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Anna Szczepanek
Holy Cross Academy n. a. Jan Kochanowski
ul. Kociuszki 13, 25-310 Kielce, Polska
E-mail: [email protected]
CUBISTIC TECHNIQUES IN
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS EKPHRASTIC POETRY
This article presents the relationship between verbal and visual arts. In order to be
more specific, the term ekphrasis (a literary description of a picture, sculpture or even
architecture) is introduced here. Subsequently, using the Differential Model introduced by
Valerie Robillard, some early poems written by William Carlos Williams are discussed. TheDifferential Model enables a classification and analysis of ekphrastic poetry depending on
the intensity of relationship between pictorial and literary works of art.
The associative category is one of the three categories proposed by Robillard. This
category comprises these literary works which relate to the visual arts on the basis of non-
formalized structural and ideological associations. This category makes it possible to explore
the relation between Williams poetry and cubism.
KEY WORDS: visual arts, verbal arts, ekphrasis, intertextuality, cubism, poetry,
modernism.
The verbal and visual arts have always shown remarkable affinities. Correspondences
between poetry and painting have been present in every epoch. Homer, whose poetry has for
ages inspired painters and sculptors, skillfully describes in his works objects of art, e. g. in
Iliad a shield belonging to Achilles. The pictorial art of the Middle Ages is based on the
Bible. The Renaissance, with its interdisciplinary interests, encouraged a mutual relationship
between the arts: poetry often made its subject pictorial representation. In the case ofRenaissance painting, the viewers understanding of the on canvas depends on his knowledge
of mythical, biblical and literary symbols and allegories. In eighteenth century England,
William Blake, a poet and a painter himself, took inspiration from the works of Milton and
Dante. Blakes pictures are not mere illustrations of the two great poets poems. They
symbolically represent his understanding and interpretation of their texts. In the nineteenth
century a similar relationship between poetry and painting existed in the poetry and pictures
of the artists connected with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Not only did they employ in their
works well-known Medieval symbols and characters, but also illustrated their own poems as
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well as painted pictures that were commentaries on the work of other poets (e. g. A.
Tennysons impact on E. Burne-Jones).
Such a close relationship between these two arts is possible due to the similar
goals of poetry and painting. Both arts try to condense images and meanings in order to
maximize expression in a small temporal or spatial dimension. Main comparisons are
based upon the way these two arts reflect reality. Aristotles idea that art ought to
imitate reality was valid for several centuries. According to it, poetry is like painting
because both have as their subjects existing reality and both are devoted to the mimetic
representation of the real world. The arts attempt to imitate the reality and comment on
it.
There are several different kinds of relationship between poetry and painting.
Poetry may be a verbalization of the subjective perception and understanding of apainting, a personal response of the poet to a particular picture. Poetry may praise the
artistic abilities and uniqueness of a painters vision. Poetry may seek correspondences
in language, images and forms that could reflect or imitate a painting. Finally, poetry
may use painting as an example of the same perception of the world shared by a painter
and a poet. All the poems which are concerned with visual arts can be classified as
ekphrasis.
Ekphrasis, alternatively spelled ecphrasis, is a term used to denote verbal
representation of visual arts. The term primarily can be found in Aphthonius Progymnasmata,
an early book on rhetoric. The original definitions of the word from the Greek are speaking
out or telling in full (Greekekout andphrasein to speak). In modern times ekphrasis is
considered to be a descriptive work of prose or poetry dealing with any of the visual arts, e. g.
painting, sculpture, photography, architecture or even film (actual ekphrasis). What is more,
verbal arts can be a response to an imaginary work of art or even a mental process of creation
of a particular visual work of art (notional ekphrasis)1.
Due to apparent disagreement in the subtleties of the use of the term and itsapplication I have decided to follow the idea proposed by Valerie Robillard in In Pursuit of
Ekphrasis. The author treats ekphrastic texts as intertextual constructs which allows creating
a descriptive framework dealing with various approaches to ekphrasis. Robillard introduces
her own Differential Model which is meant to enable the distinction and classification of
different kinds of ekphrastic relationships. She identifies three typological categories:
depictive, attributive and associative. The first one includes texts which aim at the most
1 HEFFERNAN, James.Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago,
1993, p. 6.
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truthful representation of the pictorial sources, including both description and analogous
structuring. Attributive category encompasses such sub-categories as: naming, i.e. mentioning
the source of ekphrasis in the title or the text) and alluding to a painter, style or genre, or
through indeterminate marking, understood as presence of foreign elements and traces
incorporated into a new system .The last one, the associative category, accounts for poems
which refer to some ideas, trends or conventions related to visual arts. The associations might
be thematic, theoretical or structural2.
In this article I try do analyze some of W. C. Williams ekphrastic poems employing
Robillards Differential Model, particularly focusing on the associative category. This
category seems to be helpful in discussing Williams works, as they are often a combination
of inexplicit visual sources, quite difficult to identify or classify in any other way. Williams
poetry significantly reflects different aspects of ekphrastic literature, yet, my mainobjective is to show the unusual structural and ideological experimentations which are
the result of Williams encounter with European cubist art at the Armory Show in 1913.
An interviewer once asked William Carlos Williams what he considered to be his
strongest characteristics. The poet answered: My sight. I like most my ability to be
drunk with a sudden realization of value in things others never notice 3.
Since seeing came first for Williams, it should come as no surprise to learn that
the poet was a Sunday painter when he attended medical school at the University of
Pennsylvania. However, he gave up painting for poetry as the latter required less
apparatus and could be done on the run, between patients if necessary. He filled out a
prescription blank with French Painting and Modern Writing viewing poetry as a kind
of relief for himself, a doctor who still wanted to paint 4. Yet, the modernist painting
provided Williams with some other kind of relief offering him an encouragement to
liberation from the traditional poetics.
It was not until I clapped my eyes on Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a
Staircase that I burst out laughing from the relief it brought me! I felt as if an enormousweight had been lifted from my spirit, for which I was indefinitely grateful 5.
The Armory Show served for Williams as a trigger in order to search for new forms of
expression. Owing to Cubism, the poet found it possible to break with the mimetic tradition.
Abstract painters were the first to reject the purely representational role of art. Every picture
2 ROBILLARD, Valerie. In Pursuit of Ekphrasis: An Intertextual Approach. In ROBILLARD, V.;
JONGENEEL, E. (ed.) Pictures into Words. Amsterdam, 1998, p. 56.3 DIJKSTRAN, Tashija. William Carlos Williams and the American Scene. New York, 1987, p. 14.4 DIJKSTRAN, footnote 3, p. 15.5 WILLIAMS, William Carlos. Recollections. InArt in America, February, 1993, p. 52.
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tells a story: this was at least the general supposition until the appearance of a
deliberately abstract ideal of painting in modern times. Those artists, who in the early
years of the twentieth century, turned away from the conventional modes of expression,
claimed to be motivated by a concern for the freedom and creative independence of their
art. During the Cubist years, which stretched from 1907 until the outbreak of the First
World War, new formal and conceptual rules were proclaimed 6.
E. H. Gombrich observes that Cubism itself and its methods are radical efforts to
call attention to the work as manmade, as artifice, and thus to break the mimetic
illusion7. Mimesis, which is art understood as an imitation of nature, was the dominating
approach until modernism. Cubists paintings are not meant to be imitative or in
competition with reality. They are conceived as possessing a purely pictorial reality of
their own. Cubist paintings form a composition, but they imply no world outside on thecanvas. Cubism frustrates our attempt to decipher the signs in terms of referential
meaning. Picasso seems to be experimenting: how far can he go reducing physical and
psychological context, and yet paint something that still contains elements of
recognizable life. However, the function of those elements of reality is not to inform the
observer about particular objects, but to narrow down the possible interpretations until
we are forced to accept just the flat pattern.
Cubism works by accentuating the contradictory and disharmonious, and by
bringing together on the same plane, elements normally separated into different planes
by mimetic illusion. Cubist painters disrupt the Renaissance norms of linear perspective,
chiaroscuro and other means of suggesting three-dimensionality on a two dimensional
medium. In Cubist art, the size and the position of objects are not dependent upon their
distance from the viewer but upon their conceptual and formal importance. Cubism
breaks up into multiple perspectives the ancient focus, which was fixed, static and
unitary. Cubist objects are presented as if viewed from many different angles at the same
time, often chopped into block-like forms. Breaking with perspective also meansbreaking with creative principle of cause and effect8.
Visual works of art became for Williams a pretext for finding the universal form of art.
No ideas but in things9he said, and he believed that the poets business is not to talk in
vague categories, but to write particularly ...upon the thing before him, in particular to
6 BAKER-SMITH, Dominic. Literature and the Visual Arts. In COYE, M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of
Literature and Criticism. London, 1990, p. 98.7 GOMBRICH, E. H.Art and Illusion. Princeton, 1961, p. 281.8 STEINER, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago, 1985, p. 80.9 WILLIAMS, Carlos William. Selected Poems. London, 1976, p. 133.
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discover the universal10. In his poetry Williams put emphasis, not so much on the
representational, but on the structural aspect of both visual and poetic object. Such an attitude
towards visual arts indicates Williams commitment to form as well as his life-long interest in
painting.
The analogy between Cubist poetry and painting involves both the matching of
technical elements of painting with those in writing and the resemblance of aesthetic
presuppositions and ideologies. Thus, the associative category proposed in Robillards
Differential Model may comprise the majority of Williams early poems.
Many Williams poems are very often little pictures depicting moments unnoticed
by others. Let us consider the poem A Locust Tree in Flower.
Amongof
green
stiff
old
bright
brokenbranch
come
white
sweet
May
again11.
The poem concentrates around the static image of a blossoming tree. The unusual
condensation of adjectives gives primarily importance to the visual recognition of the
locust tree. Williams separates the particular sensations placing only one word in a
verse. By means of this the poet gradually comes from the detail a branch, to the more
general May. However, the poem is not descriptive. It does not aim to reflect a truly
10 BRINNIN, Malcolm. William Carlos Williams. In UNGER, L. (ed.) Seven Modern American Poets.
New York, 1960, p. 8385.11 WILLIAMS, footnote 9, p. 89.
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existing locust tree, yet it produces a series of visual impressions which are associated
with the arrival of spring season.
Williams attacks the mimetic tradition that distanced us from the original writing.
His attack implies a questioning of the foundation of ontology, not to destroy the
tradition, but to loosen the rigidity of its logical structure. As Heidegger says: tradition
takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our
access to those primordial sources from which categories and concepts handed down
by to us have been in part genuinely drawn 12. It is this blockage that provokes
Williams to write as an attack.
He maintains that language in the twentieth century has become blurred and
obscured by continual comparisons. To counter the effects of this situation Williams
avoids poetic practices that decorated language with associations (e. g. rhyme andmeter). He often writes about unconventional poetic subjects (e. g. wheelbarrows,
kitchen sinks, ice cream), and uses nonlinear syntax (e. g. non-finite verbs and parataxis
co-ordination of clauses without conjunctions). The non-representational line is
another feature of Williams poetry. In traditional poems, lines typically end where a
sentence, a clause or a phrase ends, unless they are enjambed for some purpose.
Williams rejects this practice because he feels it is one of the ways in which traditional
poets avoid emphasizing the clarity of objects 13. He claims:
o separate the pattern from the line is an important part of the poets
occupation today; in painting the color and the outline frequently have the same
relationship. The statement, no matter how embellished by metaphor, today runs over,
irrelevant to the metrical pattern, from one line to another.
Between Walls can be treated as an exemplary poem illustrating Williams
innovative poetic approach.
Between Walls
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
12 Quoted after: RIDDEL, Joseph N. The Inverted Bell. Modernism and Counterpoetics of William
Carlos Williams. Louisiana, 1991, p. 251.13 BRINNIN, footnote 10, p. 516.
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will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle 14.
The fact that the lines do not extend to the right margin tells the readers that they
should pay attention to the visual possibilities of poetic discourse. Because we are
accustomed to the end of line which reinforces some message, such words as: the and
where are stressed as if they carried some special meaning. What their importance is,
however, is by no means clear. Williams gives them significance, but unlike in
conventional poems, he does not provide any context to which connect these words.
Perhaps the intensity he gives to insignificant words is analogous to Cubist paintings in
which some background elements tend to be overexposed.
Many other Williams poetic techniques are connected with those of Cubist
painters. Williams needs the ideas borrowed from Cubism for practical ends: to restore
some of the tensions that were lost in poetry that discarded regular form and meter.Williams does away with the foot, at least as traditional poets knew it: the metrically
regular lines are, in his poetry, very infrequent. To regain some expressiveness he has
lost in discarding the traditional foot, Williams turns to the visual dimension of poetry,
complementing the sound of the poem with its appearance on the page. Williams
interest in painting made him unusually appreciative of the poem on the page. The
spatial arrangement of words on the page became just as important as syntax or style.
Similarly to Cubist painters, Williams eliminates the perspective and breaks up
the expected (representational) syntax of relations between things. His use of words
tends to strip the detail of any interpretative ambiguity. Nevertheless, Williams
withholds all clues. Any meaning we find is a meaning we create. In Nantucket the
poet presents a colorful picture of a household.
Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow
14 WILLLIAMS, footnote 9, p.189.
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changed by white curtains-
Smell of cleanliness-
Sunshine of late afternoon-
On the glass traya glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which
a key is lying And the
immaculate white bed15.
Still, the choice of subject matter is by no means justified; the reader does not
know what (if anything) is hidden behind the images of purity and innocence.The details of Williams personal life and the observations of works of art which
have touched him, create a poem where one thing exists beside another or after another
or echoes an earlier appearance not because of some identifiable meaning and value but
because they happen to be there.
Each word in Williams' poetry functions not as symbol, or logos, but as a shape,
as the real. Just as Paul Klee has to produce the most sophisticated abstractions in
order to simulate the primitive, Williams violates the rules of language to achieve the
natural American speech.
The early Williams poetry is an assault on the habits of interpretation. The poet
crumble the clues which may allow possible interpretation, so they erase the point of
departure for interpretation (relation of the work of art to another world that lies outside
it the world of reality, or the world of ideas or symbols). Some of the poems lack
moral, social or psychological context, that is why they are only art for the arts sake
impersonal and detached from reality. Similar paradox can be observed in Cubist
painting, too. Cubists in their quest for what we might call the purely visual, took away
from the things they painted most of the attributes on which visual recognition depends.
Still, without this recognition painting may not lose its meaning. Visual arts operate with
colors, lines, shapes and images, therefore they can affect our sense of sight without
intellectual involvement. The vehicle of poetry is language. Thus if a poet wants to
express his own perception of reality (often clear only to him) by means of a distorted
language, he is bound to fail. P. Moore compares Williams poems to a red STOP
15 WILLIAMS, footnote 9, p. 171.
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painted on a triangular YIELD sign16. It challenges the traditional way of looking at
things and proposes a fresh and new attitude towards them, yet it leads nowhere.
The notion of poetic and pictorial representation is also similarly discussed by Stephen
Bann. In his essay on collage he speaks of Apollinaires poem, a calligramme, dedicated to
Picasso as an example of how the pictorialist mode of poetic representation produces a kind
of reversal of the processes involved in painterly collage. Through the activity of reading the
poem, we make the page irretrievably abstract; its space is negated, to the extend that it is
scored through with the tracks of signification with our perception slavishly follows. By
contrast, the Picasso collage makes the page concrete: that is to say, it emphasizes both its
physical presence and its ambiguous representational status as an episode in a structure of
parallel, frontal planes whose spatial interrelationships cannot be easily determined17.
In analyzing the above poems by Williams I have attempted to demonstrate theapplication of Robillards Differential Model to some poetical texts which at first reading
do not seem to be typical examples of ekphrastic poetry. The associative category offers a
structural basis for further discussion of any ekphrastic texts which only allude to some
pictorial media. Still, as the case is with all possible kinds of ekphrasis, its actual
understanding depends on the readers whose aim is to reveal for themselves the elements of
visual discourse hidden behind the verbal ones.
Anna Szczepanek
Akademia witokrzyska im. Jana Kochanowskiego w Kielcach
TECHNIKI KUBISTYCZNE W EKFRASTYCZNEJ POEZJI WILIAMA CARLOSA
WILLIAMSA
Streszczenie
Artyku przedstawia relacje pomidzy werbalnymi i wizualnymi rodkami przekazuartystycznego. W celu precyzyjnego ujcia tematu zostaje wprowadzony termin ekfraza
(utwr literacki bdcy opisem dziea malarskiego, rzeby lub budowli), a nastepnie,
korzystajc z Modelu rnicujcego, zaproponowanego przez Valerie Robillard, omwione
zostaj wczesne wiersze amerykaskiego poety Williama Carlosa Williamsa. Model
16 MOORE, Patrick. Cubist Prosody: William Carlos Williams and the Conventions of Verse Lineation.
InPhilological Quarterly, 4, Fall, 1986, p. 528.17 BANN, Stephen. The Poetics of Discontinuity? In Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal Visual
Enquiry, Nr 4 (1), JanuaryMart 1988, p. 354.
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rnicujcy umoliwia klasyfikacj i analiz poezji ekfrastycznej w zalenoci od
intensywnoci relacji pomidzy dzieami malarskimi a literackimi.
Jedn z trzech kategorii wyszczeglnionych przez Robillard jest kategoria asocjacyjna,
zawierajca utwory literackie nawizujce do sztuk wizualnych na zasadzie
niesformalizowanych odniesie strukturalno-ideologicznych. Kategoria ta daje sposobno
przedyskutowania zwizkw i zalenoci pomidzy wczesnymi wierszami W.C. Williamsa i
malarstwem kubistycznym.
SOWA KLUCZE: sztuki werbalne, sztuki wizualne, ekfraza, intertekstualno,
poezja, Kubizm, modernizm.
Anna Szczepanek
Jano Kochanovskio ventojo Kryiaus Akademija Kielcuose
KUBISTINS TECHNIKOS EKFRASTINJE WILIAMO CARLOSO WILLIAMSO
POEZIJOJE
Santrauka
Straipsnyje analizuojami santykiai tarp verbalini ir vizualini meninio vaizdavimo
priemoni. Tikslesniam pasirinktos temos supratimui naudojamas naujas ekfrazs terminas
(ekfraz literatros krinys, apraantis tapybos, skulptros ar architektros krinius).
Remiantis Valerie Robillardo pasilytu skirtuminiu modeliuaptariami ankstyvieji
amerikiei poeto Wiliamo Carloso Williamso eilraiai. Skirtuminis modelis suteikia
galimyb klasifikuoti ir analizuoti ekfrastin poezij pagal ryi tarp dails ir literatros
krini intensyvum. Viena i Robillardo iskirt kategorij yra asociacijos kategorija,
apibdinanti tuos literatros krinius, kuriuose neformalizuot struktrini ideologini
nuorod priemonmis ireikiamas vienoks ar kitoks santykis su vizualiniu menu. i
kategorija teikia galimyb aptarti ankstyvj W. C. Williamso eilrai ir kubistins tapybostarpusavio ryius ir abipus priklausomyb.
REIKMINIAI ODIAI: verbaliniai menai, vizualiniai menai, ekfraz,
intelektualumas, poezija, kubizmas, modernizmas.
Gauta 2004 12 10
Priimta publikuoti 2005 01 28
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