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Ciar\u00e1n O’Rourke<\/strong> writes about the thoroughly politicised, internationalist and anti-fascist poetry of William Carlos Williams<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cMourn O Ye Angels of the Left Wing!\u201d, Allen Ginsberg exclaimed in 1963, following the death of William Carlos Williams: \u201cthat the poet \/ of the streets is a skeleton under the pavement now\u201d. The accolade, although brief, was a fitting one. Williams, the documentarian of America\u2019s urban life, now resided \u201cunder the pavement \u201d, an appropriate resting place for a \u201cpoet of the streets\u201d who had also been a stalwart \u201cof the Left Wing!\u201d.<\/p>\n Principally remembered today for his literary credo, \u201cNo ideas but in things\u201d, as well as for imagistic snapshots such as \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d, Williams was in fact a formally adventurous and politically impassioned advocate of literature as an instrument of democratic praxis. For him, art’s purpose was to provide a record of lived experience, but one which at the same time shed light on the power dynamics at play in his society \u2013 from the gleaming suburbs to the impoverished tenements of New Jersey\u2019s industrial towns, where he worked (for over forty years) as a doctor-on-call and pediatrician. \u201cPoetry is a rival government\u201d, he wrote, remarking elsewhere that the \u201crevolution\u201d will be accomplished when \u201cnoble has been \/ changed to no bull\u201d.<\/p>\n As a poet, Williams balanced stylistic delicacy with an exuberance (sometimes a fury) of political perception. In one piece, the stirring still-life of a \u201csewing machine \/ whirling \/\/ in the next room\u201d comes to stand for both the financial want and the practical industriousness of a whole community of working-class women \u2013 as nearby, the \u201cmen at the bar\u201d are \u201ctalking of the strike \/ and cash\u201d (perhaps recalling the 1913 Paterson silk strike).<\/p>\n Likewise, and although he would maintain a personal affection for the three-time President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his later poems remained unflinching in their depiction of post-New Deal American society as one defined by inequality and social neglect. \u201cElection Day\u201d (1941) is a case in point:<\/p>\n Warm sun, quiet air <\/em> in the doorway of <\/em> boards for windows <\/em> from between the stones <\/em> of a spotted dog<\/em><\/p>\n The poem’s \u201cbroken house\u201d serves to reflect (and maybe also to accuse) the greater house of American democracy, divided or otherwise as it may be. By virtue of its very marginality, the slow, permeating poverty of the old man’s surroundings comes to stand in a representational relation to the political system in which he lives.<\/p>\n The radical redness of wheelbarrows<\/strong><\/p>\n Even Williams’s beloved \u201cred wheel \/ barrow\u201d may be understood as a statement of inclusivity: like the rain that glazes it, the wheelbarrow is a humdrum specificity, now suddenly become general \u2013 made luminous by the poet’s glancing view. It exists in multiple forms simultaneously: as a thing, a symbol, and a literary experiment in which Williams’s readers are actively involved. The redness of this poem-object is radical in its universality, filling in for all the colour and vibrancy of the world at large, as the \u201cyellow, yellow, yellow!\u201d does in his piece, \u201cPrimrose\u201d. \u201cIt is not a color\u201d, Williams proclaimed in that poem, but rather represents the flash and flow of life itself: \u201cIt is summer! \/ It is the wind on a willow \/ It is a piece of blue paper \/ in the grass…\u201d. It is as accessible to us, in our own lives, as it was to him \u2013 the very opposite of the literary fetish so prized in academic circles.<\/p>\n Williams himself ascribed his political and observational focus to his being, in some ways, an outsider in America. \u201cMy mother was half French [from Puerto Rico]\u201d, he noted in 1954: \u201cMy father was English… [and] never became a citizen of the United States though he made no objection to my remaining one after I had been born here.\u201d Such an upbringing, Williams suggested, \u201cled me to look at writing with very different eyes from any to be found about Philadelphia\u201d.<\/p>\n Crucially, however, by choosing to write in what he called \u201cthe American grain\u201d, Williams was attempting to tap into an expressive tradition that for him was as politically exemplary as it was culturally original. Perhaps curiously, for so antagonistic a literary innovator, \u201ctradition\u201d was a keyword among Williams’s motivating concerns \u2013 and was the trope, indeed, that he resurrected in the aftermath of the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, when he searingly blamed the American public (as typified by his suburban neighbours) for the outcome. \u201cAmericans\u201d, Williams writes, \u201cYou are inheritors of a great \/ tradition\u201d, despite doing only \u201cwhat you’re told to do. You don’t \/ answer back the way Tommy Jeff did or Ben \/ Frank […] You’re civilized\u201d.<\/p>\n Whether or not we accept the totalising equation of the radicalism of America\u2019s secessionist settlers with that of persecuted anarchists of the 1920s, the logic here is telling. For if Williams’s perennial urge as a poet was to \u201canswer back\u201d to his times, then such an impulsion, in his view, was by definition an American one: to be both dissident and dissonant amid prevailing orthodoxies, like Sacco and Vanzetti themselves.<\/p>\n Just as Williams was keen to place his work on the side of rebels of varying political stripes, his modernism was remarkable for the insight into industrial modernity it conveyed. He portrays New York city as a conglomerate of \u201c[s]weatshops \/ and railroad yards at dusk \/ (puffed up by fantasy \/ to seem real)\u201d, a vista that chimes with a later, quietly irreverent portrait of Henry Ford as \u201c[a] tin bucket \/ full of small used parts \/ nuts and short bolts \/ slowly draining onto \/ the dented bottom\u201d and \u201cforming a heavy sludge \/ of oil\u201d.<\/p>\n Analysing the phenomenon of Fordism from afar, Antonio Gramsci had argued that \u201cthe new type of man demanded by the rationalisation of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalised…. In America, rationalisation of work and prohibition are undoubtedly connected\u201d. If Williams’s poems were intended, as he put it, to resemble a \u201cmachine made of words\u201d, their outlook nevertheless presented a counter-vision to the mechanisations and resulting alienations identified by Gramsci here \u2013 presenting an alternative literary narrative, with all the lasting force (and occasionally the same slapstick sincerity) of a Charlie Chaplin picture on the big screen.<\/p>\n Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) in fact pivots on exactly those material contrasts and contradictions on which Williams’s poems themselves so frequently hinge. In the film, the gloriously haywire dance of the main character’s \u201cnervous breakdown\u201d in the factory (due to the repetition and strain of the job) makes for superb entertainment, recalling poet Hart Crane’s gleeful celebration of Chaplin’s key artistic insight: that \u201cwe can still love the world\u201d, despite the \u201cmeek adjustments\u201d and \u201crandom consolations\u201d of contemporary experience.<\/p>\n
an old man sits<\/em><\/p>\n
a broken house \u2013<\/em><\/p>\n
plaster falling<\/em><\/p>\n
and strokes the head<\/em><\/p>\n