"Academic" Writing

Okay, just 'cause I'm still thinking about it, here's a short write-up, just of an example of my prose, when I'm explicitly trying not to be annoying in style (and, really, an example of the kind of thinking that I like to do, anyway) I wrote for poetry class about this poem:

	William Carlos Williams - The Avenue of Poplars
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

In the section of prose which follows the eighth poem in Spring and All, Williams writes “The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation” (p. 111). This statement, already provocative, is made all the more so by the fact that images of nature and natural objects abound in the poems of Spring and All, especially when the reader makes sure to process these images in a way that is in line with Williams’s opinions towards the natural, the poetic, and the real. When reading a poem which contains a description of a natural setting (or any setting, for that matter), we should be concerned not with what was actually there (nor even that there even was an actual setting which Williams saw), but rather with how Williams imagined it. This is achieved, according to Williams, by noticing that poems are written with words, and words, when properly interpreted, link to the imagination of the writer as much as (if not more than) they do to what they depict. In a book that starts out intending to be haphazard—and achieving that haphazardness, by the final quarter of it—Williams’s thinking is actually quite lucid on these points. “That [words] move independently when set free is the mark of their value” (p. 149).

Though many of the poems in the book are quite musical or song-like, Williams prefers to see poetry, especially in its relation to imagination, as a dance, or play:

[Poetry] affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature… (p. 149-150)

Of course, this play or dance, while not just an imitation of nature, is also not entirely free. There is something fixed about the relationship between the word and the reality it describes, but using the imagination to make that relationship dynamic is the source, for Williams, of the energy of poetry, when “[words] are liberated from the usual quality of [specified meanings] by transposition into another medium, the imagination” (p. 150).

Thus, in Poem 24 (aka "The Avenue of Poplars"), when Williams describes a “wordless world,” the reader must immediately take note of this description, for it brings to the fore the very tensions which Williams has been working through in the prose of this book. “The leaves embrace / in the trees / it is a wordless / world / without personality” (p. 142). There is nothing spurious about this claim, as, surely, leaves in trees really don’t have words, but that very world is presented to us in words—the words of Williams’s imagination. What is particularly interesting, then, is the role that negation plays in Williams’s description of this world; again, he isn’t “holding a mirror up to nature,” but rather operating with his words in the opposite fashion, telling us what isn’t there rather than showing us what is. What we know about this world of the canopy we know through negation: it is “wordless,” “without personality,” the speaker “do[es] not seek a path,” the “kiss of leaves” is described by what it is not (“poison ivy / or nettle”), and the reader is assured that we “need look no further,” as the speaker “do[es] nothing unusual.” It is interesting to me that Williams never discusses negation in his prose, as it is clearly the device by which he achieves a poem which so closely falls in line with his argument. The power of poetry thus imagined is perhaps best embodied in the paradox of action of the speaker, as he simultaneously ascends and descends through the canopy. That this paradox is achieved, according to the logic of the poem, by the fact of the speaker doing something as humdrum as driving in his car and thinking about cave paintings is surely an example of Williams liberating words from their usual qualities. Though much of the poem is strange or paradoxical, when we agree with Williams that “the only realism in art is of the imagination,” we find that Poem No. 24 is about as real as it gets.

[Page citations refer to this book.]