I’ve spent the lion’s share of the past 15 years transfixed by the works of William Carlos Williams. This admittedly is a rare obsession, one divorced from any sort of personal biography. Williams lived his life stubbornly, purposefully in the rural New Jersey town of Paterson. He was a doctor, delivering by his own account more than 2000 babies during the life of his practice. He was a university friend of Ezra Pound with whom he also carried a lifelong friendship and enmity, differing as they did on how to touch the modern poetic technique. Me, well, I was born in the city, as far from a doctor as one can reasonably be and still be a functional contributor to society.

What fascinates me about Williams is his mastery of the word. Not merely words, phrases and the glimpses they capture, but the word itself, properly placed, realized, uncovered anew. Jarring, his language has the constant feel of discovery, although by design his topics originate from the common place.

Recently I've been sitting a lot with why I keep coming back to Williams as a primary architect for my relationship to life. And so, given this forum with which to work, I plan to unravel my relationship to the poet and by extension, the poem, and as a benefit introduce interested readers to an increasingly obscure but crucial writer.

As he himself wrote: 'I am not, / I know / in the galaxy of poets / a rose / but who, among the rest, / will deny me / my place.' There is something counterintuitive about him, impossible to duplicate, reproduce, as though he lived his life performing constant backflips through trap doors in the floor. Against the grain, or again in his own words:

The Manoeuvre

I saw the two starlings

coming in toward the wires.
But at the last,
 just before alighting, they

turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that's what got me – to
face into the wind's teeth.

Facing into the wind's teeth. That captures it. Rather than the path of least resistance, beauty at all costs but the filth as well, the sandpaper as well as the smooth result of its effort. When Wallace Stevens affectionately called Williams' work the 'anti-poetic' in an essay, he responded angrily:

...and they speak,

euphemistically, of the anti-poetic!

Garbage. Half the world ignored...

The garbage too, as well as the goddess. For stubbornly operating in obscurity convinced that this new language and focus of attention would waken his age to its new dawn, he was mocked and accused of all manner of things, to which he wrote:

“What do they mean when they say: ‘I do not like your poems; you have no faith whatever. You seem neither to have suffered nor, in fact, to have felt anything very deeply. There is nothing appealing in what you say but on the contrary the poems are positively repellant. They are heartless, cruel, they make fun of humanity. What in God’s name do you mean? Are you a pagan? Have you no tolerance for human frailty? Rhyme you may perhaps take away but rhythm! why there is none in your work whatever. Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent. Poetry that used to go hand in hand with life, poetry that interpreted our deepest promptings, poetry that inspired, that led us forward to new discoveries, new depths of tolerance, new heights of exaltation. You moderns! it is the death of poetry that you are accomplishing. No. I cannot understand this work. You have not yet suffered a cruel blow from life. When you have suffered you will write differently’?

Perhaps this noble apostrophe means something terrible for me, I am not certain, but for the moment I interpret it to say: ‘You have robbed me. God, I am naked. What shall I do?’—By it they mean that when I have suffered (provided I have not done so as yet) I too shall run for cover; that I too shall seek refuge in fantasy. And mind you, I do not say that I will not. To decorate my age.

But today it is different.”

Strip it to the bone, expose it to the elements, let its essence speak. That was the point. And so, he was an essentialist of sorts. If at its
essence a thing had romance, so be it. But, when raw, if the thing only shat and snarled, then speak it must.

There is something whole about the poet, an integrity, a purpose true to life, impossible to fully capture. For a moment I've got it, so
simple, so clean, and then, out of the clear blue sky, sideways, a lightening strike, a thunder crack (the light / for all time shall outspeed / the thunder crack). It escapes the mind, there for a moment, then disappears. When the moment passes, something unholy moves to take its place, delusion in many attractive veils. So the poet, eyes always afresh, shifts again to capture the elusive. Far from unstable, the essence of a thing is alone indestructible.

Pastoral

The little sparrows

hop ingenuously

about the pavement

quarreling

with sharp voices

over those things

that interest them.

But we who are wiser

shut ourselves in

on either hand

and no one knows

whether we think good

or evil.

                          Meanwhile,

the 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.

                         These things

astonish me beyond words.