Poetry break: William Carlos Williams

I promised, or rather hinted some time back that as I prep my intro English course for the term, I might introduce some poetry periodically onto this humble blog.

This afternoon has been mostly dedicated to prepping this week's material for English 1080: Critical Reading and Writing I, the English course that every single Memorial student must take, and which I had a bit of a hard time with last year. As I droned on about in that previous post on this subject, getting first-year students to read poetry seriously—and think about it substantively—is not at all unlike getting little kids to eat their vegetables—assuming that said little kids have been indoctrinated into believing that vegetables are actually poisonous.

But I soldier on, both because I do in fact firmly believe that learning to read poetry is a valuable thing in and of itself, and because I love the damn stuff too much not to. A colleague of mine the other day told me he no longer does poetry in 1080 any longer, because he can't stand having stuff he loves disdained and mistreated. I'm not quite there myself, but I'll keep you posted.

At any rate, as I was compiling my syllabus, I pulled out my collected William Carlos Williams to find a poem not in my anthology that I wanted to use ("Landscape With the Fall of Icarus"), and came across the following little gem:

Labrador

How clean these shallows
how firm these rocks stand
about which wash
the waters of the world

It is ice to this body
that unclothes its pallors
to thoughts
of an immeasurable sea,

unmarred, that as it lifts
encloses this
straining mind, these
limbs in a single gesture.

I read this, and think "William Carlos Williams visited Labrador?" What followed was one of those flurries of activity that was, essentially, a distraction from the work I needed to do, but which felt like productive research. As it turns out, Williams visited Newfoundland and Labrador in 1933 on a cruise with his wife. That relatively short—two weeks—vacation left an impression. The cruise took them up the west coast, as far north as St. Anthony's. I found some references to this in William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, a biography by Paul Mariani. My favourite bit:

"How alien this world seemed. Still, Williams had sworn had sworn he would swim in these northern waters and had taken off—alone—for the north end of the island. There he found only puffins and water so cold he could hardly believe it. Nevertheless, he did manage to dip beneath the surface … and to gash his stomach on the shelly bottom before he scrambled for shore. At least he'd come into intimate contact with the primitive elements of that place."

I'm thinking that Williams' Newfoundland connection is something to explore at greater length, especially considering that he apparently came back on a few occasions (visits my relatively cursory research did not reveal). Speaking to a senior colleague about this at a start-of-term mixer, I discovered that not only had Williams returned several times, but that the senior colleague in question got pissed as a newt with the man. Huh. The oral history here needs uncovering, I think.

But to return to the poem in question, I find Williams' primitivism interesting. He is, to a certain extent, falling into what I tend of think of as the Group of Seven cliché—the reductive association of the north with what Williams' biographer calls "the primitive elements of that place." Perhaps I've simply read too much CanLit that mythologizes the north as somehow pure and clean, a space in which the human soul can test itself (Farley Mowat being public enemy number one in this respect), but it does get a little repetitive after a time. That Williams "had sworn had sworn he would swim in these northern waters" is unsurprising—his poetic philosophy was "no ideas but in things," and focused his writing on the concrete, the tactile, and the tangible, and loathed such over-intellectualized poetry as T.S. Eliot's (Williams called The Waste Land a "catastrophe" for American letters). I didn't know he had the Hemingwayesque tendency toward extremes of physicality, but it's a little endearing. Better him than me swimming in Newfoundland waters, is all I have to say. Wading ankle-deep at Middle Cove beach is about as much as I can handle.

Williams was one of the premier "imagists," one of a group of modernist poets who desired to ground poetry in concrete things. His most famous poem, which most people encounter in high school (and which is one of the first things I'll be doing in 1080) is "The Red Wheelbarrow," a deceptively simple, seemingly descriptive work:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Much of Williams' poetry lies in the lyricism of such simple, parochial things. Ironically, this can make him a difficult poet to teach: while students are generally reluctant to engage with poetry, they nevertheless tend to have a sense of poetry as something somehow elevated or rarefied, and when presented with Williams' insistence on simplicity they dismiss it. It's not that they are more at home with the complex interplay of themes in a John Donne poem, but at least with Donne they find the opacity and archaism they stereotypically associate with poetry.

"Labrador" is, in many ways, an exemplary Williams work—the first thing one notices is its simplicity and symmetry, moving from the image of the rocky shore, to a more complex connection between the chill waters and the self, to that amazing final stanza that collapses the distinction between the self and the vast ocean. Though I've already taken issue with Williams' replication of the northerly mythos, I must say he phrases it in rather an elegant and, for all the vividness of the imagery, nebulous fashion. He transmutes the specificity of place—we know from the title where the speaker is, and that first stanza's description of the rocky shore is striking—into a universal, citing at first the universality of the ocean ("the waters of the world"). The second stanza gives us particularity again in "this body," but makes that key connection to "thoughts / of an immeasurable sea." One thinks here of Jung's metaphor for the unconscious as an ocean—though I somehow doubt Williams had much use for psychoanalysis (not a point I'm familiar with one way or another), the sea certainly becomes an image of connection and universality. The wrinkle in a Jungian reading is that it is uncertain whether the speaker is concerned with other people, or his connection to a primal natural state, or simply nature itself. My own reading is the latter: the freezing ocean in this poem appears indifferent to the shocks it visits on the frail human body. The gesture, rather, is the speaker's offering to the sea, which accepts the sacrifice with a sublime magnanimity.

Again, it is the symmetry of the poem that is striking: three short stanzas, the first of which frames the setting; the second, which while speaking of the poet's body, moves into somewhat vaguer and more abstract language and generalizations; and the third, at once the most moving and the most opaque. I always remember the professor in the one creative writing course I ever took stressing that poetry moved from the concrete to the abstract: "Love might be your topic," she was fond of saying, "but NEVER use the word love." We might have used "Labrador" as a case study: that final stanza is beautifully cryptic, but would be useless if Williams had not given us the vivid image of the Labrador coast in the first.

So what is that final stanza saying? What is it doing? I have to imagine I've been Googled by some of my new students, who found their way to this blog—please, tell me what you think.