The Pure products of America

 

William Carlos Williams knew a few things about America. He knew the pure products of America went crazy, and he knew of the American lovemaking out there in the fields:

succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—

William was torn between admiration and horror, fight or flight.

And listen to American balladeers. They are never so wrought to a pitch as when the song is about killing women. Leadbelly via Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix via Patti Smith. Joe is going to shoot his old lady. And that, that is terror unnumbed. That is terror that comes out in buckets, and that entertains us all, one slasher audience under God, with liberty and justice for all.

Patti Smith is the interesting transitional figure here. Her way of collaging Hey Joe and Patti Hearsts kidnapping – or Patti Hearst’s joining the Symbionese Liberation Army, an Army dedicated to the liberation of nothing – has to be a nodal point, a cultural political nodal point, of the seventies.

But I don’t understand it. I sing along, but I don’t understand it.

Joe won’t have a noose around his neck – a symbol, an event, that is linked by every vein in our American bodies to lynching. And Patti Hearst – Patti Smith’s secret sharer of the name – won’t wear that name around her neck, the name her father and mother gave her. Her father’s pathetic speech to the press that she was a good girl – grind that back into his face.

But whose bodies litter the path to this liberation? And why is it, why, a “freeing”? Why this ecstasy in the face of such violence? On the down low side of an inheritance from the darkest Child ballads.

Williams came to no conclusions in the 1920s, when he wrote his poem. Although he was writing In the American Grain, he was never going to give you the word on high, like his Enemy-Double, T.S. Eliot. Categorical judgments put a noose around all our necks. But the game, that patriarchy speaks for “women”, is crooked, a matter of House rules when the House is an All Male Pimp show.  Which might be what Patti Smith, inveterate trans-performer, was moving towards.