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

Yıl 2020, Sayı: Ö7, 588 - 609, 21.10.2020

Burcu Gürsel

https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.808780

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

Öz

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.

Anahtar Kelimeler

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

Kaynakça

• Ahearn, B. (1994). William Carlos Williams and alterity. Cambridge University Press.
• Altieri, C. (1979). Presence and reference in a literary text: The example of Williams’ “This is just to say.” Critical Inquiry, 5(3), 489-510.
• Altieri, C. (1981). Act and quality: A theory of literary meaning and humanistic understanding. University of Massachusetts Press.
• Altieri, C. (2006). The art of twentieth-century American poetry: Modernism and after. Blackwell Publishing.
• Bertonneau, T. F. (1995). The sign of knowledge in our time: Violence, man, and language in Paterson, book 1 (an anthropoetics). William Carlos Williams Review, 21(1), 33-51.
• Bremen, B. A. (1993). William Carlos Williams and the diagnostics of culture. Oxford University Press.
• Carlson, C. (2006). Compelling objects: Form and emotion in Williams’s lyric poetry. William Carlos Williams Review, 26(1), 27-50.
• Crawford, T. H. (1993). Modernism, medicine, and William Carlos Williams. University of Oklahoma Press.
• Diggory, T. (1991). William Carlos Williams and the ethics of painting. Princeton University Press.
• Driscoll, K. (1987). William Carlos Williams and the maternal muse. UMI Research Press.
• Driscoll, K. (2016). Williams and women. In C. MacGowan (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to William Carlos Williams. (pp. 143-160). Cambridge University Press.
• Duffey, B. (1986). A poetry of presence: The writing of William Carlos Williams. University of Wisconsin Press.
• Duplessis, R. B. & P. Quartermain. (Eds.). (1999). The Objectivist nexus: Essyas in cultural poetics. University of Alabama Press.
• Eby, C. (1996) ‘The ogre’ and ‘The beautiful thing:’ Voyeurism, exhibitionism, and the image of ‘woman’ in the poetry of William Carlos Williams. William Carlos Williams Review, 22(2), 29-45.
• Fisher-Wirth, A. (1996). The allocations of desire: ‘This is just to say’ and Flossie Williams’ ‘Reply.’ William Carlos Williams Review, 22(2), 47-56.
• Halter, P. (1994). The revolution in the visual arts and the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge University Press.
• Halter, P. (2016). Williams and the visual arts. In C. MacGowan (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to William Carlos Williams. (pp. 37-52). Cambridge University Press.
• Kinnahan, L. (1994a). History and the textual process: ‘To discover woman’ in Williams’ prose and early poetry. William Carlos Williams Review, 20(2), 30-51.
• Kinnahan, L. (1994b). Poetics of the feminine: Authority and Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denis Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser. Cambridge University Press.
• Markos, D. (1994). Ideas in things: The poems of William Carlos Williams. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
• Marling, W. (1982). William Carlos Williams and the painters, 1909-1923. Ohio University Press.
• Miller, J. H. (1965). Poets of reality: Six twentieth-century writers. Harvard University Press.
• Miller, J. H. (1970). Williams’ “Spring and All” and the progress of poetry. Daedalus, 99(2), 405-434.
• Perloff, M. (1993). The fallen leaf and the stain of love: The displacement of desire in Williams’ early love poetry. In C. Giorcelli & M. Stefanelli (Eds.), The rhetoric of love in the collected poems of William Carlos Williams. (pp. 189-212). Edizioni Associate.
• Perloff, M. (1999). The poetics of indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to Cage. (c. 1981). Northwestern University Press.
• Prin, A. E. (pseudonym: Kiki de Montparnasse). (1929). Les souvenirs de Kiki. H. Boca.
• Rabaté, J-M. (2007). 1913: The cradle of Modernism. Blackwell Publishing..................
• Ricciardi, C. (1993). Between sacred and profane: Rain as a figure of love. In C. Giorcelli & M. Stefanelli (Eds.), The rhetoric of love in the collected poems of William Carlos Williams. (pp. 131-152). Edizioni Associate.
• Riddel, J. (1991). The inverted bell: modernism and the counterpoetics of William Carolos Williams. Lousiana State University Press (1974).
• Riddel, J. (1993). Cupid’s arrow—‘Asphodel . . .’ and the dynamics of language. In C. Giorcelli & M. Stefanelli (Eds.), The rhetoric of love in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. (pp. 41-70). Edizioni Associate.
• Rodgers, A. T. (1987). Virgin and whore: The image of women in the poetry of William Carlos Williams. McFarland.
• Whitaker, T. R. (1989). William Carlos Williams. Twayne Publishers...................
• Williams, W. C. (1951). The autobiography of William Carlos Williams. Random House.
• Williams, W. C. (1954). Selected essays of William Carlos Williams. Random House.
• Williams, W. C. (1958). I wanted to write a poem. Beacon Press....................
• Williams, W. C. (1970). Imaginations. New Directions................................
• Williams, W. C. (1982). Yes, Mrs. Williams: a personal record of my mother. New Directions................
• Williams, W. C. (1991). The collected poems of William Carlos Williams (Vol. 1 and 2). (C. MacGowan & A. W. Litz, Eds.). New Directions.
• Wrede, T. (2005). A new beginning: William Carlos Williams's Cubist technique in Spring and All. Interdisciplinary Humanities, 22(2), 35-52.