“The mind / is listening”: Aurality and Noise Poetics in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

Abstract

asks Williams in Orchestra, the third poem in his collection The Desert Music, we / or there a sound / to the (CP2 251).We half closeour We do nothear it through eyes.It is nota flute note either, it is the relationof a flute noteto a drum. am wideawake. The mindis listening. [ . . . ] (CP2 251)Amid the characteristic whirling polyrhythms of sticks, maracas, marimbas and other percussion instruments, this passage is vocalized by a chorus in Steve Reich's 1984 composition of the same name, The Desert Music. In that piece, Reich stretches these lines Williams among layers of rhythm that come to include pulsing strings and woodwinds. Though Reich's The Desert Music does employ audiotaped voices, the structure of Reich's score for voices achieves a sonic blurring similar to the phase shifting of works like Come Out and It's Gonna Rain, in which Reich modulates the speed of two identical tapeloops, causing short clips of recorded speech to slip further out of sync and turning speech into a complex of sounds. The bass section of the choir begins by sustaining Well over several seconds of the polyrhythmic sticks and marimba. Tenors enter at a faster tempo, articulating the remainder of the first three lines, we / or there a sound / to the ear. Alto and soprano voices sing the rest of the passage, competing with pulsing strings and woodwinds and with sustained vocalise syllables, through the climactic I am wide / awake. The mind / is listening, before trailing into more pulsing vocalise.In Reich's notes for the score, he writes, [t]hose at all familiar with my music will know how apt those words are for me and particularly this piece which, among other things, addresses that basic between what the text says, and its pure sensuous sounds (Reich). We could very say that Reich's words are apt for Williams. To return to lines 32 through 47 (quoted above) of Orchestra, the text begins with one of the primary elements of Williams's prosody, Well, shall we / or listen? Here is a very brief instance of Williams employing the direct address, the comfortable diction and cadence of the speech-based American idiom. The question is asked in the polite language (shall we?) of the casual invitation, the host gently shepherding guests into the dining room, and the well lends an even more informal friendliness to the language. The line break, however, and the following question work in characteristic fashion to strain the orality of Well, shall we, by enjambing the line to carry it over and break the sentence awkwardly at the juncture of subject and verb-in this case compound verbs think or listen. The enjambment, of course, is another primary element of Williams's prosody, which often serves to complicate the employment of the first element, the direct, idiomatic speech cadence and diction. The next lines (33-37) are indicative of this complication: Is there a sound / to the ear? / We half close / We do / hear it through eyes. Though the syntax of the question is precisely from the mouths of Polish mothers, the language continues to be simple, dominated by monosyllables (A 311). Yet the simplicity of the language is complicated by the line break and the triadic line spacing. The break between addressed and not wholly divides the sentence between the participial adjective and the adverb while line 36, our We do / hear it through eyes, severs the complete verb. The line breaks here seem capricious, as they do occur reliably between any particular units of grammar. The result is a visual fragmentation of the text. Williams is very much at play here, deep in the ambiguity of what the text says and its pure sensuous sounds.The middle of this passage continues the sense of playing among ambiguities: It is / a flute note either, it is the relation / of a flute note / to a drum. …