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. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities. And we hope, gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners, and I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poet's themselves as part of our PennSound Archive, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound.

Today, I'm joined here in Philadelphia, at the Kelly Writers House in our third floor, garret studio by Bob Perelman, whose first book of poems was Braille, 1975, and most recent is If Life, 2006. Whose critical writing includes The Marginalization of Poetry, and his PennSound page includes recordings for many occasions, the earliest dated, you want to guess Bob? March 1978, a reading at 80 Langton Street, in San Francisco, and the most recent, dated October 2009 at the Writers House. And by Charles Bernstein, who is the author of 40 books, collections of poetry, essays, pamphlets, literary translations, and collaborations. His volume of selected poems to be called, All the Whiskey In Heaven is due out this spring, and who with me, I'm honored to say, is co-founder and co-director of PennSound. And by visiting us from the left coast, Robert Grenier, whose many works include Sentences, a box of 500, 5 x 8 index cards, and What I believe: Transpiration, transpiring, containing unbound boxed 8.5 x 11 pages of holograph, writings, drawings and whose senior honor's thesis at Harvard in 1965, was called Organic Prosody in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams, and Bob Grenier had to apply to write about such a recently dead writer. Bob's newest effort is the much awaited, The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner.

Hello to all three of you. Welcome back to Poem Talk Charles and Bob P.

Bob Grenier:  Hello.

Bob Perelman: Hello.

Charles Bernstein: Good to be here.

Al Filreis: Welcome back to the Writers House. Bob Grenier into Poem Talk for the first time. We're really glad you're here. So now speaking of Williams today on Poem Talk, we're going to talk about two very short well known poems by Williams as chosen by Bob Grenier. Maybe we'll even decide that they are especially Grenierian, I don't know. They are, "The Red Wheelbarrow," the chestnut classic, and "Flowers By the Sea," PennSounds Williams page includes eight recordings of "Flowers By the Sea." Five, only five of "The Red Wheelbarrow." Interestingly enough, he stopped reading that at performances after about 1952 or so, and he kept reading the other one. We're going to listen to each poem twice, four different recordings. The first "Wheelbarrow" recording was made at a reading before a convention of teachers in 1942. The second, rare recording is from a 1950 radio interview on The Mary Margaret McBride Show, aired on WJZ. The first "Flowers By the Sea," was recorded at the Library of Congress in May of 1945. And the second, was at Williams' Rutherford, New Jersey home in 1954. So here now, is William Carlos Williams reading "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "Flowers By the Sea."

William Carlos Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow"

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

"Flowers By the Sea”

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s

edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies

tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape

perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem

Al Filreis: Bob Grenier, why these two, of all the Williams these two stuck with you, or something you think about?

Bob Grenier: Yeah. Stuck with me. You get to a certain age, wake up in the morning sometime before dawn, and what's to do? After a while, you know, after you've tried to figure out what to do, you get passages of ... words, and they'll come together. Then you'll hear a part of a poem, I do, and then see if you can reconstruct it, or allow it to return. Formerly, you know there, was some attempt to try to remember the poem. You'd read it, and then try to remember it.

Al Filreis: So this is not remembering now, but what? If it's not remembering?

Bob Grenier: The poem is remembering me, in a way.

Al Filreis: It's part of you.

Bob Grenier: It’s putting me back together, in the quiet time of my existence, in so far as I am alive. It's a moving thing to be the place where those words return.

Al Filreis: Bob and Charles. I was rereading, and also listening to Bob Greier's performance of "Sentences." Several occasions, while thinking about these incredibly short, stick in your mind, Williams poems. I kept thinking about a connection between Bill and Bob. I know that it's there. I wonder if either of you, or both of you wanted to say something about, the connection between Williams and Grenier.

Bob Perelman: Well, I certainly remember one of the early lessons, as a young poet, that I learned from Bob. Unofficial, but very instructive lessons, when I was in my early twenties. Also, Bob wrote about this, "The Red Wheelbarrow," and this one. I, just like Bob is, you know, was talking about, remembering a poem. Actually, I find right now that I can remember quite a bit of what Bob wrote in this one. He was very comic about the little tiny ... couplets in "The Red Wheelbarrow." "So much depends", he quoted that and then commented very Riley Emersonian, Moralism, etc. Then, at the end, with, "beside the white chickens," he pointed to the vibrancy of the short vowels in chickens. And how this kind of still life, this minimalist still life poem, suddenly broken into motion. The word is in the letterism of the poem. Even though it's also about that which is real. Sometimes people read it as about labor, is about farming, etc. But, it is also about words and about patterning of words. I think that's very Grenieresque.

Al Filreis: Charles? I mean, certainly "Flowers By the Sea," strikes me as a perfect example of autotelism. Everything else that it is, it is also a poem that is simply what it is, in front of you. It has a kind of circularity. It is sufficient unto itself. It just is. I know that for a long time, for 20 or so years, that was kind of out of fashion in any English department to say. That something could be incredibly memorable, because of its autotelism. Autotelism is, in fact, was a word that the new critics used. So it's really out of fashion anyway. It strikes me that Bob Grenier sentences and other bird soundy, imagistic and word itself only. I don't know how to talk about it. But I can do it, aesthetic. Maybe it doesn't come from here, but it's there. What do you have to say?

Charles Bernstein: Well, to avoid the mini lecture that we don't do here on Poem Talk, I just point to his own self understanding of a tradition of which this poem fits into. You could read backward, this poem with an understanding of Grenier's own readings of, in particular, Creeley. After Williams and Zukofsky, sort of in between. So, you have similar to what Bob is saying, these are not poems about so much a lyric I speaking, but about some kind of observation which has its own specific fact. Then there's the counting the Bob talks about, so they're both poems of eight lines, and divided into two stanzas. Each of the stanzas themselves, has a kind of specific autonomy to them. I was really struck, you know, spending time with Bob recently, and thinking about Eigner with just the second line of "Flowers By the Sea." "Edge unseen, the salt ocean," which could be a Larry Eigner line. Just itself, "edge unseen, the salt ocean." If you just skip lines in the first thing, you get these fantastic, perhaps of restless —

Al Filreis: It maybe emphasized by the second reading we heard, which is a reading done by Williams after his second stroke so that the words are trippy almost. He's almost voweling them as it for the first time.

Bob Grenier: That was the version that I heard, in a caveman recording, that came back to me. I think it's better than —

Al Filreis: I think it's better too. Why would you say it's better though?

Bob Grenier: That the intonation is has peculiar, sort of snotty, nasal schoolmarmish quality that I really appreciate. It articulates what's said in a way that ... Pound of course said, that Williams' virtual was his opacity. This poem purports to be, you know, of the condition of "The Flowers By the Sea." But what it's actually saying is in question throughout. What in the world? You're gathered into the spacey quality of the ocean being by the ocean. Which has been so important to me and in time, and all this stuff is going on. Then this curious figure is constructed in the end, which is hard to visualize.

William Carlos Williams:

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s

edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies

tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape

perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem

Al Filreis: Well, you know, logically speaking, and logic may not be the trump card in any way here in this conversation. He's saying that the ocean is flower-like. Then he says, but the flowers are ocean-like. He essentially says, well this is like that, and that is like this. It feels like it's ... I feel like the high tides is coming in.

Bob Grenier: Yeah. It's the sound. It's all this, restless perhaps circled, peacefully sound. This is mesmerizing, in his capacity to conjure this kind of spacey place by the ocean. Where these things exist.

Charles Bernstein: I think of H.D.'s "Oread," used by Pound as his version of the images poem. Just in the single line, "the sea is circled and sways." "The sea is circled and sways," has the kind of quality that—

Al Filreis: "Whirl up sea," I think. She says, "You know, when Williams performed, so much depends upon maybe it became a schticky thing for him," but he introduced it by saying, "This is a perfect poem. I don't think I've ever written a poem that was so perfect.” I don't know what he meant by that. I wonder what you—

Bob Perelman: In 1950 recording with Mary Margaret McBride program. One of the things interesting to me about PennSound, is the comments that Williams makes. And he says, as you know Al, of course, we have eight second versions of this poem and five readings, he says, that it's the same as a thing of beauty, but instead of a thing of beauty, I say, "a red wheelbarrow," referring to Keats "Endymion." I mean, that's an amazing comment.

Al Filreis: He says the first line is a rewriting of "Endymion." Same as —

Bob Perelman: The first line is a thing of beauty. I mean, "the wheelbarrow."

Bob Grenier: Well, it does, as Bob was saying, I was thinking in the old days, it's, you know, it's an injunction to pay attention to something because of its moral value. It directs you to what is in fact an image in itself, as an image. Then, "beside the white chickens," for me, that was the thing that really opened up a possibility of thinking words as being composed of letters, as a composition of successive ... shapes. It's the sounds of the E's and the I's, "beside the white chickens." It only happens because of the conjured quality of the form. So much depends upon, a red wheelbarrow."

Al Filreis: Of course, he never reads with those line breaks.

Charles Bernstein: That's a very interesting fact that we should note.

Bob Grenier: "Water, beside the white chicken."

Charles Bernstein: Chickens. Discussion. Why doesn't he read the line breaks? People always are struck by that.

Bob Grenier: He doesn't read it well at all.

Charles Bernstein: Because you read it with the space in between. I think the thing of beauty in that poem, is the second line-

Bob Perelman: "Flowers By the Sea" gets read, as one would want "The Wheelbarrow" to be read. He- The dashed off phrase that Bob Grenier mentioned, "The flowers alone, but color," "Or the shape perhaps of restlessness," that interruption gets read.

William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s

edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies

tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape

perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem

Al Filreis: When you came upon this stuff for the first time, how radical how eye opening was it?

Charles Bernstein: It's funny that you should mention "upon" because I was going to say that the second line, the single word "upon" in the poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow." I know Robert here is going to point out, that this was originally part of a long serial work, spring at all, and that it wasn't an isolated poem. But Williams, certainly included and selected poems, and treated as a separate poem.[crosstalk 00:16:20] It's a very different sense and perhaps, in one sense more radical to think of it as spring at all. I think that it also in response to what Bob Perelman was saying, for him, the visual spacing didn't translate into duration or temporal spacing. That was deliberate. That was his thought about it. I want to turn the tables and ask you a question Al, this is your subject anticommunist, anti modernism in two of the comments that Williams makes on "Flowers By the Sea." He mentions Max Eastman. The second time he thinks it's Max Ernst, but he means Max Eastman. He says, sort of in a mocking way, that Max Eastman says, "That this "Flowers By the Sea," was the one poem that he was credited as writing was the only real poem that he wrote." Then he reads it, and he keeps reading it, you know, who was at Max Eastman. And what does this have to do with this poem?

Al Filreis: Max Eastman, by the time he's performing, Williams is performing this, in the 50's, Max Eastman had done a loop dee loop ideologically. He was a sort of, he'd become an anti communist, although he was being treated as if a communist. He was basically doubly persona non grata. So maybe Williams, in his own clumsy way, was you know, affirming the outsider ness of ... Max Eastman really was the first communist to discover Modernism. That was his claim to fame.

Charles Bernstein: But then he became anti communist, and also anti Modernist.

Al Filreis: He did indeed.

Charles Bernstein: He somehow thought this was a real poem. I can't tell whether Williams thought that was ridiculous as communist, or he liked it.

Al Filreis: Eastman wrote a screed against Stein and I think that, this seems to be a poem that's metaphorical. We've just affirmed that it's metaphor that undoes itself. So it's actually like the wheelbarrow poem in that sense, but I think Max Eastman misread it, and maybe Williams understood that.

Bob Perelman:  Short, lyrical poem with "Flowers By the Sea" in it. That's okay.

Al Filreis: It sounds okay.

Charles Bernstein: That's what I think. I think it's just a sort of a funny thing. He repeats it twice. There's something about the fact that he likes its legibility, as something more like a lyric or conventional poem.

Al Filreis: I think in the same spirit, you know, Williams went on the road, you know. I don't know why he did it. He was tired, but he went on the road. He had his little, schticky introductions for these things. "The Wheelbarrow" was always introduced as the perfect poem. I think that, that's an ironic statement. I think he's saying basically, "All you blue haired ladies out there, think that what my poems are is really essentially a laundry list. So, I'm going to call this perfect."

Bob Perelman: I don't know I think his I think his late reading comments are just the result of a lifetime of feeling deprived of the spotlight. I think he was glad to have this-[crosstalk 00:19:02]

Al Filreis: He certainly loved the laughter that he got. Bob Grenier, you wrote about prosody and Williams at Harvard. That must have been frowned upon.

Bob Grenier: Well, no. It was the only thing I could do. I had Williams himself was interested in the discovery of form in the spoken word. He would listen and write down things that he heard, not because people said them or they were particularly important statements, but because there was a pattern of some sort in them which he was researching. He was looking for an alternative to quote free verse, which wasn't regular meter. He would find patterns such as exist in this wheelbarrow poem. As you know, the various ways you can ... describe it. One is that by syllables. It's 4,2,3,2,3,2,4,2. One concentrates on, you know, the alternation of the I am "upon," and followed by, the chokey "barrow," followed by the chokey “water." Which, if you were looking for a perfectly balanced form, might be followed by an iamb in "chickens."

Bob Perelman: "Chickans"

Bob Grenier: The result is sort of like, what is that ... foot which is a double stress.

Charles Bernstein: Spondee.

Bob Grenier: It's a spondee.

Al Filreis: He reads it like a spondee. William Carlos Williams says we're chickens like a spondee.

Bob Grenier: Yeah. It starts to isolate each syllable as-

Al Filreis: Is it a trochee? We're wrong.  Spondee is two unaccented.

Bob Perelman: No, no. A spondee is like spoonbill.

Bob Grenier: Yeah. Yeah.

Charles Bernstein: Jersey.

Al Filreis: That's what I'm saying this is. Here we are on Poem Talk, getting it wrong.

Bob Grenier: Yeah. Pound's line, characteristically might well ... commonly would end with a spondee. I will think of an example. Anyway, what's interesting to me in the form of the poem, is that you don't know after the line, "beside the white," what's going to come. There's something about the balance, and the repeated measure in the counting of the poem, which frees each next thing to become itself, beyond whatever one might have imagined it could be up to that point. Williams emphasizes the imagination as the constructive element, in the making of the poem, in the prose and the "Spring and All." chicken's seemingly, is constructed out of the form of the poem itself. Shaping itself into its next element. It's by this time, no longer an imagistic presentation, and never was a description of nature. It's an invention of a particle of language. Two pieces put together. Chickens and they exist in space, as if the poet had made them out of nothing. And yet, they have the reality of the white chickens which the poem gathers them back into. I think that you know, a good exercise for people looking at this poem, is to try to replace the word "chickens" with another word and see- [crosstalk 00:22:53]

Charles Bernstein: Which is what you did in this one.

Bob Grenier: See if you can come up with a word, which will stand there. Which will be there with equivalent constructed materiality. It's hard to do. I haven't succeeded. But it showed me that it was possible. That the language itself, out of its own internal shaping form, forming capacity, can articulate something which is real. Which comes into existence and occupies space. That's a fantastic thing that the words can do. Especially if you bring that power of the imagination back to a quote, "contemplation of nature." So that they're not making quote, "abstract sounds for their own sake," but contributing to one's perception of the situation. One is investigating.

Al Filreis: Well, we could talk about these poems and about Williams forever. But let me ask each of you in turn just to say something else about the two poem together, or about Williams in any way you like. A final thought on this. Why don't we start with Charles.

Charles Bernstein: I would just mentioned the first line of the third stanza of "Flowers By the Sea," again just pulling that out of the context. "But color and the movement or the shape." I love [crosstalk 00:24:21] just that as a whole poetics for Williams, and for the poem.

Al Filreis: Bob Perleman.

Bob Perelman: They're so different I guess. That's something I like very much about Williams is that he isn't being the poet Williams, but he does have these poems have tremendous autonomy and individuality.

Al Filreis: Bob Grenier.

Bob Grenier: I'll try to answer the question that you asked them earlier.

Al Filreis: You didn't get to answer that about, how radical [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Bob Grenier: I can answer that. No. The connection is between me and at least a connection. Williams demonstrated for me, in poems like this, and also the "Locust Tree" in "Flower: is another one, that —

Al Filreis: What version?

Bob Grenier: The second version like one word, one word at a time, that something which is evidently and calls attention to itself, as an invention in the structure of language, can also be a way of making a very exacting presentation of what's experienced perceived in the world. That the word has this astounding capacity in its own internal structure, to name the event that's happening, simultaneously and inextricably from ... Both of those are together, in a way you can't pull them apart. Neither can exist without the other, as writing in any way that's moving to me.

Al Filreis: Wow. Perfect. I'll say this now. I hadn't planned to announce it but our next Poem Talk will be a discussion of Robert Grenier's "Sentences." Robert Grenier will not be here for it to. There will be three other people.

Bob Grenier: That's not fair.

Al Filreis: It'll be fun though. It will be tremendous fun, and I look forward to. We like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of gathering paradise. A chance for several of us to spread wide our narrow hands to gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone, or something, going on in the poetry world. This is basically your recommendation. Do you have a quick something we should be reading or knowing about Bob Perleman?

Bob Perelman: Yeah. I can't remember the title. Carla Billitteri's new book on cratylism in poetry. That discusses Whitman, Laura (Riding, Jackson, Charles Olson, and there's a coda about Robert Grenier and Linda Genia.

Al Filreis: Great. Thank you, Bob. Charles Bernstein.

Charles Bernstein: I shouldn't really do this because it's turning the tables. But given my question about Max Eastman. The social context we didn't discuss so much about Williams, which I think is very important, is so much discussed in your book, which we don't get a chance to introduce you and your work. It's a book called The Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960. I think anybody listening to this, and wanting to understand the broader context in which Williams or any of the writers from the 50's, 40's, 30's were writing, should look at that book.

Al Filreis: Thank you, Charles. He was certainly red-baited, and it's a story that I tell in that book. Well, that is all the white chickens we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the writer South is a collaboration and center for programs and contemporary writing and Kelly Writers House is a collaboration of the center for programs and contemporary writing and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation. Poetryfoundation.org. Thanks to my guests Bob Perleman, Charles Bernstein, Robert Grenier and to Poem Talk's director and engineer James LaMarre, and to our editor Steve McLaughlin.

This is Al Filreis, and I hope you'll join us again soon for another Poem Talk.