Williams Carlos Williams Quotes

It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

We sit and talk, quietly, with long lapses of silence and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes which has no speech

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 is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

If they give you lined paper, write the other way.

Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.

It is at the edge of the petal that love waits

In summer, the song sings itself.

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

That which is possible is inevitable.

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

A new music is a new mind.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech-- is, of necessity, my sole concern.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention.

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.

He was always on the point of 'going away', where it didn't seem to matter...

It was ... a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you

It's just a moment, we die every night.

I am the red wheelbarrow of communism. William Carlos Williams wrote a poem about me.

Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?

Say it! No ideas but in things.

And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.

So most of my life has been lived in hell.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

Death will be late to bring us aid

A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin.

If there is progress then there is a novel.

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.

To hell with everything I myself have ever written.

Their story, yours, mine - it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

The Hurricane The tree lay down on the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you?

You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?

Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

Your thighs are apple trees. Your knees are the southern breeze.

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

Danse Russe 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?

Marriage So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.

The pure products of America go crazy... ...[] No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car

…those who belong properly to books, and to whom books, perhaps, do not quite so properly belong.

You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.

I have had my dream—like others— And it has come to nothing, so that I remain now carelessly With feet planted on the ground, And look up at the sky— Feeling my clothes about me, The weight of my body in my shoes, The rim of my hat, air passing in and out At my nose—and decide to dream no more.

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence. Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive. ― William Carlos Williams, Paterson. (New Directions; Revised Edition edition April 17, 1995) Originally published 1946.

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile.

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

If you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out. (Dedication for a Plot of Ground)

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. --through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home.

the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.

The poet thinks with his poem...

unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning

Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?

My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Beautiful thing, my dove, unable and all who are windblown, touched by the fire and unable, a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense with its reiteration unwilling to lie in its bed and sleep and sleep, sleep in its dark bed. Summer! it is summer .—and still the roar in his mind is unabated

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open." --Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR

I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*.

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

The Last Words of My English Grandmother There were some dirty plates and a glass of milk beside her on a small table near the rank, disheveled bed-- Wrinkled and nearly blind she lay and snored rousing with anger in her tones to cry for food, Gimme something to eat-- They're starving me-- I'm all right--I won't go to the hospital. No, no, no Give me something to eat! Let me take you to the hospital, I said and after you are well you can do as you please. She smiled, Yes you do what you please first then I can do what I please-- Oh, oh, oh! she cried as the ambulance men lifted her to the stretcher-- Is this what you call making me comfortable? By now her mind was clear-- Oh you think you're smart you young people, she said, but I'll tell you you don't know anything. Then we started. On the way we passed a long row of elms. She looked at them awhile out of the ambulance window and said, What are all those fuzzy looking things out there? Trees? Well, I'm tired of them and rolled her head away.

I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.” William Carlos Williams, c. 1931

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned Memory is a kind of accomplishment a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized of new kinds— since their movements are toward new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned) No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness With evening, love wakens though its shadows which are alive by reason of the sun shining— grow sleepy now and drop away from desire Love without shadows stirs now beginning to awaken as night advances The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening: which is a reversal of despair For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love what we have lost in the anticipation— a descent follows endless and indestructible

I am here now to tell you that you were wrong. Family is not the only thing that matters. There are other things: Pachelbel’s Canon in D matters, and fresh-picked corn on the cob, and true friends, and the sound of the ocean, and the poems of William Carlos Williams, and the constellations in the sky, and random acts of kindness, and a garden on the day when all its flowers are at their peak. Fluffy pancakes matter and crisp clean sheets and the guitar riff in “Layla,” and the way clouds look when you are above them in an airplane. Preserving the coral reef matters, and the thirty-four paintings of Johannes Vermeer matter, and kissing matters.

The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.

In the American Grain" "Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways: I am a writer. I was half-wasp already, I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day. My poems came back...often rejected, though never forgotten in New York, this Jewish state with insomniac minorities. I am sick of the enlightenment: what Wall Street prints, the mafia distributes; when talent starves in a garret, they buy the garret. Bill Williams made less than Band-Aids on his writing, he could never write the King's English of The New Yorker. I am not William Carlos Williams. He knew the germ on every flower, and saw the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature.

My attitude toward woman’s wretched position in society and my ideas about all the changes necessary there, were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for literature? That my particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterned standardized feminine feelings, enabled me to do some passably good work with poetry—all that was fine, wasn’t it—something for you to sit up and take notice of! And you saw in one of my first letters to you (the one you had wanted to make use of, then, in the Introduction to your Paterson) an indication that my thoughts were to be taken seriously, because that too could be turned by you into literature, as something disconnected from life. But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the very same attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as literature—that was an entirely different matter, wasn’t it? No longer admirable, but, on the contrary, deplorable, annoying, stupid, or in some other way unpardonable; because those very ideas and feelings which make one a writer with some kind of new vision, are often the very same ones which, in living itself, make one clumsy, awkward, absurd, ungrateful, confidential where most people are reticent, and reticent where one should be confidential, and which cause one, all too often, to step on the toes of other people’s sensitive egos as a result of one’s stumbling earnestness or honesty carried too far.