“To refine, to clarify, to intensify,
that eternal moment in which we alone live
there is but a single force–the imagination”
William Carlos Williams – Spring and All
I have loved Dr. Williams for forty five years, through his poetry, not his prescription pad. (I do know a woman who had him as a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey when she was a child.) As a physician he had a mind cleared for science. As a poet he had an imagination attuned to what was before him and within him. Sometimes a patient was before him. Williams wrote: “To treat a man as material for a work of art makes him somehow come alive for me.” As any artist knows, to treat woman, man, life as material for a work of art makes the ‘Lebenswelt’ the life-world leap out as experience.
Logos and eros* were inextricably mixed in the poet as was the English and Hispanic heritage reflected in his name, William and Carlos. His depictions of things was precise. But the energy he found transmitted through things was vivid and vital.
Most of his poems were not pretty. Some critics thought they were not even poetry. But his poems were to life as a whetting stone is to an axe blade. They put a sharp edge on experience. They blatantly greet the objective world in a subjective way. His surroundings were littered with hard things to be softened in the furnace of imagination and transformed into a phenomenon to be experienced more than thought about or enjoyed.
Hard as it is to believe, some folks don’t want to be bothered with reality. Too finely sliced, reality dissolves into insignificant detail. I’m not talking about the reality they see on the 6:30 evening news, nor the reality they lap up on the 24 hour t. v. breaking news. We feed on that reality like a forest fire feeds on dry wood. Add the reality of the daily work-a-day world and our lives really get overheated, dried out, and brittle, like weeds weeks without rain.
The reality I am talking about are the miniscule and mundane packets of life we are awash in everyday, things we barely hear nor see because they are so blatantly audible and visible we ignore them. These unobtrusive things caught Bill Williams’ attention. Here is an example:
Between Walls
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
Life does not get much more prosaic than that. Yet Williams sees and sings. The ‘green bottle.’ Could it have been a medicine bottle? A beer bottle? He doesn’t say and it doesn’t matter. It shines in this dull circumstance.
After a night raid on the icebox he writes an apology to his wife Flossie, the poem:
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
In twenty eight words he plumbs (plums) the depth of a guilty conscience, recognizing the consternation he will cause his wife, and asking for forgiveness. Yet, he cannot deny the pleasure of taste. He did enjoy the plums. He is a man of bodily enthusiasm. On a home medical call he passes white chickens and a rain drenched red wheelbarrow in the yard. He can’t help himself. He wants to capture the experience. (see: The Red Wheelbarrow on line)
Big deal. But wait. There’s more.
In a world crammed with things that are no big deal we get a richer world when we see them as small but not insignificant, when we appreciate how they stubbornly hold their place in the world. We have much more than a rational connection to the plain facts of life. We feel.
Speaking of the ‘facts of life’ Dr. Williams celebrated sex. He brought babies into the world and he knew where babies came from. But beyond the obvious, he was sensitive and alert to eros in all of its varied and subtle manifestations. One such experience was articulated by him and given to us in the following poem.
The Young Housewife
At ten AM the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house,
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
A young woman, a married young woman, is still at mid-morning moving about her house in the gauzy sheer dress of the night. Does it excite her to be dressed in diaphanous light, the gossamer cloth caressing her skin? She is safe “behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house.” But now she ventures farther out to the curb, needing to conduct some business. She needs fish and ice.
Is she more properly dressed? The poet doesn’t explicitly say. He does tell us that she remains ‘uncorseted’ and her hair is a bit of a mess. She is shyly aware of a certain degree of disclosure she is offering the ice-man and the fish-man. The poet says no more. He trusts us with our reveries. He also allows us to be completely disinterested.
Dr. Williams drives by in the privacy of his own musings. In his mind and later in his poem he compares her to a ‘fallen leaf.’ Why? Frail beauty? The transitory nature of life?
He knows that he has been near a powerful totemic force, representing more than her single self alone. She is Aphrodite, the sacred flowering feminine. How do we know this? Dr. Bill Williams bows and smiles as he continues on. Notice that he does not simply smile. He bows, a sign of reverence.
This is not a middle-aged man’s silly sexual fantasy.
This is a transcendent moment. Williams has communed with Eros, the force that quickens. He wants to waken us to eros as well.
In his poem Asphodel: That Greeny Flower, Williams offers this insight:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
What kind of news do we get from poems?
The news we find in poems is the thousand bits of artfully rendered color made of words, like glass pieces in a kaleidoscope. These give us a vivid experience of life as it comes in the daily details that make our world. Poetry transforms a two-dimensional world into 3-dimensional and probably 4 and 5 dimensional as well, although we do not have words to describe those states of conscious awareness.
Poetry refines and intensifies experience.
*Logos = objective descriptions of the world
Eros = energy that makes the world come alive for us