pieces of transport and shudder from other bloggers and Publisheds who happen across great things while chewing the rubber on the end of their pencil and holding their forehead with their fingers
10/22 by William Carlos Williams: out and not wet from The Descent of Winter, 1928
10/28 ‘in this strong light …’ by William Carlos Williams: specificularity within a cast-iron-changing season from the Descent of Winter, 1928 by William Carlos Williams
10/28 ‘On hot days …’ by William Carlos Williams: sultry from The Descent of Winter, 1928
10/30 by William Carlos Williams: obviously, the sound, echoingly, the sound, only, the sound; from the Descent of Winter, 1928 by William Carlos Williams
11/1 by William Carlos Williams: the billboard credo of William Carlos Williams from The Descent of Winter, 1928 by William Carlos Williams, luminary to my early wonder; the bit about writing by the light of the lamp while writing by the light of the lamp while writing about the giganticness of vividism did it for me for a good three decades
The Atlantic City Convention: 1. THE WAITRESS by William Carlos Williams: with love from Poems, 1928
THE ATTIC WHICH IS DESIRE: by William Carlos Williams: from Poems, 1930: the word becomes the poem, nothing beyond the word itself – cf. * SODA * – but everything in it just the same; WCW was an atomist, a catalyst and maybe, even, an alchemist, but he was not a dogmatist or a fantasist and definitely not a rhapsodist, although he was a poet, and very often-enough, didn’t know it
“BABA MARTA” by Amy Jo Sprague: Bloody marvellous: the wisdom of staring into the dark, and letting it be what it is, but not letting it be everything … becomes beautiful, beautiful
“Barely Conscious” by Tiffany Coffman: this is such a true ‘graph of consciousness’ (Whalen), such deep hole in a single, simple experience … single, simple experiences are never single and they are never simple if we have been alive for anything more than a few seconds
“A Blessing” by Wordgeekery: there are so many killer lines in here, all barbed; like hooks; under the water; which make you realise; you’re drowning; I think the ‘bless you’s are for the reader when they actually get to look in the mirror of the water; they drown in; with sad love
BLUEFLAGS by William Carlos Williams: WCW was good enough to let us into his local so much that we found his family there too; he espoused the search for poetry within your own fingernails, within your local yards and backstreets, within your private moments in front of your own mirror, within the loaned experience which can only be borrowed when you’ve brought up children and shown them the world in which you brought them to their own existence … rather than charging off for it rummaging about Europe’s kulture: he was an icognito prince, old WCW
“Cold Tea and Sympathy” by David Archer: in his gravatar description he said his poetry is mediocre at best; he obviously hasn’t read ‘Cold Tea and Sympathy’ or any number of pieces he created a few years ago: he can churn out dollops of heartbreak in an ironic instant; I like his tragic poetry the most, but I realise that he can’t just keep churning it out to keep ME happy and heart-stop enthralled (and I am happy for him for that); here is a ‘short, fat, 45, shit with money and prone to bouts of depression’ man with a beautiful heart and lots of tattoos with a sardonic sense of humour (and a love of Barnsley – herm); go read this man … mediocre, my arse
“Crone Descants” by Bonnie Marshall: Bonnie speaks Woman fluently without guile (of course, for that is Man semantic) or demur; I love [the language of … no, there I go again – [Male] qualification; agh I’m getting parenthetically lost] Woman, like the fascia tissue that holds bone, ligament, muscle and organ in one moving embrace … as my yoga teacher explains
“DANSE RUSSE” by William Carlos Williams: Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes were in New York in 1916, inspiring the abandon of conformity and the discipline of acceptance which were so necessary to the budding 20th Century
“THE DESOLATE FIELD” by William Carlos Williams: I read this field so many years ago; it left a sort-of impression because I liked the word ‘simulacrum’ although I didn’t know what it meant or why it was in this poem; now, I think I know the field – in fact, have known the field all along – and I realise I am just a goat and that there is no other love to find than the grass out of the ground
Disembodied by Rachael Heap: a superb piece – this works, night and day … in fact words just clutter this up – `stays with me like the shape of my lungs
“Family Portrait” by K. A. Brace: an absolute cracker; I ‘got’ all of the words straight through on the first reading … I wasn’t even thrown by the stones in the shoe because I’d relaxed into the ambulation by then; the memories are their own journey, not just the nostalgic destination; this really was a portal to travel through; a superb pieces (sic; look at the collage too) of work
“February 2” by C: getting lost, going, arriving, being, remembering all successively at the same time
THE GREAT FIGURE by William Carlos Williams: how could this not be included; how could I not include the painting by Charles Demuth; how emblematic is this of taking the notice of all that is in the universe that we are born to …
“Haibun Rants of a Blender” by Toshimitsu Kareishu: absolutely barking mad – I’m sure I’ll calm down once I understand it all – but I greatly enjoyed the ride; still don’t understand it fully, still enjoying the ride six months on
“EL HOMBRE” by William Carlos Williams: a ‘strange courage’ because it is unconditional, neither democratic or moral, predicated by time before all wall, fresh as a consciousness that has lost reference; this gave me courage, likewise, to find ancient echo in the least presumptive of circumstance – the birth of writing
“i am” by Tiffany Coffman: Tiffany! What are you doing to me! This is so mindful it is compassionate! This seeps into its own canvas like a watercolour: dwelling in creation rather than the scuffs and marks on the moon! !
“In parenthesis” by Lazy Wednesdays: – sharp intake – you’ve done it again, Wednesdays, plonked me straight in there (hear (sic), I should explain myself) (sorry, it cheapens your device, but it ‘clicked’ a perspective in me: I had to use it), (so the device worked), (but I’m not quite in control of it yet) – breathe out, breathe out; true out-formative (sic, again) poetry makes me giddy with the possibilities that are all about (all the time) – thank you
IN THE ‘SCONSET BUS by William Carlos Williams: it was the revelation: that there was of such importance, in the minute observation, with wonder, of the minutest things, with love, and their intersposal with each other, with relationship, quite denuded of any sticky intention, that let’s them so; that has made WCW such an influential poet for me
“I Shift” by Bruce Ruston: lingering – as you do in the bathroom – on a glint and a glimpse mixed, usually too wistful and wispy to capture but unpacked here like a magnificent chest of drawers (or even condensed on the mirror!?)
“it’s a flipside circus day today” by Bonnie Marshall: this is a wonderful ‘scape, right here in front of you – from mind to sky to porch to road to street to smile, with all manner of obtuse-angle movement and colour and music that just keeps opening and opening … a wonderful 21st century echo of WCW
“It is for you” by Emina Redzic: this is so utterly plaintive; and honest; and lived; so many of the poems on elimelike’s blog are like going through a favourite grandparent’s coat pockets to see what you can find – they are all ‘for you’ if you have the love; I love Emina’s work
“JANUARY” by William Carlos Williams: it’s the immanence of writing within the experience that it is writing about that makes writing a wrestling match between perception and the thought thereof …
“January 16” by C: best Batman poem I’ve read in a long while … I know, I know, the subject is ‘we’ but he has … existential issues; I’m probably stomping through C’s delicate piece with muddy Wellington boots, I’m sorry, but it works for me because I likewise have a gothic-love relationship with the Bat … in fact …
THE LONELY STREET by William Carlos Williams: from Sour Grapes, 1921
“LOVE SONG” by William Carlos Williams: some poems ride the air: they are about nothing much at all (of import to the nation), they don’t do anything, but they are so much more alive and enduring than the cleanest and enshrined momument; I suppose they renew each time they are read with evanescence and sniff …
“Menagerie” by Lostinmist or maybe en route Menagerie by Lostinmist: this just kept spindling, threading, weaving, stitching and trimming me in, and cascading down, with each successive stanza – what a fall, and what faint glimmer of true redemption, always along the way; I usually cannot read long poems unless I get the thread (and I often only catch hold of the wrong end of the stick, anyway), otherwise I cannot sustain the attention … unless the poem sucks me into a vortex; this piece tipped me (us?) into a cascade, but the landing was beguilingly cushioned – perhaps all is not lost
“MORNINGS WITH SYLVIA” by Eli Kyoko: the habitation of metaphor, the truest tribute
“Not nothing” by Laura M: the Purple-Toothed Grin has such a jaunty angle on life: clear-eyed fresh (but slightly rolling), but always sitting with the chair turned at an angle to the table, ready to get up and dance (or rush to the telephone box), so that when you read her you can’t help notice that you are actually waltzing around the room, and laughing joyously with your head back, face to the spinning ceiling – even though some child tied your laces to the chair you were sitting on and you have been dragging it around the room oblivious
“November 15” by C: This is a superb piece of work: lots and lots of shallow steps that each allow a walk-step before the next step down; or up …; floating high above the rainforest to see the rifts in the land, space in the sky, and also down on the land, the banks down to the river – bird calls; and then Trump is in there with the tags! What just went on there?
“Ode to Dorian Gray” by mywordpool: mywordpool reads with true thread – like Ariadne; this is a true key to why any one of us puts pen to sandpaper as if it were an important thing to do and was actually getting us somewhere – this is where it gets us, to some where there is an enlarged sense of consciousness that includes one’s self rather than [de]spites it; this is en-grown poetry, this is transforming-ative poetry
“Orange Days” by omrum: a big apartment building sits on the horizon, meditating in the morning while it waits for its various minds and preoccupations to sleepy-wake and stretch their limbs searching piquantly for its true nature which it feels sure is an individual life; this from a delicate poet, steady as a building
“PASTORAL” by William Carlos Williams: and he’s right, of course: the ‘import’ of the nation can only progress when it doesn’t have to concern itself with the right and wrong of wealth distribution – but you can’t have progress without competition, otherwise we all just stay where we are; but honouring competition as inviolable is honouring that which is our basest common denominator, surely inequality is less than we could achieve – to try to rise above the process of evolution, the survival of the fittest, is, rather, to surrender to hubris and daydream which doesn’t put bread on the table; but – however; eventually – man up … but to look, and take in, with love and, without scheme, all behind the, dappling cacophany, with which we, mark our height, where we can breathe, without implication, or compromise, free as a glance, single as an ethic, and twice as, selfless
“PASTORAL” by William Carlos Williams: it was these ‘pastorals’ that made me notice: there is a way out of societal precursoring, there is a way to see other than through those bi-focal lenses; and there is a way to see that doesn’t involve a revolution, that doesn’t involve the dismantling of what is there at all, but the love and heart to accept what is really there – clean, audial and postural – once the glasses have been taken off; it takes courage, of course, because in doing so you have to dismantle all the constructs which you had thought to be your identity, and even soul – this is why you need love, in order to handle the searing wisdom you will receive, there’s no place for ‘what about me’ (in fact, WCW, in just the previous poem in the Collected (‘Apology’) talked about how it is the faces that make him write, that oblige him to see); the everything about the anything that is ever more true than any myopic and partisan specificity
POEM by William Carlos Williams: from Poems, 1930-1931: the care; and bother; to be so; meticulous; about no; thing in; particular; that it; becomes; everything; worthwhile; noticing
prose piece 2 from POEMS 1927 by William Carlos Williams: a most vibrant biographical sketch of a person; I know her so well just from this; I wish biographical sketches of famous people were like this – sinewy fibres of life that tell no story, but reveal all that you need to know; and straight-forward language that doesn’t beguile but nonetheless jabs out into the universe
“Rhubarb and Ginger Jam” by Lazywednesdays: I read this when it was first published and read it again recently and it is just as fresh and preserved as ever – it has become a landmark in my reading psyche-scape
“The Roof Stayed On” by Suzy Blue: all beautifully wrapped-up under an over-arching metaphor; this is a journey that has to be travelled as it is read, through time and world, but never leaves home; and never should
“Rooftops” by Heather Minette: I resonated with the search, the rooftops are still familiar, the destinations, likewise, only turn out to be stages; this piece takes you on a long nostalgic journey – even though to different places and resting stops – so that by the last stanza, when the dénoument really arrives at its own destination, you are surprised to find that you are Heather Minette; glad to have met you, Heather, ‘out on the vast and subtle plains of mystery’ where I found Joni Mitchell around here somewhere
“September 14” by C: what happens, when words sing to heartbeats rather than synapses, is that the space around and between them allows one to breathe a fresh air which was never designed but is as old as the previous lifetime; published (and written?) the day of my mother’s birth – I have been trying to think how to remember her for the last 18 years – this poem gave me a clue …
“Sequences” by Liana Barcia: this poet only posts very occasionally; as in this one – she brushes broadly with throat-open similes scattered all over the canvas but nonchalantly congeals them with a just-as-they-are quip somewhere in the piece making them Plain New
“Singular Revolution” by Earthslang: a thunderous blow, rolling across the heavens until lost beyond some horizon, and then suddenly back in your face and my face and everyone else’s face that ever turned on a tv or cruised the net; I wondered if this would pall after eight months, but it doesn’t, it becomes even more ruddy over time as if in an oak casket; and from one so young (he said patronisingly because she is probably not much younger than Ginsberg when he howled); Earthslang has not published anything since May 2012, please visit her site and bring her back
“A Solitude” by Denise Levertov: how to be in another’s head about being in another’s head: this is a wonderful example of Whalen’s ‘graph of the mind’ – the reach and score of effervent; there is a wonderful clarity and excise about these words such that the encounter is ours as much as just reported; thank you Denise Levertov, as she touches her throat lightly to feel the vibrations as she listens
“Something Less Than Naked” by mywordpool: signed, sealed, delivered … I’m yours
SPRING AND ALL by William Carlos Williams: from Spring and All, 1923, from which Paul Mariani’s excellent biography of William Carlos Williams got its name “A New World Naked”; being is to break and contrast, it is primordial but also cyclical, WCW doesn’t bother with the cosmic, he deals in twigs
SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams: I’d have loved to have sculpted this into a circular poem so that the beginning line slipped off the end line at the apex of a circle and could be read round and around in circles until nothing was achieved; but it’s not my place to
SPRING AND ALL XI by William Carlos Williams: “In passing with my mind …”, the perfect beginning, middle and end of a poem; I read this when I was younger, possibly a bit impatient that I wanted something more to happen to call it a happening and also a little annoyed at the snagged details in passing thinking them too particular to so little that was happening … but I liked it; and this liking slipped in between my pomposity and fussiness and worked its way out over following decades through poems exploring this same sense of passing not being the start of something and its almost immediate dissolution, but its almost-not-being-there being its universal reality: vivid, important and sufficient unto itself – “the supreme importance / of this nameless spectacle”; it wasn’t until later I read more of the text in which WCW embedded these poems, raised beds, nonetheless, with earth so finely nourished and turned over that you could sink your fist into it up to your elbow: “When in the condition of imaginative suspense only will the writing have reality … Not to attempt, at that time, to set values on the word being used, according to presupposed measures, but to write down that which happens at that time / To perfect the ability to record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives, to practise skill in recording the force moving, then to know it, in the largeness of its proportions …”
SPRING AND ALL XXII by William Carlos Williams: “wait, is that it, one of his most famous and quoted poems, and that’s it?”; well, no … this poem was actually nested within a whole weave of contemplations and exclamations to the contrary (quoted liberally, tatteredly and patch-workly – sorry, Bill): “the fixed categories into which life is divided … exist – … not as dead dissections … but in a different condition when energised by the imagination … but at present [early 1920s, America, and hence the upcoming androcentrist reference, I do apologise] knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative … the inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge … it is on imagination on which reality rides … it is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomisation … it is for this reason that I have always placed art first … art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality – Poetry … poetry has to do with the crystallisation of the imagination – the perfection of new forms as additions to nature …”
“SPRING STRAINS” by William Carlos Williams: the cacophany of a single moment – all instruments loosening-up, scaling, tensing, waiting for the grand inaugural middle ‘C’ – all held together in a fidgety bag; the shabby audacity of this piece – ‘let’s not just have vignettes, let’s also have local, tectonic landscapes’ – made my young eyes work, I had to read it several times successively to hold together all the strands, and then he lets me off, I finally ‘got’ the three birds disappearing … you don’t hold it all together, you don’t; there’s no need to; William Carlos Williams was a crafty master
“SPRING” & “LINES” by William Carlos Williams: there is a beauty to ageing, there is a crack to glass; which cannot be appreciated until one has shifted at right angles to the time it takes or the import it hasn’t
“SUMMER SONG” by William Carlos Williams: the trajectory of a turn of quip of humour going absolutely nowhere far, with dew
“Sweet Swinging” by omrum: days are never just days; activities are never just actions; the sweetest and most unforced metaphor is never just literary but like a perfect moment of LoJong practice; and notice, please notice, that she breathes the washing …
“Three Facets” by johnnycrabcakes: most words you read you have to hack through, like underbrush working out what they mean – ‘where is it?’; other stuff you read and the meaning just goes straight through your eyes and burns direct onto your retina so that you don’t have to do any thinking about the meaning, you just see it; presence, like a forgotten idea
“This Staircase” by April Resnick: most poems I’ll get a ‘seam’ of something mineral and the rest packs tightly around it; if it’s good; this piece by April Resnick from her ..sometimesihatemycat.. blog, is ALL SEAM, I was able to inhabit (and wear) every – single – word; every once in a while she makes some floor-creak-alive pieces which leave me totally relaxed and able to breathe out peacefully and gratefully
“THURSDAY” by William Carlos Williams: a song, perhaps, to sing when once one is retired, althout WCW was only in his thirties when he wrote this, which possibly means you don’t have to wait to be broken by the long haul in order to realise the beauty oftheworldwhichcrushesyou is precisely where you stand in it with being rather than reach …; we try to make ourselves so solid and de-fined by what we want rather than what we are, that we are afraid of the openness of the sky that arcs so far away from us, but that when we jump right into it – the ultimate skinny-dip – we feel ourselves so solid on the ground from which we leapt … he wasn’t a showman, old Bull Williams, but he knew his shit, even from the age when you wouldn’t believe it
“TREES” by William Carlos Williams: a lot of these poems were some of the first poems I read with intent and an open, clean mind that had no precursor of what to see or find; and their reading imprinted deep, even when I didn’t read that well or attentively or learnedly; and, much later, when I attempted to re-ignite my writing, the language emerged like tramlines, there to follow, but fresh, utterly fresh; and utterly mine – which would never have been but for reading WCW
“TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE” by William Carlos Williams: it was me he was talking to, it was me; and although I was young and didn’t really follow him with consciousness, nevertheless, as I grow older I notice, mon cher, that I walk about with my head, tilted;
“Tulips” by Sylvia Plath – How Far To Step Before You Raise The Other Foot: I read this with a big stupid smile on a long flight from Gran Canaria. It is the third or fourth time I have read it. Some poems open like pockets when read additionally, enfoldingly. And make you smile, stupidly, because you hadn’t realised how much there ever is in the very same journey being made in the reading. How much more beautiful can something become: I am beginning to understand why Seymour Glass suffered from the utter-ness of beauty – how beauty can demand your respective and perspective extinction in its unfoldment if you are not too careful. And Seymour Glass and Sylvia Plath were not too careful – what beauty they saw, how shocking (for us) to behold … if we are not careful.
“What You Are” by Roger McGough: when I first read this poem in 1978 I was too young to let go associations enough to get the metaphor; after a lifetime of being obligated to associations which stood idly by while I wildly floundered without ground, I can let them go with glee and relish and relish the metaphors to the portrait’s content (… still not sure about the ‘lost day of the child murderer’, however, and I’m still not sure why I’m not sure, but I’m not; but I can’t think McGough just slipped up over one couplet … (and I can’t find any discussion of this line in the pages-that-proliferate-like-spores-wafted-across-their-own-private-amphitheatres))
“Why before?” by Tiffany Coffman: this one produces ‘the smile’: a stupid smile on my stupid face when something ‘zings’; when something makes sense, and I don’t know why; when someone is quite ‘out there’ in a piece they have created, and when they have stopped they open their eyes and look around with ‘wha’ and blink
“The Women Descants” by Bonnie Marshall: I knew the tumblers would fall – like a bank vault … just as you mentioned them – psshhhhhhhh; you are SO RIGHT that ‘women need wilderness’, and I am not woman; and then I stepped down off that pedestal with her … Bonnie is one of those writers – you have to take a deep breath and keep your wits about you when you enter her pieces of work because they are so well crafted they take you to a strangefamiliar land where you have to breathe anew (a wilderness, in fact), and you can’t do that with your own clutter of pans and utensils; these descants raised such a heartbeat in me that I realised that I am as much woman as my body is not.
“The wood is the quiet mass” by Lazywednesdays: this one hits you like an aftermath, like a surprise mirror; it works with a true power of fairy story (not just the elements it includes) because all the dress and activity of the story are clothes for real life … us; us during whichever war, us during any struggle, us during whenever lifetime, whether in the past, whether in Syria now, and probably into the future; oh, please have sympathy for all of our grandmothers, children and wolves – look what happens when you don’t (actually look at Wednesday’s follow on poem on her blog These are the leaders we’ll regret if you need a prompt.
YOUNG SYCAMORE by William Carlos Williams: its the indigeogravity that I like of justwhatistherehere … only
YOUNG WOMAN AT A WINDOW by William Carlos Williams: I prefer the second one, but I can’t fully appreciate the second one without the bed of the first one; which is why WCW had them this way, I guess; this is observed compassion, not getting-in-the-way compassion, not judging compassion; it is the compassion of a passing stream
“zen moments of the senior kind” by miriam louisa: I KNEW there was something OK about becoming old – despite all appearances and reference to the otherwise; what glorious sitting-in-the-middle and not getting snagged by the slings and arrows, the barbs and the shards of outrageous indifference to my tiny, needy, ageing sel__________ _ _ … – !; this is the first piece of work that has moved me (shifted me) enough to want to include it in my own ‘others’ page in-a-lonng-time; there is always space to shift and aside, but the still-movement doesn’t happen very often that it’s always a surprise to find it … around here, somewhere, nowheredidIputit?
mlewisredford 