Notes on Williams, Abstraction, and the Line

A little over a year ago, I started writing poems that entered into conversation with specific drawings and paintings by Cy Twombly, a practice that sent me to William Carlos Williams. Williams was one of the first American poets to overtly write poems about particular paintings, and he was also one of the first American poets to write, regularly, about art and poetry. As Bonnie Costello correctly notes, “While T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were reading the classics, William Carlos Williams was looking at pictures.” So, I began looking at Williams looking at pictures and started taking notes, writing down fragments, lines, and ideas from poems, essays, and books. Eventually, these notes and fragments became themselves a demonstration of the matrix of line, abstraction, and meaning.

These notes are for Cy Twombly.

In short, these two arts, poetry and painting, have in common a laborious element, which, when it is exercised, is not only a labor but a consummation as well.
     —Wallace Stevens, “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”

1. “What we are seeking is the least common denominator in the means of expression: in painting, color reft of all other reference; in the poem, the unaccented line, capable of accepting every shade of revolutionary significance.” (A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists, 217)
2. I am thinking of Breton and the surrealists who believed that revolutions in poetic form, even in the poetic line, was a revolution against a society ruled by rational thought. For Williams, the unaccented line was the equivalent to painterly abstraction—both radical reimaginings of perspective and perception and therefore the machinery of knowledge.
3. In “The Rose is Obsolete,” Williams longs for “the ur-rose, the rose before “the rose,”—the “sharper, neater, more cutting” rose before The Bachelor, before the image of the rose, before the idea of the image of the rose, before the idea of a reality show in which there is a rose and a poem about a rose on a show. Williams wanted to do to the rose what the Surrealists wanted to do to rationality, which, as it happens, is also what Williams also wanted to do to the poetic line.
4. The implications of the variable foot first struck Williams rather famously, in 1955, and prompted what he thought of as his “solution of modern verse.” Of course, Williams is talking about his triadic line, in which each line of the triad is equal to the other two.
5. This brings to mind Mondrian and in particular Clement Greenberg and his recasting of Mondrian’s notion of the equivalent. Greenberg: “Just as Schonberg makes every element, every sound in the composition of equal importance—different but equivalent—so the ‘all-over’ painter renders every element and every area of the picture equivalent in accent and emphasis. Like the twelve-tone composer, the ‘all-over’ painter weaves his Work of art into a tight mesh whose scheme of unity is recapitulated at every meshing point. The fact that the variations upon equivalence introduced by a painter like Pollock are sometimes so unobtrusive that at first glance we might see in the result not equivalence, but an hallucinatory uniformity, only enhances the result.”
6. I think of the uniform image of the asphodel, perhaps Williams’s best triadic line poem but one in which his fondness for painterly abstraction gives way to figuration. Abstraction in poetry works differently than abstraction in painting. In painting abstraction is literal; in poetry, it is figurative.
7. Williams from Paterson: “Pollock’s blobs of paint squeezed out with design! pure from the tube. Nothing else is real.” (211)
8. Williams from Spring and All: “Today where everything is being brought into sight the realism of art has bewildered us, confused us, and forced us to reinvent.” (111)
9. Wallace Stevens was more successful than Williams in aligning poetic abstraction with painterly abstraction, at least on the macro level. On the micro level, Williams’s concreteness functioned similarly to that of the abstract modernist painters in that the machinery of their compositions is not about instrumentalizing content. Rather, it seeks performance and expression.
10. “It is no longer,” writes Williams, “what you paint or what you write about that counts but how you do it: how you lay on the pigment, how you place the words to make a picture or a poem.”
11. Williams to Allen Ginsberg in 1952: “I just try to squeeze the lines up into pictures.”
12. In The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams, Henry M. Sayre writes, “The greatest source of confusion about Williams’s Brueghel poems lies in our consistent failure to remember that they are not literally pictures.”
13. Sayre is both correct and incorrect. The poems are not pictures of Brueghel or pictures of Brueghel’s paintings. Nor does Williams try to recreate the movement of the painting on the canvas with his poem on the page. And yet, Williams’s poems are—as all poems are—pictures of letters.
14. For me, Williams’s poems about Brueghel’s paintings are, from a formal and syntactical perspective, among his least aesthetically urgent. The poems are descriptions. They paraphrase. They translate. They do not innovate.
15. Williams on Rene Char: “As far as I can see, and I acknowledge that it may not be far, the abstract as a thing in itself is a man without a body.”
16. But what about a human’s body and an animal’s body? Charles Altieri recently reminded me of Williams’s “Poem (As the Cat)”
    

     
    As the cat
    climbed over
    the top of

    the jamcloset
    first the right
    forefoot

    carefully
    then the hind
    stepped down

    into the pit of
    the empty
    flower pot

17. Like many of Williams’s short poems, the text is one sentence. Altieri: “Here, the cat and the sentence become equivalent—cats that are sentences and sentences that are cats, and that is the kind of reality—the kind of conflation of form and content—that abstract painting seeks.”
18. What if we think of abstraction in a painterly sense for poetry that invites self-consciousness about how participation becomes possible as a primary condition of reading? In this way, many of my own poems owe a debt to the project of abstract art.
19. But what about abstract art that owes a debt to writing? I mentioned earlier I have been writing poems in response to Cy Twombly drawings. I say drawings, but do I mean Cy Twombly writings? What is the difference in the line in drawing versus writing? What does it mean, for Twombly, to have an unaccented line? Williams’s lines read through the lens of Twombly reveal not so much a shared vision of sight but of movement. I wonder what Williams would have thought of Twombly’s scribbles.
20. If Williams’s responses to Breughel are little more than descriptions, then what of my responses to Twombly? Are they Interventions? Interrogations? Inversions?
21. I was thinking of Williams and the variable foot when I began this poem, though that will not be obvious. This poem is the opposite of what Greenberg loves about Pollock—rather than equivalence, it seeks inequivalence. Or perhaps simple valence.
22. I’m reminded now of early Williams and Imagism and the image and Robert Bly calling Imagism “picturism,” since, for him, imagist poems merely recreated external reality as poetic snapshots. To what degree is semiotics related to abstraction and the line? When does Williams make the move from picturism to abstraction?
23. I would say Williams never really does, though he both wants to and is afraid to. Pure abstraction, for him, would mean an abandonment of realism. Go back to the previous note on Breughel. So grounded in verisimilitude are Williams’s poems about Breughel’s paintings, one wonders where the poetry lies in his renderings. Remarkably, Breughel is more abstract than Williams.
24. That brings us back to the line. What is, after all, the purpose of the line on the page? “Both the modern poem and the abstract in painting . . .” writes Williams, “. . . lead integrally into what we must be.”
25. And that brings me back to Twombly’s line on the canvas, which both is and is not my line on the page. Is there an equivalent in contemporary poetry to painterly abstraction? To what degree is a line abstraction? To what degree is a line realism?
26. Williams: “It is in the structure of the poem or painting that excellence exists, and that is unlimited, the least common denominator.” To what degree is line structure? And to what degree is structure an exhibition of process?
27. “I mean, I didn’t go and look at a Jackson Pollock painting and decide to try to imitate this in poetry somehow. But it’s just the idea of being as close as possible to the original impulse to work, which somehow make the poem, like the painting, a kind of history of its own coming into being.” John Ashbery on the “abstraction” of his poetry, 1974.

 27a. See epigraph.

28. And to what degree is abstraction not only a mode of becoming also a mode of interpretation? Altieri: “Poetry must be abstract in order to focus attention on the genuine concreteness of its processes that tend to be subsumed under the narcissistic substitutes imposed upon them when we create scenic contexts and thematic interpretations.” For Altieri, the poet who leans into abstraction versus representation is participating in an “individual resistance to hegemonic cultural values.” Thus, aesthetic processes are also a manifestation of aesthetic politics.
29. Williams: “I’ve attempted to fuse the poetry and painting, to make it the same thing.”
30. Twombly: “I never really separated painting and literature.”