“To Discover ‘The Supreme Importance of [ . . . ] nameless spectacle[s]”: Defamiliarizing the Local as a Process of Knowing in William Carlos Williams’s Poetry

There is hardly any dissension among critics that the local, and the American locale in particular, played an important role in the poetics of William Carlos Williams. However, to the extent that the image of Williams as a poet “exclusively” concerned with his “American locale” persists, the question arises what is being lost by reducing Williams’s work thus. One way to begin to delineate the role of the local in Williams’s poetics is to consider a cluster of terms that occur frequently in his writing, and of which the locale forms part: contact, local, locality, America in all its inflections, place, and the universal or universality. All of these terms suffuse Williams’s essays and prose, and considered together, they reach from the material, concrete existence of a particular locality to an ontology of place—the noun “locale,” often found in Williams criticism, captures this combination of familiarity and the materiality of place.¹ Moreover, spatial specifications have a temporal correlative in Williams’s poetics: the present, which Williams called “that eternal moment in which we alone live” (I 89). Combined, these spatio-temporal specifications form the coordinates of the here and now, which in turn constitutes the core of Williams’s conception of knowledge as process, first addressed in “Spring and All” and In the American Grain, and further articulated in The Embodiment of Knowledge and throughout his essays and prose. The coordinates of the here and now define the location from which the self seeks to know, the self who is, for Williams, the agent in the dynamic process of knowledge rather than a passive recipient of preexisting data. Without locality no process of knowing is possible, since the process always begins in the location of the self. In reading Williams’s poetry through the lens of his conception of knowledge, it becomes evident that the locale, figuring largely in his poetry, is not an end in itself, but a means to express the open-endedness of the process of knowledge.

Williams valued the exchange of knowledge, and actually regarded the exchange between different practices as the only way to validate knowledge, as suggested in his statement, “The adductions of each man are knowledge balanced by knowledge in every other man, having actuality by that in other men and equal (tho’ dissimilar) knowledge” (EK 79). Given the dialogic orientation of his conception, it seems suitable to study his work in relation to the work of others who share similar concerns, a point that Marie-Christine Leps has made about Marc Angenot’s equally dialogic work on social discourse. She discusses Angenot in the context of the work of Bakhtin and Foucault, and she explains, “Angenot’s work literally demands to be studied in relation to other correlated practices—and it would be theoretically inconsistent to consider it in vacuo” (263). Leps’s remark implies a more general insight, namely, that dialogically oriented theories inherently presume and transcend their own limitations, since they conceptually anticipate and accept complementary or corrective contributions by others. These theories are therefore methodologically open-ended conceptions, not closed systems of thought. With regards to Williams’s work, contemporary debates about traditional and emergent epistemologies within the study of Native American literature and related disciplines form such a set of correlated practices. Studies in Native American literature share a number of Williams’s thematic concerns, among them that dualistic thinking in dichotomies such as self and other, mind and body, culture and nature, when these become the norm, lead to stasis, and, therefore, death. The often literal reality of this insight is succinctly expressed in Williams’s reflections about encounters between early Puritan settlers and Native Americans collected in his volume In the American Grain. Also shared are inquiries about possible sources of ethics in a non-foundational system of thought without first principles. Critics such as David L. Moore, James Clifford, and Arnold Krupat find expressed in the work of Native American writers like Louis Owens, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth Underhill...