Take a moment to reflect on the following poem by the physician-poet
William Carlos Williams, written more than 70 years ago:
Their topics include the visual drive:
William Carlos Williams' and Vicente Huidobro's transformations of the poetic page, the alphabet as world picture: Inger Christensen's alfabet and Ron Silliman's the Alphabet, the grail and the bees: Leonora Carrington's quest for human-animal coexistence, and primitive modern practices of place: Mary Butts and Christopher Wood in Paris and Cornwall.
Mariani, perhaps best known as a National Book Award finalist for
William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (Williams was another modernist genius with a day job--as a doctor--and was an important contemporary, friend and influence on Stevens)--ably balances a straightforward chronicle of events from his subject's life with an analysis of the poet's often difficult, inventive work.
'The crowd at the ball game' by
William Carlos Williams is a fiendishly difficult poem, so condensed one wonders whether half of it is missing.
"It was
William Carlos Williams who wrote, late in life, that 'men die miserably every day I for lack I of what is found' in poetry, but it was also Williams, a family doctor, who had to write some of his poems on prescription pads, in the minutes between seeing patients..." (Stephen Burt, 2010).
She traces this development through case studies of the place-based works of
William Carlos Williams; Charles Olson; Gary Snyder; Amiri Baraka; the poet-run community in Bolina, California; and Robert Smithson, who has set a precedent on par with Williams and Olson in the way he "analyzes social space without positing the construction of small autonomous zones (like those developed by the New American poets) as the only effective antidote to an encroaching globalism."
Herbert Leibowitz, "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of
William Carlos Williams (FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 2011)
Keats studied to be an apothecarist; Anton Chekhov and
William Carlos Williams were both practicing and successful physicians; Primo Levi was a chemist; Somerset Maugham left medicine entirely to begin writing.
One thinks here of Chekhov, Marie Curie, Borodin, Frida Kahlo,
William Carlos Williams, A J Cronin, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Alexander Doblin, Keats, Kathe Kollwitz and C Louis Leipoldt.
Trause, host of the
William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative Readings, and Director of the Oradell Public Library, is the author of two poetry collections, "Inside Out, Upside Down & Round and Round" (Nirala Publications, 2012) and "Simply Serial" (Poets Wear Prada, 2008).
From
William Carlos Williams we read: "I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox." Representing Wallace Stevens well are lines from his chilly masterpiece "The Snow Man."
Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of
William Carlos Williams" is an anthology of poetry from various authors who write in dedication to this giant of influence on modern poetry,
William Carlos Williams.
William Carlos Williams - United States poet (1883-1963)