When we live in the blossom of someone’s artistic accomplishments, revisiting the source material can be a little underwhelming. Does Jackson Pollock seem radical now that mess and chaos are central to the process of modern painting? I like to corner people with some short poems, especially when spring starts to make itself known. The Red Wheelbarrow and This is Just to Say are probably his most famous, and the response is usually the same: “I could come up with something like that.” This is often said dismissively. I think William Carlos Williams probably heard that a lot when he was alive. I also think he’d be delighted to hear it. He was very much an advocate of ordinary folk expressing themselves plainly. One can imagine his reedy voice chuckling: “I think you could too.”
Williams was able to pursue his muse without compromise due to his day job as a pediatrician and general practitioner. After long hours spent intimately observing the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable, he sat up late at his desk to write. He ran on minimal sleep, embracing the live-wire intensity of chasing down his own notions of mess and chaos through poetry, short stories, novels, and critical writings. Like a Pollock canvas, there were no strict divisions separating these pursuits. In his estimation, Dr. Williams delivered over 3,000 babies in the Rutherford area, usually during house calls. How many screaming infants were slapped on the bottom by a future Pulitzer winner? Impossible to know, though dozens of them show up howling throughout his collected works. So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow.
In sharp contrast to his peers in the modernist movement, Williams wanted to be understood, often to the point of banality. In fact, the banality is the point. Though there was mutual admiration, Williams was let down by the publication of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot: “I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I’m sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself, rooted in the locality which would give it fruit. I knew at once that, in certain ways, I was defeated.”
In some ways, I agree. Williams’ conception of successful poetry, often expressed in his maxim “no ideas but in things,” was localized, and should be understandable to the subjects of the writing. Eliot, he believed, had abandoned a clear, concise American poetic voice in favor of faux-European obfuscation. Williams spelled out his thesis half a decade before The Waste Land in a poem called January Morning: “I wanted to write a poem/that you would understand/for what good is it to me/if you can’t understand it?” As much as I appreciate Eliot and his cohorts, I find myself reaching for Williams more often.
Of course, humans are nothing if not contradictory. For all his talk of clarity, Williams can’t always be understood. His interest in spontaneity sometimes leads a reader to encounter the same difficulties they would with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or Ezra Pound. Namely, we’re offered the total point of view of the speaker without explanation. In life, there is virtually nothing in the way of clarity. The modernists reflected the absurdities of a mechanized society spewing information at alarming rates, wars mixed with advertising jargon mixed with emergent technologies. Sound familiar? The human condition changes very little. The specifics are different, but the confusion is the same.
Crunching some numbers, it seems that more people followed Eliot. His work sold surprisingly well, while Williams’ mainstream success came very late in his life. Though Eliot won widespread recognition first, Williams may have won the proverbial war. His interest in capturing the spark of the moment inspired the Beats with their mixing of spontaneous prose and poetry. This influence was direct in the case of the young Allen Ginsberg, a fellow New Jersey inhabitant whose correspondence shows up in Williams’ mock-epic Paterson. It doesn’t take much to see a through-line to Jack Kerouac’s attempts to stuff the sprawl of America into a single book. This influence would carry over into the maturing of rock and roll, an unlikely bridge between The Red Wheelbarrow and Light My Fire. Williams’ desire to pin down a moment, no matter how deliberate or pointless it may seem, never fails to draw me in. For all posterity, he has frozen cats in time, wheelbarrows after the rain, and made us consider fugitive plums. Think you can write poems like that? You can, and you should.
