Everybody's a critic

Edward Hopper Truro Kitchen

Years ago, when the internet was young, a debate raged in a particular corner of it over the following, by William Carlos Williams:

This is just to say

I have eaten 

the plums 

that were 

in the icebox 

and which 

you were probably 

saving 

for breakfast 

Forgive me 

they were delicious 

so sweet 

and so cold.

In an online chat, GW, a feature writer for a major newspaper, in an act of deliberate provocation for the benefit of the conversation, asserted offhand that it was not a poem.  It's only one of my favorite poems.  But let's take a peek at the crux of his argument: 

I once heard of an intelligence test with this essay question, asking the test taker to explain, with examples, this statement:  "If you are too openminded, your brains might fall out."  It was an interesting test of people's ability to understand the metaphorical.   Dummies tried to literally explain how openmindedness might result in car accidents in which brain material might... etc.   The smarter the person, the more complex and nuanced the answer.   [A chat participant's] statement [that poetry is in the eyes of the beholder] reminds me of this question.  All things are not open to debate.    "I love you" is not a poem in any context.    This, by Yeats, is a poem in any context: [quotes For Anne Gregory]

I am willing to accept that poems don't have to rhyme.  I am willing to accept that a refrigerator warrantee, placed in a highly ironic context, might be a poem.  (I'm waiting for one, but I can see it.)  But some things you have to read, and say no, or the word "poem" has no meaning at all. That little bit of refrigerator-message nonsense by William Carlos Williams ain't no poem.  

Participants of the chat gamely attempted impromptu rebuttals which the feature writer dismissed out of hand with a determined, self-satisfied obtuseness.  While his assertion was not in that category of opinion or argument that is meant to stand up to scrutiny for any length of time, I don't know (or care) whether he ever came around.  What difference does it make?  If the feature writer managed to win the debate, would bar bets about the taxonomy of the piece waged at taverns across the Anglophone world since its appearance be settled?  Would the heirs of the publishers at Objectivist Press be entitled to restitution from Williams' estate for whatever he was paid for the publication of the 1934 collection in which the poem first appeared?  Would the wall etched with it by Typographer Lucas de Groot at The Hague* need to be razed?  

GW is of course entitled to his opinion-- though his defense of it is poor, rife with obfuscation and misdirection. His preference to authenticate the poetry of Yeats's lovely work over Williams' is of course a diversion, not an argument, and the point he wants to make about literalism is perilously close to a backfire.  Speaking not as an authority, but rather as just some schlub on the internet, I would say that GW's position-- which I can't help but see as an example of the sort of easy posturing that career mouthpieces of the elite like to do from time to time for the benefit of the rubes and contrariness merely for the purpose of incitement and clicks-- is an evasion of one of the questions at the heart of Williams' piece: not "Is it a poem?" but "How is it a poem?"  This is why he does not win the debate.  

"Poems don't have to rhyme" he says.  This poem doesn't merely not rhyme, it has no structure other than the most straightforward English grammar and how it appears on the page.  There is no meter.  The language is plain.  There are no similes or feats of language. It has none of the devices we expect in a poem, no references to anything outside of the moment.  Yet in its imagery and economy of syllables, it is haiku-like†. The son of a painter, Williams painted with words. 

It's odd that of all of WCW's short, formless, monosyllabic imagist poems he could have chosen to dismiss, GW chose this one.  It could be my imagination but to me it’s erotic-- juicy, tactile, tasty.  The simple intimacy of it makes my reading of it feel like something of an accident, an encroachment. 

Taken literally, the moment is vividly captured.  A note is left for someone to find.  (Who?)   The image of the writer coming across plums before breakfast (Last night?  At dawn?) and being unable to resist though he knows they are not his to eat-- forbidden fruit-- the hedonistic gratification he experiences;  then the apology with its gratuitous sensuous evocation of the act itself for the benefit of the aggrieved …  and then leaving!  All that,  conveyed in that seemingly prosaic note; but the image it leaves with me never fails to sear my brain.  A moment immortalized, eternalized in precise, elegant wording; echoed so as to reverberate in the reader's mind. How is it not a poem?

I'm not qualified or eloquent enough to defend the poem for all time, but I did not participate in the discussion at the time, and, though it would have been playing into the feature writer's hand if I had not been able to contain myself, I have never felt good about leaving it there, molested.  

~~~~~~

* Said wall:

Someone didn't get the memo. (Wall poem at Bankastraat, The Hague, Netherlands, 2013. Source: Wikipedia)

† And no, GW and other pedants, I didn't count the syllables in each line. I'm talking about the impact of the haiku, not the form.