William Carlos Williams Books

Some of you might know Williams for his "Red Wheelbarrow" poem. Others of you might know his poem "Paterson", an epic about the New Jersey city. Even if you don't know Williams' work, this is necessary reading, as "I Wanted..." showcases an artist at the tail end of his career documenting his artistic evolution by commenting on everything he has ever published.

And indeed, there is much to document. But despite his prolificness -- rarely did a year go by without Williams producing a volume -- Williams was not a figure in the popular consciousness for the first few decades of his career. Time and again through the book, he comments on his lack of exposure, his small print runs, and his feeling of laboring in the shadows of TS Eliot and his acolytes. Perhaps due to not having the classical grounding of Eliot and Pound, Williams worked within his own "limitations" to forge a conversational style that takes the Whitman legacy and builds on it.

I recommend this book to those of you who want to write serious work, or to simply understand the lifetime's apprenticeship that goes into serious work being created. Not surprisingly, by the way, I recovered this volume from a library discard pile, which only goes to show one more example of a society too willing to discard quiet works of grace for corporate billboards in the detention halls that double as public schools.

When he was 73 years old, William Carlos Williams held a series of "informal conversations" with a university student working on her degree. She sorted the transcripts chronologically according to the works to which they refer and compiled them in this small volume. The result is a collection of trivia, charming chatter and gossip related to the poems, stories, plays and novels written by Williams between 1909 and 1957.

The subtitle of the book is quite misleading, though. An autobiography (at least in my opinion) tries to impose a certain order or direction or "meaning" on a life. This book never tries to do any such thing for the poems or the other works. Williams does not say much about how he wrote his poems or what their "meaning" should be or in which context they stand. That was rather disappointing. But then again, I should not have expected Williams to be an interpreter of his poems in the first place. As a writer he is pragmatic and straightforward, not inclined to introspection, speculation or interpretation.

Williams seems to work by instinct, and this method works fine for him. In one interesting example in the book, used by Williams to illustrate a point, he deletes just one line from a nine-line poem - and it is an amazing improvement. His explanation for the deletion, however, is typically bland and uninformative: "See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better is looks?"

What the book conveys quite successfully it Williams's unpretentious way of communicating, his often self-deprecating humor and the ease and pleasure with which he looks back over his almost 50 years of writing. Williams has a mischievous streak in him, too. He enjoys risking a small scandal by putting on the record his thoughts at a poetry reading in Wellesley where the college girls "stood on their heels and yelled ... the girls ... my god I was breathless, but I said do you really want more and they said yes so I read what Floss [his wife] knew they would like. They were so adorable. I could have raped them all!"

"I Wanted to Write a Poem" is definitely not a must-have book. I have picked out some (but not all) of the raisins I have found in a book that was, overall, quite plain and trite. And it left me with a feeling that the 73-year old Williams is simply a nice, elder gentleman with a sense of humor, a bit of unobtrusive posturing and an easygoing, mostly sanguine temperament. At a certain point in time he must have reached that desirable and pleasant state in which he decided to take himself not too serious anymore. My favorite quote in this context comes from his wife: "Psychiatry? He used to say, 'I'm nuts and everybody knows it,' and let it go at that."