“To Discover ‘The Supreme Importance of [ . . . ] nameless spectacle[s]”: Defamiliarizing the Local as a Process of Knowing in William Carlos Williams’s Poetry

Abstract

HERE is hardly any dissension among critics the local, and the in particular, played an important role in the poetics of William Carlos Williams. However, to the extent the image of Williams as a poet exclusively concerned with his American locale persists, the question arises what is being lost by reducing Williams's work thus. One way to begin to delineate the role of the local in Williams's poetics is to consider a cluster of terms occur frequently in his writing, and of which the forms part: contact, local, locality, America in all its inections, place, and the universal or universality. of these terms suffuse Williams's essays and prose, and considered together, they reach from the material, concrete existence of a particular locality to an ontology of place—the noun locale, often found in Wil- liams criticism, captures this combination of familiarity and the materiality of place. 1 Moreover, spatial specications have a temporal correlative in Williams's poetics: the present, which Williams called that eternal moment in which we alone live (I 89). Combined, these spatio-temporal specications form the coor- dinates of the here and now, which in turn constitutes the core of Williams's con- ception of knowledge as process, �rst addressed in Spring and All and In the Grain, and further articulated in The Embodiment of Knowledge and throughout his essays and prose. The coordinates of the here and now dene the location from which the self seeks to know, the self who is, for Williams, the agent in the dynamic process of knowledge rather than a passive recipient of preexisting data. Without locality no process of knowing is possible, since the process always begins in the location of the self. In reading Williams's poetry through the lens of