Berry on Williams on Place

I’ve been on a personal study of poetry and place. Two weeks ago, I talked here about This London by Patrick Hicks, a collection of poems about London. Hicks is not a native of London, nor a resident; he’s simply in love with the city. His poems reflect that love that comes from appreciation and understanding of a particular place like a city, even if you don’t live there. 

But there’s another kind of place, the kind that comes from living and being rooted in a particular area or region or town or city, as if your DNA shares traits with the DNA of the place itself. William Faulkner used the fictitious town of Jefferson in the fictitious Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, based on his hometown of Oxford, and created a body of work that eventually became universal in its appeal and meaning. 

If there is a contemporary writer who has done much the same as Faulkner, it is poet, novelist and essayist Wendell Berry, who has based the fictitious Port William on his particular region of Kentucky. Berry has gone far beyond Faulkner, however, is developing a body of literary, philosophical and economic work that is rooted in his concept of place. 

Berry’s latest work is a collections of essays and reflections on another poet of place – The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford. Including “of Rutherford” in the title implies more than is seen at first glance – Berry sees Wiliams as the poet of Rutherford, his hometown in New Jersey where he lived and practiced as a doctor, but he also places that “Rutherford-ness” in a much larger context. 

The generation of American writers that included William Carlos Williams largely transplanted itself to Europe, and specifically Paris, because that is where American writers coming of age in the early 20^th century went to write and hobnob with each other. Williams stayed where he was born and raised, and yet his influence was as great if not greater. 

In his reflections, Berry firmly positions Williams as a kind of counterculture influence, then as well as now (today, American literary writers tend to congregate on the coasts, and generally around universities; Berry is a definite oddity to live and write near the Ohio River in Kentucky, but much like Faulkner eventually did in Oxford, after stays in New Orleans, Hollywood and a few other places. 

The volume that established Williams as a major poet was Spring and All, published in 1923 by the same publisher in France who had published Ulysses by James Joyce. The volume, containing both prose and 27 poems, firmly established Williams in the mainstream of modernism, but there was that little quirkiness of place. 

In late 2011, New Directions Books published a facsimile edition of Spring and All, and it is a rather plain little volume, with a blue-gray cover printed on a matte paper. I read the facsimile before I read Berry’s book, and I reread it afterward. It was a good way to meet Williams and his poetry, and then read an interpretation of his work by a major writer and poet like Berry. Unsurprisingly, Berry compares him to Faulkner. Surprisingly, he also argues that Williams had much in common with T.S. Eliot, even though Williams maintained a kind of argument against Eliot and his poetry during their lifetimes. 

Much of Spring and All is indeed like reading Faulkner – sometimes simple, often complex, but well worth the effort to understand. Here is Poem XI from the collection: 

In passing with my mind
on nothing in the world 

but the right of way
I enjoy on the road by 

virtue of the law
I saw 

an elderly man who
smiled and looked away

to the north past a house –
a woman in blue 

who was laughing and
leaning forward to look up 

into the man’s half
averted face 

and a boy of eight who was
looking at the middle of 

the man’s belly
at a watchchain – 

The supreme importance
of this nameless spectacle 

sped me by them
without a word – 

Why bother where I went ?
for I went spinning on the 

four wheels of my car
along the wet road until 

I saw a girl with one leg
over the rail of a balcony

Comments

[Kimberlee Conway Ireton]

Berry's book was sitting on my nightstand when I read your review here a couple weeks ago, and because of it, I went and read Spring and All before I read Berry. Thank you for the idea! I just started Berry's book tonight, but I'm sure I will appreciate his words more now that I've read a bit more Williams (beyond "The Red Wheelbarrow"). Also, the poem you quote here was one of my favorites in this volume =)