Sonic threshold of the sacred
To William Carlos Williams
To William Carlos Williams
What waxes
wanes
the enforced reincarnation hour
and green quartz veins
over the mind of pride
nonentities
Nowhere you!
Everywhere the electric!
the golden one
living in a poetic world, devouring word
these are the thoughts that run rampant
love paves the way to our existence
the enforced reincarnation hour
and green quartz veins
over the mind of pride
nonentities
Nowhere you!
Everywhere the electric!
the golden one
living in a poetic world, devouring word
these are the thoughts that run rampant
love paves the way to our existence
The Golden Ones -- Janet Pearlman
The ears of mortals are filled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it.
--Macrobius
The ears of mortals are filled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it.
--Macrobius
Every moment is a golden for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
--Henry Miller
In his 1951 "Autobiography" William Carlos Williams commented on the intellectual internationalism of early Modernist poetry: T. S. Eliot "returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit." He incorporated this attitude within the corpus of his own poetry, particularly in Book I of "Paterson":
ReplyDelete—Say it, no ideas but in things--
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident--
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained--
secret -- into the body of the light!
Part of his approach to poetry was his painterly view of it. In a 1961 interview he was quite explicit. "I've attempted to fuse the poetry and painting, to make it the same thing.... A design in the poem and a design in the picture should more or less make them the same...." For instance, he wrote “Jersey Lyric” in response to Henry Niese’s 1960 painting of the same title:
View of winter trees
before
one tree
in the foreground
where
by fresh-fallen
snow
lie 6 woodchunks ready
for the fire
Stylistically this association led to his concept of the "variable foot" which he believed illustrated the American rhythm that existed in everyday usage. He also worked with what he labeled "triadic-line poetry" in which he broke a long line into 3 free-verse segments, as in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.