Imagery and Innovation

William Carlos Williams
Passport Photo 1921

I was introduced to William Carlos Williams and was immediately impressed (and not just because he was from New Jersey).  Williams syntax and style was fresh and new. I loved Emily Dickson but it was a down. And other than Maya Angelous, she was the only female poet I could have named at the time.  Poetry was still more of a white man's game with Frost's lyrical poems about fences and stormy nights. It was a Poe's obscure (to me) references like Pallis' bust... it took dictionaries and encyclopedias (remember those big books?) to decipher poetry. It was complicated, confusing, and beyond me. I couldn't make head or tails from t.s. elliot.  Even after spending a week on it in a graduate class, I can barely follow The Wasteland. Too many "classically educated" references for this small town American girl. Although it is thanks to eliot I know the definition of the word belladonna.

Emily Dickinson was a female author, but still, she went in the grouping of white male poets. Her poems were different from theirs, but they were depressing with death riding with her at every turn. I later learned it was because of her own anxiety and depression. Her life fascinates me now, and her words inspired me. However, they did not captivate me. The only other female poet I could have named back then (high school? early college?  dunno) was Maya Angelou, and last May we lost one of the greatest American writers when she died. Angelou's words melted into my bones. 
 

A new way to walk.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you best with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumpking in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
(excerpt from Angelou's "Still I Rise")







Like Angelou, Williams was not beyond me.  My teacher told us that Williams left poetry scribbled on the pack of prescription pad and that one night after being called out late at night to see a patient and returning home he ate the plums his wife had left in the icebox because "they were delicious so sweet and so cold."  I think that the majority of folks who have read onnly one Williams poem it was this one since it has been the majority of literature texts that I have seen.

If you read that poem in class, you may have moved on and forgotten it, but I turned the page because I wanted to see more. Williams was so much more than a lover of plums.

    

The Figure Five in Gold
Charles Demuth

The Great Figure
by William Carlos Williams
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city




 A fire truck. Williams managed to make a fire truck come to life and scream past me in a classroom. He inspired art that is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I think this is what led me to believe he was a black doctor in the 1920s in New Jersey. His voice stood out among all the male poets and showed me pictures of the world around me. He was unique and completely American. In my mind only an African American poet could break away from the old style, the old way, because the only other African American poet I knew was Maya Angelou, and she never ceases to amaze me. 

 

Never Ceases to Amaze Me (Split Enz)

What does it say about my educational background that when I was in high school, my automatic assumption was that innovative, powerful writing must be from a person of color because white folks poetry seemed so damned set in the old ways?  I was at least partly mistaken because the works we covered were, for the most part, from before World War I, which is when folks really began breaking the mold in ways that I could understand and follow.  

The imagist movement of the early 20th century was about creating images with small, simple words. Williams was part of the imagist movement with Ezra Pound but they eventually parted ways - so many of the imagists were, to Williams, sticking to older European ways. They weren't American enough for him; they weren't defining new American ways of writing.  I don't know much about it, truthfully, because I do not have a background in poetry and have studied very little of it. Perhaps folks who know their poetry ould comment here. Maybe they'll say I'm full of hooey. That'd be awesome - I love debates and learning.

Williams style of imagery poetry works for me. In two pages sitting in a high school class poetry suddenly became accessible.  It was vivid, it placed cold fruit, wet from being cleaned for the eating, into a bowl.  I strongly dislike plums, but after reading that poem, beautiful dark plums, cold on a hot night stood in front of my eyes and left me aching to bite into them and experience the bittersweet joy he felt that made him write that lovely message to his wife.