Between Walls, William Carlos Williams. Where are we? Where are we? Who's a city person, born and raised in the city? What city? >> I just raised my hand. >> What city? >> New York, DC. >> Well, you've spent a little bit of time in New York. I mean, you went to high school at Horace Mann. You spent a lot of Friday nights. >> Your rival high school. Friday nights, he'd go in and hang out with the baroness when she wasn't slugging him in the face. >> [LAUGH] >> And he also went to school in Philadelphia for med school to the University of Pennsylvania. Anyway, that's all nonsense. Where are we? >> We're kind of behind the hospital. I kind of imagine it to be almost like an airshaft or something. >> Back wings. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, how do urban hospitals get built, typically? Are they well-planned, coordinated, all the building takes place at once. There's never any sudden additions? >> No, I think, I mean, depending on when the hospital was built, that you have to take into account what's underneath there. So it's probably cramped, not ideal. >> It's a sort of, not a planned architecture. So this is a built environment. This is the environment that William's aesthetic thrives in. This is probably in Patterson, New Jersey. The hospital he's associated with. He's famous for doing his rounds. And then going out to the deck or porch or place where he could overlook these kinds of scenes and he would scribble his poems. So Kristen, what's the valuation, the resonance, the connotation of this place in our lives? We have places like this. >> So for us, I think it's very undesirable. If you're at a hospital visiting someone, the last place you want to go and relax is in the air shaft- >> Interesting. >> With cinders. >> Specifically, with respect to hospitals it would be bad enough if this were a place where a wedding reception was taking place. But this is much worse because of all the death. >> Yeah, so it's already a depressing environment, the hospital itself. >> The hospital is? >> Unless you're going to visit a baby. >> The dead space is even deader. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, unless you're going to visit a baby. And of course, Williams delivered babies, and he hung around babies He was a pediatrician and so he's full of life but I suppose this is really about death. The back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow. Molly, why won't anything grow? >> Because there's probably not a lot of sunlight. It's probably just concrete. And it's sort of where people throw out things they're discarding The cinders- >> What do you imagine, today at least, though there's a lot less smoking. I imagine cigarette butts. What else? >> Trash from food wrappers. >> Food wrappers, right. All the people visiting the hospital toss their stuff out there. These are dead spaces in our built environment. Nothing will grow. But in this space lies cinders in which shine. Uh-oh, shine. Emily, what is shine? give me the valuation of the word shine typically in our lives. >> It's typically good. It's money. It's beauty. It's, pretty things, apparently. >> Shine is positive >> It's light. Tell me about light in painting or light in photography. Anybody know anything about that? [CROSSTALK] How important is light to photography? >> It's very important. >> It's everything. >> Yeah. Without light- >> You don't have an image. >> Be a little bit more specific anyone without light. >> Well, the amount of time you allow light to filter in completely effects what you can capture. >> Light effects everything. Without light you don't have distinction. You don't have the separation between objects. >> And you don't have the shine, nothing will shine without light, so we do have some light here. Where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle. Anna, what's happened? Tell us the whole story. Williams is taking a walk after his rounds and he's walking by the gross back wings of the hospital and the light just like catches on a broken piece of glass and he just see that as beautiful. And I really hesitate the use the word beautiful. >> Why do you hesitate? Have you been socialized to think of this as ugly? >> No, it's just that beautiful is a very loaded term. So I just think that he sees this. And he's just drawn to it, because it catches the light and it just there it is. And he sees this moment of, and you use another word that has to do with perfection in the light on this created bauble. >> If it's perfection it would be ironic given that it's broken. >> Sure. >> Right, so Max, can we speak generally about an aesthetic? This is a modernist aesthetic that privileges what's broken as opposed to what's whole. That sees life, that's what's really going on here, right? That sees life among cinders in a dead space where nothing will grow. Very similar to the green poem that we talked about called lines. >> I think this is, we've been seeing a trend with HD and Pound. And now Williams to locate an otherwise harsh or dead or broken areas. >> And language? >> And language as well to locate the thing there that shines or that stands out or that's growing. But I think Williams in Lions and in this poem between the Walls is sort of flipping that equation a little bit. And he's not equating the sort of inorganic to the organic, but rather he's finding in the inorganic something that's also inorganic. But that is somehow more beautiful or tests to some kind of beauty that exists. >> I think that's why the word shine is so important in this, because the glass realistically reflects light. But shine implies that it radiates the light from itself. >> Let's talk about how these ideas get implemented in the form of the poem. These are couplets but barely. You get two or three words in one line followed by two or one word in the next line and then a stanza break. Does this help? What does this augment? Kristen, I'm sorry, Kristen and then Anna. >> The broken pieces of the bottle. >> The poem is broken, the poem is made of fragments. >> And so is the bottle. [LAUGH] Anna? >> Yeah, I agree. I think that the fragmentary nature of the stanzas, first, they make you read the poem very slowly, which kind of- >> They challenge the kind of natural flow of our reading. And I think if there's anything that everything in this course, every piece has in common with each other. It is the prospect of reading differently, of being forced to rethink the language, way word means. To think about your reading strategies as having been naturalized and socialized so that you're going to try something new. We think of modernism giving way to postmodernism as a break. That's certainly true in architecture and maybe in music. But in poetry, I tend to argue. And so do many of my colleagues in the field, that the trend, that the continuities between modernism and postmodernism are significant. There are going to be many ways in which it's different. One way in which it'd different is that the fantasy of objectivity, of precision, of concision, and of newness, especially of newness, was just that, fantasy. Postmodern poets are not going to pretend that they are creating something new. In fact, they like to recycle things, they like to admit that everything is a quotation of everything else. But a continuity is the disruption, the attempt to disrupt natural symbolization, socialized valuation, make you rethink the way everything gets read. And that's certainly what's going on here. I'm going to invite a final word or two on this poem. Amarice, I heard a rumor that you're not a huge Williams fan. So I want you to react to not your general feelings about Williams but just this poem. >> Okay, well that's not really what I was saying. >> So rumors are not to be trusted. >> Yes, so I was thinking poetically about it again, and I was thinking if you add in >> You could actually read it as one fluid line, in the back wings of the hospital where nothing will not grow lies under in which- >> It is essential. >> But the way that William Carlos Williams has created the line breaks allows these separate words to shine by placing emphasis on them so. [LAUGH] >> So, wow, dead language. These dead metaphors, such as roses, get to shine when we make them new. And one of the ways we make them new is just by putting them on a page like a painter would put pigment on a canvas. I think that should stand as the last word.
