Reading Closely
Not long ago I was teaching a graduate course called “Theory of the Avant-
Garde,” which covered such major movements as Futurism and Dada as well
as two individual American “avant-gardists”—Gertrude Stein and William
Carlos Williams. The course material was largely unfamiliar to the class: F. T.
Marinetti’s parole in libertà, Velimir Khlebnikov’s Tables of Destiny, Marcel
Duchamp’s Large Glass and the “notes” for its execution in the White Box,
Kurt Schwitters’s collages and sound poems, and Raoul Haussman’s political
satire. The students were remarkably astute on the larger aesthetic and ideo-
logical issues involved and especially perceptive about visual works. I was
therefore astonished when at semester’s end we came to what I took to be the
more familiar American modernist exemplars and found that the same stu-
dents who could discuss with great aplomb the relation of the Milky Way to
Bachelors in the Large Glass were largely at a loss when it came to Williams’s
short lyric poems like “Danse Russe” or “The Young Housewife”—both, in-
cidentally, well-known anthology pieces. Here is “The Young Housewife”:
At ten A.M. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, ¤sh-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.