learning to love the slop
NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS, william carlos williams, tampa
I grew up, like a lot of Americans, around slop. There were these super-trendy Chinese slippers I’d bought in six different colors from Jamaica Avenue, and the mesh that covered the top third of my feet would deform into hard plastic if they were left out in the sun for too long. A pair of lime dangly earrings that hung over my shoulders once started to drip a trail of beads behind me after a single wear. The first time I went clubbing, my friend and I took a trip to the fabled Mystique Boutique in Soho and bought dresses that looked good when we first put them on, but by the end of the night were somehow stretched baggy and unflattering. The beautiful and long-lasting was reserved for objects from India, hand-woven saris, intricate gold jewelry that had been passed down, carefully, between generations. But in the U.S.? We were consumers of slop. Objects that came out of nowhere.
And even though I’ve grown up to love good fabric and cuts, there is some part of me, deep down and childish, that sometimes falls back into this tendency, to think of objects as a long, easily replaceable stream of things that do their job for a little bit before they retire. Anything beautiful is in nature and in the mind. Objects are landfill.
Two weeks ago, I went to Tampa, because my parents, like all true borough New Yorkers, have turned their retirement gaze southwards to the Floridian coasts of stable weather and lower taxes. I went with two friend-cousins who I really love. We’ve grown up together and their parents are like my own, and there is something really special about our friendship, because time spent together feels like it is about something much larger than just us three.
We went to Fort de Soto on a Saturday morning, a key about the size of my thumb’s nail on Google Maps. It has powdery-soft white sand and the water is so beautiful and clear, minnowing with little fish and gentle waves and bottlenose dolphins that bellyflop right next to you, and so different from the Atlantic waters that slap you silly, that I almost declared myself a beach person.
Then emerged the question of the beach read. I had been reading William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, a strange, nearly incoherent, lucidly brilliant five book set of poems, newspaper clippings, dialogues that take place in Paterson, New Jersey, all floating around the massive, powerful Passaic Falls.
Williams has the two poems that everyone knows, about the plums and ice box, and the red wheel barrow, and I’d grown up seeing the two on the walls of Grand Central, right before you go downwards into the LIRR.
But I hadn’t read Paterson, which is very long and was met with celebratory and confused reception at the time, and was Williams’ attempt to reject how other poets, namely T.S. Eliot, relied on abstractions when describing reality. Williams’ big thing was NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS. Meaning that philosophy could best be found in the gleam of a red wheelbarrow, rather than in some lofty, far-away idea gleaned in a person’s mind.
For Paterson, those objects were the Passaic Falls, into which people dive and sometimes lose their lives, or make love underneath its small rocky perch. They were those things that had been long-promised to be manufactured in the town, and taken away: “cotton, cassimeres, wall papers, books, felt and straw hats, shoes, carriages, poetry, bicks, pots, pans and buttons needed in the United States.” They were the trash and dead fish and scum that float on the river, the newspaper clippings that told stories of women possessed and poor men killing their babies because they couldn’t afford to have them. A white hop-clover grips sand in its claws; and on that farm, a man breaks his wife’s cancerous jaw, because she can not work with him in the field. Fire ravages a tin roof and lifts it like a skirt. Materials are found at the base of a well. At 65 feet, red sandstone. At 1,370 feet, sandy rock under quicksand.
Paterson seems to have been quite radical at the time it was written. Romantic, lofty poems were still the norm, and Williams chose objects that were not beautiful or special—some were, like the thundering, massive falls. Others weren’t, like the film of oil that industry had left in it.
This was important to write working-class Paterson. Williams was openly critical of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, which had transformed the poetry world when it arrived a few years before. Williams found the poem inherently pessimistic, too willing to look backwards to rejuvenate culture and unwilling to imagine that there could be something generative in the slop of modernity. American poetry, he said, must shatter the violence and find something anew. For that reason, Paterson never lifts off into a lofty place. The objects speak for themselves.
I found that I had to read Paterson aloud to really get it, and that it was very different from most of the writing I’ve read—and loved—these days. I’m thinking Teju Cole, N.K. Jemisin, or Joseph O’ Neill. They write the experience of cities as subjective and personal to a character, which makes sense in a globalized world. There isn’t as much shared meaning in objects.
Williams, however, wrote from the gurgling voice of the falls, which pop up anywhere, speaking somewhat for the whole populace; sometimes, in a hospital, other times, in the outskirts, sometimes joyous, oftentimes violent; more like a documentary of the city, still very personal, still very intimate. The objects act as shared experiences; everyone in Paterson is looking at the falls, the film of oil that coats the river. Paterson is united by its objects, the slop that constitutes a shared experience.
Williams’ influence feels enormous to me. Sometimes, when you first start writing fiction and you’re an outsider, you read a lot of craft books so you don’t feel stupid or make obvious mistakes. I mean, this is what I did. And I’d encounter lessons like: Describe the objects that might exist in your fictional world, tell me what objects your character might surround themselves with. It will ground your work and give it more sensory details.
So I’d write objects, big-bellied steel pots and Timberlands. But it felt like I was just checking craft choices off a list or listing stereotypes about a place. Worse, I’d sometimes feel the need to explain why these objects mattered to my story, or to lift off the object mid-sentence into somewhere abstract and philosophical. No object seemed to carry an idea on its own.
Part of it was probably that numb side of me that sees objects as slop, and believes the real stuff is in the world of lofty ideas and bigger-than-me nature. But there is the flip side, which is that “craft” can sometimes be reduced to a set of computational tricks to help you write the most pleasurable book possible. Language is severed from any literary traditions. Syntax is in service of aesthetics. Meaning is superfluous.
But there are whole ideas in an object that I don’t need to explain. My air fryer is taking up too much space on my apartment counter. You know what I mean.
this was so lovely to wake up to. thanks
making me think about thing (object) vs idea (object as slop) and also now I really wanna re-read WCW. he so good. thanks for this!