(The Little Review, Vol. 6, No. 4. August, 1919)

It Started Rings

Charlie Demuth once told me that he did not like the taste of liquor, for which he was thankful, but that he found the effect it had on his mind to be delightful. Of course Li Po is reported to have written his best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor's attendants and with a dancing-girl to hold his tablet. He was also a great poet. Wine is merely the latchstring.

The virtue of it all is in an opening of the doors, though some rooms of course will be empty, a break with banality, the continual hardening which habit enforces. There is nothing left in me but the virtue of curiosity, Demuth puts in. The poet should be forever at the ship's prow.

An acrobat seldom learns really a new trick, but he must exercise continually to keep his joints free. When I made this discovery it started rings in my memory that keep following one after the other to this day.

WCW, Kora in Hell (Prologue)

To Friends Who Write

Dear Friends (You Know Who You Are),

...in search of recognition...in a world where your work is a "one in many" "face in the midst of the crowd" "still small voice"...you are lost.  In what flows from hot to cold to make engines turn, we are the dissipate leavings.

And it's not surprising, but surely dispiriting.  As I looked at your poems I grew more impressed, more interested.  That is the best I can say.  And the best, really, I think I can do, is to be an eager reader...waiting and wanting more from you. 

That is what I want in a reader...well, just that A READER.  That is the "community" we want.  Appreciation from one reader...and then one more, and then another, and then...well you see the problem.

Imagine...I am only now waking up to Williams as a man of fierce intelligence but also of fierce ambition and fierce need.

As I hold Williams-as-written in my mind, in my ears, in my hands (tangible love) I realize that publishing in 1920 is STILL small.  Still a community.  Still easily divided among small numbers of writers we label members of "schools."  There are poets, great and good, who just want to be loved (and hated) by one another and to stand in time next to other names.  To be named!  And also, bed Mina Loy...who deserves so much more than that from me here now...but there it is.

We have no more great poets because the acquisitive mind has co-opted the world and poetry is CONTENT--and content, really, turns out to be irrelevant.  And that is a warp and weft of its own devising.  Realizing that poets both love and hate Williams, that the public knows one poem and makes gleeful "get it" fun out of another; realizing that the world does not know any of Williams really as you can't know the wheelbarrow outside of its home in its book where it carries a quantity of uncertainty as payload.

As I hold Williams I hold a book Spring and All that is nearly 100 years old.  This corresponds with Williams holding onto Shelley's Triumph of Life.  Or even my holding onto Auroras of Autumn like Williams holding onto the 1850 Prelude or the barbaric Leaves of Grass.  Who is the Ashbery who springs into life at the death of Stevens?  Who is that Ashbery?  He seems volcanic of the undigested being, but who am I to judge?  What is true is that monuments are made while moments are lost.  

We have exploded and are only pieces, are one in pieces, unbounded in our bond.

Trunks like Shelley like Whitman are surely only branches though with great circumference.  You and I are nearly forced to be the ideas of leaves hoping to bud into existence on a fruitful fruiting branch not fruited.  Still to grow juicy and even sweet which is a product of dry seasons so we may fall in the autumn and be usefully dead for the great continuing Yggdrasil.

Or something like that...something more than paper recycled for bodily use.

But if so so.

As ever, your friend,
One/Many

There is proficiency in dissection...

The whole field of education is affected -- There is no end of detail that is without significance.

Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge -- in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it.

This would clarify his field at once -- He would then see the use of data.

But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative.

nothing could be more ridiculous.  To data there is no end.  There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the knowledge--

It is imagination that --

That is : life is absolutely simple.  In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always.  There should never be permitted, confusion --

There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible -- But it must never be lost -- as it is today --

I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture -- In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash.  Not one.  The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge.  There is no end --

And what is the fourth dimension?  It is the endlessness of knowledge --

It is the imagination on which reality rides -- It is the imagination -- It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science -- in spite of everything.

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality -- Poetry

The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current -- which it has always sought --

In other times -- men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense -- Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts -- broken, bruised

few escape whole slaughter.  This is not civilization but stupidity -- Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination --

The effect will be to give importance to the subdivisions of experience -- which today are absolutely lost -- There exists simply nothing.

from Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (1923)