A tramp thawing out
on a doorstop
against an east wall
Nov. 1, 1933:
a young man begrimed
and in an old
army coat
wriggling and scratching
while a fat negress
in a yellow-house window
nearby
leans out and yawns
into the fine weather
1934
The Term
A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length
and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the
wind slowly over
and over in
the street as
a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to
the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling
with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.
1938
Although all modernists were preoccupied with the idea of representing “reality”, the interpretation of what this meant was often quite different. For Williams, a practicing doctor in a poor neighbourhood, that reality also included the social conditions and lives of those he knew and treated. Although his approach often shares, with Eliot and Stevens, the idea of recording life objectively he had – and only discovered this recently – a strong antipathy towards the high modernist stance of these two poets, particularly that of Eliot.
In many ways I find Eliot a more exciting poet. There is a virtuosity both in form and texture (a kind of sonic pyrotechnics) which is absent – quite deliberately – from these poems. With Williams I find there is rarely a brilliant or memorable line but the poems as a whole are brilliant in their pared back way. I think, temperamentally if nothing else, I’m drawn to this work. It seems to me also, for all its almost documentary objectivity, to have a heart. He just presents what is there (the red wheel-barrow etc) but there is so much care in how he does this. The work has, in the end, an empathy with those it represents (the tramp lying in the doorway, the scruffy young man, the black woman who leans out her window) though like the best documentaries it almost never explicitly states this.
In many ways I think the lyric poem and the photograph have a lot in common. Although a poem is imagistic it also has temporal quality so the analogy is not complete but somehow they seem close. (In a way, a poem has to be an image or sequence of images and cannot be abstract, say, in the way a painting can.) But ‘The Sun Bathers’ and ‘The Term’ are closer to very short, and seemingly random, pieces of video – as though a camera were simply pointed at an average scene (like the bag tossing in the street) and allowed to run for 10 or 15 seconds. The poems have that almost found quality that so many of Williams' peers in the art world were also exploring.
Obviously though, these poems are not casual at all. There is a real art to the images he turns his eye to and the sequence in which they appear. Sometimes they are like a pan-shot that moves slowly from one image to another (from the tramp to the woman in the window in the first poem), or the camera that holds on an image that most people would simply ignore like the cat stepping into a pot, or a bag as portrayed in 'The Term' (“about the length and apparent bulk of a man”) blowing down the street. It is almost impossible to be this direct and simply.
I’ve often wondered if Alan Ball had 'The Term' in mind when he wrote the scene for the film American Beauty where Ricky shows Jane the video footage he has taken of a plastic bag circling round and round as it is caught up in an eddy of wind.
There was a wonderful American documentary series called Voices & Visions which looked at the great American poets of the 20th Century. One episode was dedicated to Williams. Unfortunately it's not possible to embed this material but here are the links that will bring you to two long clips from the episode available to view on Youtube:
Pt 1: http://youtu.be/BE60GfjkEGI
Pt 2: http://youtu.be/x1SRnf7cS_U
Pt 1: http://youtu.be/BE60GfjkEGI
Pt 2: http://youtu.be/x1SRnf7cS_U