Shawn's Response to Williams

William Carlos Williams' Spring and All was a very interesting reading experience. I enjoyed it-- I really did-- but I found it to be a highly disjointed work that went out of its way to make a point by, well, going out of its way.

Williams' hybrid format of essay and poetry combined into one certainly challenges the status quo of both styles, but as with a toddler showing off his skills on a tricycle (or anything else for that matter) the constant call of attention grows tiresome. His point was well taken that he is perfectly adept in both formats, and I get that he's trying to uproot the factions of established styles and traditions, but shouldn't one such shift be enough? No, of course not if you're William Carlos Williams. The guy can't even get enough of his first name, he has to have it in his last name, too! But I digress...

One of the most interesting aspects of Williams' essay, I thought, was the idea that limitations can drive an artist to produce more. On page 179, he frames this thought: "The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world." This is a very interesting idea for Williams to include because it somewhat debases his ensuing argument, that creation is dependent on imagination and imagination works with less output if subjugated. The phrase "intoxicated by prohibitions," though, brings to mind a situation in which subjugation only increases creation. However, he doesn't necessarily talk about imagination in this passage. It is important to realize the distinct difference between creation out of imagination and creation for the sake of creation. It's the difference between writing because you want to or writing because you have to. (That's not a dig to this assignment, by the way. I'm actually really enjoying this assignment.)

"The value of the imagination to the writer," writes Williams, "consists in its ability to make words. Its unique power is to give created forms reality, actual existence." I found this to be a really interesting quote, especially when put in the same context as our continuing discussion of binaries centered around Rae Armantrout and Philip Levine. If imagination can create these forms as real as if you were to touch them, then it must be frustrating to know of that failure in language to effectively transmit these ideas. If this does frustrate Williams, I can't tell (other than the fact that he mentions the idea) because of his easy boredom with ideas; if he can't find a logical ending to one, he just doesn't end it and moves on. He seems to have no problem expressing complex ideas, but unlike Levine and Armantrout, he doesn't complain much about the failure of language. Instead, he seems to focus most of his grief on failures of ideas rather than the words that express them. It gives me the thought that any idea of his, in his mind, is well-formed. It doesn't matter how it comes across, just as long as it does come across.

Caroline's Response to Williams

Reading Spring and All was a particularly interesting experience for me because I had only ever been introduced to Williams in the context of an anthology, from which I was assigned two of his poems. The poems I read were, of course, "The Red Wheel Barrow" and the one about the "contagious hospital" which had actually been entitled "Spring and All" in that particular collection. I know we have talked about this in class, but it really surprised me to find out that this whole long piece was actually "Spring and All" and not just the short poem I had studied previously. And now that I know, I have a completely different perspective on Williams. I have to say that in that course that I took last year, I really struggled to find anything good to say about Williams, because I only had such a narrow sampling of his work and I couldn't understand a thing he was saying.

Now, however, I do have a much bigger appreciation for him. Having said that, I still think he's absolutely nuts, and I can't honestly say I understand much of what he's trying to get across, but nevertheless I enjoyed the process of reading his words and found several places that struck me. One of my favorite quotes is, "Life's processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetitious" (203). As I was working through this dense text I would occasionally come to a line that actually completely made sense to me, that stood out as plainly and simply true. This is one of those quotes. For all of the rambling that Williams does, I feel like he also manages to truly say some incredible things about writing, about art, and more generally about life and human nature. For him to say, for example, such a blunt thing about life is rather bold, but he's right. We, as humans, typically only ever do a handful of unique and profound things, and most of the rest of our lives are spent repeating our own acts and the acts of others. That, to me, is a pretty powerful thought.

One part that I really wish I understood better is the section where Williams talks about Shakespeare. Many of us, as English majors, have had an enormous amount of exposure to Shakespeare and so naturally I was intrigued to read what Williams had to say about one of the most famous writers of all time. Of Shakespeare he writes, "He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature's composition with his own" (208). This seems to be a compliment but throughout this section he criticizes Shakespeare for perpetuating the copyist tendency. Honestly, I just can't fully wrap my head around what he is really saying about him.

All in all, I feel like I have gained a much better feel for Williams style and general beliefs. I appreciate his passion for original art, for art that isn't rooted in someone else's art. I think Spring and All is a great example of what he is preaching if for no other reason than it completely toys with the reader's mind. It is a challenging read that catches you off guard and forces you to throw away your preconceived notions of literature. In order to get anything out of this piece, I really had to challenge myself to forget about rules and just take in whatever ideas I could. That, to me, proves that Williams accomplished what he wanted to.

Renate's Response to Williams

May I just start off by saying that this was the most confusing thing I have ever read? Ever???

Maybe I should be a bit nicer about it and just say that it was very difficult to understand. So, he starts out talking a little bit about the reader; Oh, Williams loves his fellow man? OK, that's fine. "I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him: endways, sideways, frontways, and all the other ways--but he doesn't exist!" (178). . . Wait, what?

"Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman, and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east) sparing none" (178). Why??? What have they ever done to you? Where did this come from (and this doesn't really make sense if his fellow man doesn't exist)? I understand, now, why there was all this killing and destruction--to bring about spring and rebirth, which I did recognize as a main theme in this piece--but why, in his scenario, did we all have to kill each other? Why couldn't some natural disaster wipe us all out? Or is the apocalypse in Williams' mind one where people just kill each other?
". . . we love them--all. That is the secret: a new sort of murder" (179). This makes even less sense. I can't form my idea concretely in my head, but I could guess that we love them so much we want to make a new world for them. But that wouldn't work if they're already dead. We seem to want the new beginning more than we want to keep our friends alive.

Bear with me as I skip towards the end (pg 226) where Williams says, "If the power to go on falters in the middle of sentence--that is the end of the sentence--Or if a new phrase enters at that point it is only stupidity to go on." Excuse me for being stupid. I'd rather people understood all of what I was trying to say.
But that one sentence pretty much sums up how he's written this whole. . . thing. The beginning was hard enough to understand--what with killing the whole population of the world because we love them. Now we have to get through his broken thoughts. On page 192, for example, he says, "A work of the imagination which fails to release the senses in accordance with this major requisite--the sympathies, the intelligence in its selective world, fails at the elucidation, the alleviation which is--" Which is what???
Or on page 194, "In work such as Shakespeare's--" This is even worse.
Oh, here's a good one, page 198: "Cezanne--"

OK, I'm sorry. I don't mean to poke fun (as I smile to myself). I think I focus more on the random breaks than what Williams is saying before and after. I just feel that I don't have much to contribute when I don't understand the reading. I just have questions. Which are also OK, but I wish I could answer them once in a while!

I wonder how Williams felt about writing this. I mean, I assume that what was going through his head is almost exactly what's written on the page. But what made him decide to write this? Who was his audience?

I hope it wasn't me.

"Spring and All": a very fitting title for this piece. Especially the "and All."

Amanda Bissonette- Williams' Response

Spring and rebirth is a constant theme throughout Williams' Spring and All. "It is spring. That is to say it is approaching THE BEGINNING" (182). Williams' is expressing that spring is the rebirth of the world. In the beginning, Williams' talks about destruction of the world before the rebirth. Every thing needs to be broken down before there can be new life. "Never mind; the great event may not exist, so there is no need to speak further of it. Kill! kill! the English, the Irish, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the rest: friends or enemies, it makes no difference, kill them all" (179). There is another place in Spring and All where Williams' makes mention of destruction before rebirth. "Beyond there was of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen...twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines...One by one objects are defined- It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf" (183). The poem mentions the death of the plants around the hospital where there is also human birth. The human birth is parallel with the new life in the plants. Williams' ties in human birth with the theme of spring, because human birth brings new life as well. "They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind-" (183).

I feel as though William's contradicts himself quiet a bit, especially when he talks about spring and evolution repeating itself. "It is spring, but miracles of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place durning these seemingly wasten eons. Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING" (181). Here, William's is saying that although spring brings new life and new experiences, whatever has been newly created, is just taking the place of what was once there. Where there was once a tree, there is now a similar tree in it's place. Williams' is saying that no matter what has come from the new spring, it will never be originally new, but a copy of what once was. "Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceeded in the dead ages gone by" (181). I feel as though he is saying that nothing on this planet can ever be truly new. We live in a world of duplication, and nothing can ever be its own original creation. Even as humans, we are new form of our parents because we cannot be created without them.

When I first encounted this piece of work, I was jolted from my concentration whenever the piece would shift from poem to text. It took me a while to get used to the shifts because when I read the text parts, I can easily understand what it is telling me and move on. When it came to the actual poems, I would have to go back, read it again, and write notes as to what I thought was going on.

Benjamin Gadberry: Williams Response

Spring and All continues to be a piece that impresses me not so much on a level of artistry but instead on its grand measure of cleverness. Spring is more commentary than poem, and resonates more, I would assume, with writers than the general public. This is the sort of piece that had me, at every turn of the page shouting “Yes!” or “Brilliant!” as I found something more to agree with.
The central theme of Spring hasn’t changed. Williams attacks a powerful establishment of what writing should be, weak tenets held up by literary critics and writers without imagination who believe that a work set strongly in reality is therefore superior to anything the imagination might create if given the chance. Williams fights this with flourishes such as “In the condition of imagination suspense only will the writing have reality” or “imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam, it is not a plaything but a power” (206-207).
These passages I found more profound and more relatable than Williams’ poetic departures, which are as a poet perhaps his speciality but doesn’t (at least in my mind) carry as strongly as his commentary.
Another point which caught my attention was: “Writing is not about in the daily experience for apt smilies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced this to my sorrow.”
Now, Williams’ exact purpose behind this statement eludes me, however, based on my interpretation, it is a further attack against the idea of writing in reality, of not being able to expand beyond reality. Williams adamantly opposes the idea that writing is a mirror of nature or the natural world.


Indeed, the best aspects of Spring come from the first few pages, including a passage in which Williams mocks his critics by pretending to act like them, stating:

“You seem neither to have suffered nor, in fact, to have felt anything very deeply...you moderns! It is the death of poetry that you are accomplishing.” (177)

The above (heavily abridged) statement is the basis of Williams’ argument. As a writer, it carries a lot of weight, but as I read I could not help but question whether readers would embrace or understand it. Spring is intensely personal in that it is a writer who finds himself defending his art--a place any relatively sane person would not want to back an artist into, as it is the place where any artist will strike back most savagely.

One last section that intrigued me was Williams’ contention that certain art purists felt that art “must be real, not “realism” but reality itself––” (204). Previously WIlliams expressed that he wanted to create “new forms, new names for experience” (203-204). This conjured in my mind thoughts of impressionists, cubist painters, and so on. Williams wanted to try capturing the world in new ways, or transcend it altogether and write about something else. Spring and All can be torn down to the point where the themes of the piece lie in tatters, or the imagery of spring is exhausted to ridiculousness, but what caught me most about this piece will remain Williams’ accurate and amusing attack against literary conventions.



-Benjamin Gadberry

Kelsey's Response to Williams

(I don't remember needing to post these, but as I saw one up already I figured it couldn't hurt)
AMENDMENT: I realized I'm not in group one and this was not my blog post anyway it was the response so please ignore...or comment if you really feel like it but I can't figure out hot to delete this.
Williams

I love this piece for many reasons, first being that I hadn’t realized I’ve read bits of it before and enjoyed it then (even without the glorious context of the full-er piece) and three that he has the same sort of snarky humor I associate with some of my favorite writers/critics/artists/etc. I especially appreciate the paragraph (I won’t quote the whole thing for the sake of typing and space) “What I put down of value will have this value…not as the essential of the work, one of its words.” To me this is the moment where he embodies all that Modernism wanted and ultimately achieved (I think anyway) to say aha you silly bastards with your silly traditional forms this is just as art-sy and is in fact better you pompous stuffed-shirt cockroaches. Ok, actually that is my interpretation of what I think Virginia Woolf wanted to say when she wrote The Waves (not that it actually has anything to do with the novel but I always imagine her as a snarky person). Oh yes, binaries. Well, clearly in the world of Williams and other wonderful people of that time the binary was Modernists versus not-Modernists (traditionalists, Romantics, Victorians,…other names for them?). So, in that sense I don’t think he ever really exists in the binaries that we talked about in class. That might’ve been a lie actually because reading ahead (ahem oops) he sort of straddles “the line” between Camp A and Camp B as we defined them. He is versatile enough to have the more grammatical seeming prose-y type lyrical and definitively lyrical parts in the prose interjections and the remaining paragraphs as well as the ‘jarring’ line break infested less imagistic (ahem I disagree but for lack of better descriptors…) more ‘experimental’ type that is more easily recognizable as brain hurting deep poetry. (I don’t remember how much I was supposed to write so I apologize for the continued rambling.) In any case, these binaries that supposedly exist are after Williams’s time (at least maybe?) and are therefore moot. I need to read this again, which I will, but there is so much to absorb and although he comes back to the image of spring and eggs (chicken references?) and the end of the world coinciding with the beginning of the world there are so many other moments that pass by that I haven’t absorbed them yet. Also, I need to re-emphasize the meaningful parts as in some places I got distracted by his gorgeous language and may have underlined pretty passages just because they’re pretty. And now I’m off-topic.

Richard's Response To Williams

Mr. Williams is... a delightful contradiction. I've never encountered a poem like this before in my life, and I seriously hope that there's more poetry around like this because, despite how hard it can be to write my mind around some of the longer monologues, it's a very enjoyable, stimulating, thoughtful poem, containing several elements from different forms of poetry. The poem's shifts from flowing, dramatic, Mark Twain-length sentences, ("The fight is on: these men who have had the governing of the move through all the repetitious years resent the new order.") to short, jagged, broken lines reminiscent of William Shatner's acting (Petals radiant with the transpiercing light / contending / above") is jarring, but refreshing. It's refreshing, and keeps a reader wondering what happens next. Even stranger is that the sections seem to change within themselves every now and then, even changing its typeset. For example, the final line in the second paragraph in CHAPTER IV sudden switches to all capitals for the second half of the sentence: "Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING!"

And that rather eloquent, poignant sentence is immediately followed by a mere two word paragraph: "Good God!" which is followed by yet another long, eloquent, flowing monologue, saying "Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceded in the dead ages gone by."

The best thing I can say about this poem is that it encompasses a little bit of everything and by doing so states that it doesn't need to conform to a single binary... it's more fun to have them all!