Spatial Rhythm and Poetic Invention in William Carlos Williams Sunday

William Carlos Williams was fascinated by the ways in which living organisms and achromatic matter occupy position--how they move in it, or cannot move, are cramp or allowed to roam freely--and how the space inside organisms and matter is charted, perceived, and manipulated. Williamss preoccupation with developed space in the material world is paralleled by his formal experimentations with the posture of words on the page. Without invention nothing is well set (P 50), Williams writes at the stem of Sunday in the Park, raising the question, what does well spaced symbolize for Williams? How can the world and how can poetry be well spaced? The aim of this paper is to look at the relationship between Williamss using up of what I will call spatial rhythms and the vision of poetry that emerges in Sunday in the Park--a section of Paterson interrupticularly important for thought process about Williamss late poetic style because it contains the famous section beginning The descent b eckons / as the ascent beckoned, marking Williamss invention of the triadic stanza with variable foot, a form he would begin to use frequently in the 1950s. My swear is to offer a new perspective on Williamss poetics by screening how it is rooted in a conception of space, both external and inner(a) or biological, that is constantly moving in a rhythmic fashion. Although William Carlos Williamss epic poem poem, Paterson, is about the city of Paterson and a man, also named Paterson, who is that city, the actual physical space of that city tends to be elusive throughout the poem, becoming most concrete in the second Book, Sunday in the Park, which, however, does not deal with the city itself, but with the park above it. The park is both a part of the city of Paterson (... ...s A New World Naked (McGraw-Hill, 1981), 462-63 and 466-67.Hit the back sack on the upper left hand control of your browser to requite to the text4. Mariani, 462-63.Hit the back button on the upper left ha nd corner of your browser to return to the text5. Kenneth Burke, The Thinking of the Body in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley U of California P, 1966), 340-41.Hit the back button on the upper left hand corner of your browser to return to the text6. The blend two descending sequences I have quoted the first beginning with She was matrimonial with empty words and the second with The descent beckons are also redolent of Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending Staircase. On Williamss interest in cubism and in Duchamp in particular, see Reed Whittemore, William Carlos Williams Poet from Jersey (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 113-124.