Week #2 blog post: Modernism, Localism, and Cosmopolitanism

[jsca...@gmail.com]

"Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us.

"To purify the dialect of the tribe"--T.S. Eliot, _Little Gidding_

(1942)

 

This is the first blog post assignment for Poetics of Dislocation. Please post 1-2 pages by Tuesday at 10 am by replying to this thread.

William Carlos Williams wrote in a 1939 letter to Horace Gregory: "Of mixed ancestry I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was expressedly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it."  One may read _Paterson_ as an effort

to "possess" America as a home through synthesis of its geographies and/as tongues.  But there are tensions in this project of making "particulars" "general," of translating the noise of this land into a "common language to unravel," into "straight lines."  Williams wrote to Alan Ginsberg, “I don’t even know if Paterson is poetry. I have no form, I just try to squeeze the lines up into pictures.”

 

T.S. Eliot comes up against a similar tension in his effort to revolutionize the poetic idiom by incorporating and purifying "the dialect of the tribe"--an

effort reflected in his initial title for _The Waste Land_ (1922), "He do the police in different voices."  The "tribe" is a hybrid, impossible for the expatriated poet to isolate and police.  As Marx wrote in 1848, "All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-

formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify."

 

Choose a passage in each monumental modernist poem in which the poet ventriloquizes opposing voices.  How does the clash between languages of different nations, high and low idioms, or classical and vernacular references  resonate in these works?  Does such a clash imply the synthesis of homeland or of a cosmopolitan fellowship outlined by Appiah's "Making Conversation"--or cultural alienation, fragmentation?  How do you see Williams and Eliot differing with respect to their constructions of place and space?

[David Finch]

Line 12: "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch": "I am not Russian. I come from Lithuania, a real German." 

It isn't clear on the face of the poem who is saying this. Perhaps it is the overheard voice of another patron at the cafe, perhaps it is just sort of a caption or ephocal undertone of discussion. The next lines seem to come from, or allude to, Countess Marie Wallersee-Larisch, the go-between who arranged the affair between Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and the seventeen-year-old Mary Vetsera. The murder-suicide of Rudolf and Mary at Mayerling in 1889 tore apart Viennese court society; destabilized delicate relations among Austria, Germany, and Russia; and exacerbated volatile ethnic and nationalist tensions within the Austrian empire (Magyars vs. Germans vs. Serbs vs. Slovenes vs. Slovaks, etc., etc.). Rudolf was replaced as successor to Emperor Franz Josef by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination by a Serbian nationalist in 1914 plunged Europe into war and destroyed the old social and cultural order as Eliot wished to honor it in "The Waste Land."

Back to "Bin gar keine Russin": The line is crude, unsophisticated. It sounds like something that Eliot might have thought a Jew would say. Jews called themselves "Russians" if their families came from any part of the Pale of Settlement that was once Russian territory, including Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and large chunks of Poland. Jews from Lithuania, "Litvaks," sometimes thought of themselves as being more refined than those from Russia, closer to the German-Jewish ideal. Eliot might be making a joke here: Litvaks who thought that someone from Riga was a "real" German were only deluding themselves. There were Baltic Germans in Lithuania, but East Prussia didn't go that far north, and real Germans looked down at Litvaks. And no Jew could be a real German anyhow. 

The juxtaposition with Countess Marie is one of many such clashes that occur in the poem, ugly new against ill-fated old. It is certainly an example of the mish-mosh of ethnic and national consciousnesses that is the poem's backdrop.

[J. Scappettone]

Thank you, David. Can you add some thoughts about Paterson? The ultimate goal is to think a bit about both works.

[Patrick Morrissey]

(What follows is too fast and loose, but I didn't want to go on too long, so I’ll hope for some refinement in class on Tuesday!)

It strikes me that while both The Waste Land and Paterson place diverse voices and source materials in contiguity, Eliot and Williams deploy fairly different techniques to collect and arrange their materials.  An important precedent for Eliot’s method is drama and the Victorian dramatic monologue; Williams is all over the place, as he himself acknowledges, but I think we can recognize a fundamentally documentary impulse in Paterson.  I suspect that these differences of technique and form—these different styles of ventriloquism—imply different attitudes and relations to the city each poem occupies (or is occupied by) and the diverse voices that accrue in those places. 

            Consider the moments when false teeth appear in each poem: in The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess” concludes with a Cockney woman’s monologue recounting the conversation in which she urges her friend Lil to have her remaining teeth pulled so that she may “get a nice set” of dentures in preparation for her husband Albert’s homecoming (line 145).  This passage is pretty straight dramatic monologue; almost everything is routed through the speaker, except for “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” and the final good-byes, but these outside voices fit easily into the norms of theatrical staging.  The “low” Cockney voices play off the more literary discourse of the chess-players, the depiction of whom seems to draw on techniques both drama and narrative fiction.  We might begin to talk about The Waste Land—the “unreal city” that is London but could also be Vienna, Jerusalem, Athens, or Alexandria—as the space of a stage upon which various player-voices appear.  The imaginary or “scripted” quality is important: the “particulars” of speech, place, and character seem somehow generic or “representative” to me—not things someone actually said, but things Eliot imagined a certain kind of person would say.  The poem might depict fragmented and alienating urban and cultural landscapes, but the poet’s mediating theatrical intelligence also serves to neutralize conflict between different voices: they’re all “purified” as fiction and subordinated to his direction.  Swept up into the generality of literary tradition, they also don’t seem to belong to anyplace in particular.

            Meanwhile in Paterson, we find “A quart of potatoes, half a dozen oranges, / a bunch of beets and some soup greens. / Look, I have a new set of teeth.  Why you / look ten years younger” (27).  This little stanza seems to run together utterances from three different speakers, unattributed and without quotation marks.  I take it that these, and the voices of the two preceding stanzas, are “overheard” voices of Patersonians.  But why do these “common” voices seem less fictional to me than the ones in The Waste Land?  I think it has something to do with the poet’s own account of his arrival in Puerto Rico (from which his Uncle Carlos fled) and the quoted letter from his Midwestern friend Alva Turner that preceded these stanzas.  WCW self-reference (his “personality” in contrast to Eliot’s “impersonality”) and his collaged texts create a kind of veracity-effect that spreads out to other parts of the poem, as if to testify that “this really happened” in real place called Paterson.  Of course the poet is still mediating all this stuff, but WCW the documentary editor lets his material stay a little ragged, a little less synthesized.  The risk is that the particulars don’t become general enough, but the gain might be some sense of an actual locality.

[David Finch]

Of course. Sorry. Some thoughts:

Paterson Book I, Part III, the passage beginning, "And the silk spins from the hot drums to a music / of pathetic souvenirs, a comb and nail-file / in an imitation leather case..." through the stanza beginning, "Things, things unmentionable, / the sink with the waste farina in it...."

This exemplifies Williams's ability in his political poems to use different patterns of speech in collage-like staccato bursts of strangely juxtaposed sentiment, to cover ground quickly, to make his points hard and fast without prolonging the polemics. He measures the silk spinning from the hot drums against "pathetic souvenirs" (note his use of "pathetic," a descriptor most poets would merely imply), leading to "Your interest is in the bloody loam but what / I'm after is the finished product." This is his vaguely symbolist way of taking in a sense the conflict underlying Paterson's working-class history: the big silk mills, the 1913 strike which failed when the mill owners starved out the strikers and ran the magnificent organizer Carlo Tresca out of town -- all of which, in Williams's vision, ends up being a comb and nail-file, the wiping of the nose on sleeves, to the "tranquil" and "lovely" waste farina and rancid meat. Many of Williams's patients were working-class poor, and he wasn't about to show disrespect by sentimentalizing or underestimating them. (He was "baffled" by the complexity of their "apt paper flowers," by their coming to Paterson "to dream.") His speech goes from the Kierkegaardian abstract ("a mathematical calm, controlled," "clumsiness of address") to gutter cynical ("What do I care for the flies, shit with them. / I'm out of the house all day"), forcing us to see what he sees of the odd beauty and sad hopefulness of urban poverty -- or less abstractly and more accurately, urban poor people.

Eliot has no interest in these observations. His poetics could have walked through the Paterson bus station at rush hour and see nothing but the distasteful inauthenticity in the passengers' choice of footwear, which, for him, might have profound implications for the shape of the coming order. These implications might even be valid, should one wish to discuss his poetry on that level. 

[David Finch]

Regarding high/low idioms, let me comment on the following passage: "P. Your interest is in the bloody loam but what / I'm after is the finished product. // I. Leadership passes into empire; empire begets insolence; insolence brings ruin."

The interest in "the finished product" is expressed in the language of bourgeoise capitalism. The retort is expressed in high and haughty Roman diction, but it cuts both ways: the comment would seem to be directed to the mill owners, but Big Bill Haywood's leadership passed into empire when he tried to use the 1913 walkout to effect a general strike, thus achieving the Wobblies' grander aims, but he failed -- he failed the mill workers, he failed Tresca, and the IWW collapsed as a force in industrial unionism not long thereafter. The mill owners did okay. Big Bill had no sense of the finished product that ought to have been seeking. Williams understood us-against-them, but recognized its many ironic subtleties.

On Thursday, April 4, 2013 6:52:50 PM UTC-5, jsca...@gmail.com wrote:

[Peter]

The elements that I'm trying to think together this week are the ideas of multiplicity, incomprehension, and death (primarily in Paterson, but also in The Wasteland). The aspect of language that resists unitary sense seems to get thought in Paterson as water, and particularly through the fluid splitting and merging that rough or falling water undergoes. So the metaphorical character Paterson is lying on his side with his head near the falls, and a stone ear upturned to the noise of the water (6). The image recurs again with Reverend and Sarah Cummings, "[a] false language pouring--a / language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted)...crashing upon a stone ear" (15) and again with Sam Patch when he hesitates on the precipice, "the water pouring still / from the edge of the rocks, filling / his ears with sound, hard to interpret" (16). In both cases the speaker's language is replaced by the water's (Sarah's scream, Sam's speech), and the water's barrage overloads its meaning. Confused and misinterpreted, this overfull language then leads to death. We can even say that this overfull meaning, the swarming and buzzing of sound, is actually death made present, as we have the image of "the roar of the river / forever in our ears (arrears) / inducing sleep and silence, the roar / of eternal sleep" (17). This is death as a chatter rather than silence.

That, as I see it, is the context of images for the passage I am interested in, which describes flowers/women who leave their home for the coast where: "The language is missing them / they die also / incommunicado" (11). Perhaps this is stretching the sense of ventriloquize, but the final word, and the syntax of the sentence seems to condense two competing voices in Spanish and English. The syntax plays on the construction of the Spanish verb faltar, whose irregular form comes through in the poem ('language is missing [to] them' rather than 'they are missing language'). The primary reading of this line would be something like: they cannot speak the language of their new environment and therefore they die. The second reading, however, would take the awkward translation literally: the language longs for these lost flowers, whose death (like the others' deaths) is inevitable, but which returns them to the mother tongue if not to the speaking community. Death seems to function as a kind of repository of speech here, and perhaps one on which a community can be paradoxically modeled.

My sense is that something similar is going on in The Wasteland, though at a remove from the thick layering of death and rebirth symbolism in the poem. As an example I was drawn to the dialogue within "A Game of Chess" starting on line 111 which seems to fill the alley with dead men, and pile nothing on top of nothing. While its dramatic emphasis is relatively minor, the first speaker's question "Are you alive, or not?" (2.126) carries with it a paradox and tension: it is a question the dead cannot answer, and the second speaker does not answer it. Without the quotation marks to indicate speech, the second speaker might then be taken as a kind of ghost or haunting, a verbal echo of the first speakers questions. The responses seem to unmoor the first speaker from his home, readying him to rush out into the street. So, while I'm not sure I can draw a neat parallel between the two poems, there seems to be a logic that connects death, non-comprehension, and multiplicity to a sense of being rootless.

[Michael]

I agree with Patrick that _Paterson_ aims for a documentary; that it wants to collect the everyday detail without making it generic, and that this may be its weakness, its possible inability to translate particularity into universality.  I’m also learning from his description of Eliot’s voices generalized in order not “to belong to anyplace in particular”—which reminds me of the “no-place” of utopia, and therefore the possibility that Eliot, for all his seeming to look back at the traditions before him, is also always trying to catch up to the promise of convergence ahead of him.  Perhaps Eliot wants traditions to converge in the same place, whereas WCW wants to present a space in which difference can be kept alive by failing to merge.  (It’s the melting pot versus mosaic thing, the twin but opposing orientations toward multiplicity and the binaries that reduce it (high/low, etc.): fusion or fission.)

This led me at first to want to differentiate a technique of palimpsest, layer, and polysemy (Eliot), from a technique of juxtaposition, list, and singularity (WCW). But I see that wouldn’t be right.  I wonder if things are complicated a bit when both are very interested in voicing the “Earth” itself, the physical world, and opposing this voice to the voice of poetry:

“The Waste Land” begins with an anxiety over “breeding” and “mixture,” preferring instead the homogeneous space of “covering.”  This stated preference for the one (even if artificial) over the many motivates an ambivalence throughout the poem; it was summarized in the original title (_the_ police, but in _different_ voices) and surfaces towards the end in Eliot’s voicing of the earth:

If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine tree
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water (352-59)

Eliot’s intervention is to give us the onomatopoeia of, indeed, the water only (drip drop), making the world of the poem diverge from the world of the too-noisy (but not of the right noise) world beyond it. We hear _that_ the grass sings (386), but not the singing itself.  Eliot imagines an opposition of earth-voices, and he selects an option not available.  The poem voices that which the earth could not provide, and does so through a process of filtering.

Not so with _Paterson_. “Earth, the chatterer, father of all speech” (39), or “I am aware of the stream / that has not language, courses / beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes” (23): the physical world is for WCW the substrate of a human language, and there is a homology with the poetic project instead of a divergence or compensation.  But in WCW’s account, this voicing of the earth is an accidental discovery; we know from WCW’s letter that he intended first to develop a homology between _city_ and language, or “to use the multiple facets which a city presented as representations for comparable facts of contemporary thought,” to “objectify” man, but it is the Falls which end up enchanting him and pointing to “a language which we were and are seeking” and he decides to “struggle to interpret and use this language.”  Whereas Eliot writes a poetic world that opposes the physical by fantasizing alternative voicings of earthly elements, and therefore the poetic project is a fantastic substitution for the inadequate world, for Williams, the physical world is substituted for the city as part of a return to the foundational world and all its nurture. (I.e., perhaps WIlliams is a better primitivist, as organicist, than Eliot?)  

In this way, even as Eliot leans toward converging multiple traditions into a unity (and imagines, in his notes, his poem as a pedagogic roadmap to them), he remains interested in negativity, that which cannot be merged because it has not yet appeared in the world.  And even as Williams leans toward the documentary method, he is fundamentally interested in the universal, the commons of nature which he sees as the commons of (linguistic) sociality.  

I don’t think I would associate either very strongly with cosmopolitanism (except, perhaps in Eliot’s notes.)

On Thursday, April 4, 2013 6:52:50 PM UTC-5, jsca...@gmail.com wrote:

[David Gutherz]

First off, let me say, Hi! My name is David (you can say daveed to differentiate), I'm a second year in the Committee on Social Thought and I'll be auditing this class. Unfortunately, I will only be able to make the Tuesday meetings due to a conflict with a course in the Committee on Social Thought, but I'll be a doing all the readings and participating in this group just like the rest of you. So here we go...

I want to pick up on a few excellent points Patrick made about the different origins and intentions of WCW and Elliot’s technique. It seems right to place Eliot in relation to Victorian dramatic monologue. We also need to find a place on this family tree for the mock lectures and literary monologues of Mark Twain. In “American Literature and the American Language,” Eliot singled Twain out as one of those rare writers who “purified the dialect of the tribe.” He lauds Twain for being “strongly local” while turning the Mississippi (the river Eliot grew up along) into the “universal river of human life.” The formula for great national literature, Eliot continues, is: “strong local flavor combined with unconscious universality.” I don’t know if Eliot intended to invert this order to create more “cosmopolitan” poetry, but it seems to me that The Waste Land, at least, is a case of “strong universality with unconscious local flavor.” On the one hand, as Patrick already pointed out, the text tends towards universalization, conceived as a kind of deracination of particulars that have been chosen, to a great extent, because they're perfect for the part.  Eliot’s repressed local sensibility, however, reappears occasionally in his choice of universal symbols. I’m thinking here of the passage that begins “The river sweats…” The proper names that follow—Greenwich, the Isle of Dogs—indicate that “the river” in question is the Thames, which quickly—thanks to Tiresias—becomes a symbol for Man’s homelessness. But I also get the sense (it’s probably the barges that do it) that Eliot is drawn to the Thames because it reminds him of home, that when he looks at the Thames he sees the Mississippi and thinks “Homeward.” Thus, the “universal river” is a kind of optical illusion created by Eliot’s cosmopolitan attachment to two rivers separated by an ocean. 

In regard to Williams,  while I again agree that the impulse is in the opposite direction, “from mathematics to particulars,”  I’d like to press a little on the role of documentary in Paterson. Put simply, what is the man who wrote “it is difficult to get the news from poems” doing putting “newspaper clippings” into a poem? I don’t have a good answer, but the surrounding lines from “Of Asphodel…” (thinking to bring you news/ of something that concerns you/ and concerns many men. Look at/ what passes for the new./You will not find it there) warn against idealizing the empirical.  My sense is that the peculiar particulars in Paterson—the supposed scraps from the archive most of all—are part of a critique of the contemporary cult of information, the tendency (as Walter Benjamin put it) to substitute the “nearest,” i.e. anything subject to “prompt verifiability,” for the “intelligence coming from afar.” By dating episodes—20th of June, 1812, November 13,1826—Williams both signals “this really happened here” and calls into question the whole category of “outdated” news, technology, artworks, etc… In this, the nearest analog or ancestor might be Picasso’s collaged newspaper in the Guitars from 1912-14, for example. 

Looking forward to seeing you all in person...

[David Finch]

David, I suppose Williams picked up the technique of putting newspaper clippings, quotations from historical documents, etc. in his poems from, among others,  Dos Passos, who used it to good effect in his U.S.A. trilogy, and from Pound, who used it in Canto XXXI and elsewhere. I'm not sure that Williams used the quotations to say "this really happened here" as much as he wanted to say, "this is someone else's snapshot in time," which may or may not have happened as depicted. Pound could comment on it, or use it as a starting point for a riff, from point of distance or contrast. 

[Mollie McFee]

 I’d also like to turn to the passage in “A Game of Chess,” but with a focus on intimate miscommunication, silence, and thought that resists speech. Only a part of the conversation is explicitly voiced. This small part repeatedly requests the desire of one speaker to hear the voice of the other. The speaker expresses a profound anxiety around the presence or absence of sound, wishing for chatter rather than meaning (as Peter indicated in his post). The scene, however, is full of unvoiced sound and song, from the “jug jug” of the nightengale painted on the wall to the “Shakespearean rag.” These are all songs which gesture outwards to narrative, populating the scene with unvoiced words. Then there is the written voice of the respondent, which does not speak out of its liminal, deathlike state. Both the silent and spoken words of the poem express differing states of agony, be they the agony of rape narrated through the figure of Philomela, the paranoid anxiety of the speaking figure, or the inner voice ruminating on images of death. Silence and speech are staged as two languages that cannot be reconciled, and the encounter is ultimately tragic.

 The expressive capacities of silence and speech are also staged through an intimate scene in Paterson, but as parallel expressive qualities that complement and intensify one another. In section two, as the couple “Sit[s] and talk[s] quietly, with long lapses of silence,” desire proliferates. The speaker sits and talks, wishes to be abed, wishes to go to bed. These desires do not follow an ordinary chronology of seduction but seem to spring instantaneously and concurrently from the moments of silence and speech. This moment is indented from the sections of the poem that precede and follow it, stepping out of the poem’s format like a daydream. Ultimately silence prevents desire’s end in a sexual encounter, as the two speakers continual to engage in the play among desire, silence, speech, and the occasional interruption of the water. The giants too are present in the scene’s silences.

 While Eliot stages silence and speech in the romantic couple through an unreconciled opposition, in Paterson intimate silence and speech feed each other. Though Williams describes silence and speech as working cooperatively, they are nevertheless distinct enough to create a productive interplay of feeling and intensity. The same kind of interplay is present in the scene of “A Game of Chess,” but the interplay of opposing languages is characterized by an inability to engage them.

On Thursday, April 4, 2013 6:52:50 PM UTC-5, jsca...@gmail.com wrote:

[David Gutherz]

David Finch--to clarify,I wasn't trying to suggest that Williams use of archival material was unprecedented, but just to take a step towards understanding his specific way of appropriating found materials. He may of picked up the technique from Pound or Dos Passos, as you say, but each one of these authors uses these means to achieve different "good effects," as your response illustrates. By mentioning Picasso as an ancestor what I meant was mostly that, for reasons I'll hopefully have found words for by class-time, although the other two may have been bigger influences on Williams, there is a strong ideological affinity between the collages in Paterson and Picasso's Guitars.

[David Finch]

David, I agree that one can compare Picasso's Guitars with Paterson and would be interested in hearing how you see the affinity as ideological in any but the broadest sense (rather than, say, technical or experimental). In any event, I did not mean to imply that Williams imitated Pound or Dos Passos in this regard. Dos Passos used his "Newsreel" segments to make points of sociological irony and to pace out the passage of time. Pound quoted from political documents largely in order to attack their authors. Williams was doing something different. His agenda was different.

[Ingrid Becker]

I found myself drawn to moments in which opposing voices appear as competing writing methods, that is, moments of generic multiplicity, intermingling, indeterminacy. I was also caught up by your tracking of silence/death/impoverished intimacies as they run up against conversation (Appiah as well as our poets)/vitality/crowds and lovers (Peter, Mollie), and so I wanted to talk about the problem of distilling particulars into the universal through examples of something like cosmopolitan loneliness or isolation in the crowd. In both poems we can locate structured or formal groupings in which the relationship between individual and crowd (or, in couplings, individual and individual) remains troubled by communication difficulties.

First & briefly, Eliot. The initial appearance of the “Unreal City” unwinds in a picture of the alienated individual amidst the urban mass (regular enough trope): “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (62-5). These lines are some of many in the poem that feel prose-like; this style gives way very quickly to another, that of quotation/citation.

Paterson too is occupied by generic interplay. The poem navigates amongst grammars typical of poetic, journalistic, and legalistic languages, to name a few, and incorporates citational practices (Daveed, newsclippings etc.) to try and account for the “things” that it takes as content. The lives & deaths of Sam Patch and Mrs. Cumming are narrated both in poem-time and in interstitial fragments of prose that call upon non-fiction/reportage. Sam, as stunt performer, is a locus of the crowd, and yet he travels in total alienation, his only companions a bear and a fox. Before his fatal leap, he gives “A Speech!”, perhaps drawing together the crowd with words-in-public (as opposed to private, the bedroom, or overheard, the pub etc.). Speech fails him, he becomes confused, is sort of emptied of identity (because "there's no mistake in Sam Patch"), hits the water wrong, and: “A great silence followed as the crowd stood spellbound. Not until the following spring was the body found frozen in an ice-cake.” One can’t get much more isolated than Sam’s body here, and yet, he is also the object that unifies the crowd in a “spellbound” state, a state that is also characterized by silence. This crowd, bound in silence and in spectacle, is at least briefly able to share a collective gaze; this is more than Eliot’s crowd of urban commuters, eyes on their own shoes, can do in terms of recognizing shared experience.

But Ms. Cunningham’s death complicates things further. She falls with a shriek that her husband understands instinctively and can do nothing about. Intimacy is revealed to be just as precarious as anonymity. There’s so much more to be said! More in class I hope.

I want to offer a final broad justification for attending to an admixture of methods as confronting tensions of the particular and universal in the context of “Say it! No ideas but in things." Ideas—in this case, something like Appiah’s morality—are revealed in methods of synthesizing things (the process of “Say it!”). And perhaps these things, for Appiah, might be thought of as the details and practices making up cultural difference. Something like cosmopolitan morality, enacted through conversation, is challenged with synthesizing these details and practices. And Williams remarks, in the first stanza after Patch's reported fall: "I cannot say / more than how. The how (the howl) only / is at my disposal." Thinking with Appiah, the problem of reconciling difference in global unity is best apprehended through attention to "how" and the noise this makes.

[Ariana]

I am interested in considering how the city is represented in Paterson, and then in comparing these observations to The Waste Land. One fascinating thing about Williams’ poem is that in the first book, the city itself is almost silent. The river, the falls, and the natural world of Paterson speak; but the city itself rarely enters the poem. We are given a sense from the beginning of the elevation of these natural forms: “From above, higher than the spires, higher / even than the office towers… / the river comes pouring in above the city” (7). The first book’s title “Delineaments of the Giants” suggests this dominion as well. But I am not certain that this means we are meant to read this as an easy relationship with the preeminence of the natural world or, as Michael put it, the foundational world.

We are almost cut off from the city throughout much of the poem. We get occasional glances into scenes that might take place in the city—such as the scene at the doctor’s office—but it is only at the end that we come into contact with the urban space. Then we see “Tenement window…in which / no face is seen—though curtainless,” “vulgar streets,” and “Things, things unmentionable” (37–38). And there are spaces that are unspeakable in this space. We cannot see the faces of those who live in poverty; we see instead the moon staring into the window. The urban space is “vulgar” next to the mythic, natural world (which is not meant to imply that then natural world is not without its complexities, i.e. in the repeated images of drowning).

The preface ends “and so to man, / to Paterson,” and yet, we barely get to Paterson in Book I (5). We stand above Paterson, and do not enter the tenement buildings or the mills, and do not hear the city, which remains silent. The poem also occludes winter: “spring, summer, fall and the sea,” “a nine months’ wonder.” There is a tension built up therefore in the poem, between the wonder and foundation of the natural world, and the idealization and obstruction that forms for the poet trying to enter into the language of the city and of man.

In The Waste Land, the natural and urban world are more fluidly represented in the poem: the mythic figure of Tiresius is placed in an urban bedroom. Phrases like “a carved dolphin swam,” “rats’ alley” and “trams and dusty trees” suggest the interpenetration of these worlds (96, 115, 292). Yet, by the final section of The Waste Land the city is largely absent, besides the “Falling towers” and London Bridge falling down as well. In this final section, the natural world seems to reassert itself as dominant and potentially peaceful. Voices sing “out of empty cisterns,” the thunder chants the way to a righteous life, and the poem ends with a phrase meaning: peace surpassing understanding.

Finally, I’d add, though this is only speculative, that Williams’ dichotomizing of the natural and urban worlds so that they’re discrete, even in tension and Eliot’s interweaving of the urban and natural world, only to collapse the former, seem to parallel the observations Michael made about the use of different voices in the two poems: that in Williams’ poem the different voices are collaged, keeping the boundaries more distinct between them, and in Eliot’s they are merged, though I see the urban world collapsing to create a utopian singularity. 

[Suzannah Spaar]

     The opposing voices in both Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Williams’ “Paterson” are essential, according to Appiah’s claim that “the model [of cosmopolitanism]...is that of conversation--and, in particular, conversation between people from different ways of life...it is inevitable (xxi).” However, there are instances in both of these poems where the poet is not only agreeing that conversation is inevitable between different races/classes/&c, but between different kinds of text—between high and low discourse, between erudite diction and slang.  Between different languages.  Even the fact that Appiah lands on “cosmopolitanism” as a term for what’s going on, and then backs down to “partial cosmoplitanism”(xvii) suggests the inability for a single word to function without a relationship, or dialogue, with other words. Look, for example, at this passage from The Waste Land:

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

I think we are in rats’ alley
here the dead men lost their bones.

“What is that noise?”
            The wind under the door.

“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
            Nothing again nothing.
                    “Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?”
    I remember
            Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in our head?”
                    But
O O O O that Shapkespherian Rag---
It’s so elegant
So intelligent

    The repetition of the word “nothing” from both speakers  in this dialogue almost nullifies the word. Let me explain what I mean.  When Appiah is trying to land on the word “cosmopolitanism”, he first tosses out and rejects several terms. One of these is “globalization,” which Appiah says is “a term that...now can seem to encompass everything, and nothing (xiii).” So nothing also encompasses everything. At the end of “The Waste Land,” Eliot finishes the poem with the words “Shantih shantih shantih.” This is a Sanskrit word that has no translation and is meant to encapsulate unnamable peace. It is said after the “OM” (so that the chant goes “OM Shantih Shantih Shantih”). The OM is a moment of spiritual transcendence beyond the body, beyond language. It is nothing. The three nothings used in dialogue “Do/You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember/Nothing?” draw a parallel to the final three “shantihs.”  And then, when the second participant in the conversation answers, finally with “O O O O,” he is opting for the “OM”, for a closed ecstasy that goes beyond language.  Eliot searches for this OM within poetry, within the “intelligent” “Shakespearian Rag” and in the physical space (on the page and in the air) between the dialogue of two different people.  Williams explores this same phenomenon within poetry, within pictures, within factual writings. He writes:

Two--
    disparate among the pouring
waters of their hair in which nothing is
molten--

two, bound by an instinct to be the same
ribbons, cut from a piece,
cerise pink, binding their hair: one--
a willow twig pulled from a low
leafless bush i full bud in her hand,
(or eels or a moon!)
holds it, the gathered spray,
upright in the air, the pouring air,
strokes the soft fur--
   
            Ain’t they beautiful!


    He has embedded a poem amongst the far left’s description (the “two”), and the far right’s dialogue “Ain’t they beautiful!”  The poem exists between these two touchstones--the academic and the actual. This is the O, attainable only when sifted out of conversation.

On Thursday, April 4, 2013 6:52:50 PM UTC-5, jsca...@gmail.com wrote:

[Dani Fox]

Originally I approached The Waste Land through the lens of "no ideas but in things" that appeared and stuck with me from Paterson last week.  But I found instead that I was framing my reading of these two texts through knowledge and noise.  Notions of noise were particularly interesting to me in the way that so often the speaker of The Waste Land is perhaps unclear and so too are the changes between the voices.  Like many people, I am thinking of a scene in "A Game of Chess." 

"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

"Speak to me. why do you never speak? Speak. 

"What are you thinking of?  What thinking? What?

"I never know what you re thinking.  Think."

And then comes the potential for a new voice, one unmarked by quotations marks. As the lines and lengths of the phrases shorten and gain speed going on through the next twenty lines or so, the confusion and communicative misfire serve to create a background of noise.  It seemed more to me between lines 111 and at least 138 that the speaking created a texture or maybe an environment that descends upon the poem like a new kind of vocal landscape.  

Similarly quite often the speaking (in the sense of "we sit and talk" that repeats itself) in Paterson and the references to language fall away from real meaning and is "divorced from their minds."  The silences are most meaningful, the language always prime for miscomprehension and some kind of failure either on the part of the speaker or the one trying to listen. I am thinking too, now, of the girls whose families have gone to the hills in part one.  

[Tala Radejko]

I initially sent this as a reply to the email thread and it didn't work out - sorry for the (very) late addition but here are some of my thoughts. 

The first stanza of The Fire Sermon ("The river's tent is broken... chuckle spread from ear to ear", 62-3) can be taken as an example of the heteroglossia pervasive in The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem is composed of fragmented voices, a mixture of the past and present, and scattered with references to famous literary passages. As indicated in the notes, “Sweet Thames, run softly…” is a line taken from Edward Spencer’s poem Prothalamion, in which it repeats as the closing line to each verse. The juxtaposition between the reference to Tudor England’s much cleaner River Thames to the present-day river strewn with litter and the results of an English night out is an example of Eliot’s placement of past and present side-by-side. Furthermore, the line “by the water of Leman I sat down and wept..” is taken from psalm 137. The low vernacular and life style represented by the litter on the Thames thus clashes with the higher forms of both Biblical and Tudor poetry, the later of which was written explicitly for the weddings of the Earl of Worcester’s daughters – something that again reinforces the ways in which the passage embodies the clash between low and high idioms both in terms of language and class representation, but also between past and present. The repeated references to the nightingale and the rape of the young woman in The Fire Sermon echo the rape of Philomela, while the presence of Tiresias and Phebas (in Death by Water) also demonstrates the intermingling of classical imagery with depictions of the cruder aspects of life.

The opening passage in Book 1 of Paterson similarly reflects a merging of the past and present – the city is personified as an immortal and sleeping stone giant; imagery more often associated with myths and legends than contemporary depictions of urban life. Passages like the one on page 12 also help root the poem and provide evidence of other localities – thus demonstrating another manner in which multiple voices are made present in the poem. One thing that struck me about both poems is the manner in which they are composed of fragmented scenes and references, and how such composition relates to notion of a collective memory, identity, and language use. Word choice and the application of language are crucial in constructions of national and collective narratives, and it is interesting to look at the types of scenes both authors chose to use as well as authorial distance, and maybe how those choices reflect the authors’ relationships to the places they were describing.