“Korkunç yakınlık:” Williams’ın şiir anlayışında modernist yıkım ve tekrar yaratma

Öz

William Carlos Williams’ın şiir anlayışı, belki de Ezra Pound’un “Sil baştan (Make it new)” düsturu doğrultusunda, yıkım ve yeniden yaratma, iniş ve yeniden ortaya çıkış, yalıtılmışlık ve temas diyalektiğinden beslenir. Bu şiir anlayışı doktor-şairin, doğa ve toplumun işleyişi konusundaki görüşlerinin de bir yansımasıdır. Başlı başına her “şey”, şairin yalıtılmış ama olumlayıcı hayalgücü ile temas ettiğinde, alışılagelmiş ve hissi çağrışımlarından sıyrılarak, capcanlı ve hakiki varlığıyla yeniden meydana çıkmalıdır. Ancak her “şey”, her şiir nesnesi—nesneler, sözcükler, toplumsal varlıklar, bireyler—bu yıkım ve yeniden yaratılış dinamiğinde aynı ölçüde yer alabilir mi? Bir yandan, şairin hümanizması merak ve tensel bir büyülenmişlikle birleşir ve insanı toplumsal yapıların yıkımından usulca kurtararak yeniden doğuşa ulaştırır. Öte yandan, yakın ilişkideki kadın figürünü işleyen şiirlerinde şairin yıkıcılığı artmaktadır, zira bu kadın toplumsal yapıları şairin hayalgücüne geri sevk etmekte, onun yaratıcı sükunetini bozmakta ve kendisi de imkansız bir şiir nesnesi haline gelmektedir. Edebiyat eleştirmenlerinin genelde gözden kaçırdığı, mesafeli kadın figüründen ziyade, yakın ilişkideki kadın figürünün Williams’da acımasız bir şair-tanrıyı ortaya çıkardığıdır. Hiç bitmeyen bu yeniden yaratma projesinde şair, yakın ilişkideki kadını şeyleştirerek fiziksel parçalarına ayırır. Yakınlık kurarken ve yakınlığı şiirleştirirken ortaya çıkan yıkıcılığına ikilemli bir yaklaşım sergilemekte, hem hayıflanmakta, hem de bir ölçüde övünmektedir. Williams’ın şiirlerinde gördüğümüz yakın ilişkideki kadın, modernist estetikte ‘yıkıp yeniden yaratma’ ile neyi kastettiğimiz sorusunu gündeme getirir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Williams Carlos Williams
• modernist şiir
• kadının temsili
• yakınlık

“Terrible intimacy:” Modernist destruction and recreation in Williams’s poetics

Abstract

Perhaps in keeping with Ezra Pound’s dictum, “Make it new,” the modernist poetics of William Carlos Williams thrives on the dialectics of destruction and recreation, descent and reemergence, isolation and contact—a poetics that reflects the doctor-poet’s views on natural and social processes. Stripped of conventional and sentimental associations in contact with the poet’s isolated but sympathetic imagination, each particular thing must reemerge in its vivid and authentic presence. But are all “things,” all objects of poetry, on equal footing in the dynamics of poetic destruction and recreation—objects, words, social entities, individuals? On the one hand, the poet’s humanism combines with curiosity and sensual fascination as he gently delivers the human subject from obliterated social constructs, in rebirth. On the other, he inclines more toward destruction in his treatment of the “intimate” woman, who somehow channels social constructs back into his imagination, thereby threatening his creative equanimity and becoming an impossible poetic object herself. Often missed in literary criticism is the fact that it is the figure of the intimate woman—rather than the distant woman—that brings out the ruthless poet-god in Williams. Disintegrating the intimate woman into a thingly physicality in an unfulfilled and ambivalent project of remaking, the poet in fact both celebrates and regrets his destructiveness in intimacy and its poeticization. The intimate woman in Williams’s poems problematizes what we mean when we talk about “destruction and recreation” in modernist aesthetics.

Keywords

• Williams Carlos Williams
• modernist poetics
• representation of women
• intimacy

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