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William Carlos Williams
On poems as machines made out of words
To make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
From: Williams's introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (NY: New Directions, 1969), p. 256.
sense to me It
is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN
will
take away? This is the problem
which any poet who departs from closed form is
Close inspection showed
that a crack
in the concrete matrix
dams
FIELD COMPOSITION
--puts himself in the open--
he can go by no track other than the
found carbon wires or fibers used
in high corrosion environments and metal wires
regress
progress
