unwary cows in wheelbarrows

I’ve been reading a lot of William Carlos Williams’ poetry lately. So it was a happy surprise at the bookstore last week when I discovered Wendell Berry’s The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford. I’ve only thumbed through it a bit, and noticed this passage last night:

In his introduction to The Wedge of 1944, in contradiction of one of my own principles and much to my dislike, Williams said, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” In the years between 1944 and now, that metaphor of the machine has grown upon us until it has ceased to be a metaphor and has become an equation or an identity, so that organisms, including ourselves and our minds and the world itself, are now conventionally spoken of as machines, and this has helped to make us cold-hearted and destructive. But Williams’ explanation of his metaphor is perfectly acceptable to me: He meant, as he went on to say, that a poem, like a machine, should have no redundant parts. It should not be overloaded. He is speaking practically. A robin does not need four feet or a long bushy tail. You can’t transport a cow in a wheelbarrow. A line, a sentence, or a poem can have its back broken by too many details or too many words. There is pleasure, and there is beauty too, in any work accomplished with an exacting sense of enough.

Here, for example, is “The Term”:

A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length

and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the

wind slowly over
and over in
the street as

a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to

the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling

with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.

It is easy to see how an unwary young imitator could mistake this for free verse, simple and easy. It certainly is not pretentious. Nobody could call it magnificent. But if we are not an unwary young imitator, we begin our second thoughts about the poem when we feel its considerable power. Its power comes from its overturning of expectations. At first we may think we are reading a poem that is merely descriptive or “imagist.” By the end of the fourth stanza, we may suspect that the poem is developing a metaphor. But the metaphor, “the length / and apparent bulk / of a man,” turns out to be a sort of reverse simile: “Unlike / a man it rose / again…” It becomes a poem about the finality with which a man can be crushed by a machine. Quietly, without breaking stride, the poem assumes poignance and gravity dramatically disproportionate to its occasion.

The occasion of this poem is small, without any significance that is immediately apparent. It is odd, too. I suppose this is an instance of the “anti-poetic.” But the image of the blowing paper does not shock us by being anti-poetic. It shocks us by becoming suddenly poetic— and a lot more poetic than we expected. What the unwary imitator needs to see is that the poem’s sudden access of power is made possible by its strict economy, which may register on our senses at first merely as unpretentiousness. But not a word is wasted. Excess at any point would have spoiled everything.