An Interview with William Carlos Williams

by Stanley Koehler, 1964

Rutherford, New Jersey: Number nine stands on a terrace at the foot of Ridge Road, just where it angles into Park Avenue and the stores along the main street. For fifty years the sign beside the walk read William C. Williams, M.D. Now it carries the name of his son, with an arrow pointing to the side entrance and the new office wing. In his last years, Dr. Williams’s health suffered from a series of strokes that made it difficult for him to speak and impaired his physical vigor, so that there would often be a delay before he appeared, pushing out the aluminum storm door and retreating a step or two, extending welcome with a kind of hesitant warmth. On the occasion of the interview, he moved more deliberately than ever, but his greeting was still at pains to be personal. A leisurely progress brought us upstairs past a huge, two-story painting of the Williamsburg Bridge filling the stairwell, to the study, a room at the back of the house, overlooking the yard. An electric typewriter, which Dr. Williams could no longer use, was at the desk, and, though he could scarcely read, a copy of The Desert Music and Other Poems, opened to “The Descent” was propped up in the open drawer. In a corner of the room, over a metal filing cabinet, was an oil painting hung against a wallpaper of geometric simplicity. We sat a little away from the desk, toward the window, with the microphone lying on a stack of small magazines between us.

At the time of these talks, in April 1962, William Carlos Williams was in his seventy-ninth year, author of forty published volumes from Poems, 1909, a collection so rare that Mrs. Williams has had trouble holding on to a copy, down through various collected editions and the successive books of Paterson to The Desert Music and Journey to Love. Both of these last volumes were written in an unusual recovery of creative power after Dr. Williams’s first serious illness in 1952. Now, with customary impatience, he was fretting to see his latest collection, Pictures from Brueghel, scheduled for publication in June. The doorbell never rang but he expected some word from New Directions, though it was still early in spring.

Because it was so hard for Dr. Williams to talk, there was no question of discoursing on topics suggested in advance, and the conversation went on informally, for an hour or two at a time, over several days. The effort it took the poet to find and pronounce words can hardly be indicated here. Many of the sentences ended in no more than a wave of the hand when Mrs. Williams was not present to finish them. But whatever the topic, the poet’s mind kept coming back to the technical matters that interested him in his later years. One of these was his concern with “idiom” the movements of speech that he felt to be especially American, as opposed to English. A rival interest was the “variable foot” a metrical device that was to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse. The question whether one had not to assume a fixed element in the foot as the basis for meter drew only a typical Williams negative, slightly profane, and no effort was made to pursue this much further. As a result, the notion of some mysterious “measure” runs through the interview like an unlaid ghost, promising enough pattern for shapeliness, enough flexibility for all the subtleties of idiom. No wonder a copy of “The Descent” was in evidence as we began; for however much one may argue over the theory of this verse, it is hard to resist the performance.

On March 4, 1963, William Carlos Williams died in his sleep, at home, of a cerebral hemorrhage that was not unexpected. Two months later, Pictures from Brueghel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and Mrs. Williams accepted, in his name, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Though he did not see this interview in print, he approved it in its final stages. Mrs. Williams reports him as having been much entertained by her part in the second half of it.

William Carlos Williams
Well, what’s to be done?

Interviewer
I would like to ask you about this new measure that I see here—

Williams
If I could only talk.

Interviewer
Perhaps we might begin with Rutherford, whether you thought it was a good environment for you.

Williams
A very bad environment for poets. We didn’t take anything seriously—in Ruth—in Rutherford. We didn’t take poetry very seriously. As far as recording my voice in Rutherford—I read before the ladies, mostly.

Interviewer
You mean the Women’s Club? How did they like it?

Williams
Very much: they applauded. I was quite a hero. [Picking up a volume] I remember “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital” was one of the ones I read. The hospital was up in Clifton. I was always intent on saying what I had to say in the accents that were native to me. But I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew that the measure was intended to record—something. But I didn’t know what the measure was. I stumbled all over the place in these earlier poems. For instance, in this one here [“Queen-Ann’s Lace”]. I would divide those lines differently now. It’s just like the later line, only not opened up in the same way.

Interviewer
You were saying that Rutherford was a bad environment for poets.

Williams
Yes. But except for my casual conversations about the town, I didn’t think anything of it at all. I had a great amount of patience with artisans.

Interviewer
Did you mean it when you said medicine was an interference which you resented?

Williams
I didn’t resent it at all. I just wanted to go straight ahead.

Interviewer
And medicine was not on the way?

Williams
I don’t know whether it would be. I used to give readings at the high school and Fairleigh Dickinson. I was sympathetic with these audiences. I was talking about the same people that I had to do with as patients, and trying to interest them. I was not pretending: I was speaking to them as if they were interested in the same sort of thing.

Interviewer
But were they? Perhaps they felt the double nature of your role, as both poet and doctor, was something of a barrier.

Williams
No, no. The language itself was what intrigued me. I thought that we were on common territory there.

Interviewer
Did you write the short stories on a different “level” than the poems—as a kind of interlude to them?

Williams
No, as an alternative. They were written in the form of a conversation which I was partaking in. We were in it together.

Interviewer
Then the composition of them was just as casual and spontaneous as you have suggested. You would come home in the evening and write twelve pages or so without revising?

Williams
I think so. I was coming home. I was placing myself in continuation of a common conversation.

Interviewer
You have insisted that there cannot be a seeking for words in literature. Were you speaking of prose as well as poetry?

Williams
I think so. Not to choose between words.

Interviewer
Certainly the word does matter though.

Williams
It does matter, very definitely. Strange that I could say that.

Interviewer
But when you had come home, and were continuing the experience of reality—

Williams
Reality. Reality. My vocabulary was chosen out of the intensity of my concern. When I was talking in front of a group, I wasn’t interested in impressing them with my power of speech, but only with the seriousness of my intentions toward them. I had to make them come alive.

Interviewer
You have said you felt trapped in Rutherford, that you couldn’t get out, never had any contact with anyone here. Do you still feel that Rutherford hasn’t provided enough of the contact you managed to find during the twenties, in New York, with the Others group? Was that a genuine contribution to your development?

Williams
That was not a literary thing exactly. But it was about writing—intensely so. We were speaking straight ahead about what concerned us, and if I could have overheard what I was saying then, that would have given me a hint of how to phrase myself, to say what I had to say. Not after the establishment, but speaking straight ahead. I would gladly have traded what I have tried to say for what came off my tongue, naturally.

Interviewer
Which was not the same?

Williams
Not free enough. What came off in this writing, finally—this writing [pointing to “The Descent”]—that was pretty much what I wanted to say, in the way I wanted to say it, then. I was searching in this congeries. I wanted to say something in a certain tone of my voice which would be exactly how I wanted to say it, to measure it in a certain way.

Interviewer
Was this in line with what the others in the group were trying to do?

Williams
I don’t think they knew what they were trying to do; but in effect it was. I couldn’t speak like the academy. It had to be modified by the conversation about me. As Marianne Moore used to say, a language dogs and cats could understand. So I think she agrees with me fundamentally. Not the speech of English country people, which would have something artificial about it; not that, but language modified by our environment; the American environment.

Interviewer
Your own background is pretty much a mixture of English and Spanish, isn’t it? Do you think the Spanish has had any influence on your work?

Williams
There might have been a permanent impression on my mind. It was certainly different from the French. French is too formal; the Spanish language isn’t. They were broad men, as in El Cid, very much broader than the French. My relation to language was a curious thing. My father was English, but Spanish was spoken in my home. I didn’t speak it, but I was read to in Spanish. My mother’s relatives used to come up and stay two or three months.

Interviewer
You have said you equated Spanish with the “romantic.” Is that a designation you would shrink from?

Williams
No, not shrink from.

Interviewer
What I was getting at is that you have kept the name “Carlos.”

Williams
I had no choice but to keep the “Carlos.”

Interviewer
I understand Solomon Hoheb, your mother’s father, was Dutch.

Williams
Maybe. The Spanish came from the Sephardic Jews. Though the English was strong indeed, through my grandfather.

Interviewer
You’ve been more conscious of the Spanish, then, than of the other.

Williams
Yes! I’ve insisted on breaking with my brother’s memory of the Williamses as English. All one needs to do is look at my nose. Flossie says, I love your nose. And the hell with my nose, after all. The thing that concerns me is the theory of what I was determined to do with measure, what you encounter on the page. It must be transcribed to the page from the lips of the poet, as it was with such a master as Sappho. “The Descent” was very important to me in that way.

Interviewer
You mean that is where it finally happened?

Williams
Yes, there it happened; and before that it didn’t. I remember writing this (trying to read):
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind . . . 

Interviewer
. . . of accomplishment.

Williams
A sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places.
You see how I run that line? I was very much excited when I wrote this. I had to do something. I was sitting there with the typewriter in front of me. I was attempting to imitate myself (I think I can’t even see it at all) but it didn’t come alive to me.

Interviewer
It seems to me you were reading it just now.

Williams
More or less. But something went wrong with me. I can’t make it out any more. I can’t type.

Interviewer
Would a tape recorder or a dictaphone be uncongenial?

Williams
No, anything that would serve me I’d gladly adopt.

Interviewer
The appearance of this poem on the page suggests you were conscious of it as a thing—something for the eye.

Williams
Yes, very good. I was conscious of making it even. I wanted it to read regularly.

Interviewer
Not just to please the eye?

Williams
The total effect is very important.

Interviewer
But the care in placing the words—did you ever feel you would be as happy painting?

Williams
I’d like to have been a painter, and it would have given me at least as great a satisfaction as being a poet.

Interviewer
But you say you are a “word man.”

Williams
Yes, that took place early in my development. I was inducted early into my father’s habit of reading—that made me a poet, not a painter. My mother was a painter. Her brother Carlos won the Grand Prix—the Gros Lot it was called—then he financed her to go to Paris, to study painting. Then the money ran out.

Interviewer
And she met your father through Carlos, whom he knew in—

Williams
Puerto Plata. My father was a businessman, interested in South America. But he always loved books. He used to read poetry to me. Shakespeare. He had a group who used to come to our house, a Shakespeare club. They did dramatic readings. So I was always interested in Shakespeare, and Grandmother was interested in the stage—my father’s mother. Emily Dickinson, her name was. Isn’t that amazing?

Interviewer
Quite a coincidence: I notice a picture of her namesake over the desk.

Williams
Emily was my patron saint. She was also an American, seeking to divide the line in some respectable way. We were all of us Americans.

Interviewer
Then you did read a good bit of her at some stage, with your father?

Williams
My father didn’t know anything about Emily Dickinson. He was sold on Shakespeare.
[Doorbell rings. WCW makes his way downstairs to answer it.]

Interviewer [As he returns]
You say you were hoping it might be the new volume?

Williams
Yes. I am keenly disappointed. But that’s always the way it is with me—my life’s blood dripping away. Laughlin has been a wonderful friend, but it’s always so goddamn slow! I have still the illusion that I will be able to talk when I make these connections. It’s possible, because I am an emotional creature, and if I could only talk, to you for instance. Here is a person well-intentioned toward me, meaning yourself, and I can’t talk to him. It makes me furious.

Interviewer
It’s good of you to put up with this business at all. We were talking about painting and the theater and poetry. Was that a natural progression for you?

Williams
More or less; stemming from frustration. I was wondering—I was seeking to be articulate.

Interviewer
At one point you wanted to be an actor.

Williams
I had no skill as an actor. But through Dad’s reading, the plays of Shakespeare made an impression on me. He didn’t want them to necessarily, just to read them—as words, that came off as speech.

Interviewer
How did this interest in words make you interested in poetry as opposed, say, to writing novels?

Williams
That didn’t have any connection.

Interviewer
The words weren’t sufficiently important in prose?

Williams
No. I never thought I was a very good prose writer anyway. But when I speak of Emily Dickinson—she was an independent spirit. She did her best to get away from too strict an interpretation. And she didn’t want to be confined to rhyme or reason. (Even in Shakespeare, the speech of the players: it was annoying to him to have to rhyme, for God’s sake.) And she followed the American idiom. She didn’t know it, but she followed it nonetheless. I was a better poet.

Interviewer
You are speaking about language now, not form.

Williams
Yes; her native speech. She was a wild girl. She chafed against restraint. But she speaks the spoken language, the idiom, which would be deformed by Oxford English.

Interviewer
This new measure of yours, in the later poems, is meant then to accommodate the American speech rhythms.

Williams
Yes. It’s a strange phenomenon, my writing. I think what I have been searching for—

Interviewer
You were suggesting that Emily Dickinson had something to do with it; and her objection to rhyme. But that you were a better poet.

Williams
Oh, yes [laughing]. She was a real good guy. I thought I was a better poet because the American idiom was so close to me, and she didn’t get what the poets were doing at that time—writing according to a new method, not the English method, which wouldn’t have made much sense to an American. Whitman was on the right track, but when he switched to the English intonation, and followed the English method of recording the feet, he didn’t realize it was a different method, which was not satisfactory to an American. Everything started with Shakespeare.

Interviewer
Because it was meant to be spoken?

Williams
Yes. But when the Shakespearean line was recorded, it was meant to be a formal thing, divided in the English method according to what was written on the page. The Americans shouldn’t tolerate that. An Englishman—an English rhetorician, an actor—will speak like Shakespeare, but it’s only rhetorical. He can’t be true to his own speech. He has to change it in order to conform.

Interviewer
You think it is easier for the English to conform, in poetry, to their kind of speech pattern than it is for an American? You don’t think for example that Frost is as true to the American idiom as you are trying to be?

Williams
No, I don’t think so. Eliot, on the other hand, was trying to find a way to record the speech and he didn’t find it. He wanted to be regular, to be true to the American idiom, but he didn’t find a way to do it. One has to bow down finally, either to the English or to the American.

Interviewer
Eliot went to England; you stayed here.

Williams
To my sorrow.

Interviewer
To your sorrow? What do you mean by that?

Williams [yielding, perhaps]
It is always better to stick to something.

Interviewer
It’s rare to find someone who has. Eliot says he would not be the same if he had stayed. You have said there was a great virtue in the kind of isolation you experienced here.

Williams
A key question.

Interviewer
And you have been called our most valuable homespun sensitivity.

Williams
“Homespun sensitivity.” Very good.

Interviewer
But you still feel it was a bad environment.

Williams
It was native, but I doubt that it was very satisfactory to me personally. Though it did provide the accent, which satisfied me.

Interviewer
Do you think you could have picked a better one? Do you think you would have been happier in Boston, or Hartford, or New York, or Paris?

Williams
I might have picked a better one, if I had wanted to—which I did. But if I lived there—if its language was familiar to me, if that was the kind of conversation which I heard, which I grew up with—I could tolerate the vulgarity because it forced me to speak in a particular manner. Not the English intonation.

Interviewer
Do you still feel that the English influence on Eliot set us back twenty years?

Williams
Very definitely. He was a conformist. He wanted to go back to the iambic pentameter; and he did go back to it, very well; but he didn’t acknowledge it.

Interviewer
You say that you could never be a calm speaker, so that this unit you use, which isn’t either a foot or a line necessarily, and which works by speech impulses, this is meant to reflect also your own nervous habit of speech—in which things come more or less in a rush.

Williams
Common sense would force me to work out some such method.

Interviewer
You do pause, though, in the midst of these lines.

Williams
Very definitely.

Interviewer
Then what is the integrity of the line?

Williams
If I was consistent in myself it would be very much more effective than it is now. I would have followed much closer to the indicated divisions of the line than I did. It’s too haphazard.

Interviewer
The poetry? You admit that in prose, but—

Williams
In poetry also. I think I was too haphazard.

Interviewer
In the later poems—like “The Orchestra” here—you think there is still some work to do?

Williams
It’s not successful. It would be classical if it had the proper division of lines. “Reluctant mood,” “stretches and yawns.” What the devil is that? It isn’t firmly enough stated. It’s all very complicated—but I can’t go on.

Interviewer
You mean you can’t find a theory to explain what you do naturally.

Williams
Yes. It’s all in the ear. I wanted to be regular. To continue that—

Interviewer
[picking up a copy of Paterson V, from which some clippings fall to the floor]
These opening lines—they make an image on the page.

Williams
Yes, I was imitating the flight of the bird.

Interviewer
Then it’s directed—

Williams
To the eyes. Read it.

Interviewer
“In old age the mind casts off . . .”

Williams
In old age
the mind
casts off
rebelliously
an eagle
from its crag

Interviewer
Did you ever think of using any other city as subject for a poem?

Williams
I didn’t dare any mention of it in Paterson, but I thought strongly of Manhattan when I was looking about for a city to celebrate. I thought it was not particularized enough for me, not American in the sense I wanted. It was near enough, God knows, and I was familiar enough with it for all my purposes—but so was Leipzig, where I lived for a year when I was young, or Paris. Or even Vienna or even Frascati. But Manhattan escaped me.

Interviewer
Someone remarks in one of these clippings that there is no reason the poem should ever end. Part four completes the cycle, five renews it. Then what?

Williams [Laughing]
Go on repeating it. At the end—the last part, the dance—

Interviewer
“We can know nothing and can know nothing but the dance . . .”

Williams
The dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
satyrically, the tragic foot.
That has to be interpreted; but how are you going to interpret it?

Interviewer
I don’t presume to interpret it; but perhaps the satyrs represent the element of freedom, of energy within the form.

Williams
Yes. The satyrs are understood as action, a dance. I always think of the Indians there.

Interviewer
Is anything implied, in “contrapuntally,” about the nature of the foot?

Williams
It means musically—it’s a musical image. The Indians had a beat in their own music, which they beat with their feet. It isn’t an image exactly, a poetic image. Or perhaps it is. The beat goes according to the image. It should all be so simple; but with my damaged brain—

Interviewer
We probably shouldn’t be trying to reduce a poetic statement to prose, when we have The Desert Music here: “Only the poem . . .”

Williams
“The counted poem, to an exact measure.”

Interviewer
You think it should be more exact then, than you have yet made it.

Williams
Yes, it should be more exact, in Milton’s sense. Milton counted the syllables.

Interviewer
“And I could not help thinking of the wonders of the brain that hears that music.”

Williams
Yes.

Interviewer
“And of our skill sometimes to record it.” Do you still feel that such modesty is in order?

Williams
Modesty is in order, God knows—facing the universe of sound.

Interviewer
At least you are not talking about painting now.

Williams
No. I’m more or less committed to poetry.

Talking with Mrs. Williams—the Flossie of White Mule—is like going on with a conversation with Dr. Williams: the same honesty, the same warmth, mixed perhaps with briskness and reserve. The living room of their house reflects the interests they have had in common—the paintings, the flowers, the poetry. For fifty years the daily mail brought letters, books, journals, to accumulate in corners and cupboards and on tables around the edges of the room: books from authors and publishers, books with dedications to WCW, or titles borrowed from his poems; and the whole lot of those almost anonymous little magazines that he encouraged with contributions: poems, articles, the inevitable “visit with WCW.” On the first day of these particular interviews, a new hi-fi set still in its crate stood in the middle of the room, a gift from the second son, Paul. Now, while waiting for Dr. Williams to come in, Mrs. Williams put on a record, and we listened to the poet’s voice for a while, recorded in this same room with occasional sounds of local traffic coming through. It was an aging voice, unmodulated and didactic, but curiously effective in reading the late poems. Mrs. Williams talked about the town of Rutherford, and the poet’s brother Edgar, an architect with plans for improving life along the Passaic. She talked of the house when they first moved into it, and of her early impressions of Bill Williams as a young man, at a stage of their life when he was generally off in New York at the clinics, or at various literary gatherings.

Interviewer
Did you have to be converted to poetry, in those early days?

Mrs. Williams
No, I was sympathetic. Of course, Bill never paid much attention to me. He used to come to see my sister, who was quite a bit older. She played the piano, and Bill played the violin—not very well. And Edgar sang. Bill didn’t read his poetry to me then. He read some to my sister, but she didn’t think much of it. Bill’s early verse was pretty bad.

Interviewer
I understand Dr. Williams wrote a sonnet a day for a year, when he was at Pennsylvania. Edgar says he called it brainwash, or something worse.

Mrs. Williams
Meeting Ezra Pound seemed to make a difference. It was not really a literary relationship at first. They were too wholly different, but I think that was the turning point. From that time Bill began seriously to want to write poetry. But he realized he couldn’t make a living at it.

Interviewer
How did he happen to become a doctor?

Mrs. Williams
His father wanted him to be a dentist. Bill was willing to try. But he hated it. Bill was just too nervous to stand in one spot. But he loved being a doctor, making house calls, and talking to people.

Interviewer
He didn’t care to be a surgeon?

Mrs. Williams
He didn’t have the long fingers he thought a surgeon should have. That’s why he was never a good violinist. But he and Edgar both had ability with their hands. Edgar was a master at drawing, and Bill used to paint. And of course he loves to garden. Two years ago he turned over that whole garden for me when he could scarcely use his right arm. Things would really grow for him.

Interviewer
Was there much literary life in Rutherford?

Mrs. Williams
Not until much later. We had no literary contacts in Rutherford at all: except for Miss Owen, who taught the sixth grade. She knew what Bill was trying to do.

Interviewer
I had the feeling Dr. Williams felt there was no real response to his poetry, even when he read to local groups.

Mrs. Williams
They took what they could get, and ignored the rest—it just wasn’t for them. I think to this day very few people in Rutherford know anything about Bill’s writing.

Interviewer
Is that a comment on the town or the writing?

Mrs. Williams
I think both. It’s a lower-middle-class type of mind, and Bill has never attracted a general audience. My mother used to try to get me to influence him.

Interviewer
To write more conventionally?

Mrs. Williams
Yes. Some of it I didn’t like myself, but I never interfered. And I was never blamed for not liking it. [Telephone rings] I’ll get it, Bill. [Answering] Is it an emergency? No, there are no office hours on Friday. [Returning from phone] A patient for young Bill. He left the answering service off. That’s what happens.

Interviewer
I suppose you are used to that by now.

Mrs. Williams [groaning]
Yes, by now, I’m afraid I am.

Interviewer
Is Dr. Williams not writing now?

Mrs. Williams
No, not for over a year; he can’t. He just can’t find the words.

Interviewer
Was he writing very much when you were first engaged?

Mrs. Williams
No; once in a while he would send me a poem. But he was busy building up his practice. After we were married he wrote more. I saw to it that he had time, and I made it pleasant for people who came here—because I liked them myself. They were much more interesting than most of the local people. Everyone you can think of used to be in and out. We were the only ones who had a permanent address in all that time. For fifty years, this was headquarters for them all. There was Marsden Hartley—that was his only pastel, over the divan there. He was broke and wanted to go to Germany, so he had an auction at Stieglitz’s gallery. An American Place. Bill bought another one at the same time, an unfinished oil up in the study. Maxwell Bodenheim came and stayed a couple of weeks once. He almost drove us crazy. (He was supposed to have a broken arm but Bill was never convinced of it.) He was quite dirty and disagreeable. He couldn’t eat carrots, though we had to have them, for the children’s sake. And he stuttered terribly. One day we received a telegram from him saying: send two hundred dollars at once am going to marry a very beautiful girl. Maxwell. He was later found murdered in his apartment in New York, with his wife, if she was his wife; probably not the one in the telegram. Then there was Wallace Gould, whom you may not know, a friend of Hartley’s from Maine. His mother was an American Indian. And Marianne Moore used to come out with her mother. Bill’s writing developed tremendously in that period. There was a group up at Grantwood, near Fort Lee. Malcolm Cowley was in it; and Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alfred Kreymborg. Robert Brown had the one solid house; the others all lived around in their little shacks. Later on they used to meet in New York, at Lola Ridge’s place. She had a big, barnlike studio. I suppose today you would call her a communist, though I never heard any talk of that kind. She was older than most of the young writers. Then there was John Reed, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World; and Louise Bryant—they were all in that group. And there we were. There were arguments; they were all very serious about their writing. They used to get up and read—they would always read. It used to be deadly sometimes. But then I wasn’t too interested in the group, and after all I had two small children. And then in the thirties, there were the Friends of William Carlos Williams—Ford Madox Ford’s group. Toward the end we had a big party for them out here. But that was rather ridiculous. Bill says it was poor old Ford’s last gasp for—you know, a group around him. He was dying on his feet. And he did die a couple of years later.

Interviewer
How did you get along with Ezra Pound?

Mrs. Williams
Pound was never around. Pound came over in . . . I think, 1938 to get an honorary degree at Hamilton. And he spent two days with us when he was released from Saint Elizabeth’s in 1958, before he sailed for Italy. I wouldn’t know what to say of this last impression. He was self-centered, as always. You couldn’t talk to him; it was impossible. The only one he ever talked to nicely was Win Scott. It just happened that Win came out to see us, and they got along beautifully. Ezra always tried to tell Bill off, but they got along as friends over the years. Bill wasn’t afraid of him; their letters used to be rather acrimonious, back and forth.

Interviewer [to WCW looking in]
Apparently those letters don’t represent your final attitude?

Williams
No; the only thing that I remember was the attitude of Flossie’s father—

Mrs. Williams
But that has nothing to do with Ezra’s last visit here, dear.

Williams
Just a passing comment. [withdraws]

Mrs. Williams
Bill and Ezra wrote quite a number of letters to each other when the war started; they were on such opposite sides. Ezra was definitely pro-Fascist, much as he may deny it, and Bill was just the opposite. Not pro-Semitic but not anti-Semitic either, by any means.

Interviewer
After the war, wasn’t there some local concern about Dr. Williams’s so-called communism?

Mrs. Williams
That was in 1952, when Bill was going down to take the chair of poetry. Senator McCarthy was in the news then, and they were frightened to death in Washington. There was a woman who was lobbying for a reform in poetry, who had no use for free verse. She had a little periodical, I’ve forgotten the name of it, and she wrote a letter saying what an outrage it was that a man like that—

Interviewer
Of course, this was all in the aftermath of the Bollingen award to Pound.

Mrs. Williams
Bill had nothing to do with that. But if he had been a member of the Fellows then, he would certainly have voted for him.

Interviewer
Was Dr. Williams ever asked to testify against Pound?

Mrs. Williams
They questioned him two or three times. They wanted him to listen to some records and swear it was Pound. Bill couldn’t do that, but he said he would tell them frankly what he knew. And that was all. Every time we went down to Washington, Bill went to see him.

Interviewer
Going back to the First World War: perhaps this isn’t something you want to go into, but there were some local reactions then, weren’t there?

Mrs. Williams
Against Germans. Yes; that would involve Bill because he was married to me. Bill’s mother made my life one hell because I was partly German. Though she wasn’t living with us then.

Interviewer
So with one thing and another—Greenwich Village, communism, and the Germans—

Mrs. Williams
Bill was always in a controversy. But I think he stood his ground very well through it all.

Williams [coming in, and with his hands on Mrs. Williams’ shoulders]
Maybe you’ve had enough.

Mrs. Williams
Oh, Bill, it’s all right. Don’t worry about me. Go out and take a walk.

Interviewer [to WCW]
Do you have any recollection of writing a play for the PTA. years ago? It was on some local issue, like putting in a school nurse, on which you took a liberal view.

Williams
I can’t think. I was certainly interested in plays. But the only person I ever worked with was Kitty Hoagland.

Mrs. Williams
That was Many Loves, much later. Kitty didn’t come until the thirties. But Bill wrote four or five small plays during those early years. One about the Dutch around this area; and a very nice little play called The Apple Tree that was going to be done at the Provincetown, but Alfred Kreymborg lost it. And a Puritan play, Betty Putnam, that was acted over at the Tennis Club. Do you remember the old tennis courts over on Montross Avenue? There was a very active young group connected with it.

Interviewer
But the town itself didn’t quite get all this, I suppose. [To WCW] Your brother Edgar says it’s a narrow town, and what you have done is in spite of it.

Williams
Yes. There were some aristocrats back there who would have nothing to do with budding genius.

Interviewer
Not to mention political matters. Edgar says that in the political club which your father started, you were always the liberal.

Williams
Yes, to my sorrow.

Interviewer
To your sorrow?

Mrs. Williams
He doesn’t mean it! I don’t see why—

Williams
Do I mean it? For God’s sake, my friends have all been pretty disillusioned friends.

Interviewer
Marianne Moore, who knows you pretty well, says you were always a bit “reckless.”

Williams
I guess she’s right. I was a Unitarian. And Unitarians are liberals.

Mrs. Williams
I think Bill has always been willing to be reckless. There was the social credit business for instance, that Bill got involved in in the thirties. They wanted to give a kind of dividend to the people to increase purchasing power. There were large meetings in New York and down at the University of Virginia. But that was about the end of it. In fact many of those involved withdrew from it when they saw how things were going, with the war coming on and all. Some of them were so nervous about that whole episode they wouldn’t even speak to Bill. That’s the difference. I don’t say Bill was na√Øve; perhaps it was honesty. Bill isn’t a radical or a communist or anything else. He’s an honest man. And if he gets into it with both feet, it’s just too bad. That’s the way it’s been.

Interviewer [to WCW]
Right?

Williams
[Agrees, laughing.]

Interviewer
If we could talk a few more minutes about personal matters—how did you enjoy Saint Thomas? I understand you have just come back from there.

Williams
I could stay there forever, with reservations, of course. Saint Thomas is the place where my father grew up. I remember a photograph of the blizzard area—oh, for God’s sake, I mean the hurricane—in eighty-eight.

Mrs. Williams
Bill, dear, I’m sorry, but it must have been in the seventies. It was when your father was a boy.

Williams [with a sigh]
Yes, yes, yes. [Laughs] I remember a story of the hurricane. Thoroughly documented. How first the water went out of the harbor and left it dry, the ships lying on their beams’ ends, and then another shudder and an earthquake worse than they ever had in the area. And I have a distinct memory of some photographs of my father, taken at perhaps twenty-one years of age. I was very much interested in making contact with his memory.

Mrs. Williams
It was a good trip, but Bill gets restless. And it’s too difficult at our age.

Williams
I think we’ll not go again.

Interviewer
To get back for a minute to the troubles of 1952—do you think you were working too hard at that time?

Williams
I was interested in the process of composition—in the theory of it. And I was working pretty hard at it. But I couldn’t make much of it.

Mrs. Williams
Bill had a contract with Random House for three books. There was no hurry; but that’s the only way Bill can work. And he doesn’t want to look things over, which is his worst fault. The Build-Up was written then. I’m afraid Bill garbled that one. It was just impatience. And he didn’t want me to read the things either. I wish I had, there were so many errors in the Autobiography. That was inexcusable. Then, one night in the winter of forty-eight, Bill felt a pain in his chest, shoveling out the car. He kept going until February. I used to drive around with him on house calls. But it was too much.

Williams
I had a heart attack. Perhaps it was a good thing. I thought I was God almighty, I guess, in general. But I got over that one.

Mrs. Williams
There wasn’t any kind of cerebral trouble until 1950 or so. Bill had given up medicine and we were going down to take the chair of poetry in Washington. But in 1952, when we were up visiting the Abbotts, in New York, Bill had a serious stroke.

Williams
I tried to play it down. I was conscious, and rational; and I could joke about it. But I was in a strange house, and I needed to get home. I couldn’t write—

Mrs. Williams
Then suddenly you could hardly understand him.

Williams
That was the end. I was through with life.

Mrs. Williams
No, it wasn’t the end. You had a lot of life left. You had a whole play running through your mind while you were lying there, The Cure. You thought it out and dictated the notes to me. You wrote it when we got home.

Interviewer
That was something of a change in approach.

Williams
Yes, the novels I just did as I went along, at first though I tried to think them out as well as I could.

Mrs. Williams
Of course White Mule was about a baby, Bill’s favorite subject. But most of the later poems were written after the stroke. Bill used to say things like spelling didn’t matter, and he would never correct at all. I think he did much better work after the stroke slowed him down.

Williams [perhaps grudgingly]
The evidence is there.

Interviewer
It was when you were at the Abbotts’ that someone read Theocritus to you.

Williams
Yes, Mrs. Gratwick; I asked her to. Theocritus was always strong in my mind. But I wasn’t capable of hearing it in the Greek. I’m in an unfortunate position, because I don’t have the original language. For example, I started to take Latin at Horace Mann, but the teacher was withdrawn, to my infinite regret. That was the end of that—all my life, that was the end. And I always regretted, too, that I didn’t know Greek. I don’t know, as far as the Theocritus was concerned, whether it came first, or the stroke.

Mrs. Williams
You had talked of doing an adaptation.

Interviewer
Why Theocritus?

Williams
The pastoral nature of it gave me a chance to spread myself. It was Greek, and it appealed to me; and it was a wonderful chance to record my feeling of respect for the Greek classics.

Interviewer
There was a change in the verse in the fifties. Was this the first time you tried the new measure?

Williams
“The Descent” was the first. I regard that as an experiment in the variable foot.

Interviewer
You said earlier that you were almost unconscious when you wrote it.

Williams
Yes, I was. I was very much excited. I wasn’t conscious of doing anything unusual but I realized that something had occurred to me, which was a very satisfying conclusion to my poetic process. Something happened to my line that completed it, completed the rhythm, or at least it was satisfying to me. It was still an irregular composition—but not too much so—but I couldn’t complete it. I had written that poem to retain the things which would have been the completion of the poem. But as for picking the thing up and going on with it, I had to acknowledge I was licked. I didn’t dare fool with the poem so that it would have been more rigid; I wouldn’t have wanted that.

Interviewer
You felt there was nothing more you could do with it?

Williams
Nothing more. I felt all that I could do with it had been done, but it was not complete. I returned to it; but the irregularity of that poem could not be repeated by me. It was too . . . I’ve forgotten.

Interviewer
You feel it wasn’t a perfect poem?

Williams
It was too regular. There were variations of mood which would have led me to make a different poem out of it.

Interviewer
And you don’t think anything after “The Descent” goes beyond it?

Williams
No. I always wanted to do something more with it, but I didn’t know how.

Mrs. Williams
There was one written quite a long time before: that was the start of it. Then there was the “Daphne and Virginia”—Virginia, of course, was Paul’s wife, and Daphne is Bill’s. That poem always makes me sad. “The Orchestra” was written in 1954 or 1955, I think. Bill wrote quite a lot after he had the stroke.
It’s really amazing what he has done; and he gave readings, too, in Saint Louis, Chicago, Savannah—

Williams
I couldn’t break through.

Mrs. Williams
Harvard, Brandeis, Brown. We took two trips to the coast after that—to UCLA, the University of California, Washington—

Williams
I’ve been going downhill rapidly.

Interviewer
And the Pictures from Brueghel?

Williams
Yes, those are late, very late. But they are too regular.

Interviewer
Did you ever grow any fonder of the academic world after your trips around the campuses?

Mrs. Williams
They liked him, at least. And the girls’ colleges all loved him.

Williams
The high point was the appearance at Wellesley. It was a very successful impromptu appearance, a reading. I always remember the satisfaction I got pleasing the ladies—the kids.

Interviewer
Beginning with the Women’s Club in Rutherford.

Williams
Always. I was always for the ladies.

Mrs. Williams
Bill has always been fond of women, and terribly disappointed not to have had a sister. And he never had a daughter. But women liked him; they sensed that he was sympathetic, and they could talk to him.

Williams
Very sympathetic.

Interviewer
Just one or two more questions. Do you think your medical training—your discipline in science—has had any effect on your poetry?

Williams
The scientist is very important to the poet, because his language is important to him.

Interviewer
To the scientist?

Williams
Well, and the poet. I don’t pretend to go too far. But I have been taught to be accurate in my speech.

Interviewer
But not scholastic. Someone has said you would not make so much of the great American language if you had been judicious about things.

Williams
It’s a point well taken. The writing of English is a great pastime. The only catch to that is when a man adds the specification English. That is purely accidental and means nothing. Any language could be inserted in its place. But the restrictions that are accepted in the classics of a language enclose it in a corset of mail, which becomes its chief distinction.

Mrs. Williams
Bill has always experimented. He was never satisfied to keep doing the same thing. And he has been severely criticized. But I think some of the younger poets are benefiting from it. Like Charles Tomlinson, and Robert Creeley—they’ve learned a lot from Bill. David Ignatow—any number of them. Allen Ginsberg was a good friend for many years.

Williams
I am a little concerned about the form. The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable, but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven’t been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong, but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

Interviewer
What do you think you yourself have left of special value to the new poets?

Williams
The variable foot—the division of the line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American. It’s all right if you are not intent on being national. But an American is forced to try to give the intonation. Either it is important or it is not important. It must have occurred to an American that the question of the line was important. The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of. As for my own elliptic way of approach, it may be baffling, but it is not unfriendly, and not, I think, entirely empty.

Mrs. Williams
All the young people come out to see Bill. Charles Olson has been here a lot. Denise Levertov was out last week. Then there is Robert Wallace, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Bell, Tram Combs. Charles Tomlinson stopped in on his way back to England.

Williams
Yes. He is writing in my vein. He’s even conscious of copying me. I don’t think he is too popular with his contemporaries. But it does look suspiciously like the beginning of something in England. I defer to you. But—do you have an example of his poems there?

Interviewer
He seems to be carrying on the new measure. Do you have any comment?

Williams
The lines are not as I would have done, not loose enough. Not enough freedom. He didn’t ignore the rules enough to make it really satisfactory.

Interviewer
But you think he shows your influence in England, finally. That must be a satisfaction.

Williams
It is.

Mrs. Williams
I think Bill will shortly be published in England.

Interviewer
You would think they might have appreciated the American idiom.

Williams
Not my American idiom.

Mrs. Williams [looking about among the books]
These are some translations of Bill’s poems in Italian—the early poems, Paterson, The Desert Music.

Williams
Yes, I was very pleased by those.

Mrs. Williams
Here are some selected poems in German: Gedichte, 1962.

Williams
I’m alive—

Mrs. Williams
There is a selection coming out now in Czechoslovakia. And here is an anthology of “American lyrics” in Norwegian—

Williams
I’m still alive!

The Paris Review (Issue 32, 1964)

Meditation My Ass

Get your morning meditation out of my face.
I don't care about your fucking cardinal,
don't want to hear about your cattle call.
Who cares if the dog has a master.
Words, pious my ass. Keep your dreams
to yourself and your woodpecker, too—
any other birds you want to twist in here?
Warblers? Shit, why not an Evening Grosbeak?
I'd rather eat their warbling little heads
than read anything more about them in
your finely crafted poem. Take your drums
and shove them down your dove coos.
Stop forcing yourself to talk dirty to me—
grubs and worms, you're so transgressive.
Get out of my event horizon, stat.
Take your honey-suckers and your bark-
breakers and demonstrate your metaphor
on some other fucking plane of existence.
Sap? Stop pretending you're not full of
shit. You can't hide behind the husks
of "rough" words. You're right about
one thing: we miss the obvious, don't we?
Where there's skin and blood there's sure
to be a hawk or something worse
circling in the duh sky. Why not put him
in her brain? It's wider you know.
You meant you and she when you said
"we," right? You meant the love between you
was no less than a song, where a song
is like this transcendent superhuman thing—
you meant you like made love for hours
then fucked like bonobos, scratching
each other's backs and biting each other's
flesh, mmm mmm good. I'm sure she wants to
see your fucking cardinal light up again.

Thoughts rise like gas

Thoughts rise like gas as I sit on the can. White walls dull as the technical faculty, or facility I guess, of a poet. Who couldn't take quickly to the counting, and variation, of feet? How many years wasted before the epiphany of full-bodied beat? Could be a lifetime, this lifeline, or you could get away without it. Spring and all, against the grain. As if any work could be without it. To mind the line but not to toe it. The line is a plank but it's not. The poem is not a pirate ship, but it is, as it sails with its stolen cargo below deck, sails ever under the sign of skull and crossbones. The lines, canons. Galleys charged with forgetfulness. Samples composed of dummy text . . .

This is a line. This is a line
break. This is a line. This
is a line break. This is a line. This is a line break.
 

Like surfing the Web

Writing, like surfing the Web. You're reading a webpage and notice a link, in a sidebar, say, and you think you'll click on it when you finish what you're reading. But what you were reading has led to a different link. You click on that one, read that webpage, and click a link there to some other site, etc., until you end up someplace very different from that first link you noticed when your surfing started. But that link not followed is as much a part of your reading as the links followed. What's the difference between a link not taken and a link taken but mostly forgotten? The browser history won't show the link not taken, but it's in you, like a little black rock. Shakes loose and gets stuck in an interior nook of you, like a bit of dirt in your shoe. And so writing the writer is struck by an idea, or image, or series of words. An angle, a slant, a take. A nuance. Phrase mentally noted but not set down. Not yet. Not yet. Till not yet becomes never. But it's always there. Even if it's eventually forgotten on the surface. There in the authorial mind at least. A parenthetical of the unconscious mind. Less parenthetical (like this) than parenthetical like this.

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
 

What about the lyric

What about the lyric as phenomenological inquiry? I wake up with the same thought I left off with. The last thought I can at least remember. There were others. So much of life is forgetting. Hmm, into the morning routine, except I eat and have my tea before brushing teeth. Jazzy morning. Vaughn buzzing around the living room. KC tottering along, room to room, with Dash in her arms. Room to room? There are only three-and-a-half down here. Plus a half-bath. Is that four? Never fully comprehended the mathematics of realty. Would a phenomenological lyric be called phenomenolyrical? Why care what it'd be called when I can't say what it is? Saying, saying. I hate saying. Intuitive movement through the lyric. Silence in the words. Between the words. Of the words. Constituted but not chained. KC sets Dash in his crib upstairs. She's "in the shower" before she's in the shower. Vaughn building Duplo towers in the living room. Chatting to herself. Taken over the years by the idea of "phenomenological lyricism." Taken over by the illogical impingements of connotations. Formerly in the full phrase: "a phenomenological lyricism which recreates the texture and logic of interior experience." Redundancy. The interior is built into the phenomenological. Texture in necessarily a result of the dynamic process of person-al experience, of self-reflective consciousness, of being in time. The lyric as synthesis of the minute analyses at work in the self-reflective moment. The moment is a movement. Jargon and redundancy led me to an ill-conceived, half-understood concoction of surrealism, cubism, beat, post-langpo, etc. quagmire, futility. The need to start over. Recognized over the years, but seeking articulation in order to act. Damn articulation. But is that right? The "free world" is riding piggyback on the inarticulate speech of a not particular president. A president of the Word. Who doesn't understand the Word is a black stone. Whose white stone is black with oil and blood. Whose white house is invisible black with oil and blood. Whose home is a mansion, but whose room in the house of being is a half-bath the size of a public bathroom stall. Who eats and sleeps in the oil and blood of his own shit. Empty mug of tea. Where's my family—they're upstairs. Black stone words. That "language is the house of being" is the poet's challenge, not his or her sentence.

Where were we

Where were we? I was sitting with my back to the windows that line the south wall in the dining room. Back to the gray light on the rainy noon. Vaughn sitting across from me. KC sitting to her right. Dash in his high chair to the right of KC. Between me and Vaughn, the tuna casserole she helped her mom make. Different this time because they used elbows instead of bow-ties. This is as good as it's ever come out. We talk about how we haven't had it in a while, and how maybe that's why it seems so good. Or maybe it's because we're all so hungry. KC cuts up tiny pieces to feed Dash. As much tumbles out of his mouth as stays in. He likes it too. It's quiet, now, across the street. In the lot being excavated in preparation for a new two-family house. Rain coming down hard enough it forced the work to stop. The rain as benevolent force. Vaughn's through and ready for dessert. Today she chooses Edy's orange & cream low-fat fruit bar. What we used to call a popsicle. I get it for her before either KC or I are done with our meals because she's been good today. She'll be upstairs setting up a party for her stuffed animals before KC and I start on our dessert. But now, where were we? We were all at the table and KC was shooting glances at me as Vaughn was chatting away at us. KC could tell I wasn't registering a word. My mind more than half elsewhere. I'm thinking of Dale Smith's Black Stone: "What we are to each other is locked into language—" and there may be a sense in which that's true, that bears closer inspection. Language may be, as Heidegger had it, "the house of being," but I refuse to believe we're locked in. On a hot day, where I'm sitting, I can feel the sun through the window behind me as its heavy rays shawl my shoulders. I could turn around in my chair and see the house next door, the rain flowing out the gutter, dropping to the driveway and running down garageward. I could see the cars blurring by over the glossy black pavement with its shiny yellow demarcation, blurring by under branches with deep green leaves drooping under the weight of too much water. I could see the empty, muddy lot across the street where more and thicker trees used to be. I could turn knowing that KC and Vaughn and Dash are turning with me, and it's not quite because of language. They are with me inside me, beyond where words can go. What if we could kick down all seven doors in the house of being, what would it be? Now what about the lyric as phenomenological inquiry?

Strum

The content and opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect the views of, nor are they endorsed by, the poem.

The poem will not acquiesce to poet distinctions of truth and untruth, perfect and imperfect, whole and fragment, cooked and raw, objective and confessional, scratch and exhaust, home and away, center and circumference, armpit and snatch, handout and charlatan, bogus and brave, benign and beyond, child and parent, open and closed, waking and sleep, service and severance, vaccine and virus, apostle and apostate, known and unknown, forgiving and unforgiving, what and what not, more and less, self and other, tenured and diapered, all or nothing.

Exhausted yawp, or yawn

The poem longs to be exhausted
The poem longs to be compact and infinite
(The poem longs to be speared my treatment)
The poem is a filter of silences
The poem knows the transcendent cannot be signified
The poem knows the transcendent does not cross does not in fact transcend
The poem knows what is and what isn't
The poem knows it's easy to see this for nothing is hidden
The poem loves the hole that envelops the poem and devours the poet
The poem loves the hole the poet passes through to bring the poem to the world
The poem touches it lightly
The poem accounts for as much as ninety-five percent of universal mass
(That's a lot)
The poem abhors mirrors and cell phones
The poem injects itself into the earth around a termite home
The poem is a pesticide unnatural and potentially harmful when breathed
The poem abhors the word "death" in a poem
The poem abhors "God" and "soul" and "capital"
The poem has death wrapped around its voiceless vowels
The poem does not age but advances
The poem becomes its opposite before butchering both poles slabs of cow
The poem picks its moments from its monster nose
The poem is relentless
The poem could just as easily pass out of existence
The poem comes to a stop without stopping
The poem is a stop sign in halogen headlight brilliant red glazed with rain water the white letters shivering starry-night-like at the darkness
The poem stops the poet in his animal tracks
The poem bites back, ass, and ear
The poem touches it lightly
The poem splits its head to reveal a volcano
The poem never itself erupts it exists ever on the verge of eruption
The poem races the poem traces the poem displaces
The poem itself aces high will not judge the collateral damage of war
The poem puts "do or die" in quotes
The poet can't resist
The poet could slip and fall and break his neck rushing down the stairs to pen and pad
And the poem would not shudder the poem would not blink
The poem goes on
The poem longs to be exhausted
The poet is a flamethrower fueled of the sun
The poet is a two-dimensional figure a zero on the page
The poem downloads at its own furious nonchalant pace
The poet wants to burn the poem to disk
The poem couldn't care less

Last night's roasted

The poem doesn't fear the soft surrealism of American poetry that blunts the blue serrated edge jagging through alternating black and green landscapes
The safe surprises that tug with baby teeth at the French fell seams of the red parachute in the oblivion sky
The poem trusts what will endure or else it does not care
While the poet frets, warped guitar, and the poet stews, last night's roasted carrots and red potatoes.

Nobody in the books

As if I have enough attention (or time but who has that) to give to one blog, which is destined to be neglected for another long period of time, if not right after Dash finally comes sliding out into the world, due date was today now yesterday, then shortly thereafter, last week I went and produced a spin-off, Nobody in the books. It's nothing, really, but a gathering of links to online poems, but it has meant that much of whatever "free" computer time I have (of course, things in real life, hmm, are never quite stated that way, I'm supposed to be one of the adults in the household after all) has been spent, and will be spent assuming it's there to be spent, surfing through back issues and such. I'm not sure there's any point to it. I used to do stuff like this, photocopying or typing up poems, and collecting them in binders, but that fell wayside years ago. I suppose this is a kind of reconnecting with that impulse. It's times like this... who? what? huh? Shit.

I hate that "the sound of one hand clapping" has become a cliche. Because this is it.

The poem in her bed pulling her stuffed animals toward her
The poem is out of the crib and into the twin
The poem needs the animals to sleep
The poem does not fear dreams the poem is afraid of
The poem pulls the covers up to her nose
The poem is mandatory at a certain point of the night
The poem is the sleep more than the sleeper
The sleeper cannot be separated for the poem is a siamese twin
The poem steps off a short yellow bus with the help of the driver
The poem does not fear the driver only the drive
The poem walks into the arms of its mother
Snaps out of its dream for the poem cannot walk
The poem is helped into the wheelchair
The poem's mother smiles to the driver and steps behind the chair
The poem's mother will push
The poem up the ramp through the brown brown row of public housing
The poem sleeps above my computer nook
The poem keeps me typing
The poem is the severed limbs of Little Bear
The poem bleeds when you scratch it
The puppet called Monster dances on the limbs of Little Bear
The poem can't control the puppet
The driver of the bus has driven the animals into darkness
The computer nook palpitates with a palpable starkness
The poem delivers the words on a slate gray vibration ruffling under the yellow walls
The poem opens and disappears
The poem beats the head of Little Bear against the bathroom wall
The poem is not potty trained
The poem breathes deeply hugging her stuffed animals
The poem rolls to the floor
Wakes and cries and mommy and daddy rush to her surprise
The poem needs to be soothed and told Tomorrow will be a good day

On a Review of Pieces of Air in the Epic

How is writing a volume of poetry based on a concept tricky business? How often do contemporary American poets do this? How often has it been done in the past? What is the success rate? Is writing a single poem not tricky business? What makes Hillman's hands so adept? What is the pitfall she is avoiding? How is tricky business a pitfall? If air can change and is therefore a master of disguise, what is the missing premise? How is an affected trope distinguished exactly in a work which self-consciously draws attention to its artifice? What is negative about an affected trope in such a context? Is it the definition of "affected?" What does it mean to call wind, space, and breath different guises of air? Is the difference between them supposed to be vast? Is the difference even moderate? Why don't we always recognize whether the poem is about air in general, or about air in detail, or about air doing something? Does Hillman place extra space between words and phrases? Are such spaces just to provide pauses and enticements to pondering possibilities? Is such intention as simple as opening a window, "to let in some air," or is there a deeper, more specific reason?

What is Hillman's approach? And what does it have in common with "language poetry?" Is all opaque writing influenced by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement? Why not replace transition with transformation? What is the line being tip-toed here? Is the import such that we could not bring ourselves to make the edit completely? If something is cryptic what does it matter whether it's intentional or not? What is the skill required? Syntax is torqued, pronouns shift, and a griffin appears: why a griffin? Why did Hillman choose the tired techniques of the post-avant over the tired techniques of the traditional lyric? Are materials themselves "a little bit of [meaning]"? Why not explicate the little bit of meaning that is there? Or is all meaning made in the mind of a reader? Was this an interesting thought in 1968? Is it an interesting thought in 2006? Were such a thought laid bare and broken into five relatively wordy lines would the result be recognized as "absolutely dazzling" by the post-avant activist? What is it about Hillman's lines that should make readers want to "put [the materials] together" themselves? Does every response of "What the fuck? This is nonsense?" mean the reader is confused or alienated? Why would such a response be inaccurate here? Should the reader feel bad that little epics have hurt feelings because they're not big epics? Is "little epic" French for orgasm? What would Shakespeare do with this material? What about Whitman? What about Tu Fu? If those aren't fair questions, what if we make adjustments for inflation? What are the people who find "exactly what they are looking for" in Hillman's work looking for? What is the freedom her poems achieve? Is it the freedom of a former slave? Could a reader be something other than liberated by this freedom? Could the freedom lead to a kind of oppression? Or is it really, truly a complete freedom? Is it possible? Is a former slave ever anything else?

It may be true that "we must trust" Hillman, but should we? What hints are there that it will be worth our time? What good is it if only "she knows the way through her poems?" What if I get distracted in the middle of a poem, how will I find my way back into it? Is the path different every time? Most of the time? Some of the time? If only she knows the way, but the reader is making the meaning, then who is in control? What if I'm the reader and I don't feel like engaging in this tug-of-war? Am I included in the "we" of this review? Do we ever get the feeling that we're in a not-for-profit version of The Matrix? Is this how we want to spend our days before we die? If avoiding order is a worthy goal why make poems and not bombs? How can we tell that Hillman is "willful" in her violent treatment of sense? If a great disorder is an order, is the poet back where she started? If a great disorder isn't an order, why not make every poem out of random words plucked out of a hat? How will readers piece together meanings when they can't even acquire expectations? I could have the expectation that something unexpected will constantly be happening, can't I? When one expects something unexpected is the unexpected very interesting? Even if it's possible, could it possibly be likely? How would one figure? What is significant about Hillman's "fractured, refracted, dispersed by space" vision? How is this not an affected trope?

What does the injection of "pure lyricism" into a non-lyric poem do for the poem? How about to the reader? Is it beautiful? The "intersection of abstraction and the real world" may be "a fair description of what we encounter in subsequent poems," but isn't it also a fair description of what we encounter in the poems of any number of post-Modern poets? Why not the periwinkle noise of sparrows? Or the pepper spray noise of sparrows? Would "someone else's dream" be stranger than mine? Do dreams bleed off the trim or do they cry? Are moments of clarity and precision always this dizzy and vague? Have we, perhaps, reached a point of agreement?

Are lyrical threads and narrative lines necessarily non-associative? What is the form Hillman takes away from her poems? How does association help her get to the heart of her poems exactly? Could there be an ordering of words, random or otherwise, in which the words don't accumulate in sense, here broadly defined, and sound? How does "often whimsical" language lead to an "intentionally cryptic" approach? Would being willfully whimsical in the course of being "deliberately opaque" imply that the whimsy is just affect? Is the incomprehensibility of the world an accomplished fact? The existence of meaning is arguably meaningless, but is there really no order in the world? If Hillman's work is like holding up a mirror to the world, why not hold up a mirror to the world and forget the words? What is gained by holding up an opaque mirror? Why not a self-portrait in a convex mirror?

Wouldn't the "I" have to feel less like a narrator in a non-narrative poem? Why use "I" to enter into self-referentiality? Why not a greater disordering of pronouns? Is this a case of being trapped in a tank? Where is the air here? If air is invisible why are there words in the poems at all? Why not an epic composed of blank pages? Why write lines that "create and keep a certain distance" when the reader must trust the writer to blaze a path through the poems? Is this supposed to introduce air into the text, as if it's merely an affected trope? What does it mean to write an existential riff and include it in a book of poems, to publish it and wait for it to be quoted in a review and recognized as such? Would any reader have thought it more heartfelt question than intellectual musing? More question period than musing? Why bother? What is the greater sensibility behind these poems? Greater than who? Greater than what? If a question is a rhetorical question, to the point that the question mark is left out in favor of a period, why not say: this is a rhetorical question? Who could argue that idle questions aren't the devil's balls?

Wouldn't it be better to be whimsically political or cryptically political than forthrightly political? Why the change of heart? How long ago did we reach the point where it became a cliche to state that being political in a poem is "risky?" Crossing the street is risky and it's a cliche, too, but why should the reader care? If Hillman's language gains force when being forthright, why not be forthright all of the time? Most of the time? More of the time? Has she achieved the perfect one-part-this / five-parts-that balance? How can we tell? Why are the moments of unmistakable meaning interesting when contrasted with the abstract wording surrounding them? Is bluntly referencing the president more political than opaquely referencing the world in which he lives that has no order? What would an American poem of epic sweep be without Greek references? Am I included in the "we" of this review? So she's saying we're all side stories? Is this the news Williams was referring to? Why only include "the gods, men and women of classical mythology?" What about the rest? What about the breath of all the people in all of the cultures of all history? Shouldn't that breath be joining ours, too, in this affected trope we call a world?

Who Cares About Literature Anyway?

Poems which start out by referencing the act of writing are easily dismissed as too self-involved and usually have to be fairly well-written to be published. This is especially true when the poem's arguably provocative thesis is quickly dispensed with because of faulty memory, though the rest of the poem's images purport to offer figurative support. When the poem proceeds into cleverness and an even clunkier rhythm than it started out with, a reasonable mind would think that even a fringe literary magazine would pass on it. Throw in a weather report, a platitude, and a brave but unsuccessful attempt to retrieve an image from cliche-ville, and most certainly the poem is destined for a fistful of rejections and, at best (if the circumstances are right) publication in the juvenilia section of the late poet's collected works, perhaps on the strength of its humorous final stanza—even though, there too, the lineation is questionable. But none of this applies for established poets, in which case, the poem will appear in a respected-by-most biannual poetry journal. If it were only that, I wouldn't be writing this. But what's more, the poem, in this case Franz Wright's "Publication Date" will be selected for the Poetry 180 program ("a poem a day for american [sic] high schools"—all lowercase: so contemporary, so cool) so that the nation's youth can be subjected to poor writing and equate that with poetry for the rest of their lives. Yee-hah. Go poet laureates! Keep fighting the good fight.

All poets have their clunkers—and if I can be considered a poet it's despite the fact that most-if-not-all of my poems have been just that—but there's no excuse for whichever editor (is this still Billy's gig?) selected the poem for such a high-profile space—and for pedagogical purposes to boot. Then again, some readers really like this poem. When Wright's latest book was reviewed in The Harvard Crimson, the poem was highlighted for its "slapstick desperation" and the reviewer finds the poem a hoot. Last year, poet Peter Pereira felt compelled to post the poem on his blog. (But then, Pereira's next book is titled What's Written on the Body and the judgement of any poet who would use that for a book title after Jeanette Winterson's brilliant novel Written on the Body is at least suspect.)

Anyway, if all the poets who stand around lamenting the lack of poetry readers, young and old, really want to get kids, at least, interested, then they should start a campaign to ban it. Just ban poetry books from ever being on school grounds: automatic suspension for any student caught with On Earth or Ring of Fire. But be clear that rock star poetry doesn't count under the ban, to help avoid confusion. Also, be sure to demand that rating labels be placed on all poetry and poetry-related book covers. You may have to wait a few years for the stigma to fade, but then watch: The loot will accrue in stacks and rolls.

Chicks Flushing, But I Can't Eat a Grouse

Poetry Daily has posted an awesomely bad poem today about flushing birds. I can only imagine that "Furniture of the World" was published in the Boston Review because the author resides in Cambridge. Perhaps she met somebody? It's funny how PD reports that a poem is selected "for its literary quality"? I thought PD was trying to attract new readers of poetry, not send them scurrying away? (Stop trying already! All of you!)

It's not clear whether the birds are being flushed or if they're actually doing the flushing themselves. Maybe it's a metaphor, you know, like there's a bunch of chicks in the lady's room that I'm spying on. That, at least, might explain why I fall to my knees. And I have to assume she's talking to me, since the "you" of the poem isn't defined at all, not even hinted at (I'll take hinted at!) as being herself or some lover or other friend or relative or enemy. Maybe the birds are simply turning red, and the poet just didn't care that many readers will laugh at the first line as they initially read the opening words to the sound of a toilet. The poet won't deign to say why the bird would be turning red; but it's too bad she couldn't at least specify what bird it was, that could clear things up. Bird specificity shows up in the next line, though, with "a hazel grouse" I couldn't eat for some reason. (I don't normally eat a whole fowl anyway, just a breast usually.) Do American restaurants serve hazel grouse? Why not a bigger grouse? Why not a kind of turkey or chicken or duck? I'd love to cook somebody's goose. But at lest she tells me why I couldn't eat a grouse for what I make of the chicks flushing the lady's room; it's because of "the soft berth of [my] own / great reliable outcome." Apparently I have a soft "spot" reserved for the ship of the things that I almost always do. Or maybe the berth is a bed to bunk in once my day is done? Who knows? In the real world something is configured in order to meet certain requirements. In this poem I configure myself "out of the quiet blood of beasts" (although quiet blood would seem to be blood of the dead, but even still: my dad was not quiet, and: are you calling my mom a beast?) so that I may be a toy. Why would I make myself into a toy? Aren't there better ways to become mild as a giraffe? Is this there to reassure me that I'm only a peeping tom with my "discrete, unrequired interest" in the flushing chicks. That being "mild" I'm really harmless, not a stalker, or a rapist. Well, jeez, that's nice to know. Did I really have to configure myself to do that? Are you sure I didn't have any help? Ah well, just cut out a phrase from a catalog and stick it over the words. There, we have a poem. Let's just hope somebody doesn't "tie [it] to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it."

Google Blogoscoped Googles Favorite Words

Many people have Favorite Words and they're not afraid to share them. I have a favorite word, but only as it exists in my head, when I hear it, or read it, or say it (can't do it, not even in a whisper, and certainly not in a yell), it falls apart and depresses me.

Spicer This Is Not a Trilogy

Dear Spicer,
    I don't want to make poems at all. The lawn was a mistake, because it is a lawn. The writer is nothing but a temple in collapse. Poems should break out of the ether. There is no ether. How about the newspaper? Poems should break out of the newspaper and— fucking I don't want to say the sky. Do you know the moon? She is sweet, like they say, right? Are you feeling me? I get excited I cut myself this morning my middle finger I wasn't shaving I was shopping it was morning but it was lunch I was Stop n Shopping I felt so dirty I felt clean at work in my office chair. How cliche. There is no I in imagination. Poems should break out of the newspaper incomplete and whole and falling around I cut my finger. Sans I.

Dear Spicer,
    You and Lorca both tried to be free of shadows—in the Platonic sense. When poets, or anyone, start talking about Platonic shadows sliding along cave or bedroom walls, it makes me want to watch Fox News. It's not like listening to Clinic's "Internal Wrangler" in the mystery of one's own kitchen, which is like an orgasmic experience you can have even while mashing potatoes if you have the volume high enough, you should be alive the vocals are audible the guitar is genuine as a hard on if this were a poem the sound would be one of living stones climbing up a hill and the sun from a shorter distance suggesting a gurgling of salt water drained from one hell of a pulchritudinous ass. If shadows don't decay they consume their creators and join the work force.

Dear Spicer,
    When you wrote to Lorca that "Things do not connect; they correspond," you meant "Things do not correspond; they connect." That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects. That is why I agree with everything you say which is otherwise an unhealthy spot to be in. Time in Spain is time in California, and yet it's not. Time in a lemon, that is a real poem. The poet is not the lemon. The poet is the air. You knew the poet is not a real object, coy bastard. Many years ago in a classroom far far away an inorganic teacher was discussing the Bible as literature I believe it was the Psalms my faith was shaken when the red-headed gorilla-jawed boy behind me handed me a scribbled lyric joke "Squeeze my lemon till the juice run down my leg" my faith in a world where things do not correspond I completely forgot about till now.

Dear Spicer,
    These letters do, then, correspond, I guess. They correspond with only the dead know what and perhaps some future poet. It's true what they say, poets always, even at their most nihilistic, always assume a future. Just like Johnny Rotten screaming "No Future" at a bunch of faux cynical children, the future is assumed. That is how we dead men write to each other.
    Bone garden lithograph,
    Yours in context,
    Scott

Prequel. Letter. Spicer.

Dear Jack Spicer,
    You are dead and the dead are very patient enough for poetry. My dreams will be prose. Even though the subconscious is not patient prose, I will go home, sober and dissatisfied, and sleep—and other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking to destroy each other or attract each other. Listen to each of these two poets who speak to me. And I to them and we to he speak in prose. Presciently I should go to a bar and there be one with a mad man who is talking to himself. But in the room next to mine: image. Prose invents poetry, discloses temporary untruth, unable to yield to the substance of a single. If fifty poets in fifty languages, they still would be these paragraphs—poetry couldn’t be translated, transformed by a chain. See how weak prose is? I invent a word like invention is merely the enemy of poetry, but calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else? Invention never loses anything. This has nothing to do with losing something. With each transformation, such as, of course, telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining on generations of different poets in different countries, patiently worded: tradition means much more than that. It means Pantheon, which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare town, or obscure hints of obscure bits of magic and published bygones, of Elizabethan quotations or guide books. Oh, the poet’s hone cements lately into an historical patchwork like weather made up for these letters that will think by this. We mean what tradition seems to. In my last letter I will speak of the tradition. The fools that read precisely written letters are unnecessary because they must be in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help. Let them swallow their permanent teeth. They will establish the bulk, the wattage that, my, these letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be Love.
    Arc hill night,
    Scott

Letter to Jack Spicer

Dear Mr. Spicer,

When I read one of your poems and I come across words I understand, I never guess at their meanings. I am randomly getting it. A really perfect poem (of the kind you wrote) could be perfectly understood by a person who knew all of the words and had many interpretations. A really perfect poem (of the kind you wrote that cannot be written) is an infinitely small black hole.

It is somewhat simple. We want to obliterate the temporal object, explode the material emotion into the poem—and yet the temporal always sends out hundreds of its own ideas, prickly and depressive as mosquitoes. It is fine to tense your arm as they pilfer your blood, and watch them explode. A poet is an agent of nature not a saint. The ideas cast by the temporal harden and crack like a failed plaster cast of a wasted rock star's cock. No lipstick of oldest tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words, must be obliterated and reimagined outside of time.

I hear "Fire" from the back of the proverbial cinaplex. I grip my lover's hand and laugh. We have heard "Alas." But if there is a real fire, with real smoke, the word "Fire" will arrive outside of time, and we will hurry our asses for the nearest "Exit" sign, trusting it accurately signifies "this way out," trampling those in our path if we must.

Everyone I know is enthralled by ideas. They spill them out onto a table under the interrogative light of the poem, and count them up; they group them in any number of ways, trying every combination, invoking countless binary profundities—as if an idea could become an enlightenment by mere addition, or subtraction, of contemplations. Others pick up ideas from the sidewalks, from their coffeehouses, from their classrooms and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "Look what I have collected from the Postmodern age. See my tattoos, my blog roll, my baseball cap!" What does one do with all of this flotsam and jetsam?

Ideas bounce off the imagination. We throw them at the imagination only to chart the various deflections. They are the ricochet, nothing more. They are as valuable in themselves as giant, bright red clown shoes in a brothel.

Let me repeat—the perfect poem is an infinitely small black hole with meaning only on the other side.

Broken golden lip-synch, or
Yours in passing,
Scott