Spring and All (6 page)

Her work puzzles me. It is not easy to quote convincingly.

XXV

Somebody dies every four minutes

in New York State —

To hell with you and your poetry —

You will rot and be blown

through the next solar system

with the rest of the gases —

What the hell do you know about it?

AXIOMS

Do not get killed

Careful Crossing Campaign

Cross Crossings Cautiously

What’s the use of sweating over

this sort of thing, Carl; here

it is all set up —

Outings in New York City

Ho for the open country

Dont’t stay shut up in hot rooms

Go to one of the Great Parks

Pelham Bay for example

It’s on Long Island Sound

with bathing, boating

tennis, baseball, golf, etc.

Acres and acres of green grass

wonderful shade trees, rippling brooks

Interborough Rapid Transit Co.

XXVI

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them —

all the exciting detail

of the chase

and the escape, the error

the flash of genius —

all to no end save beauty

the eternal —

So in detail they, the crowd,

are beautiful

for this

to be warned against

saluted and defied —

It is alive, venemous

it smiles grimly

its words cut —

The flashy female with her

mother, gets it —

The Jew gets it straight — it

is deadly, terrifying —

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly —

This is

the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought

The imagination uses the phraseology of science. It attacks, stirs, animates, is radio-active in all that can be touched by action. Words occur in liberation by virtue of its processes.

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.

But the imagination is wrongly understood when it is supposed to be a removal from reality in the sense of John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard the Second: to imagine possession of that which is lost. 
It is rightly understood when John of Gaunt’s words are related not to their sense as objects adherent to his son’s welfare or otherwise but as a dance over the body of his condition accurately accompanying it. By this means of the understanding, the play written to be understood as a play, the author and reader are liberated to pirouette with the words which have sprung from the old facts of history, reunited in present passion.

To understand the words as so liberated is to understand poetry. That they move independantly when set free is the mark of their value

Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it — It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but —

As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight

Writing is likened to music. The object would be it seems to make poetry a pure art, like music. 
Painting too. Writing, as with certain of the modern Russians whose work I have seen, would use unoriented sounds in place of conventional words. The poem then would be completely liberated when there is identity of sound with something — perhaps the emotion.

I do not believe that writing is music. I do not believe writing would gain in quality or force by seeking to attain to the conditions of music.

I think the conditions of music are objects for the action of the writer’s imagination just as a table or —

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are disassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transposition into another medium, the imagination.

Sometimes I speak of imagination as a force, an electricity or a medium, a place. It is immaterial which: for whether it is the condition of a place or a dynamization its effect is the same: to free the world of fact from the impositions of “art” (see Hartley’s last chapter) and to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition leads.

The word is not liberated, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of a word, thus freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time.

XXVII

Black eyed susan

rich orange

round the purple core

the white daisy

is not

enough

Crowds are white

as farmers

who live poorly

But you

are rich

in savagery —

Arab

Indian

dark woman

“It is ever more apparent that Williams was this century’s major American poet.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“If there is a single book that strikes me as representing the apotheosis of modernist writing, it is
Spring and All
.”

—Ron Silliman

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
(1883—1963) was the author of
Paterson
and
In the American Grain
. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection
Pictures from Brueghel
and was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

C. D. WRIGHT
received the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize for her collection
Rising, Falling, Hovering
. Her most recent work,
One With Others
, won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the Israel Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower and Other Love Poems

The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

The Build-Up

The Collected Poems, Volume I

The Collected Poems, Volume II

The Collected Stories

The Doctor Stories

The Embodiment of Knowledge

Imaginations

In the American Grain

In the Money

I Wanted to Write a Poem

Many Loves and Other Plays

Paterson

Pictures from Brueghel

Selected Essays

Selected Letters

Selected Poems

Something to Say: WCWon Younger Poets

Spring and All

A Voyage to Pagany

White Mule

The William Carlos Williams Reader

Yes, Mrs. Williams

Copyright © 1970 by Florence Williams

Copyright © 1923, 1931, 1938, 1951, 1957 by William Carlos Williams

Introduction © 2011 C.D. Wright

Copyright © 2011 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

New Directions would like to thank the New York Public Library for their assistance in the production of this book.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, Ltd.

First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original {NDP1208) in 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, William Carlos, 1883-1963
.

Spring and all / William Carlos Williams.

p. cm.

“A New Directions Pearl.”

ISBN 978-0-8112-2321-8 (e-book)

1. Title.

PS3545.1544S7 2010

811.52—dC22

2010021394

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011