A little while ago, there was a flash-in-the-pan, perhaps?, revival of interest in William Carlos Williams (Happy 142nd Birthday(!)) due to one of his poems being easily and infinitely re-usable as a template for riffing upon. The poem appeared in his 1917 book of poems, Al Que Quiere!, which, to my knowledge, is probably one of a handful of book of poems from the 1910s with an exclamation point in its title. It's a very interesting book. And 2017 marked its centenary with one its poems going viral.
Electric Literature dutifully recorded the phenomenon.
...
Flashing back to my undergrad days, I had been growing weary of reading T.S. Eliot after about 4 years of having been a bit too intelectually-cathected by his work (W.C. Williams was coincidentally one of the first to express the process of similar feelings so perfectly) when a friend invited me to take a bus from NYC to Connecticut, where they were, to see a Porcupine Tree show, and I threw the New Directions William Carlos Williams in with my travel stuff. I ended up reading it on the entire ride there and back. I forgot all about Williams until I was living back in my hometown of Miami in 2011 to 2012 and picked up the book again, reading it almost cover to cover. To this day I don't really understand what he's about and up against.
But maybe that's ok?
There's not much to say about Williams in direct critique. His work, like Ashbery's, and possibly like the entire genre of jazz, limits one to simply looking/listenening and pointing to favorite moments to help yourself and others appreciate them.
By which I mean that: if I'm going to try to dig a little deeper into this assessment, it's fascinating to me that for all the Williams reading I've done, I can't think of much that I've understood from him in the way of a philosophy or moralizing complex of beliefs. Surely, this is what all of us look for from poets. . . ! But individual little inventions from him are what I remember best. There are some snippets like these that have stuck with me in the most effective way, like the typesetting of the word *SODA* in a mid-period poem, or the strange punctuation that ends "Arrival", or special attention paid to the number on a hotel door in The Descent of Winter.
Somewhere in these particulars I think one can find the philosophy or perspective on living, but it's something that has to be really reached for. Somewhere inclusive in or pointing subtly to the matter at hand in all my verbiage is the work he does with exclamation points.
It's as if to say- hey, it's absolutely deranged and unhinged that there are frogs out there croaking in a puddle on this planet. It's weird! There's also a pleasant and refreshing feeling one gets from him that poetry doesn't necessarily have to be about grand ideas, maxims, life and death. One could argue that he took this direction to an extreme, actually and paradoxically...
Here are some favorite Williams moments and poems, mostly from Al Que Quiere!, starting with his 2nd and 3rd Pastoral:
- I love the disjointed and unattributed quotations. Can I say that they might have anticipated Berrigan's use of single "quotations and open or single parentheses a bit?(
from The Descent of Winter
If that final image is definitely like the moon and not pointing to or noticing the real-thing-the-moon, why is it so memorable?
Finally, and believe it or not, I've never seen the film, Paterson, but one day, I probably will. The book will have probably been better. Here is, as far as I know, an often excerpted part of it:
So be it.,
Lee
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