CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
5783
Partner Institution:
Simon Fraser University
Source Collection Label:
Reading in BC Collection
Sub Series:
Reading in BC Collection
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
George Bowering English 414 Lecture 15 at SFU on November 1, 1973 #674
Title Source:
cassette and j-card
Title Note:
On J-card: English 414 Lecture 15 Nov. 1, 1973; William Carlos Williams
Language:
English
Production Context:
Classroom recording
Genre:
Speeches: Talks
Identifiers:
[]
Rights
Rights:
Copyright Not Evaluated (CNE)
CREATORS
Name:
Bowering, George
Dates:
1935-
Role:
"Speaker"
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Image:
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Cassette
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/8 inch
Generations:
Second generation from Reel-to-Reel
Sound Quality:
Excellent
Physical Condition:
Excellent
Other Physical Description:
Black and white clear jewel case with J-card
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
Channel Field:
Stereo
Sample Rate:
44.1 kHz
Duration:
T00:30:23
Size:
34.2 MB
Bitrate:
32 bit
Encoding:
WAV for master files and .MP3 for online files
Channel Field:
Stereo
Sample Rate:
44.1 kHz
Duration:
T00:30:19
Size:
32.9 MB
Bitrate:
32 bit
Encoding:
WAV for master files and .MP3 for online files
Dates
Date:
1973-11-01
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
J-card
LOCATION
Address:
8888 University Dr, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6
Venue:
Simon Fraser University
Latitude:
49.2784
Longitude:
-122.9231
CONTENT
Contents:
Side
Track
No.
Comments
One
0000
0005
Paterson is a town, and, a man. Bowering discusses Williams’ urban home town – dirty, filthy, the population a result of the great immigrations into the United States in the early part of the 20th Century to feed the mills
0027
Bowering notes that Williams chose Patterson as the setting for Paterson, rather than nearby Rutherford, as “He had to write a poem about everything and set it in its specific place”. The image that Paterson contains is the very central image of the waterfalls
0032
Like In the American Grain, Paterson is a book, a poem, about making poetry. Bowering goes on to discuss Paterson as a veritable mine of information on what Williams and other contemporaries thought and felt about poetics
0071
…on some pronouncements about poetry by William Carlos Williams: -- ‘Order’ for example
0097
Discusses Yeats’ views of poetics in reference to a Comparison with Williams’ ideas on ‘order’
0116
Yeats’ idea was to write a poem that lasts forever, containing images which defy death
0138
Williams on ‘Masterpieces’ – beauty is found in the fresh, the unexplored. Masterpieces are only beautiful in the tragic sense, like a starfish stretched out dead on the beach in the sun
0151
Beauty – Uncertainty, hence Williams’ interest in ‘accident’, an important principle in Paterson
0207
“The impulse to order, then, involves measure, in all its meanings. The first thing one does when one finds oneself lost is try to start measuring, and the only access one has, in order to start measuring, is one’s own lineaments.” Bowering goes on to discuss various aspects of the idea of ‘measurement’
0303
A swift jump into ‘perspective’, another multi-meaning word. ‘Perspective’ suggests that the viewer is at the center, and “everything else is on the outside, and the farther away that something is from that ego, then the less important it is.”
0337
Bowering discusses the desire of the imagists and the cubists to get rid of, or distort ‘perspective’, either by deliberate placement of an image, or by ‘dis-covering’ it. One can “see the world without dominating it”, as Williams says
0376
W.C. Williams says: “It is not what you say that matters, but the manner in which you say it”
0406
Williams on ‘Ex-pression’
0483
Bowering discusses Williams’ The Wedge, as a book written contemporaneously with Paterson
0533
Williams – “One doesn’t seek beauty, it finds you.”
0574
From Williams “Revelation”: “The objective in writing is to reveal; it is not to teach, not to advertise, not to sell, not even to communicate (for that needs two), but to “reveal”. Bowering goes on to discuss Williams’ fascination for speech undistorted, by speech that reveals through its particular genre: “As a carrot grows up through the ground will have in its shape the particulars of that ground.” In other words, the place in which a person grows up will have to constitute how that person comes to the world, and has to be ‘dis’covered’ in the work itself
0620
Bowering closes by looking at a late work of Williams, namely The Poem as a Field of Action (1948), which came out at the same time as Book II of Paterson
0687
End of Lecture a
0699
End of Side One
Two
Blank
*This appears to be a second version of Accession Number #674
Side
Track
No.
Comments
One
0000
0004
Lecture begins with Bowering explaining various significances of Paterson (i.e. the city in New Jersey)
0033
Paterson, like many of Williams’ poems, is about making poems; this is discussed
0053
Bowering recommends In the American Grain as being one of the most useful and accessible books to an understanding of the local (language and place) and the difference between marrying the language and raping it (with reference to Williams’ writing)
0071
Bowering gives some of Williams’ pronouncements about poetry (esp. on order). “Time is a storm in which we are all lost only inside the convolutions of the storm itself shall we find our directions”
0087
Yeats (and Pound) in relation to Williams’ work
0097
A discussion of artifacts (emblems of perfection and eternity) with reference to Yeats
0134
Why Williams is opposed to masterpieces – they are “like starfish lying stretched dead on the beach in the sun”. Beauty is found in uncertainty and the unknown
0154
Williams’ interest in accident is discussed with reference to Paterson and “Chora in Hell” and Marchel DuChamp
0190
Bowering discusses Williams’ view of form and structure with reference to “Against the Weather” (storm and uncertainty and order)
0206
“The impulse to order involves measure in all its meanings” (measure as distinct from metre because metre is seen as something predecided – measure is used as a descriptive rather than a pre-scriptive term by Bowering)
0233
Bowering discusses Olson’s image of a bird making a nest in relation to measure
0255
Measure is discussed further in relation to prose, poetry and the self. “The measure intervenes. To measure is all we know. A choice among the measures”
0291
Imagists wanted to rid the view of her/his self-centred interpretation of the world. The act of observation is discussed
0302
Bowering discusses perspective at some length
0373
Process and composition are discussed
0398
Bowering discusses Arthur Simon’s quotation on Mallarme – “To be rather than to express that is what Mallarme has consistently sought in verse and prose”
0410
The artist for Williams is a phenomenon among phenomena. She/he is not the “I” who is a creator of order but a discoverer or a rearranger of an order that is already there. This is discussed with reference to other poets
0482
Bowering looks at Williams’ reface to “
Notes:
SFU BC Readings formatting
NOTES
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