Poetry at Work. Chapter 1: How to Recognize a Poet

If there is such a thing as a poetic movie, the 2016 film Paterson is perhaps the archetype. The actor Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson, who listens to the conversations of his passengers, colleagues, and friends, and to his own interior conversations, and writes poetry. He works in Paterson, New Jersey, and the man Paterson and the town Paterson eventually come to be seen as of the same essence. Person becomes place becomes person. Poetry constitutes a sizeable portion of the dialogue.

Not coincidentally, Paterson also happens to be the hometown of the modernist poet William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine there. Over a period of decades, he wrote a five-book collection entitled – what else? – Paterson (among a lot of other works). Williams was a physician, and he was a poet. Like the bus driver in the movie, Williams recognized and recorded the poetry of his daily work.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Your Work is Poetry: Poetry at Work Day 2018

Today is Poetry at Work Day 2018.

Most poets have day jobs. They must. Very few poets, no matter how good they are, no matter how much their words may leave us struck with wonder, can make a living solely by writing poetry.

Walt Whitman, for example, struggled financially for most of his life. He was a printer, a teacher, a journalist, a newspaper publisher, and a clerk in the Department of Interior in Washington. Maya Angelou was a dancer, a songwriter, a singer, a historian, a civil rights activist, a producer, and a director. Wallace Stevens and Edgar Lee Masters were both attorneys. William Carlos Williams was a doctor. Marianne Moore was a teacher and editor. T.S. Eliot was a banker and an editor. Robert Frost was a teacher, cobbler, and editor.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.

Poster photograph by Sonia Joie. Used with permission.

‘The Tempers’ by William Carlos Williams

It is a small volume, comprising 21 poems. It was published in London in 1913, a limited edition arranged by Ezra Pound (1885-1972). 

The Tempers was William Carlos Williams’ (1883-1963) second volume of poetry. His first, simply entitled Poems, had been published four years earlier. It was Pound’s interest and championing of Williams and his poetry that set the “doctor from Rutherford” on a lifelong devotion to poetry.  

Williams was raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, and attended the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his medical degree, he returned to Rutherford, where he worked as a doctor the rest of his life.  

The Tempers is a curious volume, both a product of its time and one with hints of what Williams would write later. Several of the poems seem strange to modern eyes – all those exclamation points! “Immortal” is an example. 

Immortal 

Yes, there is one thing braver than all flowers;

Richer than clear gems; wider than the sky;

Immortal and unchangeable; whose powers

Transcend reason, love and sanity!

And thou, beloved, art that godly thing!

Marvelous and terrible; in glance

An injured Juno roused against

Heaven’s King!

And thy name, Lovely One, is Ignorance. 

The poem contains romantic strains; it may contain echoes of Keats and perhaps Whitman (two of his favorite poets as a young man). And the surprise at the end – the poem turns into a hymn of praise for immortal ignorance. 

And then there is this, “Ad Infinitum,” a signal of what is to come later. It is a lovely poem, a poem of love, perhaps unrequited and yet persistent in its doom. 

Ad Infinitum 

Still I bring flowers

Although you fling them at my feet

Until none stays

That is not struck across with wounds:

Flowers and flowers

That you may break them utterly

As you have always done. 

Sure happily

I still bring flowers, flowers,

Knowing how all

Are crumpled in your praise

And may not live

To speaker a lesser thing. 

The ebook version of The Tempers is free on Amazon Kindle. 

Related:  

My review of Wendell Berry’s The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford.  

Photographs: Left, William Carlos Williams as a young man; right, Ezra Pound in 1913.

Poetry at Work: The Doctor

Earlier this year I read (and wrote about) Wendell Berry’s The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, a collection of essays and reflections about a theme in the life of “the poet of Rutherford” that is near to Berry’s own heart. That theme is place, or what Berry refers to as “local adaptation,” and he explicitly says that his purpose in writing the book was to examine “Williams’ lifelong effort to come to terms with, to imagine, and to be of use to his native and chosen place.”

It is that phrase “to be of use to” that I want to consider here. For those of us interested in poetry, we tend to think in terms of poets as “poets” or writers before we think of them as people with lives, and sometimes lives where they excelled at things other than poetry. Williams was known as a doctor (specifically, a pediatrician) before he became known as poet. And he was a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey, and he was “of use” as a doctor before his poetry helped put Rutherford on the map.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Berry on Williams on Place

If there is a contemporary writer who has done much the same for the concept of “place” as William Faulkner, it is poet, novelist and essayist Wendell Berry, who has based the fictitious Port William on his particular region of Kentucky. Berry has gone far beyond Faulkner, however, is developing a body of literary, philosophical and economic work that is rooted in his concept of place.

Berry’s latest work is a collections of essays and reflections on another poet of place – The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford. Including “of Rutherford” in the title implies more than is seen at first glance – Berry sees Wiliams as the poet of Rutherford, his hometown in New Jersey where he lived and practiced as a doctor, but he also places that “Rutherford-ness” in a much larger context.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master's Artist.