The Voices in "The Desert Music"

William Carlos Williams wrote "The Desert Music" for a fifteen-minute performance at the Sanders Theater at Harvard in June 1951. It was composed in the weeks following his first stroke at the end of March, a few months after his return from a long reading tour across the western United States. The poem had to justify his selection as poet of the year by the Alpha chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa society, reassure Williams that he could still write poetry, express insights he had reached during the past year of intense conversations on his travels, and lend itself to oral performance. Perhaps surprisingly given the occasion, which he described to Louis Zukofsky the next day as "semi-ecclesiastic, a hall hallowed by tradition" (Ahearn 439) his poem was, as he told Zukofsky "low (high)," drawing on memories of a visit with his wife and Robert McAlmon to the Mexican border town of Juárez where they visited the market, saw a strip tease, and listened to banal music. The result was his most sustained meditation on the situation of poetry as sound in the modern world, a poem that brilliantly addresses the question of what it means to be a modern poet in the nineteen-fifties, and does so by exploring another question: "what does the poem sound like in the modern world?"

"The Desert Music" is not just what one of the collected editions of his poetry called his "later" poems;¹ it would seem to exemplify Edward Said's idea of late style "as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction," (7) lacking "harmony and resolution." Even the poet's own identity is fractured, as his own Hispanic roots marked by a Spanish middle name appear to leave him stranded on a border, like the shapeless form in the poem, between Anglophone and Latin American cultures. He catches this division neatly in a strategic line-break when he records the slightly ironic challenge offered by one of McAlmon's companions:

                                                  So this is WilliamCarlos Williams, the poet

(CP2 282)

It is not difficult to hear a quizzical vocal emphasis on the middle name, as if that were his actual name and the repeated name William were a mask for the other identity: so this is William Carlos Williams. The sound and sense of fracturing identity is closely tied to his sense of lateness. He reflects wryly in response to a series of questions about why one should want to write a poem at all:

I am that he whose brainsare scattered                          aimlessly

(CP2 282)

This is a tacit allusion to a classic of late literature, Goethe's conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann. In John Oxenford's translation Goethe complains about his isolation and the geographical dispersal of his intellectual contemporaries in an oddly graphic image: "Our talents and men of brains are scattered over the whole of Germany . . . so that personal contact and personal exchange of thought may be considered as rarities" (200).² No doubt this lament resonated with Williams after his stroke and his recent journeys to see the men of brains scattered across America, though with a certain irony the poem presents us not with a modern [Alexander von] Humboldt but the sick McAlmon and his uncomprehending relatives.

The intimations of Goethe (and of Yeats, as I shall show) are part of a heterogeneous pattern of echoes, outbursts, conventional stanzas, and single disconnected lines barely connected by a narrative, all of which assemble into a work for which the adjectives that Said excavates from Adorno's account of Beethoven's late compositions seem remarkably apposite: "distracted" (10), "'catching fire between extremes'" (10), "a plethora of 'unmastered material'" (11), and "self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable" (16) are typical examples. Although Said discusses plays, prose, films, and poems, his meditations always return to music. Music is the art most sensitive to lateness, because although it is a temporal form it rarely uses historically indexical material: it is not a representational art as are texts and images but a highly structural art capable of registering the finest gradations of discontinuity and fragmentation...