Between walls. William Carlos Williams.
Where are we? Where are we?
Who's a city person? Raised, born and raised in a city?
What city? >> And the store is manned.
>> What city? >> [laugh].
>> You raised your hand. >> Bee city.
>> Bee city? >> Yeah, in New York.
>> William spent a little time in New York.
I mean, he went to high school at Horace Mann.
He spent a lot of Friday nights. >> My rival high school.
I'm just saying. >> Your rival high school.
He went, Friday night's 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 air shaft or something.
>> Back wings, yeah. How, how do urban hospitals get built
typically? Are they well planned, coordinated, all
of, 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 them into account what's already there.
So, it's probably crammed you know, not ideal.
>> Things get, it's, it's, it's the sort of not a planned architecture.
So. So, this is a built environment.
This is the environment that, that William's aesthetic thrives in.
This is probably in Paterson, New Jersey. The hospital he's associated with, famous,
he's famous for doing his rounds and then going out to the deck or porch or a place
where he could overlook these kinds of scenes and he would scribble his poems.
So, Kristen, what's the valuation of resonance, the connotation of this place
in our lives. We have places like this.
>> So, for us I think it's very undesirable.
You don't want to, if you're at a hospital visiting someone the last place you wanna
go and relax is in the air shaft with the cinders.
>> Oh, interesting. 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.
>> Mm-hm. Yeah, so it's already a depressed,
depressing environment, the hospital itself.
>> The hospital isn't. >> Usually, unless you're going to visit a
baby. >> The dead space is even deader.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
Unless you are going to visit a baby and of course Williams would deliver babies
and he hung around babies and 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, like the cinder.
>> What do you imagine today, at least. Though there's a lot less smoking.
I imagine, 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 lie cinders in which
shine, oh shine, Emily, what is shine, give me the evaluation of the word shine
typically in our lives. >> It's typically good, it's money, it's
beauty, it's, it's pretty thing there. >> Shine is positive, it's light.
Tell me about light in painting or light in photography.
Anybody do? Know anything about that?
>> That's all. >> [crosstalk] >> Not.
Well. Well, what do we, why, 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 more specific. Anyone, without light?
>> Well, the amount of time you allow light to filter in completely affects what
can be captured. >> Light is everything.
Without light, you don't have distinction. You don't have separation between objects.
And you don't have the shine, right? Nothing will shine without light.
So we do have some light here. Nothing, where nothing will grow lie
cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle.
>> Anna, what's, what's happened? Tell us the little story.
>> Williams is taking a walk after his, his rounds and he's walking by the gross
back wings of the hospital, and he just, the, the light just like catches on a
broken piece of glass, and he like sees that as just like beautiful.
And I really hesitate to, to use the word beautiful.
>> Why, why do you hesitate? Have you been socialized to think of this
as ugly? >> No, it's just that, that.
Beautiful is kind of loaded terms. I just, I just think that he, 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 he isn't
over that, he has to, to use perfection, in this, in the light on this.
>> Uh-huh. >> Grey bottle.
>> The. If it's perfection it would be ironic,
given that it's broken. >> Sure.
>> Right. So what?
Max, can we speak generally about an aesthetic?
This is a modern 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, the green poem, that
we talked about called Lines. >> I think this is.
We see it, we've been seeing a trend with, with H.D.
And Pound and now Williams to, to locate an otherwise harsh or, or, or dead, or
broken areas ... >> And language.
>> And language as well to, to, to locate the, the thing that, that shines or that
stands out or that's growing but I think Williams, in lines and in this poem
between the walls is sort of flipping that, that equation a little bit.
And he's not. He's not equating he's not equating the
sort of, the inorganic to the organic, but rather he's finding in the inorganic
something that's also inorganic but that is, is somehow more beautiful or attests
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, 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, 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. >> Mm-hm.
And so is the bottle. >> Anna?
>> Yeah, I agree. I, I think that the, the fragmentary
nature of the, 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 you know, every piece has in common with each other, it is
the, the prospect of reading differently, of being forced to re-think the way
language, the way a word means. To think about your reading strategies is
having been naturalized and socialized so that you even try something new.
We think of modernism giving way to post-modernism as a break.
This certainly true not texture and may be in music.
But in poetry, I attend to argue, and so to many of my colleagues in the field that
the trend, that the continuity is between modernism and post-modernism are
significant. There are going to be many ways in which
it's different. One way in which it's different is that
the fantasy of objectivity, of precision, of concision, and of newness, especially
of newness, was just that, a fantasy. Post modern poets are not going to pretend
that they're 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, the disruption, the attempt to disrupt natural
symbolization, socialized valuation make you rethink the way everything gets read.
>> And that's certainly what's, what's going on here.
I am going to invite a final word or two on this poem.
Amaris I, I, I heard a rumor that your not a huge Williams fan.
>> [laugh] >> But, so I want you to react not to your general feelings about
Williams, but to this poem. >> Mm-hm.
>> Okay, well. >> To clear my desk.
>> I also think it was a brief misinterpretation of what I was saying,
but I [crosstalk]. >> So, rumors are not to be trusted.
>> No yes. I like, I was thinking metapoetically
about it again, and I was thinking that 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
cinders in which [crosstalk]. >> It is a sentence.
>> But the way that William Carlos William has created the line breaks allows the
separate words to shine. By placing emphasis on them, so.
>> So wow, dead language, these dead metaphor such as roses get to shine when
we make them new. And one of the ways we make them new is
like putting them on a page like a painter puts pigment on a canvas.
I think that should stand as the last word.
Al FilreisKelly Professor, Dir. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Faculty Dir. Kelly Writers House
