a presentation of major funding for the voices & visions series is provided by and additional series funding is provided by and special funding for this program is provided by

and

[william carlos williams] "--a dream "we dreamed "each separately "we two "of love "and of desire-- "that fused in the night-- "in the distance "over the meadows "by day impossible-- "the city disappeared when we arrived--"

[honk honk] [william carlos williams] all art is sensual. listen! never mind. don't try to work it out. listen to it! let it come to you! sit back, relax, and let the thing spray in your face. could you direct me to the grand central station? got to get a cab. i'm going to be late. hi! open up a dozen. you trying to charge your batteries? you'll blow a fuse keeping that up. bring me a good ladder with money in it. atta-boy! atta-boy! what makes williams such a great poet is that he speaks about and to ordinary people.

why is any great poet a great poet? a great poet makes a difference to the art of poetry. it's as simple as that. and he made more difference to american poetry than anyone other than walt whitman. in williams' autobiography, in its foreword, he tips us off as to his own nature and the role of eros in his writing, the role of frankness and candor. he says, "i am extremely sexual in my desires. "i carry them everywhere and at all times. "i think that from that arises the drive which empowers us all." for my part, i was expecting to meet a doctor. i'd heard from pound that williams was a baby doctor, a pediatrician. that i saw immediately was true because the little house where he lived on ridge road, there was a sign-- "w.c. williams, m.d."

his wife fetched him out of the office to see me. he was clearly an authentic doctor. after we'd leave some of those apartment houses, we'd be going down those stairs. he'd say, "did you hear that?" we'd get into his car, and he'd scribble words. i'd say, "what is he doing?" at times you'd feel, "this man is just too much." well, he was too much, but he never missed a trick. that stuff would come home in his head or on paper. in the evening, he'd assemble it. i'm an artist, if i am anything at all, until i take the american language as i find it. no one believes that poetry can exist in his own life, but everything in our lives, if it's sufficiently authentic to our lives and touches us deeply enough, is capable of being organized into a form

which can be a poem. [marjorie perloff] between 1900 and world war i, which to me is the key period-- let's say, when williams was 20 years old-- you have the invention of not only the airplane and that the automobile really became ubiquitous, you had high-speed trains, the marconi radio. you had for the first time the possibility of beaming radio beams around the world. you could be in two places at once. the world changed more quickly at the beginning of the century than since. we haven't had in the 20th century the acceleration that you have before 1914. it's just an amazing period. how does that affect a poet like williams? the sheer technology is everywhere in his work, beginning with the typewriter. if you compose on it, you'll perceive differently

than if writing by hand. the look on the page becomes very important. it's not only the look, it's the whole feel of short, fast movement. one thing that williams is trying to do is make the making of poems seem like an american activity. americans have no problems with spending their lives putting machines together. detroit was founded on that premise. he saw no reason why you couldn't put poems together in the same way. his habit of typing and retyping is connected with his idea that the poem is a thing made. it is made out of small parts-- lines, phrases. he would retype the same words five or six times, only he broke the lines in different places. he'd live with it a while to decide if it was right.

he'd retype it with a word at the end of the line moved to the beginning of the next line, then he'd live with that for a while. [william carlos williams] it's what you do with the work of art. it's what you put on the canvas and how you put it on that makes the picture. it's how the words fit in. poems are not made of thought, beautiful thoughts. it's made of words, pigments, put on here, there, made, actually. first you cannot imagine anybody saying that. you cannot imagine it being said. the second thing is, you cannot devise a way to say it that sounds plausible.

"so much depends upon "a red wheel barrow glazed with rain--" wait a minute. "so much depends upon a red "wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens..." "so much depends upon "a red wheel barrow "glazed with rain water beside the white chickens..." "so much depends "upon a wed--red--wheel baow "glazed with rain water beside the white chickens..." "so much depends upon "a red wheel barrow "glazed with rain water beside the white chickens..." "so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens..." "so much depends upon "a red wheel barrow "glazed with rain water beside the white chickens..." right? for williams, the poem sitting on the page is a visual object, and the way it sits on the page does not necessarily tell you anything

about how to read it. you don't pause at the ends of lines to indicate where lines end. doing that disrupts it totally. it's not like shakespeare-- "shall i compare thee to a summer's day? thou art more lovely and more temperate"-- where the lines are the units of thought and you pause after them. they're the units of utterance. the williams line isn't a unit of utterance. the unit sometimes runs completely down the page. here was a man who had a kind of energy, really sexual energy, but energy that wasn't always-- he didn't know quite how to channel because one of the main tensions i see in williams' work is the tension between that sexual energy and desire and fear and safety. [william carlos williams] "at ten a.m. the young housewife

"moves about in negligee behind "the wooden walls of her husband's house. "i pass solitary in my car. "then again she comes to the curb "to call the ice-man, the fish-man, and stands "shy, uncorseted, tucking in "stray ends of hair, and i compare her "to a fallen leaf. "the noiseless wheels of my car "rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as i bow and pass smiling." does that hurt? yeah. what if i pusht down like that? does that hurt? no. all right. his son is a pretty good writer. i don't think he realizes it. his memoirs of his father are masterpieces of exact factual observation,

and they bear out an old theory of mine that the best thing that ever happened to williams was being a medical student because he was always being taught to observe. that is a medical discipline-- the observing of the absolutely commonplace-- looking at the patient's two hands and seeing if they match. ok. let's see the other foot. that one ok. i don't care. i like to see feet. that one ok. put this one up. see the difference? i suspect he was bitten, but what bit him, i don't know. my father and i both practiced in the golden age of medicine. i think that in the years i've been practicing, there's been a big change of the character of practice in the small town, the small community. the practice we had in this community,

traditionally, the doctor went to the home. [william carlos williams] complaint. "they call me and i go. "it is a frozen road past midnight, a dust "of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks "the door opens. "i smile, enter and shake off the cold. "here is a great woman on her side in the bed. "she is sick, perhaps vomiting, "perhaps laboring to give birth to "a tenth child. joy! joy! "night is a room darkened for lovers, "through the jalousies the sun has sent one gold needle! "i pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion." he used medicine to get in contact with a particular kind of population. he could have ultimately ended up being a society doctor or a literary doctor with a few literary patients in manhattan,

but he didn't cross that river. he stayed in new jersey and stayed with the people whose lives he tended. i think that was part of his life from theery beginning. this is the young man on the steps of the old office around 1917. that's this house before it was altered to accommodate my new offices. there's the young feller, the new doctor... taken in philadelphia. this is my mother, flossie-- another picture taken in rutherford. i would guess that's her high school graduation picture. mother and dad-- passport picture taken in, i would guess, '21. here's dad, in later years, when i've married. there's the great-grandmother wellcome as a younger woman.

one of the maids-- elsie, i believe. worked here for a couple of years. i don't know where she went-- back to the orphanage or what. this is this room, 9 ridge road, with a standup piano, mom at the keyboard, and pa herman in the corner. his rocking chair. he always sat in a rocking chair. the house isn't the same as when i was a kid. we've changed it around since i'm the resident here, but this painting on the wall is something that's been there since the forties, done by my cousin ivan. these bedrooms--the master bedroom was here in the corner, and this was dad's study. it's not furnished as it was when he was alive, but the four walls are still here, the closet's the same. some of the fixtures have been changed.

his desk sat here. on this wall where this bookcase now stands, there was a painting that mother greatly disliked. it was marsden hartley. it was a rather suggestive painting, and she insisted he get rid of it, so they gave it to the museum. [william carlos williams] "if i when my wife is sleeping "and the baby and kathleen are sleeping "and the sun is a flame-white disc "in silken mists above shining trees,-- "if i in my north room "dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror "waving my shirt round my head "and singing softly to myself: "i am lonely, lonely. "i was born to be lonely, i am best so!

"if i admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks "against the yellow drawn shades,-- "who shall say i am not the happy genius of my household?" now i'll take you up in the attic, show you where he had a part-time studio for many years and, uh... where he did writing, summer and winter. he had a telephone line run up here to wind up. the stuff on the walls was his. he put it there-- great variety. you got the record of the stock market from '28 to '32, including the great crash, and incidentally, a poem. who knows where he found it. it reads-- "i'm just a little prairie flower

"growing wilder hour by hour. "nobody ever cultivates me. i'm wild." well, williams was born in the same town in which he lived all his life. in 1883, the house where he was born was a few blocks from 9 ridge road, where he later lived and had his practice. he was there all his life, and this was one of his great strengths-- he was an intimate part of an authentic american community. i said he was the quintessential american poet in that his father was english, of old english stock.

the mother, born in puerto rico, was basque--part basque-- part jewish-- of mixed mediterranean french stock. and so when his parents came to te united states and settled in rutherford, it was such a mixture of different religious and ethnic groups. and they wanted to be the perfect immigrants, so they joined the unitarian church. she dropped her catholicism, he dropped his anglicanism. they became charter members of the unitarian church, which meant being teetotalers and doing all the right things. the father worked very hard. the idea was to better yourself, and it's the perfect immigrant experience. [william carlos williams] they came here to new york, moved to rutherford, and here i was born. i have one brother. we were both born here. [james laughlin] i think he went to grade school here in rutherford, but at 14, he and his brother were sent to a fine school--

le chateau de lancy-- on lake geneva in switzerland. this was a real opening out for him because he saw and experienced all sorts of things that you couldn't find in new jersey. many of these things remained with him all his life. so this was most important, this stage at the school in switzerland, though it was only one year. after that, he returned to rutherford. one of the best high schools at that time was the horace mann school. i think it was up near columbia or somewhere in new york. [william carlos williams] my brother and i commuted from here, taking the chambers street ferry, walking up chambers or warren, taking the 6th or 9th avenue el, riding up to 116th or 125th street, and walking up morningside heights and getting to school before the 9:00 bell.

it was quite a stunt. [james laughlin] but it paid off in his getting a very good english and some latin-- no greek--education. [william carlos williams] i had some very good english teachers at horace mann. there was an uncle billy abbott. and i believe that uncle billy abbott was the first one who really led me toward english, toward writing, toward the satisfaction of externalizing my sorrows and distresses. and i think that's the basis for my continued interest in writing. [allen ginsburg] waiting. "when i am alone i am happy. "the air is cool. the sky is flecked and splashed and wound "with color. the crimson phalloi of the sassafras leaves "hang crowded before me in shoals on the heavy branches. "when i reach my doorstep "i am greeted by the happy shrieks of my children

"and my heart sinks. i am crushed. "are not my children as dear to me as falling leaves or "must one become stupid to grow older? "it seems much as if sorrow had tripped up my heels. "let us see, let us see! "what did i plan to say to her when it should happen to me as it has happened now?" there was, i think, definitely this split in williams' life. he was devoted to his wife flossie and his family as the two boys came along, but at the same time, there was always this urge to have a little liberation

from the climate of middle-class rutherford, so he struck a kind of compromise. he had his life in rutherford, but he would also go into new york friday evenings or weekends, and there he could meet with writers and a lot of artists-- people such as the painters charles demuth and marsden hartley and charles sheeler. williams also met the poets who were circled around others magazine, and they helped him a lot to modernize his poetry, you see, because when he first met them, he was writing keatsian poetry. williams' first book of poems in 1909, of which only 100 copies were printed, is written in the genteel style of the period. it's important to know what that style was to see how rapidly and amazingly williams moved away from that style. "sweet lady, sure it seems a thousand years "since last you honored me with gentle speech.

"yet when forsaking fantasy i reach "with memory's index o'er the stretching tears "of minutes wasted counting, as who fears "strict chiding reason, lest it should impeach "all utterance must, a mighty gaping breach twixt truth and seeming verity appears." see how contorted the syntax is? the sentences are so long, you lose track of them. they're all convoluted, they're inverted, with clauses coming first and subordinate clauses-- something williams never did later. this was the going style in america in 1909. he clearly remade himself, and there were really no examples that williams could turn to, at least, very few examples. the art world became his example out of a lack of examples. williams was interested in visual arts.

his painted his self-portrait the following year. he did visit the 1913 armory show, and he did indeed see duchamp's scandalous nude descending a staircase. americans, when they thought about art, if they did indeed think about art at all, thought that art should be instructive, that it should instruct us in the highest ideals and motives of life, that art should somehow reflect the purity of life, and it should have perhaps even a religious message. they were not prepared for the sort of art that they saw at the armory show. they didn't understand what they were looking at. i think they were threatened by what they saw. williams describes in his autobiography how he went and laughed and thought it was wonderful. he saw cezannes, picassos, and braques and felt his life had begun. he realized, here was something that he wanted to do--

to deal with words as words, just as these people were dealing with paint as paint and not representing something. "no ideas but in things," is his way of insisting on the particular, the concrete, the palpable, that which is there, and refusing to move from that into abstractions that distance one from that kind of everyday, concrete life. and you see that constantly in him, not only as the doctor, who, obviously, is dealing with life's concreteness, but by his shunning of the brandishments of an abstract kind of mind

that is all too proud of itself and all too unwilling to keep itself connected to and rooted in life's everydayness. [william carlos williams] the theory is that you can make a poem out of anything. you don't have to have conventionally poetic material. anything that is felt and that is felt deeply or deeply enough or even that gives amusement is material for art. [siren] [bell ringing]

[foghorn blows] [james laughlin] in williams' day, the writers who couldn't bear america-- and that was about it-- they couldn't stand what they considered to be the insensitivity and lack of appreciation in america for their work, and they would take off. so y'd get people going abroad such as gertrude stein, hemingway, and pound.

ezra pound, who had become a very good friend of williams' when they were both together at penn, was living down in italy. pound was always writing to williams and saying, "you're wasting your time there in rutherford. "nothing is happening there. "the action in art and poetry is over here. you'd better come over here." so in 1924, williams and his wife went to paris on a rather extended visit. this was one of the most important trips of his life. he met famous writers such as hemingway and gertrude stein, and he saw pound again. but what was really important about it was the decision that it led him to. although he had an exciting time meeting these people,

he came to the conclusion that he was not going to become an emigre writer. he was not going to become an expatriate. he decided that his work and life were in new jersey, and that that was the best place for him to write his kind of american poetry. [william carlos williams] "by the road to the contagious hospital "under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven "from the northeast-- a cold wind. "beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields "brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen "patches of standing water, the scattering of tall trees "all along the road the reddish, purplish, forked, upstanding, "twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees "with dead, brown leaves under them

"leafless vines-- "lifeless in appearance, sluggish "dazed spring approaches-- "they enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all "save that they enter. "all about them the cold, familiar wind-- "now the grass, tomorrow "the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf "one by one objects are defined-- "it quickens--clarity, outline of leaf "but now the stark dignity of entrance-- "still, the profound change has come upon them-- rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken" [crying] williams' great taste for the new, perhaps even almost a cult of the new, is very intimately bound up with his feeling about america as the new world and with his feeling that the poet's mission is to celebrate the new world and with his feeling about birth. he's always dealing with the new. when you're a pediatrician constantly dealing with birth, it cannot be a coincidence that that was williams' profession,

and that it's so much the subject of his poetry. in addition to his preoccupation with birth, williams is preoccupied with despair, right from the beginning of his career. i think he felt an extreme psychic isolation and was never quite sure whether everybody else felt that way or not. maybe they did. he could only speak for himself. he has many statements to make about the simple, persistent fact of loneliness. [william carlos williams] "i lie here thinking of you-- "the stain of love is upon the world! "yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, "smears with saffron "the horned branches that lean "heavily against a smooth purple sky! "there is no light only a honey-thick stain "that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb "spoiling the colors of the whole world--

"you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west!" in your own life, that which touches you, such as your affection for your wife-- let's not call her wife, that's a pure accident-- but the woman with whom you're supposed to be in love. you feel a little sorry. she probably had these things saved for supper,

and here you raid it. it's practically a rape of the icebox. i think that's material for a poem. "this is just to say "i have eaten the plums that were in the icebox "and which you were probably saving for breakfast forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold" it actually took place just as it says here, and i think what she wrote was quite as good as this, a little more complex, but quite as good.

well, let's have it then. "dear bill--i've made sandwiches for you. "in the icebox you'll find blueberries-- "a cup of grapefruit a glass of cold coffee. "on the stove is the teapot with enough tea leaves "for you to make tea-- "just light the gas-- "boil the water and put in the tea "plenty of bread in the bread-box "and butter and eggs-- "i didn't know just what to make for you. "several people called up about office hours. "see you later. love. floss. please switch off the telephone." during what you might call the middle period of williams' work, that is, before he started writing his long poem "paterson,"

he was doing a number of things. he was writing the prose of in the american grain. he was writing his short stories about life in rutherford, and then also, he was writing poetry all the time. he was writing, i don't know, four or five poems a week. what these poems were was the mature, corrected williams. all the keats is gone. these are the authentic williams voice speaking in free verse in a broken line which has a marvelous musical ear. and they are contact poems in the sense that he is making contact with people and with his thoughts. and they are objectivist poems in the sense that they, for that period, are often focusing, though not always, on the object, something he has seen. [glass breaking]

williams had a great influence on younger poets. the reason to me is very simple-- that he was talking a language, an american poetic language, which was fresh to them, new to them, and which inspired and encouraged them to make their own experiments with an american kind of writing. ginsberg particularly found in-- although ginsberg had perhaps originally been reading whitman-- he found in williams his immediate parent, the person who could help him with his work. to elsie, which in some respects is a predecessor

to my own opening line in howl-- "i saw the best minds of my generation "destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, mystical, naked." here in elsie it begins, "the pure products of america go crazy." amazing statement. [william carlos williams] to elsie. "the pure products of america go crazy-- "mountain folk from kentucky "or the ribbed north end of jersey "with its isolate 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 gauds from imaginations which have no "peasant traditions to give them character "but flutter and flaunt

"sheer rags--succumbing without emotion save numbed terror "under some hedge of choke-cherry 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 fifteen 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 deer "going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of september "somehow it seems to destroy us "it is only in isolate flecks that something

"is given off "no one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car" "no one to witness and adjust." no one to communicate to. him imagining the emotional or erotic life of some maid that may have been sent by the state to work in his house. seeing the poverty of imagination and poverty of means, the poverty of communication of his time and ours now, half a century later, where our desire is hidden, whether it's elsie's or mine or williams', or where we're used for purposes other than our own health and beauty by the state or by the community or by commerce. what was interesting, he said, "no one to drive the car."

no one to drive the great car of state-- rather than say the ship of state, really. nobody to drive the car. nobody to manage properly. nobody that knows the road. nobody that knows the way. maybe the artist somewhat, as williams here, by his compassion, was able to penetrate the blanket around our conciousness and point out that we were settling for less than we were born with. as if the earth under our feet were nothing but shit. for me, the long poem "paterson," which for many people is williams' great poem, is a retreat. ironically, the poem made him famous. i think it made him famous because, whereas the other works were ahead of their time, this one wasn't. it was not that different from eliot's long poems.

the reason i consider it a retreat is that williams tried to do something very large, historic, mythic, and it wasn't really his bent. paterson is a fulfillment of everything he did in the twenties and thirties, because in order to build that long poem entirely out of sharply registered detail, he had to learn to register detail sharply. it is a poem with no particular story line or particular plot. it is held together by a locale, a city. it is frequently ambiguous whether that city is a city or whether it's also a person. he plays back and forth between the city of paterson, new jersey, and someone called dr. paterson. he begins with "the delineaments of the giants," which are simply giant figures hidden in the landscape. [william carlos williams] "paterson lies in the valley "under the passaic falls

"its spent waters forming the outline of his back. "he lies on his right side, head near the thunder "of the waters filling his dreams! "eternally asleep, "his dreams walk about the city "where he persists incognito. "butterflies settle on his stone ear. "immortal, he neither moves nor rouses "and is seldom seen, "though he breathes "and the subtleties of his machinations, "drawing their substan from the noise of the pouring river "animate 1000 automatons. "who because they neither know their sources "nor the sills of their disappointments "walk outside their bodies aimlesy "for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires--unroused." the problem with writing a poem without a story or leading characters is one that occupied him for a long time.

how was he going to do that? how was he going to do a kind of panoramic view of urban american life in space and in time and do this without sounding like an encyclopedia entry? [william carlos williams] "this is my plan..." "this is from paterson... "one or two?" "i don't know which one it is." "first book..." "alexander hamilton working up from st. croix..." "how strange you are..." "their eyes blown out, for love! for love!" "carefully tying, carefully" "the modern town disembodied roar" "and the guys from paterson beat up the guys from..." "but you breathless in your white lace dress-- the dying swan" "no end there, there, there" "a dream of lights "hiding in bright-edged cloud stone ring silence." "bow-wow! bow-wow!"

how is he going to structure it? he says, "that god damned-- and i mean god damned-- "poem paterson has me down. "i am burned up to do it, but don't quite know how. "i write and destroy, write and destroy. "it's all shaped up in outline and intent. "the body of the thinking is finished, "but the technique is unresolvable to date. i flounder and flunk." he floundered and flunked for about 10 years, then it came to him. what he came up with was a sort of-- to use the fashionable terminology-- a paratactic construction without closure. this means that the poem is collage. here again we go back to his friendship with the painters, you know, who in the cubist paintings would put a piece of this beside a piece of that.

he's collaging bits of new jersey history with lyrical passages of his own composition. he actually uses letters which some of his writer friends such as allen ginsberg and edward dahlberg wrote to him. [allen ginsberg] "dear doctor-- "in spite of the grey secrecy of time "and my own self-shuttering doubts in these rainy days, "i would like you to know i'm in paterson. "i hope you will welcome this from an unknown young poet, to an unknown old poet, who live in the same county." i had written a few letters to him. he wrote back that he wanted to include them in paterson, because it was like a voice from the streets of another generation answering him back. i was thrilled that, say, my interest in a place like this as being a central, sacred place in eternity,

or my eternity in paterson, that i could actually show him, and he would empathize and understand this beauty surrounded in the midst of brick factories, with all the detritus and garbage in the middle of the spillway, with the actual birds of the universe chirping in the middle of it, with the buses of the universe driving around in it, but it still being a little like a sacred wood in the middle of the city. he understood the humor of that view and my letters. [william carlos williams] "say it! "no ideas but in things. mr. paterson has gone away "to rest and write. "inside the bus one sees his thoughts sitting and standing. his "thoughts alight and scatter-- "who are these people (how complex the mathematic)

"among whom i see myself "in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, "glimmering before shoes and bicycles? "they walk incommunicado, the equation is beyond solution, yet "its sense is clear-- that they may live his thought is listed in the telephone directory--" "no ideas but in things" means that there's no god, basically. it's a nontheistic view that things are themselves. things are symbols of themselves. that's very similar to something ezra pound once said. "the natural object is always the adequate symbol." what is this symbolic of, actually? it's symbolic of itself, the falls. it's its own water falling over itself. [william carlos williams] "a wonder! a wonder! "around the falling waters the furies hurl!

"violence gathers, spins in their heads summoning them-- "they begin! "the perfections are sharpened "the flower spreads its colored petals "wide in the sun "but the tongue of the bee misses them "they sink back into the loam crying out "--you may call it a cry "that creeps over them, a shiver as they wilt and disappear-- "marriage comes to have a shuddering implication "crying out or take a lesser satisfaction-- "a few go to the coast without gain-- "the language is missing them "they die also incommunicado. "the language, the language fails them "they do not know the words "or have not the courage to use them "--girls from families that have decayed and "taken to the hills-- no words. "they may look at the torrent in their minds "and it is foreign to them. "they turn their backs and grow faint--but recover!

"life is sweet they say: the language! "--the language is divorced from their minds, the language...the language!"

bill died in 1963, and the funeral was held there in rutherford. tere was first a service in the house where the unitarian minister spent most of his time telling how foolish the citizens of rutherford had been not to realize what a great poet he was, but what could one expect in a small town? [allen ginsberg] "once anything might have happened

"you lay relaxed on my knees-- "the starry night spread out warm and blind "above the hospital-- "pah! "it is unclean which is not straight to the mark-- "in my life the furniture eats me "the chairs, the floor the walls "which heard your sobs drank up my emotion-- "they which alone know everything "and snitched on us in the morning-- "what to want? "drunk we go forward surely not i "beds, beds, beds elevators, fruit, night-tables "breasts to see, white and blue-- to hold in the hand, "to nozzle "it is not onion soup

"your sobs soaked through the walls "breaking the hospital to pieces "everything--windows, chairs obscenely drunk, spinning-- "white, blue, orange --hot with our passion "wild tears, desperate rejoinders "my legs, turning slowly end over end in the air! "but what would you have? "all i said was-- there, you see, it is broken "stockings, shoes, hairpins "your bed, i wrapped myself around you-- "i watched. "you sobbed, you beat your pillow you tore your hair "you dug your nails into your sides "i was your nightgown i watched! "clean is he alone "after whom stream the broken pieces of the city-- "flying apart at his approaches

"but i merely caressed you curiously "fifteen years ago and you still go about the city, they say patching up sick school children" captioning made possible by annenberg/cpb project

captioning performed by the national captioning institute, inc. captions copyright 1988 new york center for visual history, inc.