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Polaroid photo by Edward McKuen, August
2002 ©2002 by Stanyan Music Group. All rights reserved.
A Thought for Today
Every day I try to make a few more of my
private parts public, while struggling to make the more public ones
private.
SEPTEMBER 17 1998: IMAGINATION & ILLUMINATION
Today is the 119th Anniversary of the birth of william carlos williams,
the great and individual American poet. What follows is a Flight Plan I
wrote in 1998 to celebrate this great influence and finally friend in my
life.
SOME THOUGHTS ON A PERSONAL HERO
william carlos williams (he preferred that his name appear in lower case)
is one of our greatest American writers. His body of work and his
interests in writing encompass nearly every literary form extant. He wrote
four full-length plays, the libretto for an opera, four novels, 54 short
stories, an autobiography, a biography of his mother, a book of essays and
criticism, a history of America and even translated a medieval Spanish
novel. He spent the better part of three decades composing his epic
five-volume poem Patterson, and in addition he wrote 600 poems of such
excellence it is hard to believe that writing was an avocation not his
major life work.
For forty-two years he was a country doctor in the small town of
Rutherford, New Jersey, specializing in paediatric and obstetric medicine.
He gave the major part of his life to medical practice and nearly all of
his writing was done after midnight, or early morning before going to his
office, and in his office between appointments with patients. Even after
retiring as a doctor, with more time to write, he studied and kept up with
medicine. He had to snatch and grab every moment he could to set down a
breathtaking body of work that would embarrass many full time writers. All
of his writing was good, solid and inventive. Like Walt Whitman and
Langston Hughes he was much taken with American speech. W.H. Auden called
his "Asphodel, The Greeny Flower "one of the most beautiful love poems in
the language.
During his lifetime williams won nearly every important literary award his
country had to offer. including The Pulitzer Prize.. williams, Whitman and
Walter Benton are the first poets I ever read and I was and still am much
influenced by each of them. I first met williams in the early 1950s when I
was in army training at Fort Slocum, New York. I called him from the base
[his number was in the telephone directory]; told him I had a weekend pass
and would love to meet him. "Come along," he said and I did.
williams had always been a supporter of poetry and young poets, a good
thing since I hadn't even published my first book yet. I had completed the
manuscript though and it was about to be published by a vanity press. I
took it along to show him. He beamed when he saw that all the poems were
printed in lower case with the barest of punctuation, a style he used in
writing most of his own poetry and one the kid in front of him that day
had unabashedly borrowed. We agreed that the less emphasis one placed on
punctuation the more ways there were for the reader to interpret the work.
He told me "The poem will always be your experience but the reader will
bring his imagination to it too. All we have is the language and our
greatness is what we bring to it." Heady advice for a 20 year old.
I griped about not having enough time to write now that I was a G. I. and
about to go overseas. He replied, "You will find the time." He said he
liked my poetry and told me that my style (at that time it was more his
style than mine) would serve me well. He singled out for particular praise
an entry simply entitled July 11. "This is good," he said, "a love poem
with original metaphors. One that is erotic without hitting you over the
head with stale wording." I memorized the words and exactly how he said
them. We talked about the fact that my first book would be a 'paid for'
venture. "Do it," he said, "Get published any way and everywhere you can.
The world thinks it doesn't need poetry, but we are the most important
soldiers in the land." He was expanding to me on one of the poems he wrote
that contained these lines:
"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there".
As we shook hands again, when it was time for me to catch my ride back to
base, he kindly told me "You will be an important poet, because you are an
original." As I was going down the hill he yelled after me, "I'll be
seeing you, I know I will, don’t forget to send me a book." williams died
in 1963 after a series of strokes that stilled his mind and hand. The
freedom of being a poet without having to be a versifier is a legacy he
fought for all his life. The more awards he won as his fame and the power
of his poetry grew, the more the big shot poets of his time put him down.
Stevens, Eliot and even his former college chum Ezra Pound criticized him
for his lack of meter and rhyme. Surely it was the jealousy of a club that
fiercely guarded each other that caused the attacks. william carlos
williams created his own meter and rhyme scheme and that's what inspired
so many of us who came after him to do the same.
williams genuinely loved writing and medicine in equal measure. Not only
did he lead a life of 'quiet desperation'; time after time he writes of
retreating into his imagination when schizophrenia from a personal life
that was a mess and the torment of writing itself overtook him.
Webster Schott, in his fine and perceptive introduction to "Imaginations",
a 1970 compendium of williams' work wrote "he retreated to the senses and
found a piece of freedom through his imagination. To williams the ability
to imagine became the ability to survive. It was a need as urgent as
sexual hunger." To this he adds the poet’s own words, "The imagination
will not down . . .If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes a protest. If
it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; If it is not art, it becomes
crime. Men and women cannot be content any more than children with the
mere facts of humdrum life - the imagination must adorn and exaggerate
life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite life."
william carlos williams gave us illumination through his imagination. For
me, add inspiration. Without a winter afternoon spent in the company of
one of my great literary heroes I might not have had the courage and
tenacity to pursue that most difficult but ultimately rewarding life,
writing.
There is an excellent web site devoted to william carlos williams, I urge
you to visit it. This man could not be more my father or grandfather if he
were blood kin. The book my idol had critiqued was " . . . and autumn
came", today's poems are taken from it.
First Published 9/16/98
Don’t forget to join Webmaster
Ken tomorrow for his weekly This One Does It For Me feature. Sleep warm.
RM 9/16/02 5:15 PM PST
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