William Carlos Williams Review

That Robert Pinsky has for a long time admired the poetry of fellow New Jerseyite William Carlos Williams is demonstrated by the considerable space devoted to Williams's work in Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (1976). Examining the relationship between the work of the modernists and the verse that was still considered "contemporary" when he wrote that book, Pinsky focused on Williams's "coolness," on the way he treats [End Page 102] the interaction between a perceiving consciousness and inanimate objects, and on his ability to master the liberty afforded by prose. In the introduction to this new collection of Williams's poetry, the former poet laureate again emphasizes the magnitude of Williams's legacy, averring that "(g)enerations of poets have dug into" his "works," admiring their "enduring freshness."

Williams has continued to influence young poets, Pinsky proposes, because his poetry challenges the reader to "try to listen and see freshly and leave expectations and cliches (sic) behind." Exploring "the infinite richness of what is apparent," Williams's poems insist that we provide "something a little more like alertness than explanation." "Even the poet's name keeps the reader off balance," its hybridity "implying an immigrant story" that leads Pinsky to place Williams in "the European tradition of the scientist as progressive." His Williams combined "intellectual attention" with "painterly alertness," possessed a kind of sensitivity to the new that led him, for example, to compose what may be the first poem describing the world as it looks when viewed from an automobile.

Pinsky's Williams edition was the thirteenth volume released under the American Poets Project imprint. Several of the other volumes also have been edited by distinguished poets, including Thom Gunn, Edward Hirsch, J. D. McClatchy, Adrienne Rich, and Richard Wilbur. The stated purpose of the series is to produce, "for the first time in our history, a compact national library of American poetry." Although the American Poets Project in general is thus committed to conservation and dissemination, this particular addition seems intended also to prompt reexamination and reconsideration, for Pinsky's Williams is rather different from Charles Tomlinson's.

More than half of the poems in Tomlinson's New Directions edition do not appear in this one; more than half of those collected in the newer edition are absent from Tomlinson's. Pinsky's Williams is a lyric poet rather than a lyric poet with epic ambitions. Unlike Tomlinson's edition, this one contains neither "The Wanderer" nor excerpts from Paterson, while Pinsky provides a larger sampling of the early lyrics, including, for instance, a dozen poems from Al Que Quiere! and fifteen from Sour Grapes. He has also added a few of the more widely anthologized pieces ("Danse Russe," "The Young Housewife") as well as the posthumously published "Greeting for Old Age" and "Stormy."

This new Selected Poems is not the product of textual editing; the texts of all of the poems it contains are taken from the two volumes of the New Directions Collected Poems. The textual apparatus is lean. In addition to Pinsky's fairly brief but effective introduction, the book offers a short biographical note, a note on the texts, and a few pages of explanatory notes on the poems themselves. By presenting [End Page 103] a distinctly different selection of Williams's work, however, Pinsky may succeed in compelling at least some readers to view the poet's oeuvre with a fresh eye.