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In fact, if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t name another poem of his except this one and Patterson, and then there’s that one about plums; beyond that I’m clueless about WCW. But I do enjoy XXII. And I’ve enjoyed this thread.
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- Gregory P
The book I have is
Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson, put out by New Directions. While there's a good deal I don't like, there are some dynamite poems in there. To tell the truth, I never got much into
Patterson. I much prefer the shorter poems that are, in my opinion, a lot like what I've read of Chinese poetry.
New Directions has an amazing catalogue of great books. My book collection would suffer without ND.
I think that the thread went off track. I intended it to be about a poet, and it became all about a
poem. But that's my fault!
My favorite poem by Williams is one I posted in another thread hereabouts. Some of you here may have missed it:
Pastoral
When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
xxxxNo one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.
This page has a good selection.
**
Good point, Sam, but oddly enough, one of my all time favorite poems is also one frequently anthologized and taken out of a sequence, but one which I think works fine all by itself:
I will write songs against you,
enemies of my people; I will pelt you
with the winged seeds of the dandelion.
I will marshal against you
the fireflies of the dusk.
- Charles Reznikoff
I used that last line as the title of a novella I wrote.
Edited in:
Not to nitpick, or to argue for argument's sake, but I haven't thought of
The Waste Land as a sequence? I think of it as a single poem with numbered parts. A sequence, unless I'm mistaken, is a series of separate poems on a common or somehow-related theme?
The Cantos would be a sequence, and not really an epic, per se, like
Paradise Lost or
The Odyssey.
So, I should qualify what I said before:
The Cantos are "epic" in scope, but not literally an epic.