William Carlos Williams. Photograph by Charles Sheeler. Courtesy New Directions Publishing Corporation.
MY FIRST POETIC EFFORTS in the English language were to try to compose coplas and décimas, metric structures from my first language, Spanish. It was very difficult to continuously come up with rhymes in English. Not that it’s impossible—look how Keats swings the sound—but my bilingual head was never solidly in the English; communication and perception for me are always a pendulum between the Latin and Germanic foundations of the two languages which the forces of history have bestowed upon me.
As I grew and read and heard the sounds of English I began to appropriate its tempo. When I read the English translation of Lorca’s “Poet in New York” and, even more important and penetrating, the poetry of William Carlos Williams, I began to feel how I could bring the rhythms of my language up to an immediate and urban speed. To make things shine in the present moment of our senses, in the language that circulated within the air of the city. I felt the pulse of Free Verse or, more accurately, Open Verse. Free Verse might imply a randomness or an aspect of chance and gamble in the writing, whatever comes up; there are many inner laws and concerns involved, such as cadence and the harmony and blending of words; things must fit within the language of the poem.
The poetry of WCW was like a gentle opening, things came at you, in the order that they were found, no effort to undo them, as to undo the world with concepts. The conceptual seemingly came at the end within a resonance of the words. The natural order of things in motion—almost like a practical poetics. As if it were a rush for air after being submerged within water to the point of drowning. A poetry of the Emergency Room, a grasp for time—WCW was a doctor and had little leisure time throughout most of his life, so he got glimpses in motion, flashes between labor pains. The black ink of his words flowing down the page like a spring breeze.
The way you feel streets when you are young, bubbling and constantly changing, coming at you, full of surprises and chances, apparitions which the ordering of the poem orchestrates: a voice comes from a window—music is heard from another—a forest of bricks—blue walls inside—a flower on a table—a pretty girl passes dividing the nocturnal air in half—a scream—sirens—a police car—sudden thirst and hunger—a bodega—coconut soda—plaintain chips—while in the grocery store an old lady comes in dressed in black—she and the grocer hook into a conversation—the contents of which are from a previous encounter—it is more like an ongoing process.
—Well Soraida wrote to me and she says they’ve thrown a road up into the mountain where she lives, out there in nowhere, in the inferno—imagine what progress.
—Everything is like that there now, can’t be in peace, not even in Barranquitas by a river—now phones are ringing inside coconuts—Cafe and the olive oil—she says—while I stand with coconut soda, his brown hands find a brown bag to put the items in one at a time.
Now through the English comes the sound of Spanish as if a spirit was cooking in the beans—not in the vocabulary which is Saxon but in the march—the dance of uneven steps broken sound—the splash of almost right or left diction. Leaving the bodega as the door opens the chime of a bell, glancing up I notice San Miguel slaying a dragon, the old lady dressed in black moves towards the street as the fragrance of Florida water. Into the breeze walking with all the lights—the fires of candles that are now the image of a tropical river.
That’s how WCW poems were jumping in my head:
Starting to come down by a new path
I at once found myself surrounded
by gypsy women
—from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
Williams then sees the Passaic River—reality is just a meltdown linguistically—the metropolis turns into a desert—look at things—up close—like slow motion—amplification—from a philosophic mountain down to a broken bottle strung on a street—from a passing car a woman’s breast inspires—the picture burns the windshield. A new land peeling through the windows of the words; his poetry brought me right to where I was standing with the dictionary inside my sneakers.
William Carlos Williams. Photograph by Charles Sheeler. Courtesy New Directions Publishing Corporation.
William Carlos Williams was born in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, to a Puerto Rican woman and a British father—both moms and pops were foreigners, immigrants to a new land. Williams’s father was from the English-speaking Caribbean:
He grew up by the sea
on a hot island …
like an Englishman
to emulate his Spanish friend
and idol—the weather.
—from “Adam”
Raquel Helene Rose Hoheb was a woman of many ancestral weavings as are all Caribbean people. Williams says that she was half French (out of the French island of Martinique); her mother was Basque. Other writings mention that she had Dutch blood and in other places it is hinted that she had some Jewish in her. She was a hodge-podge from the Caribbean mercantile middle or upper classes. She grew up in a big house in the city of Mayaguez on the western side of the island. Her family either had slaves or servants—she grew up around Afro-Puerto Ricans, hearing the songs and the stories.
The decision to move north to the states made by her and her husband, William Senior, was apparently devastating to her warm spirit, according to Eric Williams in a forward to WCW’s account of his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams:
… this multinational mongrel gentlewoman transplanted to a north temperate zone suburb of a major metropolis that was infested with WASP entrepreneurs who cared not a centimo for her religious, social, or cultural background.
Williams felt this struggle of his mother to survive in a strange cold land, he felt her foreignness and otherness and he felt his own odd drama. In so many open and hidden instances he explored this theme in his poetry. Julio Marzan, a Puerto Rican poet and scholar, has written an extensive study of this link of WCW with the Latino world, The Spanish-American Roots of William Carlos Williams. There are also at least two books which explore the intriguing relationship between mother and poet. She had a great influence on her son’s path to poetry, to art. She herself studied painting for three years in Paris in her youth and worked on a couple of translations with her son of Spanish novels. Despite the fact that she was a señora of the upper classes, turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico—she was full of the habits, customs and refrains of the popular peoples of the island. The wonderful thing about this book is that the poet just allows his mother to talk—and it is her voice which takes over most of the book—here is where you truly feel a Latino-Caribbean mental structure. You feel her wit and toughness, even her harsh verbal hurricane. It is full of her ghost stories and her medium spiritist wonderings, her splashes into tongues. Her English was always broken and spiced with Spanish and French words. All of these things sailed into Williams’s poetic lines. He was among the first to use Spanglish as a literary device as in the little experimental book of spontaneous prose, Kora in Hell, and throughout his work there is this bilingual spirit.
I don’t know to what extent he accepted, reached for or even understood this Latino element or if he even cared about it at all—but it was just there by nature. He lived in an age when this ethnic insistence would not have been popular and had friends such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound who were full of phobias and racism. Pound discouraged Williams’s pursuit of his mother’s world: “ … William Williams, and may we say his Mediterranean equipment, have an importance in relation to his temporal intellectual circumstance.” Notice how here Pound leaves out Williams’s middle name, Carlos.
When I first started reading Williams in the midsixties I had no idea that he was part Puerto Rican. The information might have taken ten years to get to me. I read him because of the way he sat on an image, the momentum of his pictures, a sure and pure unrestrained language. Williams was like a literary hydrogen bomb—he wrote over forty books and worked all the forms and the new ones he was inventing as he went along, working as a doctor delivering poems and babies. There is much to learn in Williams’s books and much energy which can give us strength to continue stretching out the language to fit all of our Americano needs. Thank you, Dr. Williams. And to his mother, Helena, merci-gracias.