William Carlos Williams‘ birthday today, born 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey
“The relationship between Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams extends well beyond the conventional range of literary influence. Each saw in the other the promise if survival, not only as a writer, but also as an individual human being. In the Introduction to Howl, Ginsberg’s most famous publication, Williams expressed astonishment at Ginsberg’s “ability to survive” in the face of “the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man. The poet had been through hell, Williams asserted, but he had emerged to bear witness to “the spirit of love (that) survives to enoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith – and the art! to persist”. The following year, Ginsberg returned the compliment, though less publicly, in a letter to his father, who Williams had acknowledged in his Introduction as “a well-known poet”. Allen Ginsberg wrote to Louis Ginsberg – “With great names like (W.H.) Auden and Marianne Moore trying to be conservative, and (T.S.) Eliot ambiguous and (Ezra) Pound partly nuts Williams stands out as the only beautiful soul among the great poets who has tearfully clung to his humanity and has survived as a man to bequeath in America some semblance of spiritual democracy in independent individuality”. It was a question of integrity – artistic, personal, and even cultural. It was also a question of legacy. Ginsberg was clearly grateful for what Williams was able to “bequeath” and Williams, it turns out, was hoping to find a heir.”
Terrence Diggory’s chapter on Williams, his contribution to the Centennial volume – Allen Ginsberg in Context continues:
Paterson – “The publication of the first installment (in 1946) was the occasion for Ginsberg’s first encounter with Williams. Temporarily suspended from Columbia University, (he) volunteered to write a review..for the local newspaper and planned to interview Williams as part of the process. In the review Ginsberg objects to the poem from the perspective of the city fathers, a posture that he found embarrassing even at the time. When he reintroduced himself to Williams in a letter of 1950, he clearly adopted the position of a son – [Pater-son] “I know you will be pleased to realize that at least one actual citizen if your community has inherited your experience in his struggle to love and know his own world-city”.”
from that letter (included as prefatory note in The Gates of Wrath):
“Dear Doctor: in spite of the grey secrecy of time and my own self-shuttering doubts in these youthful rainy days, I would like to make my presence in Paterson known to you, and I hope you will welcome this from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world…”
“I do not know if you’ll like my poetry or not.. I envision for myself some kind of new speech – different at least from what I have been writing down – in that it has to be clear statement of fact about misery (and not misery itself), and splendor if there is any out of the subjective wanderings through Paterson. This place is as I say my natural habitat by memory, and I am not following in your traces to be poetic, tho’ I know you will be pleased to realize that at least one actual citizen if your community has inherited your experience in his struggle to love and know his own world -city, through your work, which is an accomplishment you almost cannot have hoped to achieve…”
Diggory again:
Empty Mirror (1961) and The Gates of Wrath (1972) were the titles of two volumes in which Ginsberg separately published his early poems..Williams stands at the head of both volumes. He wrote the introduction for Empty Mirror in 1952 emphasizing the virtue of survival as he would later do in his introduction to Howl, and Ginsberg’s 1950 letter of introduction to Williams (misdated 1949) is placed as a preface to The Gates of Wrath. Several of the poems that appeared in The Gates of Wrath had been enclosed with that letter. They are the poems that prompted Williams’ warning, “in this mode perfection is basic”, as Ginsberg’s “Hindsight” to the Gates of Wrath acknowledges – (“The poems were imperfect. I responded by sending Williams several speedworthy notations that form the basis of (the) book Empty Mirror, texts written roughly same years as these imperfect lyrics”) – In 1952, a first reading of some of the poems that were to appear in Empty Mirror elicited a very different response..”These are it“. In his excitement, Williams promised to find a publisher for the new work, to make Ginsberg, the center (original emphasis) of the next installment of Paterson, and place as the epigraph to that work, Ginsberg’s poem “Metaphysics” – “as some shit uses a quotation from some helpless Greek in Greek.” (a swipe at T.S.Eliot). None of these promises were fulfilled, although Williams included a letter from Ginsberg in Paterson V. He also shared Ginsberg’s poems with friends such as Ezra Pound, who did not respond, and Marianne Moore, who found the tone of the work depressing . The language of the Empty Mirror poems excited Williams who was less concerned about the tone as long as it was honest…
The Gates of Wrath poems used traditional rhyme and meter and archaic language – “Now that time has wormed my cheek/Horns and willows me bespeak”. In contrast the Empty Mirror poems used language that contemporary readers heard around them every day. “Their life is given back to them in plain terms” Williams wrote in his Introduction, perhaps recalling such plain description as “Cars are always/ going down the street. Williams’ example had encouraged Ginsberg to write in this way. At the Museum of Modern Art perhaps as early as 1948, Williams’ reading of the poem “The Clouds” was an ear-opening experience for Ginsberg – “I had never heard a poem that ended in the middle of a sentence”, he recalled, though I’d heard people talk that way all the time, and I suddenly realized, oh, he’s just writing the way he talks (original emphasis). The theme of “The Clouds” as Ginsberg interpreted it, was also relevant – “The subject is clouds of imagination, what happens to your discourse if your mind is up in the clouds, to put it vulgarly, if you’re not paying attention to detail, if you’re not “present” where you are, if you’re not making use of “minute particulars”, as (William) Blake said, or if you’re indulging in ideas without things,’cause Williams’ formula was “No ideas but in things“..
Ginsberg’ interest in the vernacular and attention and specificity was also, like Williams, concomitant with an interest in a useable metric (Williams’ focus and fascination with a so-called “variable foot“) and his own experimentation
From a letter to Williams, dated December 1955 – “I enclose finally some of my recent work. Am reading Whitman through, note enclosed poem on same, saw your essay a few days ago, you do not go far enough, look what I have done with the long line..”
And in his presentation of “Howl”:
Diggory again:
“Howl” marks both the most public display of the Williams-Ginsberg connection, by way of Williams’ Introduction, and the beginning of their separation. In contrast to the short line units that Williams preferred, “Howl” employs a long line that Williams associated with Whitman… The form of “Howl” meant to Williams not only that he had lost a disciple, but also that Ginsberg had fallen back on the past, become retrograde, as he complained to an interviewer..”
Nonetheless, in his introduction to the volume Williams had been able to write supportively:
“When he was younger and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg, a youg poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him during those first years after the first world war as it was exhibited to him in and about New York City. He was always on the point of “going away” where it didn’t seem to matter: he disturbed me. I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and perfecting his art is no less amazing to me…
It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way to that of the Jews in the past war. But this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. 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. The poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own – and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.”
Diggory’s extended survey (which should be read in its entirety) is only one (albeit the most recent) of a number of addresses to the Ginsberg-Williams connection.
We would also highly recommend Alexandre Ferrere‘s extensive essay, “Mechanics and Poetics – William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg”, from March 2018, that appeared on that date in Beatdom)
Here’s Allen’s extended reflections on Williams
Allen Ginsberg reads William Carlos Williams – here
and, in case you didn’t know…..