Spring and All by C. D. Wright, William Carlos Williams

It is difficult…
to read now
how it was then
yet…
    The Great War is barely in the background. The fatal flu pandemic fills the void, concentrating on the young and healthy. This weird little book is brought into the world the same month as the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first major drive to seize control. Among artists and writers, the urge for renewal is gaining ground in the aftermath of monstrous destruction, in the bud of worse to come. It is boggling that so much hearty artistic innovation has commenced to proliferate and thrive. Do or die. Those who can, do. Even the wreckage of Europe is tempting to the young, creative, contrary, and restless. One American writer stays put, finishes school, starts a medical practice. One American writer sticks around to catch the babies.
    * * *
    1923: Wallace Stevens’s
Harmonium
was published, Mina Loy’s
Lunar Baedecker
, Jean Toomer’s unassimilable hybrid masterwork, 
Cane
, and
Spring and All
, an equally unassimilable hybrid masterwork. That year, Yeats, whose dominance in poetry was commonly acknowledged, was awarded the Nobel Prize. Marianne Moore’s
Observations
and Gertrude Stein’s
The Making of Americans
were soon to clear the horizon. The former would be as steady on its feet as a wading bird; the latter, a bollard of granite. The leonine-haired Ezra Pound was the force upon which many depended and with which all had to contend. Staying on his own side of the Atlantic tendered William Carlos Williams the breathing room he needed.
    Spring and All
was printed in Dijon, by the same Darantiere who had printed
Ulysses
the year before; so the printer, at least, was already familiar with the oddities the English language could bear. Robert McAlmon’s Paris-based Contact Publishing Company issued Williams’s manifesto-of-sorts in an edition of three hundred, most of which went undistributed. The year before, 1922, was high tide in poetry:
The Duino Elegies, Trilce
, and
The Waste Land
. The latter was a head blow to William Carlos Williams. He had more or less absorbed the concussion of “Prufrock” and sounded off on it in his prologue to
Kora in Hell
. He had already recalibrated and redoubled to the task of staking out the new word for the not-so-new-anymore world. Then came
The Waste Land
, all tricked out with Sanscrit and Latin ornaments. The impact was as useful as it was painful. Whap. Now he knew what he was opposing; now he could move in the direction he wanted to go-forward-in his “small or large machine made of words.” For Williams, poetry was meant to be in motion. He willed himself ready: “How easy to slip/into the old mode, how hard to/cling firmly to the advance-”
    Williams epitomized the prepared observer. A watcher, a listener. Goat stubborn. Feet-in-the-soil independent. He could write whatever, whenever, and as he damn well pleased. William Carlos Williams was the embodiment of the values Americans touted but seemed capable of expressing only in “isolate flecks.” With an English father and Puerto Rican mother, there was no compelling incentive to become an expat. He would embrace the contrary impulse. Like his fellow New Jerseyan, Whitman, his apostrophe was to the future, but he hankered for contact here and now. The charge of this writing was change. His own personal epic and constantly shifting landscape was just on the other side of the parlor window, the whole procession. Like Whitman, he would gradually come to a great human understanding, an apprehension that eluded a number of his peers.
    Between great hails to the imagination and salvos of opprobrium, William Carlos Williams set one sharp-edged poem after another into the composition of an unframed original. So the one who did not cast off his roots chose the oldest trope in the book, SPRING, to push and pull American poetry into the present tense. Not before he had initiated a willful number of false starts, cranking up anticipation and repeatedly sabotaging