MACHINE MADE OF WORDS

KINETIC
POETICS

“In the past human life was lived in bullock cart; in the future
it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to
a difference in quality.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World, 1925

 “The machine-age imaginations of Hemingway, Dos Passos, an
others responded directly to the new value of speed which
permeated American culture. Hemingway’s syntax of the straight
line,for example, represented the shortest distance between two
points.Compressing space, it also collapsed time and so enacted
industrial-age speed. Dos Passos, as we noticed, also worked to
represent speed and the immediacy of the moment in the prose that
jammed words together and deluged the reader with simultaneous
stimuli” (Tichi 230).
 The poet and physician Willliams called the American artist “a
universal man of action.”He swore poetic allegiance to “exact
moment,” vowed to embody the day’s “ adventageous jumps,
swiftnesess, colors, movements,”and described literary first drafts
as “headlong composition” (Selected Essays [SE] 109,219,217).
 “The world force today is here,” he said, “here in our own country.
We must take advantage of it, work with it, use it. . . . I believe that
the characteristics of the age help your writing when you go along
with them. . . . I believe that the age should govern what you write”
(qtd. İn Mazzaro iii; Interviews [Int] 34, 79).

“Guided by the “characteristics of his age” he worked to exploit

both velocity per se and the imaginative grasp of the pressing
moment” (Tichi 231).
What, then defined the age? And what was the
cadence of American life?

 The journalist Mark Sullivan, physician William Osler and social

critics Charles Merz, Stuart Chase describe America as “hurried
way of life”, “the age of hury”, “a nation that lives at top speed
most of the day”, this most rapid age in history” and “ life [that]
moves faster than it ever did.”
The journalist Sullivan suggested that the new American hero, the
“go-getter”, was a type “stimulated to conform to the machine” in
an age of “the speeding up of industry” (3:296-97).

The telegraph, the phone and the train enter the American life as new
value, not as tools (Tichi 232).
 “From the university lectern George Santayana cited speed or
rapidity as a positive American value” (Tichi 234).

 “Meanwhile, in the same years (ca.1914) the Eastman Kodak

Company promised the sensations of speed to buyers of its snapshot
cameras” (Tichi 234).

 “Speed records, meant endlessly to be broken, imply a corollary

value in this new high-velocity America, namely, one of constant
acceleration in its rhythms and in the pace of social change.
Santayana remarked that public life “has been transformed and
accelerated in a way that conscience can’t keep up with, yet is
dazzled by” (Tichi 234).
Criticism of American Pace
 Osler, as a physican and medical educator, regretted that his
colleagues lacked the leisure time for beneficial reading “ because
of the ever-increasing mental strain in this age of hurry.” Osler also
remarked that “one of the saddest of the life’s tragedies is the
wreckage of the young collegian by hurry, hustle, bustle, and
tension—the human machine driven day and night, as no sensible
fellow would use his motor.”
 “Speed is the disease of power which,” says Frank, “having no
present feverishly strives to hurry to the future.”
Henry Adams was aware of what changed in American life because
of speed and cultural acceleration.

“The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a
curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average
speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty,
eightyi or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties
or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or
drugs, without breaking his neck” (E445).
Images of Speed

“In daily life middle-class readers-or scanners-of magazines saw a range

of products presented in images of speed” (Tichi 235).
 Machine production raised other issues as well, several of which
concern values of speed.

 When in 1924 Muncie citizens first used the new voting machines,
they were told to “vote quickly. . . Four to a minute! Only fifteen
seconds to a person on the voting machines!”
One newly enfranchised woman complained that she vote straight
Republican because “ they hurried me so much that I just gave up
trying to select my candidates”.
Rapid Transit: The Commuter’s
Imagination

 “By the late 1920s Williams was freely exploring the environment
of the modern America writer” (Tichi 245).

 “Most poet and novelists still worked at desks or tables in rooms.

For Williams, the poem had to be enacted in writing at the instant of
imaginative intensity which was not always possible” (Tichi 245).
 “For Williams and others understood, much of twentieth-century
life for poet and populace alike was experienced in passing
glimpses from the train, from the elevated, from the automobile. All
America was in view from vehicles in transit everywhere” (Tichi
247).

 “Williams’s rapid-transit moment is radically different. In and of

itself, it is the experience intact. The poet’s oppurtunity is not to
describe the scene a la Howells and the others but to give it form
and thus enact it” (Tichi 248).
 “One important source of William’s rapid-transit poetics is his
medical school education. Some documents characterizing the
medical student and physician of early twentieth century suggests
that kinetic values in medicine were germane to Williams’s
development as a writer” (Tichi 252).

 This example shows how science and social sciences affect each
other. It can be a good example of interdisciplinary connection.
Review
 “To Tichi, William Carlos Williams became the "most articulate
spokesman" of the "subject of design components in imaginative
literature." He spoke literally, she says, when he called a poem "a
machine made of words." Williams' inspirations for poetic design
were the "bridges, skyscrapers, and electrical circuitry" of
industrialized twentieth-century America” (Wilcox 677).

Review by: JOAN L. WILCOX

Source: Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 1987), pp. 675-677
Works Cited
 Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting gears : technology, literature, culture
in modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1987. Print.
 WILCOX, JOAN L. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 4,
1987, pp. 675–677. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/26282501.