The Image Factory

This poem is, first of all, about work. Or more specifically, it is about people during their lunch break at work, that small return to the self, that quiet in the middle of the workday’s momentum:

Now they are restingin the fleckless lightseparately in unison

like the sacksof sifted stone stackedregularly by twos

about the flat roofready after lunchto be opened and strewn

As in all of William Carlos Williams’s poems, the insistence on “Now,” on the poise of the present moment, seems a necessary corollary of his other insistence on no ideas but in things. Then there are the stanzas’ things, encompassed by a seeing that lightly roves and keenly calculates at the same time, noting weights and measures, lights and darks, the separate-but-together array of phenomena occupying one visual field: the unspecified “they” against the solidity of the stone-filled sacks, the passivity of “resting” and “stacked” pivoting towards the energy of “opened and strewn,” the clear light and the flat roof. These first stanzas of the poem are about time, readiness, imminence. They are also about the poet’s sonic wit, found in the iambic pentameter line broken into the poem’s first two lines, and in the almost heavy-handed alliteration of “sacks / of sifted stone stacked.” And they are about the angularity of the poet’s seeing, which in the next three stanzas arrives at a point of terrifying focus:

The copper in eightfoot strips has beenbeaten lengthwise

down the center at rightangles and lies readyto edge the coping

One still chewingpicks up a copper stripand runs his eye along it

Reading “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” early in my life as a poet, I was still deep under the impression that poems needed a proper subject. More often than not, that subject was ultimately the poet him- or herself. In a tacit but clear hierarchy that I intuited in the two or so years I had been reading poetry, the things in a poem served the poet’s subjectivity. Narratives, landscapes, images: everything was meant to illustrate a feeling or an idea of the poet’s. If I had seen workmen in a poem before, they were like the workmen in Whitman’s poems, who were attached to an elevated notion about labor or fellowship or strength. And if I had seen the gritty materiality of Williams’s poem in other poems, it was always in the light of a poet’s interiority: Eliot’s wry melancholy, Rich’s fierce desire. Poem and self were inextricably involved. As Stevens had put it, “Things seen are things as seen.” That dynamic, given the undergraduate’s emotional chaos I was in, was what drew me to poetry in the first place. Poetry seemed to make a virtue of the mess within the mind, within the self.

Williams troubled that first understanding about the primacy of the self in poems. In “Fine Work” and in other Williams poems, I encountered things that were things, and were valuable as subjects in themselves. His poems’ things were decidedly ordinary, and were unlikely items to be found in poems precisely because of their ordinariness. The shards of glass behind a building, the weeds by the road, the sacks at a worksite: these images had a lucidity unencumbered by subjectivity or by heavy-handed meaning. The things were things. And if the self and its emotions appeared in these poems at all, the nature of their manifestation was too subtle for me to register during those early encounters with Williams’s poems. Later, I would of course realize that his poems were as saturated with self as any other poet’s. From the first word of any poem—“Now,” for instance—the poet’s presence was present. But it was crucial for me to have gotten those initial lessons from Williams’s work: that the world, the things around me, had a vivacity that was its own subject; that my poems could be invested with a purpose that went beyond the enactments of selfhood.

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