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1. Finding the Red Wheelbarrow
2023 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow." It didn't originally have that title, or any title, but anyone reading this essay knows the poem I mean. You might be able to recite it. Sixteen words laid artfully down on the page, which have become as famous as any American poem. The other poem referred to in my title, also well-known, the one about Williams eating the plums that were in the icebox, first appeared in 1934, in Collected Poems, 1921-1931. Signature poems. Williams biographer Herbert Leibowitz says of the two poems that they are "both clever bagatelles, but hardly representative of the experimental and innovative poems Williams had composed during his long, distinguished career." In an email to me while I was writing this essay, he went a little further: "I am not fond of the endlessly anthologized ‘The Red Wheelbarrow' […] because it usurps attention from far better Williams poems." Understandable. But it's good to have a signature poem, or two, perfect in their way, if as a poet you want to avoid oblivion. I'd like to use the anniversary as the occasion for making a short survey of how he's doing, how he's holding up. I can point to some things that have happened-books and essays published; interpretations and opinions given, recently and earlier on; a movie made. But this will be a personal essay, as my relationship with Williams is personal. He was my grandfather.
Well, not really. But he was one of the first poets who knocked me out, woke me up, amazed me with his ability to get something right in words, in the enigmatic, clear, speaking-through-images, resonating way that poems sometimes have. When someone has this effect, first with one poem, then with another, and then another and another, they become not only a poet but a person you think you know, and then a friend of your spirit, in a relationship which can last a lifetime. And it has been a lifetime. I was eighteen, a senior in high school, when I discovered Williams, and now I'm seventy-six. So, I'm going to use the personal, autobiographical critical method. If it gets too subjective, or self-indulgent, forgive me, but the plums that were in the icebox were sweet and cold.
One thing about Williams that seemed important to me when I first encountered him was that he lived nearby-or he had; he'd died just a couple of years earlier. His town, Rutherford, was not far from mine, in northeastern New Jersey. Paterson, the city that inspired his epic poem, was a small industrial city close by. He was born, lived his whole life, and died in Rutherford, across the river from New York City, to which my father commuted daily. Williams' father was a commuter to the city too, and he himself went there often, first when he attended Horace Mann High School, and then for decades when he went regularly to get together with his artistic friends. When I was a kid, the area was developing like crazy. Shopping centers and houses were replacing what was left of farmland and woods, down to the last scraps. The suburbs hadn't sprawled so much in Williams' time, but it was starting to happen. His suburbs were the earlier suburbs that my grandfather had moved to, from Brooklyn--there were still some farms, and in the towns, outhouses, wooden sidewalks, yards with chickens. That would change, soon, then faster and faster. But though we were separated by a generation, the territory of the poems was recognizable to me, just as I recognized the names of Rutherford and Paterson. I guess this falls under identity poetics. We're drawn to writers we can identify with, consciously or unconsciously.
By my teenage years, I was starting to feel uncomfortable in the place where I lived--to feel a little ashamed of living in the ignoble suburbs. New Jersey was becoming a synonym for crassness, commercialism, overdevelopment, and I could see and feel the reasons all around me. But it didn't seem to bother Williams Carlos Williams, and it wasn't just because he was from a slightly earlier time. One of the first things that I perceived in his poetry was that it was OK to be from New Jersey. It didn't keep him from being acutely alive, or from finding the secret of life. The secret of life? Something like that. Some current of energy and honesty. "We are lucky when that underground current can be tapped and the secret spring of all our lives will send up its pure water," he wrote in his Autobiography, which I didn't read until later, but that's what I felt in his poems. When I was a teenager, "upstate" meant across the border into New York, just a few miles away, where the drinking age was eighteen rather than twenty-one. I ended up going further upstate, and I've spent my life in a place that has a more reasonable ratio of people to open space, and a lot more waterfalls than Williams had in Paterson. He stayed in New Jersey, which has always seemed to me part of his integrity-a quality that I felt and admired in him then, and still do.
My English teacher in my senior year of high school also seemed to have some secret knowledge. His name was Jon Rossman. I'll use his name, as Williams used the name of his high school teacher, to whom he dedicated one of his books: "To the memory of ‘Uncle' Billy Abbott, the first English teacher who ever gave me an A." Mr. Rossman might have given me an A. I know he gave me some B's. But in any case, he had us read some literature that was unlike anything I'd read before. Serious stuff. For example, we read a book of essays by Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, which was a blend of science and (though it was written in prose) poetry. I've never seen the world quite the same since reading that book. He read aloud a chapter from a big Russian book, The Story of a Life, by Konstantine Paustovsky. The chapter he read was about catching a fish, a carp, putting it in a bucket, and being splashed in the face by the fish's thrashing. It seemed profound. It was, apparently, indelible. And, he showed us some poems by William Carlos Williams, one of which was "The Red Wheelbarrow." I guess a lot of high school students have been shown the poem, with varying degrees of impact, but it hit me hard. So short, simple, and mysterious. This was a poem? This was a poem! This was a poem. What did it mean, when he said, "So much depends/ upon"? There are who-knows-how-many different answers, no doubt. I felt sure I knew the answer immediately, or almost immediately, when I first read the poem. As a poem becomes familiar, it loses some of its startling effect; it settles into being famous, too well-known for its own good, a classic, a chestnut, sometimes a subject for parody. But reading this poem in 1965, it seemed to me that William Carlos Williams lived through sharp moments of perception and feeling, which he was able to capture in the seemingly spontaneous selection and arrangement of words on a page. All these years later, I think my original understanding of the poem wasn't wrong.
When I picked up my diploma on graduation day, I found a book inside it, 100 Poems from the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth. Mr. Rossman had put it there; it had an inscription. A book of poems as a gift. That was something new to me. My old teacher lives now in an assisted living facility near Philadelphia. He was from there, and after his stint in New Jersey he moved back. But I persisted, kept in touch, and we became friends. We corresponded. Voluminously. We still exchange letters, though his come much less frequently now. Just recently I sent him my latest poem. It came back with about seventy per cent of the lines crossed out. He was always a hard-to-please critic. But there was one line he had circled, and next to it was written, "Very fine." I appreciated the compliment. As for all the deletions, I was used to that. The life of poetry--half of it at least. Still not as good as William Carlos Williams.
One more piece to my autobiographical connection to Williams: My father was born in Rutherford. 1916. His parents were young recently arrived immigrants from Sweden. I soon learned--you cannot read him for long without knowing this--that Williams was a doctor. And delivering babies was a big part of his practice. He delivered two or three thousand-estimates vary. And a lot of those babies were the offspring of newly arrived immigrants. At some point early on it dawned on me that it could very well be that the doctor who helped bring my father into the world was--William Carlos Williams! I suppose I could find out for sure, but I've never done the research. I'll leave it in the realm of possibility.
2. The Small, Amazing Book
His name is so musical, so right, that it requires a little conscious effort to stop referring to him as William Carlos Williams and just say Williams. I like to think of his parents considering names: "Let's see. Our last name is Williams. So, why not name him, William. William Williams." Actually, there was precedent for this: his father was William George Williams. But instead of making him William George Williams, Jr., they added a flourish from the Puerto Rican ancestry of his mother's side of the family, and thinking of his mother's brother Carlos (who as it happened was a physician), they gave him the most memorable name in American poetry. Walt Whitman is also good. Apparently I'm drawn to alliterative w's. In any case, we can't help but be glad that Whitman decided to go with Walt rather than Walter, or Walter Whitman, Jr., when he put out the first edition of Leaves of Grass. But if Williams had followed Whitman's lead with his name as he did in important ways in his poetry, he would have been Bill Williams--which is what his friends called him, and which is appealingly informal, democratic. But not as good as William Carlos Williams. In his fascinating book I Wanted to Write a Poem, Williams says that he thought about using W.C. Williams, and then William C. Williams, for his first book, Poems (1909). But he went with William Carlos Williams. Etheridge Knight is another name that is poetic simply as a combination of words, but which also seems perfectly suited for the poet it names--a form of onomatopoeia. Those are my top three American poet names. You might want to suggest others.
A rose by any other name smells as sweet. That's true, but if an artist has an expressive, memorable name, it doesn't hurt. This is not critical theory. I'm just saying. You can't tell a book by its cover, but covers do matter. This was true of some of the covers of the record albums that I was buying around the same time I acquired a copy of Williams' Selected Poems. Penetrating visages of artists who would be life-changers. Little Richard, he of the blazing eyes, thin mustache, and tall hair, "The Fabulous Little Richard." Otis Redding, he of the rough, beatific voice, "Pain in My Heart." Bob Dylan, he of many enigmatic expressions to come, "Bringing It All Back Home." The five shadowy guys lined up on "England's Newest Hitmakers -- The Rolling Stones." So many artists came bursting in. The creation of a pantheon. A little confusing, but at the same time, they were amazing, and though I didn't realize it at the time, touchstones, something we all need. Don't we? The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams had on its cover a black and white photo of the poet. An old guy. He looks like a tough, intense bird. He's wearing clear-rimmed glasses and a straw hat, and a sport shirt that is open at his sinewy neck. He's not looking at the camera. He's gazing off into the distance at who knows what.
The book was small, and fairly slender, which made it more appealing. Another thing: Between the cover with its penetrating photo and the poems, there was an Introduction, by someone named Randall Jarrell. I didn't know who Randall Jarrell was, and I'm pretty sure that this was the first piece of literary criticism that I ever read. It felt alive. Jarrell was intimidatingly smart, but his tone seemed casual. He made statements about this poet I had started to read that seemed true. Right off the bat, he hits a series of hard line-drives in a sentence that lists qualities of Williams: "Anyone would apply to Williams-besides outspoken, good-hearted, and generous—such words as fresh, sympathetic, enthusiastic, spontaneous, open, impulsive, emotional, observant, curious, rash, courageous, undignified, unaffected, humanitarian, experimental, empirical, liberal, secular, democratic. " I could tell that Jarrell had enjoyed making that list, and could see its accuracy-even the italics seemed to be part of its accuracy. At just about the same time that I read Jarrell's essay, he died--at 51, killed while wandering in traffic at dusk. When I learned that he had died, and how, I didn't fully grasp how ominous it was-that it was a clear indication that living by poetry could be dangerous.
I'm trying to sketch the experience of a young person with a book. Name, photo, introduction -- these things surrounded the poems. The poems were great, in such a non-great way. They were not stiff or pretentious. They were not formal in the sense of rhyme and meter. I liked that, and I liked the general attitude of the poet that his non-rhyming expressed. The first poem in the book is "January Morning," a collage of fragments, things observed. It was a revelation to me that you could write like that: "--and a semicircle of dirt-colored men/ about a fire bursting from an old/ ash can." That's section VI--all of it. There are XV. (I was hoping to write this essay in fifteen sections in homage to this poem, but I hit up against my word-count limit at ten. There are more aspects and subjects that I would like to say something about than I am able to. For example, his wife, Floss, who should have a biography herself. Not for her writing, though she did write a good response to "This Is Just to Say": "Dear Bill: I've made a couple of sandwiches for you…." but for her own experience and character.) "January Morning" is followed by "Danse Russe," in which Williams, awake before anyone else, dances naked in front of the mirror, singing, "I am lonely, lonely./ I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" He goes on to say: "Who shall say I am not/ the happy genius of my household?" The cry of the spirit in a moment of lonely joy -- the art of solitude. One after another, poems that seem to catch and release their moments, saying just enough, in that peculiar, particular voice of his. Vigorous, exclamatory poems like "Smell!" and "Tract." Poems that are small demonstrations of sheer observation of the physical world, like "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper," sharp praise of skilled craftsmanship, and "To a Poor Old Woman," another poem about eating plums. Poems that are perceptive pieces of anthropological commentary, like "At the Ball Game" and "The Catholic Bells." Sexy poems, like "The Young Housewife." Poems of complex feeling, like "Waiting." Arriving home at the end of the day, he says: ‘I am greeted by/ the happy shrieks of my children/ and my heart sinks. I am crushed." What? Not the poetry of saying the pious, expected thing. The poem closes: "Are not my children as dear to me/ as falling leaves or/ must one become stupid/ to grow older?/ It seems much as if Sorrow/ had tripped up my heels./ Let us see! Let us see!/ What did I plan to say to her/ when it should happen to me/ as it has happened now?" Even at eighteen or twenty, I was struck by the truthfulness of the poem.
And so on. Another of my favorites has always been "Pastoral," where Williams describes sparrows hopping around on the pavement, and an old man, "who goes about/ gathering dog-lime/ walks in the gutter/ without looking up/ and his tread/ is more majestic than/ that of the Episcopal minister/ approaching the pulpit/ of a Sunday." I had seen the minister approach the pulpit at church. Majestic. I liked the comparison, and I liked that Williams gave the old man the edge. He ends the poem with another one of his profound simple commentary lines, which like "so much depends/ upon," is broken as elegantly as a master short order cook breaks open an egg with one hand: "These things/ astonish me beyond words." Those words could be attached to many poems—maybe all poems, at least to their aspirations. But Williams said it in just that way, with just that timing. Then silence. This is just to say.
I took Selected Poems to college with me. There I learned that Williams was criticized for being anti-intellectual, or un-intellectual. My creative writing teacher had been a student of Yvor Winters, heavy-hitter at Stanford. I read Winters on modern poets and found that he had said about Williams: "To say that Williams was anti-intellectual would be almost an exaggeration: he did not know what the intellect was. He was a foolish and ignorant man…." Ouch. Then, in his well-phrased condescension, Winters added, "but at times a fine stylist." Many years later, when Wendell Berry stepped up with a book on Williams, he felt he needed to respond right at the beginning to the charge of Williams' "mindlessness." He doesn't defeat it exactly, but instead pivots to another quality he finds in Williams: usefulness. Berry can be pretty starchy himself, but he's a noble advocate for things being rooted in a place, whether topsoil or small farms or a poet.
Williams' most famous idea about poetry is, "No ideas but in things." Here it seems right to quote again from "January Morning." In its final section, it turns out that the poem is addressed to a specific "old woman." But his comments about the sources or motivations of poetry could be taken more broadly. You could call them ideas. In any case, they made sense to me when I was young, and still do when I am old: "I wanted to write a poem/ that you would understand./ For what good is it to me/ if you can't understand it?/ But you got to try hard-- / But-- / Well, you know how/ the young girls run giggling/ on Park Avenue after dark/ when they ought to be home in bed?/ Well,/ that's the way it is with me somehow."
3. Oblivion
It's not that I'm so worried for William Carlos Williams. He's doing about as well as any poet could hope to. But one of the things about being seventy-six is, you think about oblivion quite a bit. At least I do. You realize the great, but in another sense not so great, reality of things slipping into the maw that you never thought would do that. Soon after I started working on this essay, I lost two long-time friends, Jane and Bruce. Then my friend, the editor of The Hollins Critic, Richard Dillard died. This essay is dedicated to him. He was my teacher half a century ago, and he kept teaching until the day his heart stopped beating. When I proposed a Williams essay to him, he liked the idea, and responded, "I want to see it right now!" But that was not to be. Then a few weeks after Richard's passing, I learned that the decision had been made to end The Hollins Critic's sixty year run. It feels a little eerie, in addition to sad, to be the one to write the last Critic essay.
Soon after Richard died, so did Tina Turner. Tina was famous; there are the records, the videos -- no problem with oblivion for her…. But if Tina Turner can die, a talent and force and energy like that can pass away, you know that oblivion is hungry. My favorite song of hers was "River Deep, Mountain High," #33 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of (as we like to say) All Time. Produced by mad genius Phil Spector. According to Wikipedia, when the record didn't do very well commercially, "Spector claimed to be pleased with the response from the critics and his peers, but he then withdrew from the music industry for two years, beginning his personal decline." You get my drift. If Tina Turner and Richard Dillard can die, obviously nobody's safe.
It's silly to worry about oblivion. It's the way things are meant to be. It's natural. Back to the universe. In some ways, poetry is the oblivion business. Praising what will not last. Names writ on water. So many poems, written with longing and joy, covering the ground like leaves in fall—one hopes that they are good for the world, as the leaves are for the earth. Another hope is that some of your favorites will be remembered, if not forever at least for a long time. At twenty, you don't worry about it. At the other end of life, you do. You hope, say, that John Clare, William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston -- all of whom could easily have slipped off, disappeared, if not for luck, the quirks of fate, and the support of a few dedicated others -- will be remembered. Do you realize how close a call it was for Herman Melville? And what would life be without Moby Dick? Not to mention, many old blues musicians and indigenous bards. This is just to say.
Williams was very much aware of oblivion. Here's a paragraph from his short story "Danse Pseudomacabre," spoken by one of his very Williams-like doctor narrators: "The telephone is ringing. I have awakened sitting erect in bed, unsurprised, almost uninterested, but with an overwhelming sense of death pressing my chest together as if I had come reluctant from the grave to which a distorted homesickness continued to drag me, a sense as of the end of everything. My wife lies asleep, curled against her pillow. Christ, Christ! how can I ever bear to be separated from this my boon companion, to be annihilated, to have her annihilated? How can a man live in the face of this daily uncertainty? How can a man not go mad with grief, with apprehension?"
It's in the poems too. Look at "Death," harsh and clear-eyed and without consolation. Or "The Dead Baby," devastating, or "To Close," even more devastating, uprooted from actual recorded speech.
Will you please rush down and see
Ma baby. You know, the one I talked
To you about last night
What was that?
Is this the baby specialist?
Yes, but perhaps you mean my son,
Can't you wait until
I, I, I, don't think it's brEAthin'
"The Widow's Lament in Springtime," "The Last Words of My English Grandmother"—both frequently anthologized, both models of description of loss. "The Injury," begins "From this hospital bed," and ends with the sound of car wheels coming in through the window: "car wheels/ singing now on the rails,/ taking the curve,/ slowly,/ a long wail,/ high pitched:/ rounding/ the curve--/ the slow way because/ (if you can find any way) that is/ the only way left now/ for you." Williams was not a pessimist. But he was great at cutting through sentimentality and sanctimoniousness. He was realistic; he was pessimistic enough.
4. Al Que Quiere!, Sour Grapes, Spring and All
One of the ways that Williams is doing well--the most crucial way--is that he is very much in print. Not only does he have the big Collected Poems (in his case, two volumes) that poets dream of, he's doing even better than that. His early books—with their fresh titles Al Que Quiere! [to whoever wants it] , Sour Grapes, Spring and All--are being reprinted. Reading them as they originally were, with certain poems that went on to anthology fame set here and there among less familiar work, is interesting. To some readers, it's more than interesting—it's a kind of time travel. New Directions has published Al Que Quiere and Spring and All in facsimile format, with terrific introductory essays by Jonathan Cohen and C. D. Wright. Other reissues have come from Lisa Shea, who calls her imprint Minerva Webworks LLC. She publishes inexpensive editions of the books as they come into Public Domain. So far, Sour Grapes and Al Que Quiere. She says at the end of her very short introductions to both books: "My proceeds from this book support local art programs." I paid $3.99 for my copies on Amazon. She offers her own writings as free e-books. The "About the Editor" page has a photo of her dancing, with a note that says, "I've been writing poetry and creating art since I was quite young. I've published over 300 books in a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres. Namaste." A glimpse into the world of on-line publishing. Williams dedicated himself to, and depended upon, the culture of the little magazine, constantly scrapping to get his work out there. Today it is easier to publish. And it is almost certainly easier, whether as writer or as reader, to get lost among the overabundance.
To those not already familiar with it, Spring and All can be a shock, especially from the standpoint of "So much depends/ upon," which makes its debut here. We do not find it pristine and spare among other imagistic poems. It doesn't appear until page 74, and what it is mostly surrounded by is prose, and not just descriptive prose, but an over-the-top manifesto. Some consider Spring and All one of the great specimens of modernist rebelliousness and imagination. In it, Williams makes imagination his rallying cry, conceiving it as a kind of mystical force: "And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed--To the imagination--you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply: To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force—the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see." Amen, brother.
Williams was often given to wild, expansive bursts of prose. Spring and All is bombastic or exhilarating, depending on your taste and mood. It casts a light—maybe a strobe light. And there inside it, toward the end, sits, untitled, quietly, "So much depends/ upon// a red wheel/ barrow...."
5. The Poisonwood Bible
During the time when I was writing this essay, reading and re-reading Williams' vast and various body of work, reading biographies and commentaries, I did do some other reading as well. For years I'd meant to read Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible, her great indictment of colonialism and evangelical religion. Now I finally got around to reading it. Actually I listened to it, as a recorded book in my car. The Poisonwood Bible is an overwhelming story of enormous reach and verbal energy, with multiple narrators; large historical themes; tremendous suffering. All summer, I drove around in the Congo, 1960—a long way from Williams' New Jersey. But as I was listening one day, one of the narrators, one of the four daughters of the pathologically self-righteous missionary trying to bring salvation to Africa through Christ, teen-aged Adah, was suddenly saying, "So much depends on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water standing beside the white chickens." She continued: "That is one whole poem written by a doctor named William C. Williams." And then Adah, because she suffers from hemiplegia, affecting not only her physical mobility but also her verbal function, making her semi-mute but also bestowing a verbal quirk and gift—Adah says, "Chickens white beside standing water rain, with glazed wheelbarrow. Red on! Depends much. So?" And that is the question.
At the moment it seemed to me an instance of the mysterious natural or supernatural power of synchronicity, which I put more and more stock in as time goes on. The universe was offering me William Carlos Williams where I wasn't looking for him. This visitation was powerful, raising the perhaps most serious question about "So much depends upon": How can you think, Mr. Poet, that so much depends upon this little experience of yours, when so many people are suffering in the world? What egotism. What self-absorption. At the time Adah quotes the poem, there is an epidemic underway in the village where the missionary family is living. Many children are dying. She claims that Williams wrote it while he was waiting for a baby to die, and says, "Waiting for a child to die is not an occasion for writing a poem here in Kilanga: it isn't a long enough wait." The tone and the harrowing reality of the chapter only pick up intensity from there.
A few hundred pages later--years later in the time span of the novel--Adah has become, not a doctor, but a medical researcher. And she also writes poetry. After a day's work in the lab, she says, "I go home by myself and write poems at my kitchen table, like William Carlos Williams. I write about lost sisters and the Great Rift Valley and my barefoot mother glaring at the ocean. All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still."
There's no space in my fragments to say much about Kingsolver's monumental novel, but I did want to mention this extraordinary reference and its challenge to Williams. (Williams standing in here for the rest of us well-off people who think poems are somehow very important.) Maybe there is no satisfactory answer to the question of how someone can live a more or less contented middle class life, let alone think that so much depends upon their moments of poetic clarity, while the world is so full of suffering and inequity. At the same time, maybe the older Adah's comment about her own writing is itself one answer to the question. The "clamp it to the page" strategy; what Frost called "a temporary stay against confusion." Williams' poems were not "clamped to the page"; they were vigorously, elegantly set down there. But really, the question does seem unanswerable, except with the answer of the poems themselves. And also --
6. The Short Stories
I have to confess that in my devotion to Williams' poetry over the years, I didn't do justice to his stories. I'd read "The Use of Force," which often appeared in the anthologies I taught from in Freshman English classes, and one or two others. But it's only now that I've taken a deep dive into his short stories, and they strike me as some of the greatest I have ever read, and just about as important within Williams' total achievement as the poetry. They are so real. Some are good-humored, easy-going, like "Ancient Gentility," but more have titles like "The Girl with a Pimply Face," "A Stone Face," "The Accident," "A Good-Natured Slob," "The Insane." Without the aesthetic satisfactions of Williams' line breaks, they often seem to be written on the fly --spontaneous transcriptions of experience and people talking. Of his first collection of stories, The Knife of the Times, Williams said, "I wrote it down, without technical tricks." Of his second, Life Along the Passaic River, he said that he had "begun to experiment a little […] trying to quicken the prose." Quicken is a good word for it, both in the sense of pace, and the sense of "the quick and the dead." We are immersed in the action, in a dynamic combination of clarity and confusion. Williams was not a fan of the rules of punctuation, and he especially disliked quotation marks. In the stories, he leaves them out, and it isn't always clear who is speaking or to whom. The stock phrase "slices of life" seems right. Williams did a little fencing while he was studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He was not as good a fencer as his classmate Ezra Pound, with whom he had a life-long friendship, full of disagreements, but there is a quickness and finesse in the style of the stories that feel a little like fencing. At the same time, there's often a doctor's skillful incision or lancing of a boil. All things sharp. The stories combine the jab and the careful cut, and they frequently cause cuts and bleeding.
As for an answer to Adah's question in The Poisonwood Bible, "Depends much. So?"—it's in the details, the sharp physical perceptions and the emotions. The stories are knitted into life, made from it. Thinking back years later to the time he was writing the first stories, the 1930s, Williams said: "I felt furious at the country for its lack of progressive ideas. I felt as if I were a radical without being a radical. The plight of the poor in a rich country, I wrote it down as I saw it." Being a radical without being a radical is one of Williams' great strengths. No simple answers. It seems to me that we have now, in the early part of the 21st century, an ascendancy of self-righteousness in poetry. Gestures and postures of virtue. The language of the saved, of being on the right side; a pious self-congratulatory tone. One of the things that recommends Williams, in his poems and perhaps even more noticeably in his stories, is that he isn't like that. For an example, look at the story "Jean Beicke," where Williams lays open the feelings of a doctor trying to treat a dying eleven-month-old child. It is very far from self-righteous. He is a poet of imperfection. He's a decent person, but he isn't perfect and he knows it. That's one of the things I've always liked about him.
For Williams' short stories, we have two choices of books, and it's best to choose both. One is The Collected Stories -- all the stories, and the full range of his subjects, including, for example, "The Knife of the Times," about a lesbian relationship, and "The Colored Girls of Passenack--Old and New," Williams' celebration of the beauty of Black women. Candor, curiosity, eros, open-heartedness. The edition of The Collected Stories that I have (New Directions, 1996) has an Edward Hopper painting on its cover: "Summertime," which shows a very attractive woman wearing a semi-transparent dress, in bright sunlight, standing alone on the front steps of a building. There is a curtain blowing in the window beside her, oddly similar to the curtain that blows in Hopper's famous etching "Evening Wind." The blowing curtain of desire. Williams is to American poetry what Hopper is to American art. Light, color, realism, epiphanies in ordinary scenes, desire, distinctive clarity of craftsmanship and style. That's one way to try to describe Williams. Another is the book's back cover blurb by Kenneth Rexroth: "…these 50-odd stories are among the most precious possessions of the 20th century in any language. And when they come to ask, ‘What were they like?' we can say, ‘This is us.'"
The other book is The Doctor Stories, published originally in 1984, reissued in its current edition in 2018. It has a small but excellent selection of stories, plus a few poems. What it especially has is focus, and in addition to the stories and poems, there are four prose pieces about Williams and medicine: a recent one by Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal, a good oblivion text; psychologist Robert Coles' introduction from the original edition, which he put together for use in classes with medical students; a moving personal essay by Williams' son William Erik Williams, M.D. And a chapter from Williams' Autobiography, "The Practice." He says: "We catch a glimpse of something, from time to time, which shows us that a presence has just brushed past us, some rare thing--just when the smiling little Italian woman has left us. For a moment we are dazzled. What was that?" The sights and sounds of things around him. His patients and what they say. So much depends upon them. They are so alive. At the same time, oblivion is nearby. The doctor-writer in "Danse Pseudomacabre," called out in the middle of the night, says: "Either dance or annihilation. […] So, the next night, I enter another house. And so I repeat the trouble of writing that which I have already written, and so drag another human being from oblivion to serve my music." He charges himself somewhat as Adah charged him, feeling a little guilty for writing about the lives and suffering of others, "to serve my music." But he goes. So much depends upon his going.
I ordered The Collected Stories second-hand. When it arrived, I found that it had an inscription: "Dear Saki, Welcome to America! With Love, Stukie." Good gift! Williams' short stories as a welcome to America. Later I thought: Wait a minute. Why didn't Saki keep the book? Did something go wrong in the relationship? Did Saki not like the stories? Did things not work out in America?
7. The Duluth Vortex
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in nearby Hibbing. That alone is enough to qualify Duluth as a poetry vortex, but another major American poet lived there years after Dylan left: Louis Jenkins. He was a master, or the master, of the prose poem--so different in form from Williams' mysterious counting of variable feet and his artful line breaks, culminating in the graceful three-part lines flowing down the page in his later work. Different also in that Jenkins' tone was constitutionally low-key, while Williams' has more variety, sparkle, impatience, and high spirits. Still, they were alike in being great poets of the mundane, specialists in the ordinary. I bring Jenkins in also for my sub-theme of oblivion. He left behind many books. In the later part of his career, after his relationship with his publisher went wrong, most were self-published, through his Will o' the Wisp Books. It's true he had a fairly famous fan in actor Mark Rylance, who used a Jenkins poem for his acceptance speech when he won a Tony. But I wonder now, a few years after his death, what his odds are for being remembered. I have a feeling that he'll be an example of the mystery of how a great artist can slip away.
Duluth is a poetry vortex for me because of Dylan and Jenkins, and a third poet who lives there, a friend, Bart Sutter. Though we've only met in person a couple of times, we've corresponded for thirty years. He's about as good a poet as any writing today. I say that in all, as we say, objectivity, and I would support the claim with his most recent book, So Surprised to Find You Here, which contains, among many excellent poems, the best poem I know of on rocks, "Three Big Rocks"; the best poem I know on Antonio Machado, "Machado Lives"; and the best poem I know that brings together the moon, a canoe, and the question of the reality of God, "The Moon Beside the Canoe." When I asked him for his opinion of Williams, he wrote:
"I read him pretty early and then fairly seriously in a grad school course on (then) contemporary poetry, which included Paterson. Didn't think too much of that, thought Tom McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend, among the attempts at extended poems, had many more brilliant and moving passages, though both, it seemed to me, were finally interesting failures. I hate the fucking red wheelbarrow and took out my frustration in my own poem, 'The Rusty Wheelbarrow.' Another poem by Williams that, like 'So Much Depends,' leaves out a lot but seems to me far superior, is 'Nantucket.' I still like 'This Is Just to Say,' which I first heard Robert Bly recite when I was nineteen. Also the goofy one about dancing naked in the bedroom. My all-time favorite Williams poem, though—and one of my favorite poems altogether—is 'The Last Words of My English Grandmother.' It just rings truer and truer to me as I age. I quote the final stanza often now that my friends and I grow so close to death, ourselves. After quoting it again the other day, I went back and read the whole poem, and was stunned by how good it is all the way through. Boy, does Williams ever get that old woman's voice! And in the end, ‘The Last Words' is a hell of a lot more respectful than that bullshit by Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.' Don't tell me what to do, Sonny. This is my goddamn death."
Letters, opinions, poems—going back and forth over many years.
8. The Owner of the Wheelbarrow
A remarkable essay appeared in the venerable poetry journal Parnassus in 2015: 10,000 words, by William Logan, on "The Red Wheelbarrow." Everything you ever wanted to know about the poem--or so it seems, reading the essay. Information on wheelbarrows in general, and early 20th century wheelbarrows in particular. Information about paint, colors available. It was estimated in 1913 that about half of the paint coming out of paint factories was red. There's a good chance that the wheelbarrow in Williams' poem was painted a shade called American vermilion, also called chrome red. Did you know that chickens in those days were less than a quarter the size of factory-farmed chickens now? Interesting things to know. A lot of research went into the essay. Logan also surveys interpretations and analyses of the poem, and when he doesn't like one, he doesn't hold back in saying so. Logan is tough; of all contemporary critics, I think he is the one I would least want to get into a boxing match with. He includes his own insights along with his judgements of others. I especially liked: "Text is all, except when context is more than all," and, "Revelation always remains private. The poem is a Rorschach test." He discusses "the extraordinary way Williams sculpts the banal sentence into the sharp-witted poem," but also says that at times "the writing collapsed into slack lines and high-school banality," This last comment makes me wonder, a little nervously, about the lines I praised earlier, "These things/ astonish me beyond words." Which category would Logan put them in? In any case, I'm sticking with "Pastoral," and "These things/ astonish me beyond words." But you do need the line break.
Logan's essay includes the discovery he made of the identity of the man who owned the red wheelbarrow. Williams had identified him in in an article in Holiday magazine in 1954: " 'The Red Wheelbarrow' sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall…. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing." But Logan gives us more about the man, Thaddeus Marshall—where his house was; the fact that he had a large chicken coop; how he made a living, which probably included selling produce and eggs around town, maybe out of the very wheelbarrow in the poem.
Logan's essay was reported on in the New York Times, and it caught the attention of journalist and elementary school librarian Lisa Rogers, who was inspired to write a children's book about it, 16 Words: William Carlos Williams & "The Red Wheelbarrow, illustrated by Chuck Groenink. It's a beautiful book, both in its story and its pictures. Gentle, low-key. The fact that Marshall is Black is not mentioned in the text, but since it's a picture book that is clear. In one double-spread page, we see Williams scribbling in his notebook carrying his doctor's bag on the right, and Marshall pushing his wheelbarrow full of vegetables and eggs on the left. Later Williams visits Marshall to treat him, and the two of them stand looking out the window at the wheelbarrow and chickens in the rain. The book gives a not-too-subtle not-too-didactic anti-racist message which, in the simplified but profound way of picture books, is true to Williams' attitude on race. 16 Words, and the ten thousand words of Logan's deeply researched, sardonic essay—two different expressions of the staying power of "The Red Wheelbarrow."
What did Williams himself think about the poem? Logan's essay begins with his appraisal: "…The sight impressed me somehow as about the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon. And the meter though no more than a fragment succeeds in portraying the pleasure flawlessly, even [as] it succeeds in denoting a certain unquenchable exaltation—in fact I find the poem quite perfect."
9. Paterson, "Paterson"
Some critics consider Williams' epic poem Paterson to be his masterpiece. Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell, rising stars at the time, soon to be fallen suns, were among its supporters. Whether Paterson is the peak of Williams' accomplishment is an open question. Not denying Paterson's possible greatness, I'm going to sidestep the poem and instead say a little about another "Paterson," the 2016 film by Jim Jarmusch.
Jarmusch is an idiosyncratic filmmaker with a very distinctive style, and in "Paterson" he made the best movie ever made about poetry. Says me. You might have others to suggest. Certainly he created as moving, funny, subtle, and insightful an homage as Williams, or any poet, could hope for. The movie stars Adam Driver, whose name fits his role perfectly. He's a bus driver. (I won't try to unpack Adam.) He's also a poet, named Paterson, who lives and works in actual Paterson, New Jersey. He pilots his big bus around the city, observing the streets, the people, poems percolating in his brain. He writes them down in his notebook, catching a few moments for writing before he leaves the bus garage in the morning and during his lunch hour. Luckily Jarmusch was able to persuade Ron Padgett to write Paterson's poems, and we get to hear them, seemingly as they are being composed, and to read them, as they appear line by line on the screen. Driver speaks the poems in Paterson's characteristic careful, laconic way. Paterson has a photo of Williams over his shoulder on the bus, and another in his basement study at home. Late in the film, at a crucial, painful moment, he holds his copy of The Collected Earlier Poems, gazing at it—a sort of cameo appearance by Williams, and an image of the importance that a book and a poet can have in someone's life.
Paterson is very serious about his poetry, but he makes no effort to publish. In fact he doesn't even make copies of the poems, as his wife urges him to do. They exist only in his notebook—a fact that becomes very important at the climax of the film. For Paterson, poetry has nothing to do with "the poetry scene" or "the poetry world," or the scrambling for recognition that is such a big part of them. (Williams himself longed and scrambled for recognition as much as the next poet.) We never see him applying to an MFA program, though he does run into and interact with a couple of other poets—a guy composing a poem about Paul Laurence Dunbar at the laundromat (Cliff Smith); a young girl waiting for her mother near the bus garage (Sterling Jerins). We never see him going to any open mic events. Instead, Paterson's nightly outings to the bar are to walk the dog (Nellie, excellent as the pet bulldog; the whole cast is excellent, perfect for their roles), and for conversation with the owner/bartender—a philosophizing elder (Barry Shabaka Henley) with whom he discusses, among other things, who is the most famous person to come out of Paterson. They agree that it was Lou Costello, of Abbott and, who got a statue. Paterson keeps William Carlos Williams to himself.
All of Jarmusch's films are slow. Slow road movie, slow western, slow violent, slow romantic. "Paterson" is slow sweet. It has a sweet soul. Not sweet sentimental. Well, maybe a little. The relationship between Paterson and his wife (Golshifteh Farahani) is extremely patient, affectionate, and harmonious. She is an aspiring cupcake entrepreneur, who also dreams of becoming a country/western singer. He supports her dreams, and she his poetry. She knows about his favorite poet, though she sometimes get confused about his name, referring to him as Carlo William Carlos. When she requests a poem by Williams, it is "This Is Just to Say." "I love that one," she says. When Williams gets a movie, Paterson is the title, but "This Is Just to Say" is the poem that gets recited.
The final scene, which takes place in a park with a view of the Passaic River Falls that inspired Williams, is pretty close to ineffable. Paterson goes there on a Sunday morning in serious need of solace. The dog has eaten his poems, torn them to shreds. Chewed them into oblivion. The intended copies had not yet been made. As Paterson gazes at the falls pondering, he's joined by a Japanese man (Masatoshi Nagase), who has come on pilgrimage to the place where "your interesting poet, William Carlos Williams," lived and wrote. It can't be just random that the pilgrim is Japanese. I have read Basho and Issa steadily over the years (in translation). You could say that "The Red Wheelbarrow" is Williams' Basho poem, its rain and chickens recognizable in the same way that Basho's pond and frog are; and that "This Is Just to Say" is his Issa poem, with its human, humorous touch. I'm not a Buddhist, but I've studied Buddhism a bit. It isn't mentioned whether the Japanese guy is a Buddhist or not. He identifies as a poet. "I breathe poetry," he says. But just to say, the ten minute conversation between him and Paterson catches qualities of impermanence, suchness, inter-being, suffering, emptiness, compassion, and right speech in a very skillful way. As he departs, his momentary friend presents Paterson with a gift—a notebook, its pages blank. "Sometimes empty page present most possibilities," he says. The word, if it is a word, "uh-huh" has never been used more evocatively in a movie than it is in this scene.
10. The Small Red Book
In 2018 New Directions—founded by James Laughlin, who was a young guy with money who wanted to try his hand at publishing when he approached Williams; to which Williams owes so much, just as New Directions owes so much to him—published a small book, The Red Wheelbarrow. Four by six inches, 58 pages—smaller even than Selected Poems had been in 1963. No editor is identified, but whoever it was made the good choice of opening with "This Is Just to Say," with "So much depends," now called "The Red Wheelbarrow," in the #2 spot. The rest of the selections are well-chosen. Anyone might complain about certain omissions. No room for "January Morning"? No "Catholic Bells"? No "Waiting"? But what can you do? It's a very small book. It's meant to be quintessential Williams. I keep a few copies on hand, and give them away now and then, when I encounter someone who does not know Williams. A note on the cover flap says: "It's a perfect little gift: the most beloved poems of the most essential twentieth-century American poet." I could hand out The Collected Poems, Vols. 1 & 2. I would rather give the great, archetypal Selected Poems, along with a copy of The Doctor Stories. But The Red Wheelbarrow is a beautiful little book, bright red.
Sunday, September 17, 2023, was Williams' birthday, his 140th. So I put a copy of the small red book in my pocket when I went to the Quaker meeting I attend, in case the spirit might move me. It did. A nice thing about Quakerism, at least in some places, is that it tends to be open-minded. No doctrines, and not only that, you get to stand up and say what you want out of the silence. So at a certain point, I stood up and announced Williams' birthday, and read a few poems: "The Red Wheelbarrow," "This Is Just to Say," "To a Poor Old Woman," "Pastoral" ("These things/ astonish me beyond words."), and "The Poor." Afterward a few people told me they enjoyed the poems. But a couple of them said they had not heard of Williams, and a couple of others said they knew the one about the red wheelbarrow, though they weren't sure what to make of it. I was surprised, though I shouldn't have been. So much for the centrality of William Carlos Williams—of poetry!
The font chosen for the cover has an old-fashioned look, for this main-man of Modernism. The lettering is white, and there are a few white chickens grazing around the words. Inside, the print is red, with a few more chickens wandering here and there. For a poet living in New Jersey, Williams has a lot of poems titled "Pastoral," several of them, and in one, not the one with the minister and the man walking in the gutter, Williams describes the color of paint on fences and outhouses: "smeared a bluish green/ that properly weathered/ pleases me best/ of all colors." But in spite of this stated preference, and in spite of the purple of plums, and the green of sour grapes and the weeds he liked to write about, and the "Yellow, yellow, yellow" of "the stain of love" he describes in "Love Song," and the white of the immaculate white bed in "Nantucket," and the black of the nights he went out into when he was called to treat some sick person or deliver a baby, red is the right color for Williams, one of our most colorful poets ever. Red for the wheelbarrow. Red for the fire engine in another iconic poem, "The Great Figure": "firetruck/ moving/ tense/ unheeded/ to gong clangs/ siren howls/ and wheels rumbling/ through the dark city." Red for the red in the flowers among other colors in "The Pot of Flowers": "red where in whorls/ petal lays its glow upon petal." Red for the ribbons that tie the greens together in the magnificent ritualistic poem, "Burning the Christmas Greens," and for the fire that burns the greens up: "Their time past, pulled down/ cracked and flung to the fire/ --go up in a roar// All recognition lost, burnt clean/ clean in the flame, the green/ dispersed, a living red,/ flame red, red as blood wakes/ on the ash—." The poem is one of his greatest. The lines just quoted begin the poem. At the end, the people watching the fire are breathless, and disappearance is transformed: "Black/ mountains, black and red—as// yet uncolored—and ash white,/ an infant landscape of shimmering/ ash and flame and we, in/ that instant, lost,// breathless to be witnesses,/ as if we stood/ ourselves refreshed among/ the shining fauna of that fire." I'm not trying to suggest that Williams has the answer for everything, but those lines, and that poem, are as good a response to oblivion as I know or could ask for.
I'll close with another short poem, to put alongside the famous two of my title. The small red book is like the drop of blood which the phlebotomist pricks that gives the iron level for the whole body:
The Poor
By constantly tormenting them
with reminders of the lice in
their children's hair, the
School Physician first
brought their hatred down on him.
But by this familiarity
they grew used to him, and so,
at last,
took him for their friend and advisor.