AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writers House, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of contemporary poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close but not too close reading of a poem. Our idea here isn't so much to exhaust ourselves or our listeners or the poem itself as to open up the verse to a few new possibilities and perhaps gain for a favorite poem some new readers and listeners. I say listeners because all the Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive writing upn.edu/PennSound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia in Studio 111 at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing by Jessica Lowenthal, a teacher and poet, author of As If in turning, and director of the Kelly Writers House. And by Linh Dinh, the Saigon-born poet whose most recent book of poems is Jam Alerts. And by Randall Couch, a poet, critic, college administrator, and teacher of poetry and poetics at Arcadia University.

Welcome, all of you to Poem Talk. And thanks for joining me.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Thank you.

RANDALL COUCH:
Hi.

LINH DINH:
Hey, thanks.

AL FILREIS:
Our poem today is William Carlos Williams, “Between Walls.” And before we begin to talk about it, let's have a listen. In PennSound's vast archive of Williams' recordings, we have three readings of the poem, two at public performances and one taped at his home in New Jersey. Since today's Poem Talk poem is so brief, we've decided to play two of those three recordings. The first was read at UCLA on November 15th, 1950, and the second recorded in Rutherford in June 1954. So let's now listen to William Carlos Williams reading “Between Walls.”

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:
Between 

the back wings
of the 

hospital where
nothing 

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken 

pieces of a green
bottle

Between Walls

the back wings
of the 

hospital where
nothing 

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken 

pieces of a green
bottle

AL FILREIS:
OK. Let's talk about the poem. Would someone want to start and describe the setting of the poem? It seems an empty space. Randall, any thoughts on that?

RANDALL COUCH:
Well, I think all of us have experienced, at least any of us who've lived in cities, these kinds of sort of waste spaces behind public buildings past them every day.

AL FILREIS:
And it seems like a particularly urban space or a post-industrial space. Linh?

LINH DINH:
Yeah, but the title implies like an interior space, a kind of intimate space between walls. So, you know, it's a little misleading in that sense.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Between back walls? Is that sort of in the back?

AL FILREIS:
Well, the phrase back wings of the hospital suggests that this is something in one of those hospitals that's been added to and added to and shall we say, not very consciously architected. And one gets the sense that there are some spaces they forgot about. And is the hospital an accidental setting? We, of course, know that Williams spent a lot of time at the hospital. In fact, he jotted notes for poems at the hospital. One imagines that he's on a break between seeing patients and he's looking out the window at this hospital and he's seeing something he hadn't thought about before. So he sets it almost autobiographically in the hospital. But what do you think that the hospital adds to the meaning of the poem? Could it be anywhere in a post-industrial space?

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
I think it's important that it's a hospital. I think of it as a place of illness, a place of dying, a place of breaking things, although where there's a possibility for them to be fixed. So that seems important separate from his biography.

AL FILREIS:
But Jessica, this seems to me to be a poem that doesn't like symbols. This seems to be part of Williams. This poem was written in the late 30s, but from the late teens through the 30s, Williams was adamant about not wanting to use traditional symbolism in poetry. Your description of the hospital makes it sound like the hospital is lending at least a metaphorical quality to the meaning of the poem.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Oh, that's a literal workplace rather than a metaphorical workplace.

AL FILREIS:
OK. So it's literal?

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
OK. You're squirming out of that one then, and Randall's shaking his head. He doesn't agree with my take that it's anti-symbolic.

RANDALL COUCH:
Well, in a sense, I mean, what's amazing to me about this poem is the number of traditional poetic tools that Williams eschews in this poem. It really is all description, all things. There are no similes, no explicit metaphors. He withholds even the sort of narrative of a complete sentence in this poem. And so whatever resonance it has, the reader has to supply. And it seems to me in that sense, if we're making comparisons between the pieces of the green bottle and other green growing things or if we feel resonance in the significance of the hospital, those are things that we have to construct out of the raw description of the poem.

LINH DINH:
Well, the hospital is important because it is a place of death, too, you know. And this poem is basically a garbage poem. It's about looking at garbage. So, you know, you have decay and death and all that.

AL FILREIS:
So it sounds like Linh, your general take on the poem is that it is a negative poem. I don't mean negative in the sense of down, but it's a poem about absence. It's a poem about nothing.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:
Where nothing will grow, lie cinders.

AL FILREIS:
I imagine this to be a kind of campaign poem in a way, even though it's a poem that's supposed to be just about this one scene, it seems to be part of William's modernist campaign. Anything can be the subject of poetry. I can look at what you call garbage and I can make it a poem. But I want to go back to this sort of negativity and nothingness. It seems that the poem turns at nothing and in fact, there's a stanza space between nothing, and then a positive verb will grow. Can you have both those things at once in your take of the poem that the poem is negative and also then produces something?

LINH DINH:
Well, he's floating with, you know, like I said, the title itself, “Between Walls,” is sort of poetic, if that's all we get. But then he keeps subverting it, you know? So even the word wings in the beginning, you know, it's vaguely poetic. But then he keeps, you know, he's not talking about angel wings. He's talking about wings of a hospital.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:
Wings of the hospital where nothing will grow.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Although Williams when he reads it, says nothing will grow. The isolation of the word nothing allows us maybe to think about the Wallace Stevens poem, where nothing is a positive.

AL FILREIS:
The snowman.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
The snowman.

AL FILREIS:
Something comes from nothing. There is no such thing as nothing for a poet of the imagination. Stevens and Williams, of course, were contemporaries, and although very different, they both believed in the power of the imagination.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:
In which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle

AL FILREIS:
I usually don't think about poems this way, so forgive me, but I think if I teach this poem I want to say in a namby pamby sophomoric way, this is a poem that ends as an upbeat observation. There's something there wherever I look in this garbagy Northern New Jersey, post-Industrial corridor, I find something that grows. I find something that's fertile. I find something that's productive, you know? I'm in love with life. I know I'm overstating it, but shine can never be negative, right? In this landscape of broken things, this desolate, forgotten place, something shines and something grows. Did anybody hear anything in the readings of the poem that we heard the two readings to, one a public reading and one a private in his home? Anything that can teach you something about the poem, its prosody, its lineation?

RANDALL COUCH:
Yeah. I think actually that's a very interesting point because Williams in both cases articulates the poem semantically and for our listeners who may be consulting the poem on paper, it's very short lines, most of which are three or two-syllable lines that alternate between a longer knot line and a shorter line in each stanza, which produces a kind of coruscating effect or a concrete mimesis of light glinting on these pieces of broken glass and which doesn't come through at all in the verbal reading. So it's interesting that there really, in a way two poems.

AL FILREIS:
So you'd say, I may be pushing your point too far, but you'd say that Williams is more innovative or more lineation conscious in the writing and on the page than he is in performance?

RANDALL COUCH:
Yes, I'd say.

AL FILREIS:
What do you think, Linh, of the perfomance?

LINH DINH:
Well, he's not reading it as written.

AL FILREIS:
He isn't reading it.

LINH DINH:
He's not because there's two different versions we just heard. And he actually complained, not complain, but admit to his inconsistency of the way I mean, he's not satisfied with his line own breaks, you know, in certain interviews he mentioned.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
I just find it surprising to hear him read. I would not have expected the reading across because I associate him with line break.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:
Between the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow, lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle.

AL FILREIS:
What's his conception of nature in this poem, do you think? Is that too big a question?

LINH DINH:
Well, I mean, you mentioned earlier about, you know, the fact that this poem could be seen as negative, but it's not like the wasteland or anything, you know what I'm saying? It's more...

AL FILREIS:
I think it's optimistic.

LINH DINH:
Well, I think it's more neutral. I think he just looking at things, you know, without superimposing whatever his attitude is towards this.

RANDALL COUCH:
Well, you certainly can't read the poem without making the formal comparison between the way a sort of optimistic, romantic nature poem would observe things, you know, John Clare or somebody, and the way he treats the manufactured objects and fragments here.

AL FILREIS:
Right. So it's borrowing from the nature poem tradition, but it reverses it because it prefers man-made artificial things. And also this leads me to another question. This is a poem that where the one thing that's discovered that generates life or that shines is not a whole bottle. If there were a whole bottle, it would still be a garbage poem. But it's a broken piece of a bottle. It's kind of a simple question, but I wonder if anybody would speak to the issue of the word broken. Randall?

RANDALL COUCH:
Well, certainly. Williams on several public lecture occasions mentioned that he felt early in his career that the poems that he'd been brought up on were dead and that it was time to do something radically new. And so one can certainly look at this in the context of his attitude toward the poetic tradition and what one can do with the fragments.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Well, especially with a word like cinders.

RANDALL COUCH:
Exactly.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
There's burned stuff or this. It's not just glass in between. It's glass in the ashes. It's the shine thing.

AL FILREIS:
Has anybody attempted to generalize about history here? I mean, I am even though I take Linh's and Randall's desire or focus on this poem as one of the great Williams thing poems, the observation poem, you use the word neutral. And yet I keep thinking of history. I keep thinking of a pronouncement about what's dead and what will grow from that. And in a way, I'm moved by the fact that Williams is saying, this is what will rise up now. It will be broken, it will be fragmented, but it's alive and it's fecund and it's the imagination. And it depends, so much depends, on these little observations about what will come about. Linh?

LINH DINH:
Well, this poem also makes me think of just the banality of photographs. You know, I think there's some influence of just, you know, the proliferation of cheap images that, you know, that was part of his time and even more so in our time.

AL FILREIS:
So if a poem, if a photograph were to be made today of the back wings of a hospital with a shining piece of broken glass, very photographic or painterly, as you were suggesting, wouldn't the reviewer seeing that painting or that photograph hung in a Chelsea gallery write in The New York Times? This is cliche. This is a 1930s piece. We can't do this today. I'm trying to get us partly to talk about today's aesthetics. Can we do this anymore?

LINH DINH:
I mean, this poem was striking at the time because because it was so banal in a sense. But we are surrounded by banality these days because there's so many, the proliferation of meaningless images are all over the place, in a sense, there are so many of these objects now. You know, I'm not trying to belittle this poem, but you know what I'm saying? Like.

AL FILREIS:
No, in fact, you're celebrating it.

LINH DINH:
This esthetic is all-pervasive, you know. So in a sense, it's achievement at the time was so radical, but it seems almost invisible now because it's so pervasive in poetry. You know what I'm saying? I mean, among the American modernists, Elliott, Stevens and Pound, I mean, he seems most familiar today to us, right. Just because his lesson is so well learned.

AL FILREIS:
Randall, we talked earlier about the the precision here. One thing we might add, and I know you want to say something about this, this is not a red wheelbarrow poem which begins so much depends upon. There is no meta-rhetoric. So much depends upon no lead-up. And so to the refrigerator poem, “This Is Just To Say,” yeah, that's missing. Would you then argue that this is a purer, I'll even say better to provoke a response. Better version of that mode than those other poems that are real windups and real set pieces?

RANDALL COUCH:
Well, I'd certainly agree that it's a purer example of the poetics of no ideas but in things because he withholds even the narrative that's formed by the grammatical completion of the sentence, a fully predicated sentence. So it focuses in some way on the individual components more closely.

AL FILREIS:
The other recording of the poem that we have in the PennSound archive, which we didn't hear in this program, was recorded at the 92nd Street Y in January 1954. In that version, the people applaud after this poem and it's not the final poem. So the applause was not thank you very much, Williams. You're a great poet and we're applauding you. He read this poem and it was such a chestnut, such an anthologized poem that they applauded it. Either because they recognized it or because they just loved that he did this little set piece. I wonder, you're all poets. I wonder, does this teach you anything about this poem, about Williams attitude toward it about it, or this maybe too easy? Is this poem too much of a chestnut? Is it in danger of becoming the kind of poem that, in fact, we would pick for Poem Talk?

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
I actually think that's a danger with a lot of Williams poetry. It's taken out of its context, and I don't know if that's just a history of readership or if Williams himself helped that along by reading this as a chestnut somehow. But I'm thinking, again, of “The Red Wheelbarrow” which does not, it's read separately from its context.

AL FILREIS:
It's even given a title, which, of course, Williams didn't give it. Linh, your thought on this?

LINH DINH:
Well, that hits like Jessica mentioned, you know, the real brief short ones and I mean, personally, I like his longer poems.

AL FILREIS:
For instance.

LINH DINH:
Well, “The Desert,” for example, or, “Tract,” you know, where there's more fireworks, you know, so

AL FILREIS:
Paterson maybe?

LINH DINH:
Well, just the the mid-length poem. (CROSSTALK).

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Paterson is the best thing.

AL FILREIS:
So you like the mid-length poems, but you're still willing to concede the fact that Williams today is mostly known through these short ones, and that's good enough for you?

LINH DINH:
I'm not sure. It's good enough for me.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
I would much rather have the Williams than Paterson. The Williams that's full of all of the broken things that come together into a large piece that in itself...

AL FILREIS:
So someday, we'll have a three-hour Poem Talk episode and we'll talk about Paterson.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
Why not?

AL FILREIS:
Before we get to the Gathering Paradise segment of our show, let me ask each of you to offer a final word on this poem or maybe something more on what you get from it. Randall, do you want to start?

RANDALL COUCH:
Well, following the idea of no ideas, but in things. It just strikes me that that was such a manifesto-type assertion in his day, but it really kind of follows philosophical position that there's nothing degraded in the presentations of things as they appear. There's a great sentence, if I may just read from one of the most popular teaching texts in the 17th century, which was Charles Hoole's translation of Comenius, in which he says, “now there's nothing in the understanding which was not before in the sense and therefore to exercise the sense as well about the right perceiving the differences of things will be to lay the grounds for all wisdom.” Which I think is a wonderful just sort of note to think that as radical as Williams was, you know, he talks to ideas from other times.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you. Jessica.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
I'd say, simply put, I get an idea of permission or permissiveness to write about what is there. And I guess that's going against my sense of the poem from what I was thinking about earlier. The sense that anything can be written about even the in-between, the broken, the lost. The things you don't notice. 

AL FILREIS:
Linh.

LINH DINH:
I just like to say that my favorite line from this is “will grow lie” because of its ambiguity, you know. But he didn't read it like that, you know, because what the hell is “will grow lie” just lift it off. And, you know, the funny inversion to lie cinders you know so anyway, and, you know, just talking today, I thought of this photograph by Jeff Wall called Room. So it's like an ultimate garbage photograph. So check it out. Jeff Wall, Room.

AL FILREIS:
Well, we like to end every Poem Talk with a minute or two of gathering Paradise, a chance for each of us, including myself, to spread wide, our narrow hands to gather a little something really poetically good to extol, hail, puff up or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world. And I wonder who wants to start? Jessica.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
I'll start. I want to put in a plug for an awesome poet named Kathy Lou Schultz, who might not be known to all of our listeners or many. Kathy Lou, she teaches at the University of Memphis, and she has three books of poetry out Re dress, Genealogy, and most recently Some Vague Wife, which is from Atelos, that great publishing project by Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz. And I have a couple of lines. Can I read them?

AL FILREIS:
Please.

JESSICA LOWENTHAL:
These are from Kathy Lou's series, “The Sonneteer:” “Belief in a Narrative of patriots has now worn thin, but books are still worth their weight.”

AL FILREIS:
Very nice. Randall.

RANDALL COUCH:
Gather some Paradise for us. Well, I was thinking, since Williams said that it's hard to get the news from poetry about places where poetry might be news. And I'll just note that the Chilean Nobel laureate, Gabriela Mistral, who died in the US in the 1950s left most of her papers with her final companion here in the States who recently died. And those papers are now going to be repatriated to Chile. And that fact has caused the two major Santiago dailies to run stories every other day, both of them for the last couple of weeks, and they will continue to be doing so, which is kind of a wonderful amount of publicity for poetry.

AL FILREIS:
Poetry in the headlines. And you're being you're being modest because I believe that you and someone else have edited Mistral's a bilingual edition, and it's coming out from the University of Chicago Press. Is that correct?

RANDALL COUCH:
Yes. Well, no one else, but yes, it's mine.

AL FILREIS:
And it's yours. Even better.

RANDALL COUCH:
Terrific.

AL FILREIS:
Thanks. Linh.

LINH DINH:
Well. Since Williams was so much about place and, you know, the American place, I've been sort of obsessed about, you know, how we arrange ourselves, how, you know, physically, how we plan our community. So I would urge readers who are not familiar with James Howard Kunstler or Mike Davis to read them because they discuss in depth our living arrangement and why that's causing us so many problems. James Howard Kunstler wrote The Long Emergency and the Geography of Nowhere.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you very much. And I'd like to gather a little Paradise in the name of Adrienne Rich, who has a new book of poems called Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. These are poems written between 2004 and 2006. And in my copy, I find, in the middle of the book, a wonderful poem that I recommend to listeners. It's called “The University Reopens As the Floods Recede.” And it's a poem about presumably, New Orleans University or a Louisiana University. And the poem ends as follows, “and of all places, in a place like this, I'll work with you on this bad matter. I can, but won't give you the time of day if you think it's hypothetical.” And somehow, I think that's a good way to wrap up a discussion about Williams even though I don't think of Rich and Williams as living in the same poetic space. She's in a way saying, “no ideas but in things, but I guess things are action in response to disasters such as this.” Well, that's all the Katrina we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and of our friends at the Poetry Foundation of Chicago.

Thanks to my guests Linh Dinh, Jessica Lowenthal and Randall Couch, and to my co-producers Mark Lindsay and Chris Mostaza and Poem Talk's director and editor Steve McLaughlin with special help from Curtis Fox. This is Al Filreis, and I hope you'll join us again soon for another Poem Talk.