FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER

By Debbie Bulloch



The fourth poet to be featured in FRIDAY’S POETRY CORNER represents a departure from our previously featured poets. The first three poets, Whitman, Dickinson and Frost can best be described as “traditionalists.” This week’s featured poet, William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), is the spearhead of a wave of “modernists” American poets who came into prominence in the early 20th century.

William Carlos Williams, or WCW as he was also known, was an American poet. His poetry is closely associated with modernism and Imagism. In addition to being a poet, WCW was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.



Williams was a true American archetype. His father was an English immigrant; his mother was of Dutch, Spanish and Jewish descent (she was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico.) Williams was a doctor by profession - his formal education included: public school in Rutherford until 1896, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann School in New York City. In 1902, Williams entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During his time at Penn, Williams became friends with Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (best known as H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth. These friendships influenced his growth and passion for poetry. He received his M.D. in 1906 and spent the next four years in internships in New York City and in travel and postgraduate studies abroad, including the University of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. He wrote short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, translations and correspondence. He wrote whenever he could find the time; he spent weekends in New York City with a group of friends that included writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore.

The critic Randall Jarrell referred to Williams as, “the America of poets.” WCW was one of first American poets to look inwards, into the heart of America, for inspiration. Whereas Frost adopted a style of poetry inspired by the English masters, Williams developed a unique American voice. Unlike compatriots such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Williams resisted the temptation of going into European exile. As a populist, Williams rejected T. S. Eliot's frequent use of allusions to foreign languages and Classical sources, as in Eliot's The Waste Land. Williams advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions and, instead, try to see the world as it really is. Marianne Moore, another skeptic of traditional poetic forms, wrote that Williams used "plain American which cats and dogs can read."

Williams rejected the use of traditional meter. His correspondence with Hilda Doolittle exposed him to the relationship of sapphic rhythms to the inner voice of poetic truth. Contrast the following passage:

"The stars about the beautiful moon again hide their radiant shapes, when she is full and shines at her brightest on all the earth" — Sappho.

With one of Williams own poems, titled "Shadows” from his Journey To Love collection,

"Shadows cast by the street light
under the stars,
the head is tilted back,
the long shadow of the legs
presumes a world taken for granted
on which the cricket trills"

Notice how the breaks in the poem seem to search out a natural pause spoken in an American idiom that is reflective of rhythms found in that most American musical style: jazz.

Williams’ wide appeal to generations of American readers lies in how he gave birth to an entirely fresh form of American poetry whose subject matter revolves around everyday circumstances of life and the lives of the common people. In THE YOUNG HOUSEWIFE the author reflects on his casual observations of a young woman stepping out of her house. Williams’ use of simple words turns the mundane into a beautiful image.

Poetry is the most auditory form of writing - good poetry sounds as good as it “reads.” Williams pioneered the use of the “variable foot” which evolved from years of visual and auditory sampling of his world from his first person perspective of life as a doctor. The variable foot reflects the way that radio, television and the media influences how people communicate, "machine made out of words."

Williams considered himself a socialist and opponent of capitalism (are you reading this yucca, a socialist with a part-Dutch mom, what a surprise!). In 1935 he published "The Yachts" a poem which indicts the rich elite as parasites and the masses as striving for revolution. The poem features an image of the ocean as the "watery bodies" of the poor masses beating at their hulls "in agony, in despair", attempting to sink the yachts and end "the horror of the race." Given many of today’s current events, e.g., fat cat executives receiving HUGE and obscene bonuses while workers lose their jobs and homes, William’s vision in “The Yachts” seems almost prophetic.

In recent years the reputation of this white-haired “musician” of letters, has been on the rise. At one time British reviewers could easily dismiss Williams as a, “writer of some local interests.” Slowly, Williams has come to be regarded as one of America’s most significant poets – loved by many (myself included) and followed by many others (again, myself included).

Here then, for your visual and auditory pleasure, is a selection of Williams’ poems. Read them aloud to yourself (or better still find someone to read them to you) so you can enjoy the writer’s rhythms. And please, go slowly - poems are not meant to be sped-read through at Autobahn speed, they are more like a ride through the countryside on a horse-drawn carriage.

THE YACHTS

contend in a sea which the land partly encloses
shielding them from the too-heavy blows
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses

tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly.
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute

brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails
they glide to the wind tossing green water
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls

ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing,
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark.

In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare

as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace
of all that in the mind is feckless, free and
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them

is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling
for some slightest flaw but fails completely.
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts

move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas.

Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows.
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair

until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind;
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken,

beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.

Williams often used the same title to name poems from different collections. Look at the three poems below, all named LOVE SONG. The one common theme uniting all three poems is the author’s deeply sensual imagery.

LOVE SONG

What have I to say to you
When we shall meet?
Yet—
I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

See me!
My hair is dripping with nectar—
Starlings carry it
On their black wings.
See, at last
My arms and my hands
Are lying idle.

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

Here is a slightly different version of the poem above. If anyone doubts whether "free" verse is something more than prose, then read aloud this poem by Williams. Note the contrast between the slowing rhythm of "horned branches" and "smooth purple" on one side and, on the other, the alternating stresses of "that drips from leaf to leaf/and limb to limb." What the vowels and consonants do in the two last lines alone is as artful as any rhyme.

LOVE SONG

I lie here thinking of you:---

the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branched the lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!

There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world-
you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

Here is the third “variation” of a LOVE SONG.

LOVE SONG

SWEEP the house clean,
hang fresh curtains
in the windows
put on a new dress
and come with me!
The elm is scattering
its little loaves
of sweet smells
from a white sky!

Who shall hear of us
in the time to come?
Let him say there was
a burst of fragrance
from black branches.

The pictorial style in which THE RED WHEELBARROW is written owes a great deal to the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and the precisionist style of Charles Sheeler, an American photographer-painter whom Williams met shortly before composing the poem. The poem represents an early stage in Williams' evolution as a poet. It focuses on the objective representation of an object - the poem’s brief form is almost haiku-like.

THE RED WHEELBARROW

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.



The last two poems also reflect Williams’ use of every day words to deliver powerful images. In THE YOUNG HOUSEWIFE the reader is invited to join the writer as he cruises along the streets of a quiet neighborhood. As the author drives around, a young housewife, still wearing last night’s negligee, briefly emerges from her house. What a beautifully simple way to describe the young housewife, “shy, uncorseted, tucking in, stray ends of hair.” In DANSE RUSSE the author does something that almost all of us have done at one point or the other – sneak a naked dance in front of a mirror when no one else is looking. What can be more sensual (and at the same time lonely) than an unclothed body, joyfully moving to the beat of some unseen band?

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, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.

The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.

DANSE RUSSE

IF when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,--

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

Poetry is the music of the soul. Close your eyes and let Williams’ compositions make you want to dance naked – alone or in the presence of a loved one.