Reflections on the poetry of William Carlos Williams...

Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Restorative Nature of Poetry

In my last post, I discussed Williams’ suggestion in The Embodiment of Knowledge that “Nature’s final command is: Do not waste.” Upon reading this chapter, entitled “Waste and Use,” I began to realize that part of Williams’ aim might have been to focus on the restorative nature of poetry. Not only can a well-written poem bring restoration to one’s soul—either through reading it or writing it—but it can also bring restoration to the items or concepts that become the subject of the poem.



For Williams, there is no doubt that writing poetry was an escape and a place of restoration after a long day of practicing medicine. He describes in much of his prose such restoration. For Williams, writing was a way to release all the conversations, sights, and other musings that were rolling around in his head after a long day treating patients. He speaks of the need for this ritual cleansing before he could go to bed. In another entry in The Embodiment of Knowledge, Williams talks about a writer who “writes, attempting to strike straight to the core of his inner self, by words…which have been used time without end by other men for the same purpose, words worn smooth, greasy with the thumbing and fingering of others. For him they must be fresh too, fresh as anything he knows—as fresh as morning light, repeated every day the year around” (105). Here, as in the final chapter, readers see the idea of not allowing anything to waste—even something for which there doesn’t appear to be further use.

Let’s turn to a piece of his poetry to see how this works.

In “The Loving Dexterity,” readers are able to see Williams restore beauty to something “broken,” yet still capable of being enjoyed if and when action is taken to perform restoration. The word “dexterity” in the title alone can take on multiple meanings. In one way, the dexterity can refer to the woman’s action in the poem:



Primary importance is placed on “The flower / fallen.” Readers are introduced in the first line to something broken, fallen. As she looks at it “where it lay/ a pink petal / intact,” readers also see it and are able to realize through Williams’ diction that the beauty of the flower—perfectly pink, the blossom intact—still has the capability of being appreciated. The next line is one important word: “deftly.” This word implies dexterity, but also a skillful cleverness that allows her to see past a broken, fallen flower. She “deftly/placed it/ on its stem/again.” Here, the word “again” insinuates that she has successfully restored the beauty of the flower by repositioning it where it once was. In some ways, she has performed surgery—a skill requiring finite dexterity—on the broken flower.


In another way, Williams performs with dexterity as a poet—making this title work on a second level. As a doctor, Williams must have had some appreciation for the skills of surgery. At its core, the practice of medicine is all about the restorative. It is this same dexterity of thinking and of working with “words worn smooth, greasy with the thumbing and fingering of others” that allows Williams to succeed as a poet. Even the structure of the poem seems to scatter fragments of complete ideas around, until at the end, the flower is restored into a single phrase in a single stanza—“on/its stem/again.” The organization of stanzas wherein the last line of one stanza actually belongs to the complete thought of the next stanza—as in “she saw it / where/it lay”—forces readers to perform their own surgery of sorts (as I did in the above picture) to determine which parts (separated stanzas) actually belong together. In this way, readers are able to feel the restorative power of the woman’s action.


In all, the lesson to learn from Williams is that poetry has the capability to restore the reader, the subject, and words themselves.

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