The Voices in "The Desert Music"

Abstract

William Carlos Williams wrote Desert for fifteen-minute performance at the Sanders Theater at Harvard in June 1951. It was composed in the weeks following his first stroke at the end of March, few months after his return from long reading tour across the western United States. The poem had to justify his selection poet of the year by the Alpha chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa society, reassure Williams that he could still write poetry, express insights he had reached during the past year of intense conversations on his travels, and lend itself to oral performance. Perhaps surprisingly given the occasion, which he described to Louis Zukofsky the next day semi-ecclesiastic, hall hallowed by tradition (Ahearn 439) his poem was, he told Zukofsky low (high), drawing on memories of visit with his wife and Robert McAlmon to the Mexican border town of Juarez where they visited the market, saw strip tease, and listened to banal music. The result was his most sustained meditation on the situation of poetry sound in the modern world, poem that brilliantly addresses the question of it means to be modern poet in the nineteen-fifties, and does so by exploring another question: what does the poem sound like in the modern world? Desert is not just one of the collected editions of his poetry called his later poems;1 it would seem to exemplify Edward Said's idea of late style as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction, (7) lacking harmony and resolution. Even the poet's own identity is fractured, his own Hispanic roots marked by Spanish middle name appear to leave him stranded on border, like the shapeless form in the poem, between Anglophone and Latin American cultures. He catches this division neatly in strategic linebreak when he records the slightly ironic challenge offered by one of McAlmon's companions: It is not difficult to hear quizzical vocal emphasis on the middle name, if that were his actual name and the repeated name William were mask for the other identity: so this is William Carlos Williams. The sound and sense of fracturing identity is closely tied to his sense of lateness. He reflects wryly in response to series of questions about why one should want to write poem at all: This is tacit allusion to classic of late literature, Goethe's conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann. In John Oxenford's translation Goethe complains about his isolation and the geographical dispersal of his intellectual contemporaries in an oddly graphic image: Our talents and men of brains are scattered over the whole of Germany ... so that personal contact and personal exchange of thought may be considered rarities (20O).2 No doubt this lament resonated with Williams after his stroke and his recent journeys to see the men of brains scattered across America, though with certain irony the poem presents us not with modern [Alexander von] Humboldt but the sick McAlmon and his uncomprehending relatives. The intimations of Goethe (and of Yeats, I shall show) are part of heterogeneous pattern of echoes, outbursts, conventional stanzas, and single disconnected lines barely connected by narrative, all of which assemble into work for which the adjectives that Said excavates from Adorno's account of Beethoven's late compositions seem remarkably apposite: distracted (10), 'catching fire between extremes' (10), a plethora of 'unmastered material' (11), and self-imposed exile from is generally acceptable (16) are typical examples. Although Said discusses plays, prose, films, and poems, his meditations always return to music. Music is the art most sensitive to lateness, because although it is temporal form it rarely uses historically indexical material: it is not representational art are texts and images but highly structural art capable of registering the finest gradations of discontinuity and fragmentation; non-semiotic sound, it transcends the limitations of national boundaries marked by language; and acoustically it immerses the body making its mortal presence an inescapable accompaniment. …