Smeared Bluish Green and Foaming Pink: The Poetics of Fusion (the Beatles, Bobby Byrd, David Byrne & the Talking Heads, Rod Stewart, and William Carlos Williams)

The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams with 5 other books that changed me.

As I was preparing to review The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams as part of my blog series, "5 Books That Changed Me," I read over an artist statement I'd written for a MFA class a couple years ago as much of that statement focused on Williams's work. But as I read, I realized I really don't want to isolate Williams from my other major poetic influences.  So instead, I decided to share the following artist's statement:

                My poetry comes from two places:  the bottles and bramble in the small ravine out by the highway and rock music composed 1965-1990.  These are the worlds that informed my aesthetic early on, and it is to these, I find myself returning to again and again.

                If I could, I would like to write a poem that fuses the word-equivalents to the sounds in Rod Stewarts “Mandolin Wind” with the Talking Heads “Mr. Jones”.  (Go ahead, take a break and download the songs and listen to them thoroughly).    Something folksy, something spiritual—American Gothic and grain—split open, spewing funky pink fiberglass insulation.  Why?  Who knows the root of strange fetishes? 

                But, it may have to do with the small ravines of the American West:  beautifully eroded alkali soil along the highway; a dry, braided stream bed; a barbed wire fence, a pile trash compacted; a tumble weed and diaper half-buried by cracked mud.  Someone needs to record such sights.

                The first real poet that I fell in love with was William Carlos Williams.  It’s obvious why.  He too was fascinated by the American pastoral, as is, rather than in the picturesque or the sublime.  “A Bastardly Peace” is perfect example of his lust for American crud:

—where a heavy

woven-wire fence

topped with jagged end, encloses

a long cinder-field by the river—

A concrete disposal tank at

One end, small wooden

Pit-covers scattered about—above

Sewer intakes, most probably—

Down the center’s a service path

Graced on one side by

A dandelion in bloom—and a white

Butterfly— (lines 1-12)

In his poem “Pastoral,” Williams creates an extended metaphor for this art that seeks for that which is “smeared a bluish green,” declaring, “When I was younger / it was plain to me / I must make something of myself” but ending with how that ambition has been replaced by walking the back streets, admiring—

Roof out of line with sides

The yards cluttered

With old chicken wire, ashes,

Furniture gone wrong;

Fences and outhouses

Built of barrel-staves

And parts of boxes, all

If I am fortunate,

Smeared a bluish green

That properly weathered

Pleases me best

Of all colors.

                No one

Will believe this

Of vast import to the nation.  (Lines 8-22)

I too believe this is “of vast import to the nation,” but even though Williams is without doubt one of the most influential American poets, there are few examples of his focus on the tainted American landscape influencing younger poets.  His emphasis on realistic imagery over psychological metaphor and his emphasis on the plain spoken American English were heeded, but his focus on the transition zones between wild and suburbia were not.  This is significant, as America has always been and always will be a land of frontiers.  We are just different from Europeans in this regard:  our urban and our rural areas are not separate—they spill over into each other in sloppy, undignified ways, not just literally, but symbolically.  The heart and soul of America is not New York, Chicago or Detroit.  Not Dallas, Houston or Phoenix.  But, it’s not the Sierras or Mount McKinley either.  It’s the border lands on the edge of suburbia—the woods clogged with plastic bags from the new ShopKo and 7-ll that just moved in where Old Man Ricker’s dairy farm was before his grandchildren sold it not more than two months after his death.  To write America and ignore this zone is to tell an incomplete story.  How many grew up in the new tracts of worker housing on the edge of suburbia or in the trailer and the two acre ranchette  zones just beyond the city limits—you know, the hobby farms out by the corrugated metal warehouses, X-rated video stores and scrap metal yards?  Suburban landscapes surrounded by fields and woods somewhat natural, but clearly damaged by pipelines, electrical lines and littered by discarded washers and hot water heaters.  This is stuff we know was well as the faces of our own siblings—for we grew up here…

By the road to the contagious hospital

Under the surge of the blue

Mottled clouds driven from

The northeast—a cold wind.  Beyond the

Waste of broad, muddy fields

Brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen  (“Spring and All,” lines 1-6)

Of course, it would be dishonest to suggest these fields at the edges of civilization constitute the entire scope of Williams’ poetry.  Like all great poets, he has multiple themes running through his work.  But it was the broad muddy fields, yards cluttered with chicken wire, and sewage intakes that caught my soul.  Here was a poet who wrote the world I knew. Even though I spent most of my youth in small town America, rather than on the edge of suburban sprawl, this mixture of natural and man-made was the world I was raised in, the world I loved, and here it was to be found again in the strangest of all places, poems.

Finding Williams, of course came much later, in college.  So, although I clearly feel like I’ve been influence by him, he’s more an uncle I admire than a father. The broad, muddy fields themselves, for better or worse, have made me the poet I am, along with pop music.  

I think that it’s great so many writers were avid readers as children and adolescents, writers who are blessed to have a rich literary heritage on which to draw for inspiration.  But as writers develop fairly young, before we even know what’s happening to us, and as books were not an important part of the household I grew up in, my canon of influences is atypical.  My only influence other than the landscape was pop music.  Therefore, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, David Byrne (Talking Heads), Bono (U2), Sting (Police) and Cy Curin (the Fixx) were my teachers, rather than Frost, Whitman or Williams. 

Because my poetic ground-water was enriched by lyricists rather than poets, my poetry is unique, I think, in that there is a simple, lyrical quality to it, even though I couldn’t meter a song if I tried.  Like rock lyrics from the 1960’s to 1980’s, it’s not traditional, nor is it avant-garde.  It’s hybrid:   garage-band after a few literature and art classes taken at the community college.  Traditional infused with experimentation.  The Beatles “A Day In A Life” may not be high art, but it’s not uninformed by it either.  John Cage, Allen Ginsberg are there, but so is Little Richard and Buddy Holly. 

I believe my writing, like the music of the Beatles, is a fusion of middle class values and the values of artistic avant-garde.  It straddles worlds, belonging to neither.  This creates a tension: almost rhyme, but not quite; yearning for experimentation, but never fully leaving the ground.

Not only am I okay with this, but I’d like to exploit it more than I have, play with the dichotomy and layer up the meaning and sounds the way the Talking Heads layer musical rhythms, genres and instrumentation from around the world to create an eclectic, distinctive sound.  I’d actually like to do the same thing, only with words.  However, unlike many postmodern poets, I’m not at all interested in deconstructing language.  I don’t want to dismantle anything.  Just like the Beatles pay homage to the music of the generations before them through songs like “Your Mother Should Know” and “Martha My Dear” while infusing them with some unnamable haunting undertone that is distinctly 1960’s, I want to fuse past and present in poetry in a way that is both experimental and very traditional at the same time, poems that layer language, rather than deconstruct—celebrating multiple rhythms and nuances simultaneously, so that the rich alliteration of Yeats and Hopkins live together side by side with the plain spoken American English of Williams.

 Is it doable?  I don’t know.  I’m only beginning to scratch the surface.  One thing I do know for sure is that experimentation is only valid if it produces something beautiful.  Ideas by themselves are not great art.  I’d rather fail at achieving my desired effect and produce a good poem, than achieve my desired affect at the expense of the poem.

I struggled with this in a recent poem, “Deep Porch Song.”  I came home from work, exhausted from my feeble attempts to manage my sixth period class.  I opened up the laptop, and a sort-of tune came into my head, opening with “I want a clapboard, I wanta picket,” which I realize now probably came from the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime,” where the phrase “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco” is repeated over and over (Heads).   I’d been listening to the song the night before.     As I tried to develop images to go with the rhythm in my head, I felt it soften, loosen, and transition into this:

I want an old clapboard house

with a white chipped picket fence

and a soggy leaf littered lawn.

                For me, that stanza has perfect sound.  If I was more musically inclined, I’d have metered the poem the same throughout.  Unfortunately, I’m not skilled enough to pull that off without creating nonsensical gibberish.  I think this is the ugly secret of our times:  unlike the early modernists, we don’t write in free-verse in order to shake off the shackles that bind us.  We write in free-verse because we are not skilled enough to do otherwise.  Not that I’d ever want to leave improvisation behind—to break out of meter, to follow other voices, other rhythms that can’t be counted or clapped, but exist all the same.  However, I’d like to be able to follow a rhythm long enough to know when that break is vital.  Honestly, I can’t.

                But in the early days U2 couldn’t play the music of their favorite bands, so they had to develop their own sound.  The world of alternative rock would have a much thinner sound if they’d been better musicians.  Therefore, I’m realistic about my poetic limitations, but I also realize limitations can become strengths as they keep us yearning for something more.  Where there is a void, it will be filled, eventually.  So, I accept what comes:   

 I want an old clapboard house

with a white chipped picket fence

and a soggy leaf littered lawn.

I want a long gravel lane

over a slow churning creek

through a dense thicket of dogwood.

I want a narrow valley

cradled between high mountains,

with snow embraced in limestone folds.

I want a deep porch and tarnished door knocker,

I want gold shag carpet and dark wood paneling.

I want dusty old radiator heaters coated

with five thick layers chipped and showing through.

I want the smell of roast beef,

and mashed potatoes.

I want days of sitting

in my rocker reading

Bill Bryson while stoking fire.

I’d finished a version of this, and was reading over it and I kept hearing a counter-rhythm layered over at the end:    Clock race, heart pace, rat face, gotta get to that place.  I thought, this might be good because it may make the John-Denver-like sentimentality of the poem more palpable.  So, I thought, I’d extend that little bit, and eventually came up with a refrain.

Clock race, heart pace, rat face, gotta get to that place.

Kneel down, prostrate, kiss feet, beg no, please!

I temporarily ruined the poem, literally inserting it as a refrain, but I like how it works as an introduction in the final version.  The poem doesn’t quite work, but it’s a beginning—an ugly ducking that with time, I hope, will grow into the sounds I hear in my head. 

Of the poems here, “Blue in a Baroque World” comes closes to matching the music in my head, starting fairly metered, fairly rhymed, in the first stanza:

Through some worm hole

 there is a cobblestone lane

lined with oil lamps

and pocked with rain.

And then slowly eroding in the second stanza

Galaxies of light unfold

in ripples spreading out

in gathered darkness

puddled at the bottom

of a high hill

And then pulling in tighter again on the third stanza

The ragged man

with the blue glow

hears a violin in his soul

cut a coarse chord…

                It’s this theme and variation that I’d like to develop, moving from formal sounds similar to those in Yeat’s “The Stolen Child”—

                Where dips the rocky highland

                Of sleuth Wood in the lake,

                There lies of leafy island

                Where flapping herons wake

—to more contemporary, conversational rhythms, such as Bobby Byrd’s “Real Life, #19”:

                The cat wants to go outside and the dog wants to come inside.

                The IRS says that if my wife and I don’t pay up immediately,

                then they’ll have to put a lien against our house.

                I don’t like mangos too much but pomegranates are delicious. [Byrd, 37]

But, I don’t want to juxtapose, and certainly not to deconstruct.  I want thickness, richness, texture, transition, movement, honoring old and new, not parodying either.   Most of all, I want to actually get the sounds I hear in my head on the paper, which is the hardest part. 

This chapbook is the closest I’ve come yet to capturing both the soil of the west and the sounds in my head.

Steve Brown, December 11, 2010