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"'The eternal bride and father-quid pro quo': William Carlos Williams, Marcia Nardi and Paterson."
Erin Templeton, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, UCLA
May 19, 2005

My paper looks at Williams’s collaboration with fellow-poet Marcia Nardi and the “Cress” letters of Paterson in order to explore his ideas about gender, authorship and the imagination. In investigating Williams’s critical writings on the creative process, one thing has become increasingly clear: namely, that for Williams creativity cannot exist in a vacuum. He believed that the artist’s imagination must feed on its interaction with others and that artistic inspiration is a fundamentally communal activity. Williams’s relationship with Marcia Nardi is a prime example of this kind of connection. By all accounts, before she showed up on the poet’s doorstep in March of 1942, Williams was suffering from a profound case of depression and writer’s block. Somehow, their relationship galvanized his imagination, and not only was he able to begin Paterson, but also her correspondence was eventually transformed into the controversial and provocative “Cress” sections of the poem. While critics have debated the authorship of the letters and decoded their biographical references, none have considered their implications for our understanding of Paterson or Williams’s ideas of authorship, gender and the creative process. Ultimately, my essay does just that: I consider the “Cress” letters as a model for the poem’s composition and then use this model to think about Williams’s larger ideas about gender, collaboration, and the creative process.