William Carlos Williams

Esta  nota  propone  investigar  los  usos  de  materiales  literarios  llevados  a  cabo  por  las  humanidades  médicas, a partir de la indagación de las lecturas concitadas por William Carlos Williams y el libro A Fortunate Man de John Berger y Jean Mohr.Por medio del análisis de artículos del área de las humanidades médicas que toman por objeto estos textos, se busca observar qué modos de hacer con lo literario —y, por ende, de comprenderlo— proponen con respecto a aquellos instituidos por los estudios literarios académicos.  Se  señalan  como  condiciones  generales  de  estas  lecturas  un  deslizamiento  imaginario  entre el autor, el narrador o el yo poético, los personajes, y los lectores y lectoras, y el desmonteje de las fronteras disciplinares. Asimismo, se sugieren tres formas específicas de hacer con los textos literarios: una  educación  de  los  sentidos,  la  narración  como  espacio  de  especulación  ética  y  la  reescritura  de  discursos como el de la medicina.

As the poet's himself testified and as it has been widely proven by critics, William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain is a work largely composed by the technique of montage, joining and stitching together a great number of materials withdrawn from different sources and scraps cut from the author's own texts or someone else's writings. An image of ruins among overgrown weeds, like an untracked forest in the heart of the big city, can be seen as an image of the two poles of the field of tension within which literature creates itself. Besides, that same image can suggest how the new can be made by retrieving, selecting and reassembling the debris of antiquity. Thus William Carlos Williams, with In the American Grain, built his own literary tradition through the technique of montage, like Ezra Pound did with Malatesta Cantos. To identify Williams' sources is indispensable to reconstruct the methods employed by the poet to compose his work. After having identified some previously overlooked sources for «The Discovery of the Indies: Christopher Columbus», as well as for «The Discovery of Kentucky», the primary source of the latter chapter is looked at as an example of the way in which Williams sistematically employs the techniques of montage to compose his text. The complete analysis can be found in the original version of the present essay, published in Bibliomanie: Ricerca filologica, storia delle idee, e orientamento bibliografico, n. 19, ottobre/dicembre 2009, <http://www.bibliomanie.it/ archivio_numero_diciannove.htm>.

In 1929 Nikolas Calas photographed himself in a mirror of a wardrobe, in a room in Tinos with a hand-held camera (ΕΛΙΑ L003.124). The camera is not visible at first sight, as Calas tries to ‘hide’ it, positioning it in front of his tie. This self- portrait is a manifestation of early self- portraying in photography and can be compared to other modernist self-portraits of the time, especially the ones, where the camera is not visible but somehow hidden in the shadow (for e.g. Lotte Jacobi, ‘Autoportrait’, 1937).
When examining Calas’ poetry and prose texts it is noticeable, that mirrors are a constant motive, as I will try to show. Especially interesting is the connection between mirrors and translation, for example in the correspondence with Williams Carlos Williams, regarding the translations of Calas’ french poems ‘Wrested from Mirrors’, ‘The Agony Among the Crowd’, ‘Narcissus in the Desert’ and ‘To Regain the Day Again’ into American. Williams is borrowing the metaphor of the mirror from Calas thematizing the translator as the other, as a reflection of the original. By analyzing the metaphor of the mirror it is possible as well to reconsider the use of the Pseudonyms of Nikolas Calamaris as a reflection of himself.
After this considerations I will end my talk with the portfolio of prints and objects by eleven artists (Vincenzo Agnetti, Arakawa, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, James Rosenquist) introduced by Nikolas Calas and edited in 1975 with the title Mirros of the mind.

The article offers a metaphorical reading of William Carlos Williams's poems from his fourth poetry collection, "Sour Grapes" (1921), from the point of view of cognitive linguistics. Although generally defined as "a materialist poet" for his penchant for meticulously accurate representation of physical world and for renouncing poetic abstractions, Williams suggests in his early writing the significance of metaphors in structuring the sematic space of his poems. To illustrate how Williams deploys metaphors, three poems, "The Late Singer," "March," and "A Celebration" have been examined. The article reveals that the majority of Williams's metaphors are based on ordinary metaphorical concepts that William reworks into more elaborate images. The underlying metaphor that semantically connects the three poems is SPRING IS REBIRTH, which is based on the common conceptual metaphor A LIFETIME IS A YEAR. Nevertheless, Williams succeeded to prove his creative genius by masterfully creating novel metaphors and, thus offering new and different perspectives of particular aspects of life.

This research examines the eleven poems of the Modernist American poet, William Carlos Williams who is inspired by the masterpieces of the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, of the fifteenth century. The inter-relation between painting and poetry is called ekphrasis, which can be simply explained as the linguistic projection of visual art. Heffernan (1939-) defines this term as “the verbal representations of visual representations.” In addition to ekphrasis, this thesis aims to analyze the eleven poems of Williams in terms of structural, symbolic and thematic approaches. The primary source of this study is the poetry book, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) by Williams who has reflected upon the paintings of Brueghel. The first part of this study will focus on Williams’ poetic life in order to understand the ekphrastic nature of his selected poems. For instance, when did Williams’ interest for visual art start? Where did he acquire the idea that revealed the paintings of Bruegel in the embodiment of words? What did it mean to analyze Brueghel’s paintings? All these questions and more will be answered in the research. This thesis focuses not only on the poet, Williams and his poetic revelations, but also on Brueghel’s artistic perspectives and concerns. The research aims to construct versatile experiences and enrich new dimensions in readers.

An analysis of "These," one of Williams' greatest and most enigmatic poems.  Places it in the tradition of other poems about melancholy, including lyrics by Milton and Keats, and related works, including Dürer's etching Melencolia.  Originally published in _The William Carlos Williams Review_, 1983.

William Carlos Williams is widely understood as a pillar of Modernist poetry and a smith of the American (English) Language; however, English was not his primary means of communication until he was a teenager.5 At home his mother and father—who were raised in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively—spoke Spanish with each other and to young William Carlos, who would learn English at school and from his paternal grandmother. While this circumstance had various effects on his writing—in theme, subject, grammar, syntax, and structure—the transcultural depths of Williams’s upbringing have been overlooked to an extent by critics.6 Examining the cultural and linguistic backdrop of Williams’s boyhood home in New Jersey (exploring its shaping influences on his approach to writing and translation), my argument maintains that the colonial complexes surrounding the US military invasion and ongoing occupation of Puerto Rico, as well as the colonial exigencies put upon Puerto Ricans in the US, had a profound shaping influence on Williams’s transcultural use of the English language throughout his life.

William Carlos Williams's long poem Paterson is shown to be informed by an esoteric content derived from alchemy and the Gurdjieff Work. Williams is shown to have associated with many of A. R. Orage's followers. Paterson  is not obscure when it is related to the esoteric ideas and materials that it allludes to without establishing any context for its presentations. (Previously this paper was posted as a Word file that was not stable. It is now a pdf and has a good appearance.)

This pdf available for download is a short book comprised of three essays celebrating and exploring the whole of Williams' poetic career.  The first looks at poems featuring a dog or a cat, and how for Williams these creatures embodied two different kinds of creative energy he sought in poetry (rambunctious rule-breaking vs. poise and precision). The second essay gives a deep reading of Williams' 1938 lyric "These," placing it in the penseroso or melancholic ode tradition of Keats, Milton, and others.  The third evaluates Williams' lifetime of translating poets from Latin America (including the Caribbean) and Spain.  It assesses the poems and poets themselves, the translations Williams did, and their influences on his own poetry.  Williams' Spanish translations have finally been collected and edited by Jonathan Cohen:  _By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959_ (New Directions, 2011).  They allow us to reassess the "Carlos" side of Williams' personae.

William Carlos Williams' early poetry, particularly his poems in Spring and All (1923) is related to a mode of seeing or being. His poems are strangely reminiscent of how Aldous Huxley has described the impact of reality on himself under the influence of mescaline in The Doors of Perception. Huxley seems to believe that the special quality of visual perception in his case is something the congenital artist, or some artists, can experience all the time.

This dissertation treats of the conception of “blindness” in the late work of Karl Hofer (1878–1955). Responses to Hofer’s work are sought in the immediate postwar period 1945–1955 within the framework of national discourses regarding the re-establishment of culture in the Federal Republic of Germany. In particular, the notion of the Menschenbild is examined with reference to the critique of Modern Art and abstraction mounted by Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) in the same period. A nexus is found between the two men in the form of the work The Parable of the Blind (1568) by Pieter Bruegel (the Elder).

An additional framework for the examination of Hofer’s works which pertain to blindness is the catalogue essay Memoirs of the Blind by Jacques Derrida. Through this prism, the visual experience of the visual representation of non-visual experience is examined. Whether viewed as a threat to the explicitly visual world of art, or as conceptually implicit to the world of the visual arts, the theme of blindness is inextricable from discourse on the Menschenbild and was central to developing national and international artists’ engagement with sight in the postwar period. This dissertation draws on Derrida’s text in order to highlight the tensions that inhabit the relationship between the visual arts and blindness – tensions which stem from the ineluctable fact that, as caught up as an artist might be with the fear of the spectre of blindness, drawing owes a “debt” to blindness, too.

Art historians have long claimed that Sheeler's 1923 "Self Portrait" represented a deliberate  effacement, or denial of the artist's own presence in service to a "cult of the machine." This paper argues for an alternative reading in the context the artist's exploration of the genre of still life, and his engagement with pragmatic philosophy during this period.

Some phenomenological accounts of language privilege poetry or literary language more generally as a special form of revealing or disclosure of the world, one distinct from ordinary language. Literature in such accounts is recognised not only as an object of phenomenological study, but as exhibiting a phenomenological quality of its own, as disclosive in ways analogous to phenomenological philosophy. Poetry in these interpretations is not merely the object of tribute, but manifests a unique linguistic event, one which may issue distinctly phenomenological insight. This essay will consider the phenomenology of poetry in terms of both the phenomenological analysis of poetic language as a distinctive linguistic event, and as a hermeneutic approach to poetry itself wherein are found something akin to phenomenological operations. The first part will trace the attention to poetic language and accounts of its special nature sustained in the thoughts of Heidegger and Gadamer, considering more briefly Blanchot and Bachelard. The second part will be devoted to the discussion of phenomenological moments within poems, considering works by William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. That poetry can also strain some aspects of the theory of revealing proposed in standard phenomenological accounts of language will become apparent.

El artículo-ensayo FRAMING THE DISORDERED LANDSCAPE. ON READING ROBERT SMITHSON: ARCHITECTURE AS EOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION (El Encuadre del Paisaje Desordenado. Leyendo a Robert Smithson: Arquitectura como construcción eológica) tiene como objetivo tejer la urdimbre donde podemos asumir la consideración de la arquitectura entendida como ruina, con la falta de completud. Arquitectura como construcción eológica nos invita a considerar el espacio en construcción, una arquitectura abierta más allá de sus límites. 
Al final del artículo se extraen conclusiones de la representación de las imágenes fotográficas de Robert Smithson y su conceptualización como ruinas en reverso, para su aplicación en la arquitectura entendida como un espacio inacabado. De esta manera, siguiendo a Robert Smithson en Landscapes of Loss, nos permite revertir el sentido de paisaje, abierto, en continua construcción, donde se produce un diálogo con el pasado; pero asumiendo que el paisaje (arquitectura) se despliega con nuestra nueva mirada actual (habitando el espacio), con nuestra intervención aún por venir (poema).

With the intent of representing the climate which accompanied and guided the cultural and aesthetic work of the Italian woman writer Cristina Campo within the modern twentieth-century panorama, this article underscores her role as a literary translator of a multitude of essays and books of thought and invention as well as a substantial corpus of lyric poems, which made her a very efficient commentator on others’ writings, and to which she dedicated in return various narrative texts as well as poetry. The pratice of commentary influences fundamental structural features of Campo’s translational language, and consequently her essayistic and lyrical expression.




Italian Version of Abstract:
"La riflessione commentatoriale di Cristina Campo sulle sue traduzioni letterarie"

Nell'intento di evocare e rappresentare il clima che accompagnava guidando la creazione culturale ed estetica dell’autrice italiana Cristina Campo (di vero nome Vittoria Guerrini), attiva nell’ambito del panorama moderno novecentesco, il presente articolo si prefigge l’obiettivo di porre in rilievo il suo ruolo di traduttrice letteraria di una moltitudine di libri e saggi di invenzione e di pensiero, nonché di un sostanzioso corpus di liriche, il che fece di lei al contempo una commentatrice molto efficace degli scritti altrui, a cui dedicò a sua volta i vari testi prosastici e talvolta anche i componimenti poetici. Mirando ad analizzare il fine esercizio traduttivo campiano, dal quale si evince come attraverso di esso la scrittrice fu incline a confondere la propria voce con quella degli autori prediletti, si osservano le modalità secondo cui essi furono da lei scelti trasversalmente all’infuori di ogni tentativo di sistematizzazione diacronica, poiché appartenenti alle epoche storiche o agli ambienti più disparati, per essere interpretati nei suoi commenti autoriali molto da vicino. Trattando dei protagonisti che furono i pilastri fondamentali della vita intellettuale della Campo, vengono nello stesso tempo messe in risalto le sue attività in veste di studiosa, realizzatesi nella scrittura metatraduttiva, focalizzando l’attenzione sulla genesi, sulle fonti e sul potenziale proveniente dal suo approccio commentatoriale, anche nel momento in cui lo si adatta al contesto culturologico corrente. L’autrice infatti pubblica i suoi primi lavori di traduzione letteraria negli anni ’40, con più anni di anticipo rispetto al suo pieno esordio come letterata, nel cui repertorio pubblicato, allargatosi soprattutto nel corso degli anni ’60 e ’70, si annoverano, tra le fonti di ispirazione, gli scrittori in un ampio diapason: dagli esemplari poeti barocchi, ai classici della letteratura mondiale, senza tralasciare la contemporaneità. Si esplorano i numerosi esempi in cui la Campo assorbì la cultura dei modelli stranieri che avevano ideato le loro opere in inglese, francese, tedesco o spagnolo (tutte le lingue padroneggiate, come dimostrano le apprezzate traduzioni letterarie), prendendo in considerazione sia le produzioni letterarie relative alla schiera degli amici (Ezra Pound), oppure alla cerchia dei commentatori e divulgatori contemporanei della prima ora a cui appartenne anche l’autrice stessa (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Marianne Moore; ma così pure conobbero le prime traduzioni italiane i corpora di Simone Weil e William Carlos Williams), sia volgendosi verso gli altri scrittori poeticamente indispensabili per cogliere appieno il senso del suo opus (Emily Dickinson, Eduard Mörike ecc). Si tratta dei letterati che seppero unire alle qualità formali e strutturali un'originale e acuta interrogazione problematica intorno ad alcune questioni di natura morale o sociale che si ritrovano poi in filigrana nella riflessione commentatoriale campiana. Come verrà dimostrato nell’articolo, la pratica del commento influisce così sulle fondamentali caratteristiche strutturali del linguaggio traduttivo, e conseguentemente di quello saggistico e lirico della Campo, considerato a livello contenutistico ed espressivo.

Трудот се занимава со дефинирање на екфразата и прикажување на нејзината практична функција во градењето на поетскиот стих преку анализа на избран корпус. Низ примерите од поезијата на Вилијам Карлос Вилијамс и Валас Стивенс, претставници на модернизмот но и негови критичари и пост-модернистички визионери, се утврдуваат начините на кои екфразата го претвора поетскиот текст во саморефлексивен и деконструктивен метатекст. Поради својата интеруметничка природа − при што ги користи предностите и недостатоците на вербалната и на визуелната уметност − екфразата е совршено поле за преиспитување на востановените рамки низ кои се третираат сликарството и книжевноста, или во случајов, поезијата. Екфразата се покажува како уште една дефиниција за уметноста повикувајќи го читателот на активно учество во создавањето на значења и слики преку интерпретирање на значењата и сликите кои самите автори ги нудат како резултат на сопственото набљудување на светот.


The paper deals with the definining of ekphrasis and presenting its practical function in constructing the poetic line through the analysis of an elected corpus. Through the poetry examples by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, representatives of modernism but also its critics and post-modernist visionaries, the ways in which ekphrasis transforms the poetic text into a self-reflexive and deconstructive meta-text are established. Because of its interartistic nature—using the advantages and disadvantages of the verbal and visual art—ekphrasis is the perfect field for the reviewing of the established frames through which painting and literature, or in this case, poetry are handled. Ekphrasis proves itself as yet another definition of art calling the reader to actively participate in the creation of meanings and images by interpreting the meanings and images that the authors themselves offer up as a result of their own observation of the world.

How is the idea of the "image" currently conceptualised in cultural studies and, specifically, how do certain practices of visual culture tend to understand its nature? By employing the rhetorical device of ekphrasis to discuss W. H. Auden's and William Carlos Williams's famous poems about Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting long attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I intend to show that the discursive method of visual interpretation developed in contemporary theory actually fails to account for the intermedial meaning of the objects presented to us by Auden and Williams. As Icarus comes to know, the image one wants to reach and subdue can, in the end, resist and defeat any such aim.

Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams, was written when the world still reeled from the carnage of World War 1. A general feeling of malaise, degeneracy, and pessimism had begun to take hold—especially in the art world. Williams begins the book by playing along with this pessimistic narrative of humanity, in that it is doomed to repeating carnage and suffering. He envisioned a scenario where humankind did go on to destroy itself, leaving nothing to remain " but the lower vertebrates, the mollusks, insects and plants, " and remaking the world so that it could start anew (Williams 5-6). The picture he paints represents what he believed to be the power inherent in the imagination to envision things beyond the scope of human memory that would carry on throughout the book. Williams used Spring and All in order to present his world view, which was that the way the world was perceived was not one that actually represented the truth. He believed that those who merely recorded their surroundings did not actually capture reality.

The paper starts on page 9.

The paper focuses on the poetic community associated with a New York little magazine, Alfred Kreymborg’s Others (that saw its publishing peak at around 1915). The poets in question include E. Pound, A. Lowell, O. Johns, A. Kreymborg, S. Cannell, W.C. Williams. The author concentrates on a peculiar device that is noticeable if we take into account a corpus of published poetry. Namely, it is the expression of an affective state through a reference to an object, a household item. Drawing on late formalism (“the literary everyday” concept proposed by Tynianov and Eykhenbaum, literary sociology avant la lettre) and newer literary trends (media- and sociologically-oriented approaches to literature, represented by B. Herzogenrath), the author outlines a way of establishing a correspondence between a literary technique and its context. The author suggests that we trace the genesis of a literary structure back to the communicative exchanges and practices embedded in the poetic community, thus factoring out the form-content distinction in favor of media-oriented accounts of literary texts. Here the poetic community is conceived of as a medium, the literary everyday constitutes a force acting upon that medium in order to produce a literary form, and a literary form emerges in the process of tight coupling between the two. Giving an account of the literary everyday of the magazine community and its material and social contexts (apartments, cafés, bars), the author posits that this interaction between the community as a “medium” and its literary everyday had shaped a speech orientation toward friendly, informal communication in which the emphasis is placed on understatements and non-verbalized implications. That led to the emergence of a new poetic technique: using a reference to an object as a vehicle of affective experience.

With the publication of Contact magazine in 1920–1921, American poet William Carlos Williams promoted a distinctive avant-garde literary aesthetic that was centered on “contact”—a concrete connection between literature and the vocabulary, cadence and feel of the everyday language of people. Though initially well received by expatriate authors representing the American avant-garde, Williams’ contact aesthetic was soon eclipsed by T. S. Eliot’s poetry, his magazine Criterion, and its New Criticism methods that celebrated classical allusions and advocated a detachment of texts from their subjects. This aesthetic shift within the modernist literary aesthetic frustrated Williams, who, with the onset of the Great Depression, was convinced that his contact-based aesthetic was an essential response to the times. The result was the revival of Contact magazine in 1932. Though the publication did not last long (only three editions), it did allow Williams to re-establish a distinctive contact-based “other” aesthetic for American poetry that profoundly influenced later American poets and writers.

Afonso Dias Ramos, “Adam Phillips: Toda a literatura é mudança”, Electra 13, 2021, pp. 202-219.

Adam Phillips é actualmente um dos mais reconhecidos psicanalistas, críticos literários e intelectuais públicos no Reino Unido. Já escreveu vinte e cinco livros sobre psicanálise, literatura e cultura, sobre temas que vão de Freud e Winnicott a Sebald e Houdini. É o organizador das novas obras completas de Sigmund Freud na colecção Modern Classics da Penguin e professor convidado de literatura inglesa na Universidade de York. O seu novo livro, On Wanting to Change, discute de que maneiras e porque é que mudamos, e a urgência de termos mais conversas e menos conversões.

Adam Phillips dirigiu o serviço de Psicoterapia Infantil do Hospital de Charing Cross em Londres, e hoje trabalha como psicanalista e Professor Convidado de Literatura Inglesa na Universidade de York. Considerado um dos mais destacados psicanalistas e críticos literários no Reino Unido, é autor de uma extensa lista de livros, entre os quais Attention Seeking (2019), In Writing (2017), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), Becoming Freud (2014), Missing Out (2012), Intimacies (com Leo Bersani, 2010), Darwin’s Worms (2000), On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993) e Winnicott (1988). Membro da Royal Society of Literature, colabora regularmente com o London Review of Books, The Observer, The Raritan e The New York Times. Foi o editor das obras de, entre outros, Edmund Burke, Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, John Clare e Richard Howard, e conta, entre os seus ilustres admiradores, com escritores como Will Self, Zadie Smith ou Jonathan Safran Foer. Um dos maiores peritos na história da psicanálise e em Sigmund Freud, Adam Phillips foi também convidado pela Penguin Press para ser organizador da nova edição em inglês das obras completas de Freud em dezassete volumes, relançando-o ao público, menos como autor de textos científicos do que como uma figura literária maior.

Adam Phillips foi considerado por John Banville «um dos mais elegantes estilistas de prosa na língua inglesa, um Emerson da nossa era», e elogiado por Judith Butler como um dos poucos autores que «pensaram e repensaram a psicanálise em termos decisivos para a cultura contemporânea». Mais do que qualquer outro crítico, os seus ensaios têm teorizado a relação da psicanálise com a escrita, da terapia com a leitura, apresentando a primeira delas como um parente mais próximo da literatura do que da ciência. Embora sonantes, os títulos dos seus livros são enganadoramente simples, escondendo ensaios perspicazes e eruditos que cobrem um vasto espectro de temas, de Nietzsche a Pessoa, de Shakespeare a Lacan, de Karl Kraus a Marianne Moore, ou de J.-B. Pontalis a Frederick Seidel. Abarcam tudo, desde teorias sobre alta-costura e desarrumação doméstica até histórias da insinuação e das primeiras impressões. O estilo caracteristicamente aforístico dá forma a um ímpeto provocador de refutar certos clichés modernos, manifestando-se tanto contra as ideias de autocrítica e conhecimento, diagnóstico e cura, como a favor da solidão, do aborrecimento ou das chamadas de atenção. A entrevista para a Electra foi realizada pelo telefone dias depois do lançamento do novo livro de Adam Phillips, On Wanting to Change [Sobre querer mudar], no qual o mais eminente dos «psicanalistas literários» desmonta o constante apelo contemporâneo para mudarmos as nossas vidas, como parte do mito liberal de progresso que condena a ideia de conversão que remonta a São Paulo ou Santo Agostinho. Nesta conversa, Adam Phillips fala sobre algum do seu trabalho como ensaísta literário e também do futuro da psicanálise.

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Palavras-chave: Psicanálise / Literatura / Crítica Literária