Of birthdays, those agey happenings,

17 Sep, 2004

On this day in 1883 William Carlos Williams was born. Little Willie grew up to be one of the most inventive, diverse, and influential of the Modernists.

Before I read Joyce’s Ulysses, WCW was my favorite Modernist (though I’m more knowledgeable about Pound). Willie's book, Spring and All remains one of my favorite from the period and my own poetic work is inspired more by WCW than any other single writer.

Willie C could and did write just about anything. In my mind, though, he was first and foremost a poet. Willie knew poetry. Sure, there are folks today who know poetry but WCW – damn, he KNEW poetry. From Spring and All:

XIVof death the barber the barber talked to me

cutting my life with sleep to trim my hair –

It’s just a moment he said, we die every night –

And of the newest ways to grow hair on

bald death – I told him of the quartz lamp

and of old men with third sets of teeth to the cue

of an old man who said at the door – Sunshine today!

for which death shaves him twice a week

What I put down of value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from “reality” – such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words. But this smacks too much of the nature of – This is all negative and appears to be boastful. It is not intended so. Rather the opposite. The work will be in the realm of the imagination as plain as the sky is to a fisherman – A very clouded sentence. The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognizant of the whole – aware – civilized.

Ever your student, J