William Carlos Williams

What a delight it was to be introduced to this poet! As a writer myself, I'm always a close reader of others poetry in terms of word use, spacing, analogy and metaphor. I suppose I could easily drive myself quite nuts suffering from low self-esteem in terms of my writing and always striving to be immediately as effective as some of the Greats. Needless to say, I have a fair amount to learn and reading selections of W.C Williams works was a wonderful contribution to that process.

The poem which struck me the most during my first read through was The Farmer but there were also paragraphs of pieces which came to my attention with another hour of attention. I suppose I really liked the image of a farmer being compared with an artist. Its first stanza evoked in my mind the rhythm of a piece written by Stan Rice, husband to Anne Rice, who was in his own rights a strong painter and gothic poet:

Duet on Iberville Street
The man in black leather
buying a rat to feed his python
does not dwell on particulars.
Any rat will do.
While walking back from the pet store
I see a man in a hotel garage
carving a swan in a black of ice
with a chain saw.

-January 30 1994

In contrast to that ironic depiction of urban livelihood, Williams presents us with a natural setting, and an exceptionally average man. One who must think ahead of nature in order for his and societies successes. His grasp of nature and his ability to use adjectives to describe not only the inanimate objects texture and temperature but its action is quite striking. I am thinking here of "the world rolls coldly away:/black orchards/darkened by the March clouds--leaving room fro though." and "bristling by/the rainsluiced wagonroad".

The other selections of his writing which caught my attention also had to do with his very exquisite, non-cliche, ability to describe nature. This is see in The Botticellian Trees: "principles of/straight branches/are being modified/by pinched-out/ifs of color, devout/conditions" and The Yachts: "the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies/lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold."

Also, from I (p.305) "Jostled as are the waters approaching/the brink,his thoughts/interlace, repel and cut under,/rise rock-thwarted and turn aside/but forever strain forward-or strike/an eddy and whirl,marked by a /leaf or curdy spume, seeming to forget ." The word use, and imagery and impenetrable spaces before the period left me quite impressed, to say the least.