In the summer of 1957 William Carlos Williams wrote a piece for the American Scholar called "Faiths for a Complex World." In it he wrote "My life is a constant watching of the field." It had been his daily business, according to Paul Mariani. He scanned "every newspaper, every journal, every letter for hints as to what was going on in the world of events".1
By 1957, his medical practice was curtailed by health reasons, but the spontaneous writing style he developed out of necessity, was firmly entrenched. He articulated this as early as 1923 in "Spring and All" when he said: "Most of my life has been lived in hell, a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration when a poem such as this or that would appear".2
The 1950 publication of Charles Olson's seminal essay "Projective Verse" gave Williams (and Ezra Pound) credit for being the only American poets writing from an open stance. Olson also called this stance toward poem-making "Composition by Field" and Robert Duncan was to follow shortly with "The Opening of the Field" by 1960.
Williams was there first. The field as applied to poetry was Williams' life-long concern, though what he said he was looking for was a new measure, which, as Mariani suggested "took on the dimensions of myth with him".3 That obsession with the line is best summarized in Paterson:
Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness: without invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the alder does not grow from among
the hummocks margining the all
but spent channels of the old swale,
the small foot-prints
of mice under the overhanging
tufts of the bunch-grass will not
appear: without invention the line
will never again take on its ancient
divisions when the word, a supple word,
lived in it, crumbled now to chalk.
Williams in 1938, by age 55, was intent on innovating and knew that Einstein's advances in science had implications for the new measure as well as for society and consciousness in general, evident by the just-cited passage. The "Variable Foot" was Williams' awkward attempt to name this method for breaking away from the inherited line and meter of European poetic forms and craft a way of structuring the poetic line based on the realities of life on the North American continent. But the notion of referring to his efforts as a field came not too much later. As early as October 26, 1943, at a talk given at the New York Public Library, Williams stated that the war was the "first and only thing in the world today" and that poetry was not an escape from that reality but a "different sector of the field".4
So what we see as we look back at Williams, besides the well-documented localism and the insistence on the American vernacular, are two other crucial aspects of his work rarely noticed: the notion of a spontaneous composing process and attention to structure utilizing the notion of the field.
Notes:
1 Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981, p.732
2 Willams, William Carlos. Collected Poems, Volume I, 1909-1939 4th,/SUP> Ed. New York: New Directions, 1986, p.203
3 Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981, p.438
4 Ibid., p.483
