Option 1 — Do a close reading of the following passage from William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923). (By close reading, I mean focus in on particular words and phrases and the way they build a symbolic pattern that supports the writer’s argument.) Quote one of the readings for this week (Tichi or Jones, for example) to explain how Williams conceives imagination and poetic composition in gendered ways, related to waste, efficiency, and flow.
Option 2 — Compare the two versions of modernity presented this week: the earlier European versus the later American version. How are economy, waste, and artistic composition figured differently by Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams (or some other modern American artist-figure from the 1920-30s)? What does waste represent in each context, and is it more or less valued in the European or American context? Use quotes from at least one of the readings to support your argument.
Successful poetic composition, for Williams, adheres to efficient processes. While it begins with the “imaginative man” turning to art for “release,” such a turn is not sufficient. In fact, this man, to realize his imagination, must reanimate “demoded words and shapes.” Doing so seems heroic, as forces external to both the man and the words and shapes themselves have caused the demoding. In other words, the artist battles or “contends” with an otherness (seemingly vast as “the sky”), connected here to “laziness” and “changes in the form of existence”—the latter phrase implying a sense of entropy or wasting away. Cut through the “layers” of meaninglessness to recognize the original vitality that “begot” words and shapes, Williams argues, to revivify them.
As Cecelia Tichi argues, this reliance on efficiency to compose “precise, hard-edged” work is not incidental (257). Williams was obsessed with production and its relation to “the poetic life of infinite efficient moments” (267). For example, his essays warn that “waste is the only danger” and idealize “an actual economy that wastes nothing” (263). Similarly, for Williams, the power of poem resides “in the efficient operation of its integrated parts” (258). There exists no waste.
Though this passage seems to present universal truths—things deteriorate, the poet must rediscover clear meaning to create art—it actually reveals gendered limitations. In fact, poetic construction seems similar to male maturation. The piece begins with a “man” wishing to fulfill his “baby promises.” To succeed he confirms the “essential vitality” that “a young man” feels. There is a sense of progression here. Like the emphasis on efficiency, this emphasis on masculinity is not incidental. As Amelia Jones explains, Williams conceptualized the avant-garde as inherently masculine and reacted viscerally to feminine practitioners, like Else von Freytag-Loringhaven, of it (9).
(p13) Williams uses the World War I Modernity of the virile male and the threat of the unleased feminine flow posed by industry and shifting gender roles. Women in the workforce post modern was a change that challenged marriage, the family, men and women roles.
(P16) The film Modern Times in which Charlie Chaplin being feed by the arm of machinery that goes haywire (ill 1.5 molesting him), and in the end he is strait jacket into a heterosexual marriage and they go home to their little shack. The post modern force feeding by the arm of machinery is what a wife would be doing cooking for her husband, but now she can enter into industrialized labor. However the work flow must not be interrupted so the machine feeds him(P14.) The family unit is intact he is basically forced into a heterosexual marriage in order to fit in to society norm.
As pointed out by Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire’s European modernist views of waste and artistic composition are mirrored by the ragpicker from his poem “The Ragpicker’s Wine”. “The poet finds the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse” (Benjamin, Page 48). I feel that Baudelaire views waste as something to be collected and organized and maybe even repurposed which is perhaps similar to how a poet finds inspiration from the world around them and then has to place that inspiration into the structured form of poetry. I think as Paris is further industrialized, Baudelaire finds beauty and feels it is arts job to capture that modernity since this modernity is springing out from the society around them. Based on the readings, European modernism in poetry seems to recognize that the increased industrialization can be made symbolic to economic and political issues that artists wish to communicate in their work. William Carlos Williams, an American literary modernist who, like Baudelaire, experimented with form but ultimately seems less concerned with waste than his European counterpart. American industrialization represented by Fordism seemed more based in efficiency as pointed out by Cecelia Tichi which for Williams meant “…the Efficiency Movement conveyed the message that there was abundant time and energy for increased personal output” (Tichi, Page 263). Modern innovations allowed Williams to concentrate further on his personal art. The Tichi reading makes the point that American modernism was more concerned with not wasting nature, time or space as if to say how could one excel at their craft if they were focused on more antiquated ways of both living and producing art? Therefore I feel that waste is almost more romanticized and valued in European modernism whereas American modernism seems to wish it away while still recognizing its place.
In William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923) he says “Meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the forum of existence which have let empty words.” I think this applies to Amelia Jones Irrational Modernism when she looks at Man Rays letter Tristan Tzara. Man Ray says “All New York is dada and will not tolerate a rival”. This is interesting to me because when I see some dadaist works I think to myself that’s either genious or it’s just lazy. An example of this is Marcel Duchamps fountain which he submitted under the false name R. Mutt. It’s simply a urinal. The way this relates to waist efficiency and flow is through Dadaist works using garbage or ordinary objects and calling them art or using them to create art which can be conceived to some as lazy. I think what Ran Ray might have been referring to when he said all New York is dada is that New York as a whole is art and that it embodies everything that defines dada. At the same time however, the argument can be made that what is dada? Is something dada because the artist says it is? Is it dada because of the time time period? Is a urinal art because the artist says it is? Is New York dada because I say it is or is New York dada because it is a trash filled multi cultural busy city?
In the Ragpicker’s wine, Baudelaire identifies himself (a poet) with a ragpicker. A ragpicker collects garbage and turns it into something useful while “the poets find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse” (1938, p48). Oeuvres describes a ragpicker’s work as follows. “He goes through the archives of debauchery, and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he collects the garbage that will become objects of utility or pleasure when refurbished by Industrial magic” (Arcades Project, p349). This is exactly what poets do. They work their magic and reconstruct words and make them into a poem that holds meanings. It can be inferred from Frégier’s statement “the wage of the ragpicker……ornament of wealth”(Arcades Project, p 382) that Baudelaire and residents in Paris were well aware that waste and ragpickers were a important part of economy. Baudelaire seemed to be eager to incorporate what was happening in French modernity into his work and convey it to his readers. He succeeded in finding and creating beauty from the industrialized city, Paris.
Williams did not seem to be concerned with the value of waste. Rather, he was trying to minimize waste. His main focus was efficiency. Tichi writes that Williams was “a designer of a poem-construction” (Tichi, p260). Taylor’s Efficiency Movement seemed to influence Williams greatly as it enabled him to look at a piece of paper as a construction site. His focus on efficiency made him condemn waste. Growing economy and the country’s need to win wars also seem to have somewhat affected Williams. By minimizing waste, the country advanced and Williams wrote poems that were comparable to the structure of machines. When compared to the early European Modernism, the later American modernism seems too focused on not producing any waster whether it means time or resources. From the reading Tichi, I did not find any of Williams’ poems to be concerned with recycling or reusing waste. What is there is hard work to reduce waste. It is interesting how we bring up 3rs (reduce, recycle, and reuse) in society today and each poet can be linked to a concept(s).
In this poem, Williams illustrates his mature aesthetic. For Williams, the poet, “the man of imagination,” must sift through wasteful, empty “words and shapes” in order to create art that is both efficient and earnest. This sifting is necessary because words and images have become “empty” and dull through overuse. True art, for Williams, lies instead in a moment of “clarity,” a “poetic moment” where the artist reveals an experience or perception that efficiently transcends the common, the“demoded words and shapes” (Tichi 265). Such moments are efficient in that they can encapsulate a complex idea in only a brief experience, can theoretically be accomplished in the small, interstitial minutes of a day that would normally go to waste.
This aesthetic, tied to Taylorism and the Efficiency Movement, is undoubtedly gendered. The poet, “a young man” finds art through factory-like efficiency. Condemning “laziness,” Williams calls for a poetics that mirrors industrialized labor, where “labor is mutely divided and instrumentalized according to assembly line production of machine parts…all energy is focused toward the channeling of human labor into the most efficient, mechanic production of parts” (Jones 14). Artistic production is rationalized, conceptualized through the public sphere. Art, then, is a possible answer to a man’s “baby promises,” a means for success and fulfillment that is not unlike business or factory work. Men can create, can become “virile” through such efficiency (Jones 13). Left unaddressed, then, is the domestic sphere and more feminine modes of efficiency and creation.
This passage from “Spring and All” utilizes a gendered vocabulary that enacts a separation of masculine and feminine, and ultimately privileges the former. The “MAN of imagination” (emphasis mine) is opposed to the specter of an absent maternal, evoked in words and phrases such as “baby promises” and “begot,” which allude to childbirth. Further, Williams claims that words are begotten of an “essential vitality,” vitality meaning the power of giving continuance of life—as in childbearing, and so rooted in the feminine. This phrase also calls to mind an alternate, masculine formulation—“essential virility”—and stands in opposition to it. Thus it seems that the meaning of words, for Williams, are “begotten” of the feminine.
It is the “man of imagination” who is the sole actor in this drama of meaning lost and restored—he “turns” he “contends,” the “young man feels.” Williams argues that the (essentially feminine) meaning of words cannot be “laid waste,” but rather become demoded through laziness or “changes in existence.” Even the seeming passivity of the word “laziness” implies a sense of agency on the part of the man of imagination. Laziness can be remedied; changes can be directed or overcome. The masculine loses meaning, but he is also capable of regaining it, of “contending with the sky.” He is active in his engagement with meaning. The feminine only begets.
Jones cites Williams’s essay in Contact, about his encounter with the Baroness, as an example of his (and the avant-garde in general) misogynistic and dismissive attitude towards women in the New York Dada scene. He describes her and her apartment in terms of dirt and filth: “reek,” “grimy,” “filthy,” “stench.” Jones implies that Williams and others were threatened by the Baroness, who was “a potent and active agent in New York’s cultural avant-garde.” The passage from “Spring and All” seems to enact a similar, more subtle attempt to neutralize feminine agency.
In Spring and All, Williams describes the imagination in terms not-unlike Schopenhauer’s depiction of the Will. In the imagination the author and reader are “locked in a fraternal embrace.” (178) And in its intoxication, it “rises to drunken heights to destroy the world.” (179) But the destruction is not unilateral, for it creates a space in where the world can “be made anew.” (179)
In the passage cited above, he remarks about the “man of imagination” who fights off the layers of stagnant and demoded artistic forms. Here Williams shows his almost messianic regard for the productive power of the imaginative male artist. He views the man of imagination as being able to come lay waste to the clichés and exhausted tropes that pollute the aesthetic landscape. And, in this regard, he seems to set up the groundwork for the gendered problematic that Amelia Jones identifies in Irrational Modernism: “In art history and beyond, we are far too attached to a simplistic notion of the avant-garde as a group of heroic (almost always white male) individuals fighting unequivocally against the evils of capitalism and the dumbed-down values of its mass bourgeois culture.” (19) And so, although she cites Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde as a major source of the white-male visionary myth, it seems that there are precedents in Williams for a self-affirming form of that myth.
Furthermore, Williams describes the man of imagination as “turning to art release and fulfillment of his baby promises.” In a later passage, Williams argues that “Whatever ‘life’ the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions.” (189) And so, it seems that here he is trying to evade and deflect the accusations of inauthenticity leveled against him by the Baroness and others. He’s saying that despite his ordinary bourgeois lifestyle, he is still very much the poet-hero that will defend us against out-of-date tropes and literary forms. I’m reminded a bit of Kristeva’s thoughts on abjection and its role in subject-formation. We often cut away and discard the aspects of our personas that threaten to tarnish our idealized depictions of ourselves. The Baroness forces Williams into a peculiar position where he has to do a balancing act between confronting her criticisms, while appearing to not care about doing so. He feels anxiety over the possibility of being “destroyed” and yet feels as though he has to maintain a masculine appearance of being untouchable.
Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams have different views on waste and economy as a whole. In his work W.C. Williams considered the poem as a machine made of words, “and also brought engineering values into poems…” (Tichi, 257) He saw power of poem, like the power of machine, to work for a maximal strength and energy output. Williams incorporated and enacted momentary experiences from daily life. In these poems he was celebrating rapid technological change occurring throughout the United States, and recalling the heavy conditions of his boyhood, when there was neither gas nor electrical power. Williams praised the “life of an actual economy that wastes nothing” (Tichi, 263). He sees waste as the only real danger, especially the waste of time. For Williams, real personal attainment is the life of no waste (Tichi, 263).
Opposite to Williams, Baudelaire was concerned about waste. In his work “Le Vin des chiffonniers” he used appearance of ragpicker, whose job is to collect everything that “the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned…” (48) Baudelaire believed in the economy of waste and that everything can be used again and renewed. Comparing to Williams, Baudelaire raised moral awareness toward waste. For him ragpickers find the beauty in the used and thrown things as “poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-booty” (48). He saw waste as a possible inspiration to life.
Both poets are modernists and are under influence of urban development and complexity of urban life. In my opinion, Baudelaire is more concerned about difficulty of life in Paris. He referred to ragpickers as noble people who survive in that way, and with that he mentioned how life is hard even though economy is advancing. Williams is celebrating innovations an economy as it is, not looking into its negative sides.
In Baudelaire’s view of modernity, people of different castes are poissoned by the need for the production of “masterpieces”. With an increased production and polluting factories, “it is understandable if a person becomes exhausted and takes refuge in death” (45). He goes on to describe that modernity evoked the idea of suicide among the working masses and from there he invents the “modern hero”, represented as a ragpicker or a man who collects everything the city has thrown away to turn into “the jaws of the goddess of Industry” (48). However, this hero is not a businessmen, but a middle-class educated man in a black suit who walks freely through the city without any responsibilities. Using art, Baudelaire was able to capture cultural changes that machine couldn’t do. On the other hand, Williams turned from an idealistic approach to poetry to a more efficient and realistic. He began to consider the poem as a machine made of words, and he used engineering values without any reference to machines. Due to life circumstances, Williams regards waste as useless and “he praises the life of an ‘actual economy that wasted nothing”‘ (263). Therefore, in his poetry, he reflects on efficiency of material objects, while Baudelaire looks at waste as a beauty that is an inevitable part of humans, making it more valued in European context than it is on American context.