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SPEAKER:
This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall, when he was Poet Laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by William Carlos Williams, born in 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams was the son of a New York businessman and a Puerto Rican mother with artistic talent. He grew up speaking Spanish and French, as well as English in tune early on with America's multicultural and immigrant traditions. Williams went on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Ezra Pound and the Imagist poet H.D. Unlike other modernist writers of his generation who became expatriates, Williams chose to remain in New Jersey, working full-time as a doctor for 40 years. He simultaneously developed a full literary career as well, juggling the work of poet and general practitioner on a daily basis.

He would jot down ideas and phrases for poems while out on rounds or between appointments with patients. Williams was a major poetic innovator. His free verse found its roots in the rhythms of American speech, creating an idiom and form distinctive to American poetry. His poems often enact the Imagist ideal of the direct treatment of the thing, and so his writing is populated by everyday objects such as the plums, red wheelbarrow, and fire engine of his most quoted poems. One of Williams major works is the epic five-book poem 'Paterson,' named after the town of Paterson, New Jersey. Published between 1946 and '58, it intertwines city and man while exploring the myth of American power. Williams was a significant mentor to younger writers during the 1950s and 60s, though his recognition by a wider reading public developed more slowly. Williams's last collection of poems was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Poetry Society of America continues to present an annual award in his name.

He died in 1963 after several years of declining health. The following poem was recorded in New York City in 1942. (AUDIO PLAYS) To a poor old woman munching a plum on the street, a paper bag of them in her hand. They taste good to her. They taste good to her. They taste good to her. You can see it, by the way. She gives herself to the one half sucked out in her hand, comforted a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air, they taste good to her. (AUDIO ENDS) The following poems were recorded at the Library of Congress in 1945. (AUDIO PLAYS) Title 'The Widow's Lament in Springtime.' Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before. But not with the cold fly fire that crows around me this year. 35 years I lived with my husband. The plum tree is white to day with masses of flowers. Masses of flowers load the cherry branches and color some branches yellow and some red. But the grief in my heart is stronger than they. For though they were my joy formerly today I noticed them and turned away forgetting.

Today my son told me that in the meadows at the edge of the heavy woods in the distance he saw trees of white flowers. I feel that I would like to go there and fall into those flowers, and sink into the marsh near them. 'To Elsie.' The pure products of America go crazy. Mountain folk from Kentucky, or the ribbed north end of Jersey, with its isolated lakes and valleys, its deaf mutes, thieves, old names, and promiscuity between devil may care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure, and young slatterns bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday, to be tricked out that night with gods from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt sheer rags, succumbing without emotion. Saved dumb terror under some hedge of chokecherry or viburnum, which they cannot express, unless it be that marriage, perhaps with a dash of Indian blood, will throw up a girl so desolate, so hemmed round with disease or murder that she'll be rescued by an agent, reared by the state and sent out at 15 to work in some hard pressed house in the suburbs, some doctor's family, some Elsie, voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us, her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry, and rich young men with fine eyes, as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky.

And we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth, while the imagination strains after dear going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September, somehow it seems to destroy us. It is only an isolate flex that something is given off, no one to witness and adjust. No one to drive the car. 'The Red wheelbarrow.' So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. 'Queen Anne's Lace.' Her body is not so white as anemone petals, nor so smooth, nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force. The grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness. White as can be, with a purple mole as the centre of each flower. Each flower is a handspan of her whiteness. Wherever her hand is lain, there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch, to which the fibres of her being stem one by one each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire. Empty a single stem, a cluster flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness.

Gone over or nothing. 'Postlude.' Now that I have cooled to you, let there be gold of tarnished masonry temples soothed by the sun to ruin that sleep utterly. Give me hand for the dances. Ripples that fill in and out. And lips my lesbian wallflowers that once were flame. Your hair is my Carthage, and my arms the bow, and our words arrows that shoot the stars. Who from that misty sea swarm to destroy us. But you there beside me. Oh, how shall I defy you who wound me in the night with breasts shining like Venus and like Mars? The night that is shouting Jason. When the loud eaves rattles with waves above me blue at the prow of my desire. Oh, prayers in the dark. Oh, incense to Poseidon. 'Calm in Atlantis.' Dedication for a plot of ground. This plot of ground facing the waters of this inlet is dedicated to the living presence of Emily Dickinson welcome, who was born in England, married, lost her husband and with her five year old son sailed for New York in a two master, was driven to the Azores, ran adrift on Fire Island Shoal, met her second husband in a Brooklyn boarding house, went with him to Puerto Rico, bore three more children, lost her second husband, lived hard for eight years in Saint Thomas, Puerto Rico, San Domingo.

Followed the oldest son to New York, lost her daughter, lost her baby, seized the two boys of the oldest son by the second marriage, mothered them. They being motherless, defended herself here against thieves, storms, sun, fire, against flies, against girls, that came smelling about, against drought, against weeds, storm tides, neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens against the weakness of her own hands, against the growing strength of the boys, against wind, against stones, against trespasses, against rents, against her own mind. She grubbed this earth with her own hands, domineered over this grass plot. Blackguarded her oldest son into buying it, lived here 15 years, attained a final loneliness. And if you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out. (AUDIO ENDS) That was William Carlos Williams, recorded at the Library of Congress in 1945 and used by permission of New Directions. You have been listening to the Essential American Poets podcast, produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Poetryarchive.org.

To learn more about William Carlos Williams and other essential American poets, and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.