The MLA Seminar Papers on Williams and Sound

At a breakfast meeting in Washington, D. C., in December 2005, Marjorie Perloff, incoming President of the Modern Language Association, announced to the two dozen members present her initiative for seminars on poetry and sound at the 2006 meeting in Philadelphia. I immediately thought of Williams's statement, "It's all in the sound." I looked up the poem, which goes like this:

The Poem

It's all inthe sound. A songSeldom a song. It should

be a song—made ofparticulars, wasps,a gentian—somethingimmediate, open

scissors, a lady'seyes—wakingcentrifugal, centripetal

(CP2 74)

The second thing I did was to search for Richard Swigg on the Internet and write to him to order the complete sets of both cassettes and CDs of Williams reading and talking about poetry. I wanted to have Williams himself reading the poems and excerpts of poems in the seminar papers. I wasn't sure it would work, but Professor Swigg made the effort possible, by his collecting the recordings and publishing them, and, after all the papers for the seminar were completed, by his preparing the specific excerpts on a new tape in the order they would be needed. Because of Richard's careful work, we were able to hear Williams's reading at the exact moment required. In Richard's own talk, he also provided the welcome sound of Hugh Kenner's voice saying: "If you listen to a Williams recording, you'd better have the text in front of you, so you can see what he's doing with it." Each speaker prepared a handout of the excerpts discussed in his talk so the audience would be able to compare the visual elements with the auditory. The four speakers timed their talks carefully so that there was time for questions and discussion afterward. Some of the talks are slightly expanded for publication here, but please remember that the MLA versions were strictly contained within the twelve minute boundary, give or take a minute or two, and that limit influenced the structure of each paper.

At the beginning of the seminar the poet Charles Bernstein announced that he and Al Filreis, Co-Directors of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania, planned the release date for The Complete Sound Recordings of William Carlos Williams to coincide with our seminar. We are extremely grateful for this honor. The recordings consist of about twenty hours of Williams reading, lecturing, and being interviewed. Although they can still be purchased, they are also now available online at no cost with the permission and cooperation of Richard Swigg, the heirs of William Carlos Williams, and New Directions Publishing Corporation, agent for the heirs, who hold the copyright. The recordings are made available as downloadable MP3 files strictly for educational and noncommercial use at: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC.html.

The four talks on Williams and sound published here are remarkable in their scope, as indicated by the titles and confirmed in the texts. As a thank you for such brilliant and helpful thinking, I want to share a sixteeen hundred year old quotation from Saint Augustine:

So think about it: the corporeal voice begins to sound, and it sounds, and it is still sounding, and look—it stops, and now there is silence, and that voice has passed and the voice exists no longer. . . . [It cannot be measured before or after the sound is uttered.] So it could [be measured] when it was sounding, because then it was something which could be measured. But even then it was not stationary; it went and passed on.¹

The mind reaching out to the mysteries of the universe of sound will find that time is variable, as is sound, and one can see with ears, listen with eyes, and read these four excellent essays with both.