Some Orchestrations of the American Idiom

After reading "To Greet a Letter-Carrier" and "At the Bar" at Harvard in December 1951, William Carlos Williams commented, "I think that poetry comes out of the language that is spoken on the street."¹ Note that Williams said "poetry comes out of the language that is spoken on the street," not poetry is "the language spoken on the street." The sounds of the spoken words of the man on the street are poetry's origin, not its end or even its equivalent. They are the ground, or raw materials, from which or with which the poet starts.

Williams read "To Greet a Letter-Carrier" first.

Why'n't you bring mea good letter? One withlots of money in it.I could make use of that.Atta boy! Atta boy!

(CP1 458)

The audience burst into delighted laughter. Williams then commented, "Well, if you liked that, here's another," and recited "At the Bar."

Hi, open up a dozen.

Wha'cha tryin' ta do—charge ya batteries?

Make it two.

Easy girl!You'll blow a fuse ifya keep that up.

(CP1 457)

This "language that is spoken on the street," when fashioned into these poems, has surprisingly intricate sounds. Consider the complexity of the four utterances making up "At the Bar," all framed by the word "up." The percussive 'p' in line 1 ("op en up ") is echoed in line 7 ("keep>—. . . up"), and nowhere else. There is also a rhyme in the poem, since line 2 ("do") rhymes with line 4 ("two"); the open vowel also appears in line 6 ("You'll" and "fuse"). The open vowel in "open" (1. 1) returns in "blow" (1. 6). And one closed vowel proliferates in "a" (1. 1), "Wha'cha" "ta" (1. 2), "ya" (1. 3), "a" (1. 6) and "ya" (1. 7).

Also important is the poem's attempt to catch variations of word formation. The word "you" first appears buried at the end of "Wha'cha," becomes more evident as "ya," emerges fully formed in "you'll" and then subsides to its previous form, "ya." The poem shifts to "you'll" (the more "correct" form) probably because the idiom of the speaker at that moment requires the euphony of the long "oo" sound in both "you'll" and "fuse." The next line has no comparable echoing "oo," so the speaker reverts to the normative "ya." Thus Williams demonstrates the tendency of spoken language to manipulate sound to create pleasing symmetries.

Williams presents a single voice in "To Greet a Letter-Carrier."² The poem begins and ends with elisions. "Why don't" is shrunken to "Why'n't" (two syllables become one) and "That's the" is shortened to "Atta" by removing the initial "th" from both "that" and "the." Alternatively, one could say that the elision is simpler, that the expression is "Thatta boy" and it has lost only the intial "Th." (Incidentally, the terminal "that" in line 4 makes all the more striking its absence from what immediately follows: "Atta."). But whichever the case, it is still a lopping off of what appear to be unnecessary sounds. We can see that the speaker's impatience produces an economy of expression in the first line. Similarly, the delight evident in the last line also produces compression.

In terms of sonic weaving, the vernacular in this poem is not inferior to that in "At the Bar." Short as this poem is, we discover internal rhyme ("good" in line 2; "could" in line 4), vowel echoes ("you" in line 1; "use" in line 2; plus the open vowel in "me" [1. 1] recurring in "money" [1. 3], assonance (the fricative "with" [1. 2] and "that" [1. 4]. Other instances of sounds linking the lines are the 'm' in "me," "money" and "make," plus the ubiquitous 't' in "letter," "lots," "it," "that," and "Atta." Once again, the adaptation of speech heard on the street exhibits a fairly sophisticated sonic structure.

As Williams presents it, street speech runs roughshod over the niceties of formal speech. This is quite evident fifteen...