"Love Song" by William Carlos Williams

Nov. 1, 2011

Amy Lowell, here’s another view of the color yellow, and it’s not entirely different from your take, posted here the other day.  There’s too much of yellow; it eats things.

Ladies, damsels, women, broads, chicklets, has your beloved recently called you a stain? An excess? A smear? A saffron spoiler of all the colors of the world?  If your rake and rambling man, your very own hunkadoobie did call you such things—accused you—did you dig it? Would this poem work for you?  On you?  

Nov. 16, 201

Wannabe poets, have you tried writing a three line poem interrupted by a 14-line parenthesis of emphasis, a bracket of great force, vigor, torque?  Did it work?

William Carlos Williams, how does one decided when a fairly ordinary word, like “heavily,” deserves to be its own line? 

Love Song by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation

Nov. 16, 2011

Nov. 16, 2011

Nov. 16, 2011

Love Song by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation

William Carlos Williams’ “Death”: How Much Conciseness Is Enough?

Wiliam Carlos Williams’ poem “Death” is new to me, and I thank Robert Frost's Banjo blog for the Williams poems he recommended. Here are three versions. Which do you prefer?

Here is A:


He’s dead
the dog won’t have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing











Here is  B:

He’s dead
the dog won’t have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing

he’s dead
the old bastard
He’s a bastard because

there’s nothing
legitimate in him  any
more
        he’s dead
He’s sick dead

He’s come out of the man
and he’s let
the man go—
        the liar

Dead
    his eyes
rolled up out of
the light—a mockery

            which
love cannot touch—



And here is C, the version Williams actually settled on.


He's dead
the dog won't have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing

he's dead
the old bastard—
He's a bastard because

there's nothing
legitimate in him any
more
           he's dead
He's sick dead

                         he's
a godforsaken curio
without
any breath in it

He's nothing at all
              he's dead
shrunken up to the skin

            Put his head on
one chair and his
feet on another and
he'll lie there
like an acrobat—

Love's beaten. He
beat it. That's why
he's insufferable—

            because
he's here needing a
shave and making love
an inside howl
of anguish and defeat—

He's come out of the man
and he's let
the man go—
                  the liar

Dead
       his eyes
rolled up out of
the light—a mockery

                                   which
love cannot touch—

just bury it
and hide its face
for shame.



Has Williams added important or essential elements?  Or is he obscuring or cluttering or digressing and detracting from a powerful primitive starkness, which I hear in the trimmed versions?  Do the additions in Version C  earn their keep and deserve to be there?

I like the poem as a whole, but I feel it never regains the force and momentum of the brutal first stanza. So I'm partial to  Version B   right now, but I'm just getting to know the poem, and I might be missing something obviously important, essential, in Williams' additional words. 



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NOVEMBER 27, 2009. Hawthorne's America, Artists and Intellectuals, Part Two

"My Kinsman, Major Molineaux":
Bumpkin Robin Discovers the Complexities of Town Life.









Or is this the village to which Ethan Brand returns?


PART TWO

So, as the artist makes self-centered, enlightening, courageous, impulsive, self-centered, self-destructive, egocentric, narcissistic decisions, the artist’s family and friends may have paid terrible prices—not always, I'm sure, but often. William Carlos Williams was a practicing physician, Wallace Stevens was a lawyer with an insurance company, and I’ve often wondered whether friends and relatives found them good human company, more stable—and altruistic?—than the “school” of Berryman, Plath, Hemingway, and a host of others. Banking didn’t seem to help Eliot much in his personal life. Maybe I'm grossly over-valuing what it means to look normal, hold down a steady job, to be in fact a professional. Am I the first?

Also, the same family, friends and social conventions may have been a cage, may have provided inane constraints and may have inflicted psychic wounds that half-created the young artist and sent him on his quest as much as his instincts and talent did. He might have been running from mundane demands or family pathology as much as he was running toward artistic expression and a defensible perspective on the world.

All of this is mostly likely a huge chicken and egg question. I’d be shocked to discover anything less than dozens of books on the subject, and maybe one day I’ll read some. What would I google? "Psycho Writer"? "The Dysfunctional Family and the Artist"?

For sparking all this, should Paula gets Comment of the Month, or does it just clinch the fact that Banjo has logorrhea? That’s a false apology. What I actually don’t understand is how so many people find questions like these boring, irrelevant, nerdy, especially when no one expects definitive answers—and especially compared to more manly, more exciting, mainstream problems like curing that slice at the Golden Parachute Golf Club, where the starboard rough is a genuine quagmire.

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Poem of the Day: "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)

by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

At last count, 247,822,409 American students have been driven crazy by the stature of this poem in the literary world. Many of them, in good faith, have offered that it celebrates farm life. While I don't find that wrong, I don't see why so many American teens don't think it's enough for a poem to say, "Look." Or, more elaborately: see? These ordinary objects, these items and creatures are in the world. What do you see in the world? How might it matter? Can rain or light transform them? Can you?

I recently assigned my college freshmen a descriptive sketch in prose, explaining that they need to be aware of their obligation simply to see--to witness--all they can of what's around them before they start trying highfalutin stuff like comparing and contrasting or defining or classifying. One more time, youth was baffled. "What are we supposed to see?" Or, "My world's boring." Or, "The picture frame on my desk is brown. So what?"

They don't seem to agree, or care about, Williams's and the Imagists' notion of "no ideas but in things," though it surely makes some important sense, no matter how limited or limiting it might seem compared to fancy endeavors like transcendentalism or ethics. If you don't perceive the material world, who cares whether you think you've transcended it or moralized about it effectively?

On Bill Moyers' Journal today, guest and journalist Mark Danner said that countries like the U.S. repeatedly become entangled in wars and other messes because they don't realize how much they don't know about Country X until they're already embroiled in a situation from which it would be embarrassing if not impossible to extricate oneself "honorably." And of course, embarrassment and dishonor are more critical than death. Once troops are physically there, palpably in the realities of a place, its people and terrain and objects and situations seize policy makers by the throat; new strategies have to be implemented--despite the inconvenience of moving corpses out of the way.

I don't see how it's far-fetched to say this amounts to a failure of imagination, which in turn is a failure to see, touch, hear, and smell what was there all along, but was inconvenient and inconsistent with preconceived notions--what we thought was there, what we needed to be there.

Is it really absurd to posit that this begins with noticing red wheelbarrows? And caves, really, really deep caves where people can hide? Wheelbarrow, cave, wheelbarrow, cave . . . . That stone wall and the path to it--are they glazed prettily with rainwater or merely slick enough to slip on?

There might be ideas in addition to things, but if ideas ignore things, details, as the ideas are getting born, I have a strong opinion on how much they're worth.

(By the way, I found Wikipedia's information on "The Red Wheelbarrow" interesting and helpful. It's brief and I have an eyebrow raised about some of it, but it's a beginning).

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