From: "Allen Scult" <tristamigistus-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Riders on the Storm
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 11:23:26 -0600


>From: Aristotelos <Gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
>Reply-To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: Riders on the Storm
>Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 16:21:28 -0800
>
>
> >
> > " I celebrate myself,
> > And what I assume you shall assume,
> > For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
> >
> > William Carlos williams decides to be a city and that City is Paterson
>
> > where I grew up).
> > The poet creates by taking on the wordly personna of something already
>there
> > and then gives it to us and we have it too. . .as if for the first time. 
>.
> > a storm, a falcon, a city. . . a mighty song, THERE (da).
> >
>
>You know how in the study of rhetoric what often is learnt is how to think
>on your feet so to speak. It's a flash of wit, a seizing of the moment or
>you just fade. Leaves of Grass is the American adventure in this way, 
>always
>in motion, advancing into the as yet unknow, always unique and a little 
>wild
>like a child crying. The "as yet unknowable"


Very much to the point of Williams' "Paterson," a city alive in the American 
idiom "speaking straight ahead". . .

"Say it, no ideas but in things—-
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident--
split, furrowed, creased,mottled,strained--
secret--into the body of the light. . .

A man like a city and a woman like a flower--who are in love.  Two women.  
Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower
                                      But
only one man--like a city."


The loneliness of the city.  Like only one man.  Like language.
Paul Simon on NY in the sixties:

"I turn my color to the cold and damp"

that was the America of
>Emerson. Then there is the America of the overrated Stevens

Did you ever hear him read?  He spoke American but  with a pristine,
aristocratic English chill.  Resigned himself to the too smart sufferings
of the banker.  Like Eliot.  An observer from behind a big desk, marriages 
of convenience.
His translation of Williams wonderful line:

"Not ideas about the thing
But the thing itself."

He gets it all tangled up.  "In trying to think too much,
he thinks too little."

Do you know Stevens' " The Poem that took the Place of a Mountain"?  
Probably the easiest
poem I ever loved.  I don't have it here, but it begins:


"There it was
word for word,
The Poem that took the place of a mountain!"

I used to think that was "discoveredness"!
By trying to make too much of it, I made
too little.

Better to just celebrate myself.
What little there is.
Like Paterson.
Always about to be en-gulfed, flooded out
by the Passaic river.
Barely even a river now.
More like a drainage ditch.
Except for the Falls, of course.
There's the poem.
The poem thazt became a city.

I met Kenneth Burke once at a conference.
I was surprised at how small he was.
He noticed.
He told me about how small Walt Whitman was.
To make his point,
he then stood up and declaimed some Whitman words.

I heard his words declaim him.
A giant face, surrounded by white hair, beard,
and blue eyes lighting out from inside.


Allen


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