The author of the article focuses on the selected short lyrics by William Carlos Williams and simultaneously draws readers attention the tension, existing in the American modernist poetry, between a modernist postulate of the autonomy of an aesthetic object and the pursuit-resulting from the tradition of American pragmatism-to treat this object as an intelligent commentary to customary activities in the environment of human communities. The author’s point of departure is the thesis by Marjorie Perloff. It claims that for modernist writing absolutely “pivotal” is the separation of the realities of the work from the event taking place in real life. Next, he demonstrates why this division cannot be maintained by such poets as Williams and Stevens. This inability is the result of a complex, non-European, pragmatistic admixture feeding the poetics of both poets. The main focus in the article, however, is placed on Williams.
Stevens’s poems grant a curious status to material reality. Famously abstract, they refuse to abandon the realm of the material. Rather, “material reality” is inseparable from “abstract” concepts. Stevens’s position is pragmatist: the status and significance of material objects is founded by the entirely human linguistic/mental activity, which is also an interpretive activity. The poem is a site of initiating this activity. As such, Stevens’s poetics remains in opposition to other aesthetic positions: the linguistic idealism of Mallarmé, the metaphysical realism of Miłosz and Herbert, and the material realism of Ponge and American “objectivists”. While the metaphysical positions tend to overcome the material, the realistic poets will reify it by “taking the side of things”. Stevens’s poetic pragmatism sees no lure in the extra-material, while also refusing to see matter as meaningful in itself, beyond the human interpretive activity.
The essay attends to a paradox found in some crucial poetic efforts by Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. In some of their most important poetic works Stevens and Ashbery take on the task of positioning the poem toward the plurality of reality, the plurality that is concentrated in the phenomenon of change. As they do so, they invariably encounter a tension within the poem itself: as the poem merges with the flow of changes in the external world-the physical changes in time and space-it also calls up permanent forms of imaginative purposive capability of attending to change, envisioning it, or, indeed, of installing it. These forms must be more permanent than it is postulated by some theories of the poetics of transitiveness, which are polemically discussed in the text. The tension between the element of change and permanence is what allows the poems of Stevens and Ashbery-each poet finding his own aesthetic and epistemic strategy-to put the poem forward not as an external “representation” of change, but as the very source of the abundant possibilities of producing world descriptions in which the notion of change may be meaningful. Such positioning of the poem is what I am calling “the poetics of plenitude.” This poetic strategy makes the poem an aesthetic counterpart to the epistemic action of developing an inquiry, and I am building a definition of this term by reference to the classical pragmatist theory of inquiry. This move is related to my treating Stevens and Ashbery as the poets belonging to the Emersonian-pragmatist intellectual and aesthetic tradition. The paradoxes of change and permanence discussed in the text are treated as inherent in this tradition.
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This essay compares the poetic philosophies of Wallace Stevens and Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, Stevens’s first Polish translator. In the first part, I trace a deep affinity in the way both poets engage with the Nietzschean-Dionysiac element in language. The Nietzschean dynamism creates a rich conceptual background against which it is possible to understand the process of poetic language merging with nothingness. Both Stevens’s and Rymkiewicz’s early poems are reactions to such conceptual environment: Stevens’s Harmonium and Rymkiewicz’s Co to jest drozd present a way of engaging with nothingness in which the absence of logos becomes a source of the poems’ figurative power. As they attain this power, the poems arrive at a form of self-consciousness. I trace this affinity through the deconstructive figure of catachresis, as it has been applied to Stevens by his deconstructive critic J. Hillis Miller. In the second part, I change the method. Here, I show how the later poetries of Stevens and Rymkiewicz can be approached by replacing Miller’s deconstructive catachresis, with Harold Bloom’s metalepsis. This Bloomian reading allows me to identify a vital difference between the later phases in the two poets. Discussing Stevens’s “Auroras of Autumn” next to Rymkiewicz’s Do widzenia Gawrony, I show how Rymkiewicz diverts sharply from his American Romantic/Modernist counterpart in the way his poetry reads Nietzsche’s trope of the eternal recurrence of the same. For Stevens, this concept is realized in the form of metalepsis, which, as Bloom shows, is a figure allowing the poem to retain its figurative capability while steering its course away from any notion of essence or necessity. In contrast, for Rymkiewicz, the eternal recurrence of the same paves way to an essentialist understanding, and affirmation, of human history as eternal cycle of creation-destruction, a cycle presided over by a mixture of pain, cruelty, and ecstasy. Consequently, I argue that while Stevens’s late poetry remains faithful to figurativeness as the poem’s self-reliance – that is, the poem’s refusal to join forces with any sort of concept or process conceived of as independent from the poem’s re-descriptive capability – Rymkiewicz’s late poems find their visionary power in precisely such joining of forces.
The text traces the author’s own theoretical inquiries about the function of the poem as an aesthetic object functioning in contemporary environments, fromthe earlier concept of “a poem as a speaking organism” to the contemporary slightly modified version of this idea. The modification corresponds with the remarks made by Andrzej Sosnowski who perceives contemporary poetry as the source of a negative and impenetrable performance permanently separated from the fallen world of the society. Moving from the theory of the poem as the „speaking organism” and discussing selected poems by American poets as well as his own, the author tries to develop such a concept which would enable him to protect the critical autonomy of poetry placed within the material and “contaminated” (Sosnowski’s notion) world. This new concept of the poem departs from the theory of an acute material outline and favours the critical re-conceptualizing processes which, according to the author, should occur in the contemporary poem. Such a poem is named by the author “a formal multiply field.”
In this interview, Kacper Bartczak, professor at the University of Łódź, Americanist, poet, and translator, talks about creative self-awareness in the broader context of versification studies. The question of meta-reflexivity and its role in the works of literary scholars and poets is discussed first. More specific questions follow, including the conceptualization of the line in poetry and research, the role of the line in organic poetry and translation. Pragmatism (James, Dewey, Rorty, Shusterman, Nehamas), so important for Bartczak, and the role it plays in creative self-awareness is also discussed. Bartczak also comments on American literary theory and twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon poets (Coleridge, Stevens, Williams, Olson, O’Hara, Gizzi, Armantrout).
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Wywiad dotyczy samoświadomości twórczej oraz jej odniesienia do kategorii wersologicznych. Rozmówcą jest Kacper Bartczak – profesor Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, amerykanista, poeta i tłumacz. Rozmowa koncentruje się najpierw na problemie metarefleksyjności badaczy literatury i poetów, by następnie przejść do kwestii szczegółowych; kolejno omówione zostają zagadnienia takie jak konceptualizacja wersu w optyce poetyckiej i badawczej, rola wersu w wierszu organicznym czy przekład wersu. Wypowiedzi stanowią też próbę zarysowania kluczowej dla rozmówcy tradycji pragmatystycznej (James, Dewey, Rorty, Shusterman, Nehamas) i jej roli dla twórczej samoświadomości. Amerykańska linia namysłu teoretycznego jest tu wytyczona w odwołaniu się do poglądów licznych dwudziestowiecznych poetów anglosaskich (Coleridge, Stevens, Williams, Olson, O’Hara, Gizzi, Armantrout).
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