‘Hearing the American voice’: Thomas Kinsella and William Carlos Williams

Abstract

Kinsella acknowledges that William Carlos Williams was instrumental in “opening up the voice,” offering him new poetic possibilities. He refers here to Williams' auditory or “musical” measure, and also to the tercet stepped-line form of Williams' late poetry. ‘Hearing the American Voice’ analyses this, but of equal importance for Kinsella is the American poet's attempt to defend his place, Paterson, from the predations of “devouring” corporate bodies. The only weapon that the solitary poet has with which to defend his city from the circulation of capital is a greater knowledge of place than anyone else and, by implication, a greater understanding of place. By means of an analysis of Paterson, I argue that Kinsella ultimately seeks to create his own poem of place, to be understood in terms of a poetics of polis, in which the writer takes a position of active civic responsibility. This is indicated by a separating out from a larger societal mass of an individual body, represented for Kinsella by a series of courageous “vertical men”. The poet then, seeks to inhabit this role himself and, ultimately, provide a voice which signals the resistance of the individual body to the corruption and devouring ethos of the corporate bodies, which also taints the body politic in its current form. Both of these “bodies” are held responsible for the contemporary debased polis and for the sense of divorce which the writer feels. However, the fact that the individual self has so far resisted the destructive absorption which is an incorporation by the larger social body, holds out the promise that future encounters between self and world might well be nourishing rather than destructive ones.

Keywords:

• Williams
• Paterson
• body
• knowledge
• capital
• polis
• feeding
• waste
• block

Notes

 1. Kinsella, Collected Poems 1956–1994, 83. All further references to the Collected Poems 1956–1994 will be incorporated parenthetically in the main text using the abbreviation ‘CP’.

 2. O'Hara, ‘An Interview with Thomas Kinsella’, 6.

 3. O'Hara, ‘An Interview with Thomas Kinsella’, 9.

 4. Grennan, ‘The American Connection’, 29.

 5. Koch, ‘William Carlos Williams’, 505.

 6. Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 86.

 7. Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, 269. All quotations from Williams's Paterson will be incorporated parenthetically in the main text using the abbreviation ‘P’.

 8. Bremen, William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture, 6.

 9. Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge, 61.

10. Hobbes, Leviathan, 113.

11. Williams, ‘Letter to an Australian Editor’, 207.

12. Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 391.

13. Callan, William Carlos Williams and Transcendentalism, 187.

14. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 165–6.

15. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 289.

16. Lloyd, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, 73.

17. Williams, In the American Grain, 195.

18. Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, 190, 421.

19. Williams, ‘Letter to an Australian Editor’, 206.

20. Williams, The Wedge, 3.

21. Kinsella, One Fond Embrace, 12.

22. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, 91.

23. Crawford, Modernism, Medicine and William Carlos Williams, 94.

24. Williams, William Carlos Williams, vol. 2, 230.

25. Connaroe, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, 138.

26. Williams, Collected Later Poems, 3.

27. Zabriskie, ‘The Geography of Paterson’, 202.

28. Riddell, The Inverted Bell, 135, 25.

29. Sankey, A Companion to William Carlos Williams' Paterson, 4.

30. Riddell, The Inverted Bell, 228.

31. Connaroe, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, 131.

32. Williams, Selected Essays, 103.

33. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, 53.

34. O'Hara, ‘Interview with Thomas Kinsella’, 6.

35. Grennan, ‘The American Connection’, 29.

36. Williams, ‘Two Letters’, 5.

37. Williams, ‘Poetry and the Making of Language’, 17.