So much depends: Printed matter, dying words, and the entropic poem

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 627-653

  Lunberry, Clark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249716611     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/421164     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. Robert Smithson, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution," interview by Paul Cummings, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, 1996), p. 284.
2. Smithson, "Conversation in Salt Lake City," interview by Gianni Pettena, Robert Smithson, p. 298.
3. In 1927 Williams published the two-page poem "Paterson." Within it, one can partially see, as by preliminary sketch, the outlines of the larger poem to come. See William Carlos Williams, "Paterson," The Dial (1927): 263-66.
4. Williams, Paterson (New York, 1992), p. 253; hereafter abbreviated P.
5. Williams, "The Importance of Place," The Embodiment of Knowledge, ed. Ron Loewinsohn (New York, 1974), pp. 132-33.
6. Quoted in Christopher MacGowan, preface to P, pp. xi, xii; hereafter abbreviated "P." Williams wrote to a friend in 1944 (with nearly twenty more years of working on the poem ahead of him) that Paterson was "near finished," and then nine months later, it was "nearing completion," while finally, some months later, the poet wished of the poem that he could "slash it unmercifully," even suggesting that it be destroyed entirely (quoted in "P," p. xi).
7. Indeed, Williams's automobile was for the young doctor a kind of time machine, stopping and starting, propelling him down the street, with the momentary view now gliding by through windows - seen through a new awareness of temporality and transformation "the delineation of the cresence and ebb ... sliding into nothing" (Williams, "Spring and All," Imaginations [New York, 1971], p. 135; hereafter abbreviated "SA"). He sees the sights and knows that he has seen them just at the moment of their loss or, rather, has seen them as the moment of their loss, at the very vanishing point of vision's fleeting contact with the world. "It is," Williams writes, "only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off / No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car" ("SA," p. 133).
8. Smithson, "Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson," interview with Dennis Wheeler, ed. Eva Schmidt, Robert Smithson, pp. 215-16; hereafter abbreviated "FC."
9. Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," Robert Smithson, p. 72; hereafter abbreviated "TM."
10. Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," Robert Smithson, p. 112; hereafter abbreviated "SM."
11. Smithson, "Fragments of an Interview with P. A. [Patsy] Norvell," interview with P. A. Norvell, Robert Smithson, p. 194.
12. For here, the "dialectical landscape" of the park - like the landscape of Paterson - is understood as temporally transforming, and one is thus positioned to see "things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects" (Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," Robert Smithson, p. 160).
13. Smithson's picturesque aesthetic is very usefully discussed in Ron Graziani, "Robert Smithson's Picturable Situation: Blasted Landscapes from the 1960s," Critical Inquiry 20 (Spring 1994): 419-51.
14. Williams, letter to Parker Tyler, 10 Mar. 1948, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York, 1957), p. 263; hereafter abbreviated S.
15. Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, ed. Gordon Ball (New York, 1977), p. 4.
16. Robert Hobbs describes Smithson's aesthetic method as engaging an "unresolvable dialectic" in which the terms of his investigation never succeed in synthesizing toward some apex of achievement, but instead remain forever uncompleted. "His art could be called the art of unresolvable dialectics.... Smithson constantly strove to achieve a state of indeterminacy in which meanings are projected as well as canceled out" (Robert Hobbs, "Smithson's Unresolvable Dialectics," in Robert Smithson: Sculpture, ed. Hobbs [Ithaca, N.Y., 1981], p. 23).
17. Smithson, "Fragments of an Interview with P. A. [Patsy] Norvell," p. 193.
18. Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1967), pp. 390-91; hereafter abbreviated A.
19. Williams, "Shakespeare," The Embodiment of Knowledge, p. 16.
20. I discuss my own travels to the Great Salt Lake to try and find the Spiral Jetty in Clark Lunberry, "Quiet Catastrophe: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Vanished," Discourse 24 (Spring 2002): 85-120.
21. Smithson, "A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art," Robert Smithson, pp. 79-80.
22. Smithson, "The Spiral Jetty," p. 150.
23. Gary Shapiro, Earthwords: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel (Berkeley, 1995), p. 177.
24. Smithson, "A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art," p. 80.
25. Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," p. 130.
26. Smithson, "Interpolation of the Enantiomorphic Containers," p. 40.