William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)
American poet and physician.
the set pieces
of your faces stir me
leading citizens
but not
in the same way.
It is in tune with the tempo of life scattered yet welded into the whole, broken, yet woven together.
The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast a cold wind.
Lift your flowers
on bitter stems
chickory!
Lift them up
out of the scorched ground!
Bear no foliage
but give yourself
wholly to that!
Strain under them
you bitter stems
that no beast eats
and scorn greyness!
Not now. Love itself a flower
with roots in a parched ground.
Empty pockets make empty heads.
Cure it if you can but
do not believe that we can live
today in the country
for the country will bring us
no peace.
A man isnt a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so and most take an insane pride in believing it. Consistency! He varies; Hamlet today, Caesar tomorrow; here, there, somewhere if he is to retain his sanity, and why not?
The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isnt a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work.
Brother!
if we were rich
we'd stick our chests out
and hold our heads high!
One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.
Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.
There's a lot of bastards out there!
When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them without distortion which would mar their exact significances into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isnt what he says that counts as a work of art, its what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested
the snow
is covered
with broken
seed husks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.
I liked this because of the elimination of the essential in the composition. I cut it down and down, and down. This squeezed up to make it vivid.
It's all you deserve. You've got the cash,
what the hell do you care? You've got
nothing to lose. You are inheritors of a great
tradition. My country right or wrong!
You do what you're told to do. You don't
answer back the way Tommy Jeff did or Ben
Frank or Georgie Washing. I'll say you
don't. You're civilized. You let your
betters tell you where you get off. Go
ahead
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
It's a strange world made up of disappointments for the most part.
I keep writing largely because I get a satisfaction from it which can't be duplicated elsewhere. It fills the moments which otherwise are either terrifying or depressed. Not that I live that way, work too quiets me. My chief dissatisfaction with myself at the moment is that I don't seem to be able to lose myself in what I have to do as I should like to.
The War is the first and only thing in the world today.
The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.