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

expectations. Not before the hectored reader was fetched up “by the road to the contagious hospital”—only then would the first glimpse of grass and “the stiff curl of the wildcarrot leaf’ be permitted—at the precise point at which every stick in the refuse emerged particular.
Terrifying
, as Robert Creeley was given to say.
    From page one, the doctor lurches into an exchange with his imaginary critics. In lieu of titles or subtitles or headings, he spoofs the typographical stunts of the times, using both Arabic and Roman “chapters” to fence off units of poetry and prose, completely out of sequence.
Chapter XIII
appears upside down. The effect creates a minor distraction, albeit intentional, but it is the abrupt shifting, cutting, and swerving that prevent the reader from ever relaxing into the text. The suspense of the performance is carried all the way to “the edge of the petal.” Does love wait there? Will spring ever come? Who is Kiki—the nurse, the French artist model, the waif in the long-running play? Will the doctor please elucidate what he christens
imagination
? What does J. P. Morgan have to do with anything except what new money can buy, Old Masters? What does it mean to be “drunk with goats or pavement”? Country or city? Who else but Williams would grasp that the place to get the latest news about the weather and the last word on death is the barbershop? Who else cared what the barber thought? And when the whole atavistic American scene gets intolerable, would anyone be there to drive the car? 
Tranquilly Titicaca
indeed.
    The prose is a working-through—hot with argument, loud with opinion. The overall form is a grand improvisation. Here a little rapture on the possible; here a riff on Shakespeare, on Poe, on Anatole France. The poetry was struck in one sitting, executed with what Hugh Kenner called Williams’s “great technical perception.” Here an ekphrastic poem on a painting by Juan Gris; here an homage to le jazz hot, le jazz cool; here a snapshot of what he saw through the windshield, or notations scribbled into a prescription pad. References ladled out of the “skyscraper soup” of industry, advertising, local speech—all the while spring itself was stiffly becoming manifest.
    Yet, for the mash-up of affinities, free-floating associations, and spasms of anger, Williams loved simplicity and order. He avoided the sesquipedalian habits of Pound and Eliot. The stripped-down poems in
Spring & All
are as quick and unencumbered as any nude tripping down the stairs. The choice enjambment, “under the surge of the blue/ mottled clouds,” the lucent precision of the modest noun
glaze
, and the assertion that “The rose is obsolete” were stock-in-trade. He delivered the language scrubbed clean, made new.
    This was a gutsy, self-conscious generation of writers and artists. They all knew each other. Pound and H.D. and the painter, Charles Demuth, to whom this book is dedicated, were friends from the college years. Williams was soon to befriend Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and Mina Loy. The Stieglitz crowd. Duchamp and the collector Walter Arensberg, and on and on. They promoted and financed one another’s dreams, shared and competed for lovers, for recognition and influence. Williams’s profession planted him. In the city, the painters seeded his ideas. And he was there in the first rub, reading his “Overture to a Dance of Locomotives” at the 1913 Armory Show. (Ms. Loy was impressed, but not enough to lie with him.)
    Williams was, according to Pound, the “hardiest specimen in these parts.” While zealously promoting the supremacy of the imagination, he dealt in real things, with individuals in real and current need. In his line of work, people were literally exposed. Then there was the endless variety of the species, which suited what Williams referred to as his nervous nature. Then everything along the roadside just popped out and demanded his immediate attention.