Anna Szczepanek Holy Cross Academy n. a. Jan Kochanowski ul. Kociuszki 13, 25-310 Kielce, Polska E-mail: annsz@wp.

pl 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. The Differential 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 nonformalized 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 of Renaissance 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

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 a painting, 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 (Greek ek out and phrasein 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 its application 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
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HEFFERNAN, James. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago,

1993, p. 6.

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 main objective 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 enormous weight 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
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ROBILLARD, Valerie. In Pursuit of Ekphrasis: An Intertextual Approach. In ROBILLARD, V.; DIJKSTRAN, Tashija. William Carlos Williams and the American Scene. New York, 1987, p. 14. DIJKSTRAN, footnote 3, p. 15. WILLIAMS, William Carlos. Recollections. In Art in America, February, 1993, p. 52.

JONGENEEL, E. (ed.) Pictures into Words. Amsterdam, 1998, p. 56.

3 4 5

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 illusion 7. 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 the canvas. 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 means breaking with creative principle of cause and effect 8. Visual works of art became for Williams a pretext for finding the universal form of art. No ideas but in things9 he 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
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BAKER-SMITH, Dominic. Literature and the Visual Arts. In COYE, M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of GOMBRICH, E. H. Art and Illusion. Princeton, 1961, p. 281. STEINER, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago, 1985, p. 80. WILLIAMS, Carlos William. Selected Poems. London, 1976, p. 133.

Literature and Criticism. London, 1990, p. 98.

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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.
Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again 11.

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
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BRINNIN, Malcolm. William Carlos Williams. In UNGER, L. (ed.) Seven Modern American Poets. WILLIAMS, footnote 9, p. 89.

New York, 1960, p. 8385.

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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 and meter). 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: <T>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

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Quoted after: RIDDEL, Joseph N. The Inverted Bell. Modernism and Counterpoetics of William BRINNIN, footnote 10, p. 516.

Carlos Williams. Louisiana, 1991, p. 251.

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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

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WILLLIAMS, footnote 9, p. 189.

changed by white curtainsSmell of cleanlinessSunshine of late afternoonOn the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying And the immaculate white bed 15.

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

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WILLIAMS, footnote 9, p. 171.

painted on a triangular YIELD sign 16. 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 the application 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 przekazu artystycznego. 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. BANN, Stephen. The Poetics of Discontinuity? In Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal Visual

In Philological Quarterly, 4, Fall, 1986, p. 528.

17

Enquiry, Nr 4 (1), JanuaryMart 1988, p. 354.

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 tapybos tarpusavio 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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