Introduction: The New Williams

We entitled this collection “The New Williams” because we thought it would be particularly fruitful to bring new interpretations of Williams into context with one another, forcing them to fight, bicker, and challenge each other in order to say something meaningful about Williams’s life and literary works. And since the William Carlos Williams Review is the journal that drives the field of Williams-Studies, the premise of the collection sought to gather the best new work on Williams’s poetry, fiction, drama, and critical writing. This special issue, therefore, returns to some of the major themes in the history of criticism on Williams’s work—his Spanish heritage, his frustration with European culture, his complicated (putting it mildly) views on women, sex, and romance, and his prosody—while also introducing new discourses—trans- and post-humanism, object studies, animal studies, metahistory—to the field. Although the topics and our contributors’ approaches to them are disparate, in some cases at odds with each other, the issue as a whole represents the continued relevance of Williams’s work to the field of U.S. and transnational modernism. However, we also wish to focus in this introduction on some of the problems that emerge from efforts to define new fields, focusing specifically on contemporary explorations of modernism and expansionary readings of Williams.

“The avant-garde has become petrified, enamored by its own past, and therefore forever insular and forever looking backwards. Fuck the avant-garde. We [poets of color] must hew our own path.”¹ Cathy Park Hong ends her essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” with an appropriation of NWA’s anthem, “Fuck tha Police.” The “poets and schools whom I identify as avant-garde,” Hong clarifies, “will be those who have been institutionalized as such, and I’ll include upstarts who have trumpeted themselves as the vanguard’s second coming, such as the Conceptual poets.” For Hong, the avantgarde camp consists of literary modernists (writing during the first half of the twentieth century), the Language poets (starting in the seventies), and the Conceptual poets (consecrated by Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin’s 2011 anthology of Conceptual writing entitled Against Expression). So like the poets and schools that have come before them, Hong rhetorically argues,

[e]ven today, its [the avant-garde’s] most vocal practitioners cling to moldering Eurocentric practices. Even today, avant-garde’s most vocal, self-aggrandizing stars continue to be white and even today these stars like Kenneth Goldsmith spout the expired snake oil that poetry should be “against expression” and “post-identity.”

By drawing connections between “Eurocentric practices” and Kenneth Goldsmith’s “post-identity” perspective, Hong links the new school of Conceptual poetry (ConPo) with the oppressive forces of the state (like the police, or as some on Chicago streets colloquially say, the “Po-Po”). She also produces—perhaps unintentionally—a slant rhyme: ConPo (and the now more famous “GringPo,” the derisive term a group calling itself the Mongrel Coalition has given ConPo to emphasize the school’s white, or “gringo,” poetry) can’t help but evoke CointelPro—the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s clandestine operation that infiltrated and discredited domestic political Civil Rights organizations.

Indeed Hong herself suggests that the (predominately white) avant-garde tradition functions precisely to cancel out the voices of the marginalized and oppressed. “To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition. From its early 20th century inception to some of its current strains, American avant-garde poetry has been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets” of color from past literary movements. On Hong’s account, then, the avant-garde is an institution that polices its own borders to exclude non-white poets. From this vantage, the cohort of poets and critics she indicts by name—those like Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff, identified with the legacies of Language and so-called “post-langpo” practices, and most recently with conceptual writing practices—begin to look a lot less like “avant-garde” artists and scholars, and more like celebrities of ivory tower institutions, keeping the...