#3: when the love was all worn down
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the third one.
Boredom. Yes, I hate William Carlos Williams. You could say he’s the reason I got my Ph.D.: I was so curious to know if there was something much deeper I wasn’t “ascertaining,”* not about Williams specifically, but about all these poets we read and worshipped, some of whom I liked and some of whom I didn’t.
I emerged on the other side of this experiment hating William Carlos Williams. I didn’t even know he wrote prose before I began my Ph.D., but I am now the owner of a memory of sweating outside the public library near the mall as I read In the American Grain, a stubbornly esoteric yet unfortunately influential book where he envisions all these tough conqueror guys from American History and shows how literary he can be about them. To enjoy this book, you can’t have read the real Cotton Mather, because then you would know how much more beautiful and strange he is than WCW pretending to be him. It’s a rhetorical trick: betting that his readers will be too impressed by the idea of this project—and too worried they might be wrong about the specifics—to criticize it.
He writes about the mysterious sludge that bothers a strong, smart, brave man’s life: women, savages, religious people. I can’t tell if he’s being ironic, and I don’t think he knows. He sets out to write what “no man has written.” But these men, and women, and “savages,” did write their own stories. The 1920s weren’t exactly a boom time for the recovery of Early American Literature, but he tells you insistently, throughout, that there are no records, no trace, and so he must forge into this vacant land imagination first. That wasn’t remotely true, and readers at the time would have known that. But who are you to disagree? He’s William Carlos Williams, and you’re not.
And don’t even get me started on the wheelbarrow.
Horror & Glory. I read Eileen Myles’s Inferno this month, and I didn’t think it was good at all; it was great, without any good in it. Frank Bidart has a prose poem translating Catullus: “I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.” That’s what I felt like after I finished it. It’s so much better and worse than Chelsea Girls. It seemed like it was by a regular person, and it had all this not-at-all-good stuff about how cool she was, how she didn’t need to be nerdy like the feminists, or be a feminist at all, because she was a “special” type of woman, how much a part of the cool East Village scene she was, how attractive she is to men. These are things I have encountered in other memoirs and do not care for. But the element of greatness in this book, the glory and…not exactly horror, really, but awe…moved me to a place where it didn’t matter what she was writing about. It’s irritating to read her making these social distinctions among poets in the “scene,” invisible and boring distinctions, or about how so-and-so thought she was a genius, and for pages it goes on like that—then she shows her genius and the very notion of judgment falls away.
Here are some moments in the book that filled me with awe. I’m not going to put the final paragraph here, but it’s utterly, maybe even life-changingly, transcendent. As transcendent for me as Emerson, who she sometimes reminds me of, in her wrong, right, human, beyond-language circles.
All night I struggled and tugged for the perfect word. In the brown of the dark, my sister’s soft breathing in her Hollywood bed across the way. (BROWN! I have never heard dark described as brown. Not black or blue. That is “the perfect word.” Lying in bed in childhood, the dark IS brown. And that’s such a simple, available word.)
the only virginity I am really familiar with is the past
Sappho said anything. She says about two words and then everyone, the world, jumps in.
About ten years later, when the love was all worn down I’m at a reading and Rose (who no longer lives here) was in town and my dog was lying under the table and she goes what’s her name and I said Rose.
What writes my poem is a second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That’s the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.
…My heart pounds with awe as I type those out.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Unrecommended: In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams
Recommended: Chelsea Girls and Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, Eileen Myles, “Circles,” Emerson….
“The Wonders of the Invisible World,” Cotton Mather, Prologue to “In Honor of That High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory,” Anne Bradstreet, “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” Mary Rowlandson White, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards, Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works,” Phillis Wheatley, the secret diary of William Byrd, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” William Appess
*(a word Eric Pankey said during one poetry workshop that seems so perfect to discuss poetry with, I use it during nearly every class I teach)