Kora In Hell Research Articles

Williams’s Profundity: Pragmatic Naturalism and Distributed Poetic Thinking

Abstract This essay reads Williams’s poetry and poetics from the vantage of pragmatic naturalism to clarify the philosophical and pedagogical importance of Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Drawing on the work of John Dewey and contemporary philosophy of mind, it both reconsiders the status of things and objects in Williams’s compositional practice and clarifies the poet’s radical claims for the enabling role of poetry and the arts for human agency and thinking.

Signs of Language Beyond Calculation: Williams’s Use of Foreign Languages, Citation and Collage against Consumerism

Abstract This article analyzes Williams’s use of foreign words, primarily in Kora in Hell, as well as his employment of signs in various poems, in order to consider his poetic response to a consumerist society characterized by inequality. Drawing on Adorno’s theory on the use of foreign words, this article argues that Williams crafts his challenge to the entanglement between market forces and language in part through recourse to foreign languages. Moreover, within the overall frame of a socially inequitable consumer culture, the article discusses Williams’s inclusion of wandering or immobile figures, such as vagrants, and his own conflicted position in relation to these presences in his poems. The insertion of foreign words and the inclusion of socially marginalized, wandering figures are here, together with procedures of citation and collage, seen as employed in order to expose the ways in which we are bound by a language that is made to serve consumerism and market forces and which only art has the capacity to challenge.

“Through the Intimacies of This Dance”: Moral Perfectionism in William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell and Other Improvisations

“Through the Intimacies of This Dance”: Moral Perfectionism in William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell and Other Improvisations

“Death is no answer”: Trauma and Myth in Williams’s <em>Kora in Hell</em> and “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

“Death is no answer”: Trauma and Myth in Williams’s <em>Kora in Hell</em> and “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

William Carlos Williams's The Great American Novel

William Carlos Williams was first of all a writer-not a poet, essayist, or novelist. Life isn't any more poetry than prose, he mused in a late essay,' looking back on a career that included over twenty collections of poems and an equal number of books in prose. During the Twenties, years of personal and artistic ferment for Williams, he wrote seven books of prose to one of poetry. His interest in the experimental, the new as a means of communicating, is nowhere more evident than in The Great American Novel (1923). Williams' experiments with the reciprocity between poetry and prose would culminate in Paterson, the five-book epic poem appearing between 1943 and 1958. But already in the Twenties he was an eager critic of contemporary proseHemingway, Ford, McAlmon, Stein, Joyce, Anderson. By 1923 he had voiced dissatisfaction with his own first prose collection, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920): fault is their dislocation of sense, often complete.2 He disliked the weak structure of the improvisations, the incomplete transitions; but he admired the dominant themes in the book: began there and then to revalue experience, to understand what I was at. In Spring and All (1923) Williams continued his search for an effective mode, this time a reasonably conventional prose mixed with poems. That he was fascinated by the differences in poetry and prose is clear from his many distinctions between the two. His interest in prose as a viable-a forceful-writing form had been evident as early as 1921 when he wrote admiringly of the work of James Joyce,

Private avowal, public front: reading Williams’ Kora in Hell

ABSTRACTKora in Hell: Improvisations is one of Williams Carlos Williams’ oddest texts, not only because it fits uneasily among his other works but also because it is an insistently private book that Williams took care to circulate publicly. In this essay, I read Kora in Hell’s public performance of privacy as one that invites – indeed requires – an equally and oddly ‘personal’ performance by readers and critics. In the improvisations, I argue, Williams was articulating a poetics of personality at the same moment T.S. Eliot was formulating his influential poetics of impersonality, and I find previously unnoticed points of comparison – and ultimately, contrast – between the two writers. Williams’ poetics of personality also allows us to revisit John Stuart Mill’s famous thoughts on lyric poetry’s privacy and to complicate Michael Warner’s and Virginia Jackson’s recent theorisations of lyric reading and print culture. In the midst of the modernist moment that these theorists might see as the consolidation of lyric privacy, I argue that Williams was seeking a strangely public mode of poetic address.

"Language is in its January": Dada and William Carlos Williams's Early Prose

This article explores connections between Dadaism and William Carlos Williams. Williams's attitude toward Dadaism was ambivalent. However, he made ample use of the radical strategies of Dadaism to compose four of his more experimental and less studied texts, namely: Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), The Great American Novel (1923), and the purely Dadaist A Novelette (1932). Dadaism provided Williams with the techniques (illogicality, collage, parody, contradiction, playfulness, confrontation, automatic writing, chaos) and the conceptual scaffolding he needed to pursue his self-appointed—and intrinsically Dadaist—mission to both wipe out and revive American literature.

Improvisation at the Armory Show: An Approach to Understanding Wassily Kandinsky’s Influence on the Writings of William Carlos Williams

In this article I approach William Carlos Williams’s poetry in the context of international modernism with special emphasis on Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstract painter and theorist of the relation of color to spirit. What Williams found in Kandinsky, I argue, are qualities of liberation and spontaneous laughter as a response to pleasure at desublimating repressed desires for a visual mediation that signaled a break with the past and an embrace of the new. In Kandinsky, Williams embraced an artist for whom color was an expressive dimension that connoted harmony, emotion, eroticism, or spirituality. Kandinsky’s art, for Williams, conveyed properties of an open text that left room for creative reception. I argue that Williams followed Kandinsky’s lead in creating hybrid methods that blended the verbal, the visual, and the sonicm, and trace Kandinsky’s influence on works such as the improvisational Kora in Hell , Spring and All , and the Great American Novel , all of which challenge traditional ideas of genre. By tracing a connection to Kandinsky through the work of Williams’s close friend Marsden Hartley, I argue that we can see the initial ways that Williams synthesized his local interests with the growing trend towards abstraction. I conclude that Williams’s interest in abstract art, however, did not end with Kandinsky, as Williams appreciated the work of the later American movement known as Abstract Expressionism and interpreted their work as a continuation of earlier modernist goals.

Linguistic Transformation as Counter-Hegemonic Operation in Kora in Hell and Spring and All

| This article seeks to expand our understanding of the counterhegemonic aspects of Williams’s 1920s work by focusing on commonly overlooked and seemingly minor linguistic transformations. These transformations, the article argues, form a parallel to the overtly polemical statements that are more readily acknowledged as counter-hegemonic and demonstrate the scope of Williams’s engagement with the question of American writing in relation to what I view as the European hegemony at the time. Using the figure of the imagined puma interrupting an opera performance in The Great American Novel as the starting point for discussing the implications of the European hegemony in the realm of literature and the arts in the 1920s, this article subjects specific linguistic operations in Williams’s work to extensive analysis. The article argues that these linguistic transformations, offer important insights into Williams’s conception of poetry as resistance, i.e. into what might be called poetic agency.

The Abstract Expressionist Housewife: Fracture, Transposition, Williams and the Three Phases of Modernism

In this article I argue that William Carlos Williams looks toward film as a means of grasping the power implicit within the modern era in which he finds himself, and I look at associations in Williams’s experimental writings, such as Spring and All and Kora in Hell , with an array of contemporary cultural figures. These include Frank O’Hara, Andrew Jackson, jurist Louis Brandeis, Labor secretary Francis Perkins, computer developer Charles Babbage, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Charles Baudelaire, Marsden Hartley, Barnett Newman, Edward Manet, and Walter Benjamin. I speculate about the role of qualities of brokenness, advertisement, vividness, speed, and attention to the part rather than the whole that one finds in Hollywood’s coming attractions and in Williams’s poetics. This cultural studies approach to Williams considers him in relation to the German-Jewish modernist intellectual Walter Benjamin, with special emphasis on the Frankfurt School theoretician’s understanding of allegory as a defamiliarizing, even proto-de Manian deconstructive, narrative mode that conceives of history as a paradoxical rendering of a continuous present.

Destruction and Universals in William Carlos Williams’s The Wedge

This article is part of a larger study on the cultural poetics of mid-century modernism, using a series of American and German postwar examples, both literary and visual.1 My literary examples are, at the outset, a series of late modernist American poets writing before, during, and after the end of the war, the destruction of European cities, and the disclosure of the Holocaust, including T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1936-43), H.D.'s Trilogy (1946), Williams's Paterson (1946-51, 1958), Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos (1948), Charles Olson's Kingfishers (1950), Robert Duncan's An Essay at War (1966), and Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus (1965).2 This series of mid-century modernism advances from an anticipatory wish for destruction to an anguished positing of that which succeeds it: a historically contingent demand for universals. In each of these modernist, postmodernist, humanist or antihumanist works, a wish for destruction is the prior condition for positing (or rejecting) any sort of universal.3 On this evidence, I propose: there is no universal without destruction. Critical Theory's dialectic between reason and unreason itself anticipates the historical construction of ethical universals promulgated at the Nuremberg Trials, while it makes a common caused with modernists who either negotiated these perversions or sought a way out through an invocation of universality, however imagined or represented. The poetry of mid-century modernists and what Theodor W. Adorno termed the new categorical imperative of the Nuremberg Trials connects via Critical Theory to delineate the constructedness of universals themselves.4 In an age that has flagrantly renounced the Nuremberg standards-for instance, in the detention of persons seen as without rights in Guantanamo-or that sees universals as merely the mystification of global capitalism, such a critique is timely and necessary.Anticipatory DestructionWilliam Carlos Williams, that mild-mannered physician, is my prime exemplar of an anticipatory poetics of destruction. The necessity of renewal- by means of a poetry founded on the senses and on the overturning of tradition-is thematized throughout early Williams, from Kora in Hell's negative mimesis to Spring and All and The Descent of Winter's dialectic of creation and destruction. This dialectic is central to the construction of art in Spring and All, and throughout Williams's work: decay of cathedrals / is efflorescent / through the phenomenal / growth of movie houses // whose catholicity is / progress since / destruction and creation / are simultaneous (CP1 213); modernity elicits violent change and is only comprehensible once that is recognized. In a prose section, Williams explains: word is not liberated, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of a word, thus freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time (CP1 235). Only by returning to material existence can the word be liberated from being fixated on it: poetry is the destruction of the condition of fixity by means of encounter with the material. In Williams's modernism, the necessity of destruction elevates the material and particular to the status of a universal, yielding the so much depends upon of the red wheelbarrow.The war-time publication of The Wedge produced a volume that, in its theoretical framing, objectivist techniques, and thematic disjunction, pursues the same destructive renewal as Williams's avant-garde volumes, but later in time.5 At mid century and in middle age-well-published but undervalued-Williams no longer sees the dialectic of creation and destruction as merely aesthetic but as a fact of life in history. The aesthetic is where we comprehend the creativity of destruction; destruction is the prior condition for the vitality of art. Throughout his mixed collection of atemporal lyrics and meditative verse, themes of destruction emerge out of nowhere; a feared event (and not only the war) seems to be rapidly approaching-in fact it may already have arrived and there is nothing we can do but record it. …

“There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else”: The Onanistic Abstraction of Duchamp and Williams

My article links William Carlos Williams’s poetics to Marcel Duchamp’s conceptualism—the democratic idea that anything, even a factory-produced urinal, once framed as such, may be considered by viewers as art. I focus on Williams’s improvisational writing, Kora in Hell and read the author’s ambivalent relation to art as an expression of (auto)eroticism. I also deal with the role of abstraction in Williams’s poetics, and my interrogations read such a challengingly de-centered text as a reflection of the poet’s conflicted personality, focusing on Williams’s celebration of the body and especially the female form as source of pleasure, his guilt over his infidelities in his marriage, and his ambivalent views of sex as corruption and reproduction. I argue that both Duchamp and Williams engage in a fixation on the work of artistic reproduction as an onanisitic process, though I contend that Williams does so less consciously than Duchamp. Duchamp’s anti-retinal art and Williams’s American idiom, and later his variable foot, were new ways of looking to defamiliarize and reorient the logic of art production and the definition of the artist himself. However, unlike Duchamp, who found himself relatively removed from the animal desires he coded and enacted in his Roto-sculptures, Williams was consistently entangled in issues Duchamp may have dismissed as both too animal and too moral to concern truly radical art.

The Vagaries of Imagination: Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams

The author considers a slidework project by Robert Smithson entitled Hotel Palenque as an introduction to the work of poet William Carlos Williams. Both the aesthetics of Smithson’s project and the theoretical quandaries it brings into focus have a lot in common with what Williams was doing in the late ‘teens and early twenties, coining a radically new style for himself and simultaneously engaging meta-poetic questions in his essays, his book of improvisations, Kora in Hell, as well as in the prose passages included in the first edition of his famous volume of poetry – Spring and All. Intermezzo: Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque.

Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams Eds. by Shelia Coghill and Thom Tammaro

Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired Life and Work of William Carlos Williams. Eds. Shelia Coghill and Thom Tammaro. Foreword Paul Mariani. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. xxii + 228 pp. $24.95 (paper).Visiting Dr. Williams is an anthology of poems to commemorate Wil- liams a half-century after his death, and includes poems originally published in Fall 1963 issue of Beloit Poetry Journal (14.1), a chapbook memorializing Wil- liams and edited David Ignatow. This title is fourth anthology coedited Shelia Coghill and Thom Tammaro, whose previous anthologies include Visiting Walt, Visiting Emily, and Visiting Frost. I don't know how Coghill and Tammaro choose subject of an anthology, but, undoubtedly, he or she must be, as subtitle indicates, inspiring enough to be considered. question might be how does being Williams differ from being influenced his poetry? While Visiting Dr. Williams doesn't ask to be read as a critical investigation of how poets have overcome Williams's influence, I found it useful to read more into poems than inspired by suggests. best poems in anthology have obvi- ously been influenced Williams's experimentation with possibilities inher- ent in relationship between line and syntax. So while Visiting Dr. Williams proves that Williams has many poets, those his work more so than his furthered my understanding of poetic technique with their poems.Visiting can mean the action of coming or going to a person or place for some special purpose, and, in case of each anthology, this special purpose seems to be contact with a poet's life and work. Some of contributors to Visiting Dr. Williams visited him during his lifetime. In fact, of 188 contribu- tors, a number write about interacting with him and lessons he taught. Still more know Williams through his work-not necessarily who he was, but what inspires them about his poems. As Coghill and Tammaro point out, Williams's imagery flashes through American psyche (xvii), evidenced its resur- gence in other poets' poems. Wheelbarrows, chickens, plums, and white flowers also remind us, as Alice Friman writes in her poem, Ars Poetica on Lava, of Wil- liams's ability to deliver his mind up blank as a cardboard with a pinhole (51). But allusions are enough to remind reader that it's also necessary for a poet to make it new. Williams rebelled against tradition that Eliot required, preferring, in texts like Kora in Hell and Spring and All, to break rules his con- temporaries were also breaking in poetry and visual arts. Although Williams all of poems in this anthology, comparison of one to another raises the anxiety of influence. Harold Bloom wrote that weaker talents ideal- ize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves (5). better po- ems show Williams's influence but can also stand on their own. For example, a poem like Joel Oppenheimer's We Mark Centennial of William Carlos Wil- liams's Birth Observing a New Hampshire Patriot contradicts still life Wil- liams creates in The Red Wheelbarrow with a woman using American flag as a hand towel. Yet, as a reader, I wanted less of Williams and more of Oppen- heimer; majority of poem is a rehash of what Williams has already written, starting with a first stanza that has almost same amount of syllables as The Red Wheelbarrow:yes i know alot depends onthe white house withits pink shutterseven withoutrain falling (134)In contrast to Oppenheimer's poem is A.R. Ammons's WCW, which begins with a speaker at beach and reading Williams. Ammons doesn't adopt imagery or syntax of The Red Wheelbarrow, but, like Oppenheimer, he's interested in challenging immovability of an object:a woman cameand turnedher red dog looseto sniff(and pisson)the dead horseshoecrabs. …

La invención necesaria by William Carlos Williams

La invencion necesaria. William Carlos Williams. Ensayos, cartas, poemas, seleccion, traduccion, prologo y notas de Juan Antonio Montiel. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2013. 311 pp. $15,000 pesos / $31.00 US. (paper).Prior to leaving on October 3, 2013, for a month-long visit to Chile, home of the grand, self-proclaimed antipoet Nicanor Parra, I read on-line in the country's main newspaper, El Mercurio, the review of a just-published selection of William Carlos Williams's essays, poems, and correspondence, translated into Spanish by Juan Antonio Montiel. As soon as I arrived in Santiago, I found and purchased a copy of La invencion necesaria, the book's title taken from a phrase in a letter written in October 1948 to Jean Starr Untermeyer and included in the selection of correspondence. One of my principal interests in ac- quiring this book was to see if Montiel had by any chance translated two poems on jazz, his Shoot it Jimmy! from Spring and All (1923) and his Ol' Bunk's Band (1945), since I was scheduled to talk about jazz in literature at the Universidad del Desarrollo and the Universidad Metropolitana. Unfortunately, Montiel's selection does not include the two poems on jazz, but to my delight I discovered that the works contained in the book reveal a cogent perspective on Williams's thought and artistry, all rendered into Spanish in translations of the highest quality, introduced by the translator, and with, at the back of the book, his extremely valuable notes on each selection.As the newspaper reviewer indicated, Williams the man and his work, insuf- ficiently known and published in the Hispanic sphere (at least through available translations), possess more than enough relevance and attractiveness for this book to demand one's attention.1 In the past, Spanish translations of Williams's poetry had been limited for the most part to some of the early poems, such as Red Wheelbarrow, A Sort of a Song, and Between Walls, all translated by Octavio Paz in his Veinte poemas (1973), but Paz also translated five poems from Williams's 1954, 1955, and 1962 volumes.2 As Montiel points out in his prologue, appropri- ately entitled Fragments of a New Language, only two books have included translations of some of Williams's essays, and he adds that sadly only one incom- plete edition of the essays has been published in English.3 The translator specu- lates that because Spanish readers have been deprived of Williams's prose writings his poems have not penetrated into Hispanic culture, since the essays complete and explain his poetry. To Montiel's credit, he has chosen fourteen poems that for the most part are not those usually selected to represent in Spanish the poet's themes and techniques. Apology, the first poem in the book's poetry section, comes from 1917 and speaks to one of Williams's central concerns, which is ad- dressed in most of the works selected by Montiel for translation and is expressed by the poem's opening line: Why do I write today? The translator purposely chose works that present Williams's views on poetics or the writing of poetry (as in How to Write from 1936, not found in Williams's Selected Essays), his belief in the need to invent a new American prosody (as in his letter to Untermeyer), and his commentaries on the variable foot (as in the 1960 Walter Sutton interview included, along with the 1918 Prologue to Kora in Hell, in the fifth section of Montiel's book, subtitled Improvisations). In keeping with the fact that ascribed such great importance to his discovery of the variable foot, the transla- tor selected nine out of the fourteen poems included in the book from the three volumes in which employs his tripartite line: The Desert Music, Journey to Love, and Pictures from Brueghel.4Montiel's prologue primarily deals with three basic issues: Wallace Stevens's notion that in writing poetry took an anti-poetic approach; Karl Shapiro's assertion that was not an intellectual but neither was he a symbol of the anti-intellectual; and Williams's call for recognition of American speech as a differ- ent language from English and the need to find a new measure for American po- ems to replace the standard iambics of English poetry. …

For a Caribbean American Graininess: William Carlos Williams, Translator

This essay reads the eccentricities of William Carlos Williams's translations from the Spanish, collected in By Word of Mouth (2011), as extensions of the archipelic and hemispheric poetics developed in such early works as Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) and In the American Grain (1925). Specifically, the essay focuses on Williams's idiosyncratic translations of Hispanic Caribbean poets Luis Palés Matos and Eugenio Florit, reading them as instances of what Lawrence Venuti calls a “resistant translation” that insists on a “foreignizing” viscosity—what Barbara Folkart critiques as a graininess—against the unmarked fluency of the conventional translator. Repurposing Folkart's metaphor, this essay argues that graininess is central to Williams's poetics, from his associative leaps to his transcultural approach to vernacular language. Paying particular attention to Williams's rendering of Caribbean/American landscapes (akin to Edouard Glissant's paysage), this essay considers the nonequivalences in Williams's translations within a poetics of Caribbean/American graininess.

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara Paul Jaussen In Mexico, since we are talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation. —ANTONIN ARTAUD (11) There is a famous passage in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography in which he recollects his visit to the Armory Show of 1913. Encountering Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Williams says, “I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief” (A 134). Writing several decades after the fact, he claims that the piece “is too hackneyed for [him] to remember anything clearly about it now,” a slight on Duchamp, perhaps (who himself had sufficiently slighted Williams at a party for the latter to bear a grudge), but the statement is also a revelation that the need for an effectively lasting or “timeless” piece of art was absent during the period of Williams’s early work (A 134). The time was now, a now of experiment, of change, of warfare and industrialization, a time accelerating into the future yet unable to completely negotiate the past. And yet a time of laughter and forgetting, when breaking into the world involved breaking from its orders and languages. Williams’s laughter can be read as not simply pleasure, but, as he says, “relief,” what Henry Sayre describes as “release,” the sense of unleashed opportunity that America inherited from the fractured and alienated Europe, the chance to make a new aesthetic practice all its own (16). New York in the years following the Armory Show was the place for that art of release and mirth, and Williams, despite the constraints of a medical practice and a young family, could not keep himself away. This was an era of the small magazines and the French immigrants (most famously Francis Picabia and Duchamp), of salons and parties, all fueled by the compelling need to create something new, not for the museums, but for the world in which they lived, the conflicted everyday [End Page 17] places and spaces that were dominated by the technology of the modern and the logic of warfare.1 Williams, in the thick of it, attended the gatherings and met the artists, aided Alfred Kreymborg in the publication of the journal Others, founded the magazine Contact in 1920, and, through it all, never stopped writing (Dijkstra 22, 109). As Sayre argues, this context of avant-garde energy is crucial for our understanding of the books Williams produced at this time, particularly Spring and All and Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Sayre 17). These works are far from formally autonomous high modernism, nor are they the expansive historical and philosophical vision of what would become Paterson; instead, they are texts that reveal American avant-garde at its conflicted nascent stages, coming from an author who resisted “both Europe and America” in an effort to create newness in his time and place (Tashijan 91). It is the radical commitment to the value of that new, its work as a source of energy in the world, that comes to the forefront of Spring and All and Kora in Hell. This energy went by many names in Williams’s texts, but consistently he refers to it as “life”—an eruptive force which outlasts the constraints of language and culture that always attempt to channel or block it. Life is the energy put into play by its correlative faculty, the imagination, without which, Williams is very clear, thinking disappears. In other words, the newness of life is a fundamental and essential ingredient for all human activities, such as language and science, even as those edifices tend to cover over it and deny its significance. Williams’s poetic goal at the time of these early writings is to make life happen, to restore it to sensibility and allow the imagination to move. Life’s importance is not unique to Williams, however; it springs forth as well in the manifestos of Tristan Tzara. A number of critics have read Dada as the avantgarde movement closest to the early Williams, and, as Peter Schmidt writes, although it is unknown whether or not Williams ever read Tzara’s...

William Carlos Williams and Dadaism in Kora in Hell and Spring and All

William Carlos Williams and Dadaism in Kora in Hell and Spring and All

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne</span> (review)

Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne. Anthony Mellors. Manchester University Press, 2005. ix + 230 pp. $50.00 (cloth). A research fellow in the School of English at UCE Birmingham, the editor of fragmente: a magazine of contemporary poetics, and a poet in his own right, Anthony Mellors speaks most eloquently in his closest readings, in his astute, crystalline analyses of the politics and poetries of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and J. H. Prynne. In Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne, the reader encounters, in Mellors's sinewy, percipient observations of the aforementioned poets and their mythic method(s), a singularly enduring and assuredly prudent voice. Predictably, then, Mellors offers a cogent and compelling examination of Pound's mythic (and hermetic) method, his trenchant and nefarious politics, and those belated modernists who, having embraced Pound's method in pursuit of reactionary (and radical) leftist agendas, unwittingly reaffirm Pound's problematic ideology. Mellors contends that while myths may be apotheosized as 'supreme fictions,' intuitive representations of social and cosmic unity, they can also be understood as fact[s] (2), as giving access to new kinds of spiritual, cultural, and political realities. When understood as both producing and communicating such realities, the mythic (and hermetic) method of Pound, characterized by his theories of instinct, nature, and secret wisdom (44), leads not to the liberal ideologies typically associated with the many late- and postmodernists who subsequently employ Pound's method but to a well-publicized set of racist and authoritarian beliefs (44). In light of this, such a method, embraced by so many late- and postmodernist poets, would seem to preclude any disavowal of Pound's abhorrent politics. According to Mellors, it only stands to reason that these poets would find themselves (invariably) unable to consummate the leftist utopias and political agnosticisms that form the pragmatic ground in and through which they reify their aesthetic ideals. For Mellors, Charles Olson stands as a nonpareil example of this belated modernist advocating an untenable revolutionary politics: [Olson's] historical practice attests to the unity of experience as the prime matter of poetry, but it supports a phallic, egotistical ideology that is inconsistent with its universalist claims (96). Ultimately, though many poets-including Olson and J. H. Prynne (a British poet who has greatly influenced the contemporary British avant-garde, who has only recently been accepted canonical surveys of contemporary British poetry, and who is claimed as a late modernist by Mellors)-try to transform Pound's mythic (and hermetic) method into a new conception of civic virtue (144), they cannot seem to dissociate their critiques of rationalism, consumerism, and modernity from a nostalgic sanctification of nature, a naive apotheosis of instinct, and a self-interested conception of the poet as shaman and savior. Interestingly, Mellors mentions William Carlos Williams only in passing, seemingly remarkable given that Mellors himself acknowledges that Williams represents, as he sees it, a prominent modernist and that Williams certainly employed a method in Kora in Hell, in Paterson that could be called, at least tentatively, mythic. And yet, this not so disconcerting when one understands that Mellors concerns himself primarily with the mythic method of Pound, a method that is characterized by the hermetic, which refers to both the forging of private, enigmatic iconologies and the subordination of sense to sound, creating an interplay of deeply obscure significance and numinous vacancies (4). …

A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (review)

Reviewed by: A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery John Koethe A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. Margueritte S. Murphy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1992. Pp. 246. $25.00. The thesis of this book is that certain anomalous works in prose constitute a distinct genre—or “anti-genre”—whose “poeticity” (an unhappy word) is established by subverting the norms of conventional narrative, descriptive, and contemplative prose. It was inaugurated in France by Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire, and its practitioners there included Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Henri de Régnier. Stuart Merrill’s collection of translations, Pastels in Prose (1890), introduced it to English audiences, and it flourished briefly in such examples of late nineteenth-century decadence as Ernest Dowson’s Decorations in Prose (1899) and Wilde’s Poems in Prose (1894). The received view is that the genre did not transplant well into English in part because the foil of the rigid French prosodic tradition was missing, and also because public reaction against decadence and aestheticism following Wilde’s downfall reduced it to marginal status. The genre appeared thereafter only occasionally—in Eliot’s early symbolist period for example (“Hysteria,” 1915), and more recently in the works of surrealist-influenced American poets like Michael Benedikt, Robert Bly, and W. S. Merwin. Yet Murphy’s claim is that the real impulse behind the prose poem did not dissipate, but continued to inform the writings [End Page 156] of such high modernists as Williams and Stein, and contemporary works like John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972) and Robert Creeley’s Presences: A Text for Marisol (1976) (though Murphy does not discuss the latter). This impulse is contestatory: the true mark of the prose poem is not the brevity, closure, and interiority of its decadent instances, but rather the attempt to undermine and mock the idea of fixed genres—in particular, those of narrative and discursive prose—as well as the social, sexual, and political conventions associated with fixed genres. Thus Dowson’s poems parody the fairy tale, and Wilde’s the biblical parable (though the prose poem of Murphy’s title is his notorious letter to Lord Alfred Douglas). The fragmentary and unpredictable character of Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1918) frustrates the reader’s expectations and the provincialism said to underlie them; Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) disrupts English syntax and plays against such models of women’s prose as cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and fashion magazines; and Ashbery’s Three Poems subverts the contemplative meditation by resisting philosophical closure and rendering the idea of the writing and thinking subject problematic. Though many of Murphy’s discussions of particular writers are interesting (for example, of Stein and women’s writing, and of Ashbery’s pronominal vagaries), the book as a whole seems unconvincing, largely because of the strategy of its underlying argument. It posits a classification that encompasses far more than the prose poems derived from the original French model—a classification which is then declared, not too surprisingly, to be problematic. Since the examples given of this expanded genre have so few substantive qualities in common, the “poeticity” they are presumed to share must then be characterized negatively, by contrasting them with a stereotypical model of “normal” prose. Yet the conceptions of both prose and poetry adduced in this argument are too tidy and simple to accommodate much of the literature of modernism and its aftermath. First, the model of normal prose Murphy posits strikes me as a fantasy. The aim of rhetoric at least since Quintillian has been to expand the affective capabilities of language by calculated departures from the straightforwardly declarative. The period under discussion is marked at its inception by the introspective ruminations of such “great prose brooders” 1 as James and Proust, and encompasses both the Kantian speculations of A Man without Qualities and the “novels” of Ronald Firbank. One need only reflect on the fact (mentioned by Murphy) that the same issues of The Little Review in which parts of Kora in Hell first appeared also contained excerpts from Ulysses to find the dichotomy between conventional and subverted prose somewhat tendentious. Murphy...