154
ALAN HELMS
The assumption of this passage is that of Williams's mentor: no ideas but
in things -- including word-things like
hibernaculum;
and the generous
impulse of his poetry is to describe as many "things" as possible. It's
probably inevitable, therefore, that in so doing he will sometimes per–
form in an ungainly manner and prove, in fact, to be less than wholly
successful. And it's easy, since we're listing, to imagine a list of com–
plaints against his poetry.
It's sometimes corny (one poem is titled "Smile a little, things could
be a lot worse"). It's chummy (Williams, Pound, Buckminster Fuller are
"Bill," "Ez," "Bucky"). It's irrepressibly cheerful (even the epitaphs are
happy). It's self-regarding and self-promoting (in praise of himself,
Williams quotes W. C. Williams, Duncan, Zukovsky, Dahlberg -- even
Jonathan Williams). It's confessedly, unabashedly non-"professional":
some of it is "found)" some of it is heard conversation worked into verse
form, some of it is spontaneous utterance (the
Mahler
sequence was com–
posed during the actual duration of the music -- "lest the composing
get too elaborated") . It's also, as I've suggested, not
original
insofar as
Williams is happy to incorporate into and out of the body of his poems
whatever is at hand and of use, whether it be a line from Heraclitus, the
fourteen-year-old Samuel Palmer's watercolor notations for the sketch
"A Lane at Thanet," Archie Moore quoting Cervantes, or a filling station
sign on a Carolina highway.
I could go on, but the list wouldn't much help, since it doesn't much
communicate the general effect of Williams's poetry -- which is rather
like that of a one-man, three-ring, outdoor, Barnum and Bailey circus.
Williams's poems are collages, poems-as-happenings, poems-as-eclectic,
occasional lyric. Here, from
Mahler,
is the third movement of Symphony
No.4:
III. RESTFUL
HI
live in a hole here,
but God has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere. "
o
grow
a Mountain in Fountain
Court
Sundown over
London
Kate Blake
in black
Although this poem can yield to stylistic analysis, it strenuously resists
the idea of poetry as a formal activity, self-contained and self-sufficient.
