William Carlos Williams - Smell

Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything


Traditionally, the world knows of five senses: Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Throughout time we have learned that each of the 5 senses consists of organs with specialized cells that have receptors for specific stimuli. These cells have links to the nervous system and thus to the brain. All of these senses are vital to human life, the top two are sight and hearing. In the world today, we hear about those who have no sight, and even those who have no hearing, but have you ever heard of those who have no smell!?
When I first read William Carlos Williams` poem, Smell! I was like what is he talking about!? I know poet’s are supposed to be crazy and all but really was this guy writing a poem about his nose? How odd, but then when I read it a few more times, I realized that he is not only writing about his nose but he is talking to his nose. He first begins by explaining what his nose is like, and then he goes on to ask it a question. He continues throughout the poem in this way, talking to his nose about all the different things it helps him to smell, the souring flowers, to the rank oder of a passing springtime, but then at the end I think he reaches his main message he is blaming his nose for continroulsy smelling everything. His nose is always in the way and must have a wiff of everything that is out there. I think this implys the famous phrase, keep you nose out of others busniess. At the very end the last two lines of the poem, he says

WCW - Spring Storm

The sky has given over its bitterness. Out of the dark change all day long rain falls and falls as if it would never end. Still the snow keeps its hold on the ground. But water, water from a thousand runnels! It collects swiftly, dappled with black cuts a way for itself through green ice in the gutters. Drop after drop it falls from the withered grass-stems of the overhanging embankment.

 

 

 

This is just a description of a spring thunderstorm, written in language as plain and direct as William Carlos Williams could manage.
William Carlos Williams thought that most poetry up until his time (the 1930's and later) was over-written. He thought that the words had got out of control, poets were just talking - instead of looking at things and telling precisely what they saw.
Williams set out to write a poem of plain description: making his language as ordinary, but also as precise, as a scientist would.
Often William Carlos Williams writes poems of dazzling clarity with his revolutionary technique.
Sometimes - as here - the clarity is there, but it does not dazzle.
It is a description of a storm, in as plain a language as the poet was able to find.

Jorie Graham - Just Before

At some point in the day, as such, there was a pool.  Of

stillness.  One bent
to brush one's hair, and, lifting

again, there it was, the

opening—one glanced away from a mirror, and there, before
one's glance reached the

street, it was, dilation and breath—a name called out

in another's yard—a breeze from

where—the log collapsing inward of a sudden into its

hearth—it burning further, feathery—you hear it but you
don't

look up—yet there it

bloomed—an un-

learning—all byway no birthpain—dew—sand falling onto sand—a
threat

from which you shall have

no reprieve—then the

reprieve—Some felt it was freedom, or a split-second of
unearthliness—but no, it was far from un-

earthly, it was full of

earth, at first casually full, for some millennia, then

despertately full—of earth—of copper mines and thick
under-leaf-vein sucking in of

light, and isinglass, and dusty heat—wood-rings

bloating their tree-cells with more

life—and grass and weed and tree intermingling in the

undersoil—& the

earth's whole body round

filled with

uninterrupted continents of

burrowing—&earthwide miles of

tunnelling by the

mole, bark bettle, snail, spider, worm—& ants making
their cross-

nationstate cloths of

soil, & planetwide the

chewing of insect upon leaf—fish-mouth on krill,

the spinning of

coral, sponge, cocoon—this is what entered the pool of
stopped thought—a chain suspended in

the air of which

one link

for just an instant

turned to thought, then time, then heavy time, then

suddenly

air—a link of air!—& there was no standing army
anywhere,

& the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all

the cities of

what was then just

planet earth

were lifted up out of their sleeping

bags, & they walked

away, & the sensation of empire blew off the link

like pollen—just like that—off it went—into thin air—&
the athletes running their

games in Delphi entered the zone in the

long oval of the arena where you run in

shadow, where the killer crowd becomes

one sizzling hiss, where,

coming round that curve the slowness

happens, & it all goes

inaudible, & the fatigue the urgent sprint the lust

makes the you

fantastically alone, & the bees thrum the hillsides,
& all the blood that has been

wasted—all of it—gathers into deep coherent veins in the

earth

and calls itself

history—& we make it make

sense—

& we are asked to call it

good.

Authenticated by the reach of its perceptions and its sense of obligation, the self appears magnified, even aggrandised, in the poet's repeated reaching towards an indifferent but beloved infinity amid which humans oppress and slaughter each other. The suspicion grows that the important thing may somehow be not the thing seen or understood, but the fact that the self has seen it: the intended scale of things is in effect reversed. That this seems quite guileless makes it more worrying, though not unfamiliar.
There are precedents for Graham's work in the way America adapted Romanticism – in Whitman, for example – and in traditions of Protestant testimony.

William Carlos Williams - Peace on Earth

The Archer is wake!
The Swan is flying!
Gold against blue
An Arrow is lying.
There is hunting in heaven—
Sleep safe till tomorrow.

The Bears are abroad!
The Eagle is screaming!
Gold against blue
Their eyes are gleaming!
Sleep!
Sleep safe till tomorrow.

The Sisters lie
With their arms intertwining;
Gold against blue
Their hair is shining!
The Serpent writhes!
Orion is listening!
Gold against blue
His sword is glistening!
Sleep!
There is hunting in heaven—
Sleep safe till tomorrow.

 

The Arrival - William Carlos Williams

And yet one arrives somehow,
finds himself loosening the hooks of
her dress
in a strange bedroom--
feels the autumn
dropping its silk and linen leaves
about her ankles.
The tawdry veined body emerges
twisted upon itself
like a winter wind . . . !

William Carlos Williams

 

William Carlos Williams addresses several working-class themes that would include this renowned writer into the canon of working class literature. While often regarded as a writer of the professional-class, Williams dealt with themes very integral to the plight of the working class. These issues include: poverty, distrust of authority, work shaping one's life, urban blight, struggle, gender issues, and class consciousness.
From his occupation as a family practitioner, Williams had a wealth of first hand experience with those of the working class. Although an industrial town, Rutherford would be considered affluent compared to the surrounding North Jersey communities it served. Cities like Newark, Passaic, Kearny, Paterson, and Hackensack were where the immigrant and first generation Americans made their homes. These people were laborers, and they were Williams' patients. Robert Coles offers insight to Williams's life in William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America. He explains that when Williams was asked by a college professor where he got his language from Williams responded, "From the mouths of Polish mothers" .

Jorie Graham - The Surface

The Surface

It has a hole in it. Not only where I

                                 concentrate.

The river still ribboning, twisting up,

into its re-

arrangements, chill enlightenments, tight-knotted

quickenings

and loosenings--whispered messages dissolving

the messengers--

the river still glinting-up into its handfuls, heapings.

glassy

forgettings under the river of

my attention--

and the river of my attention laying itself down--

bending,

reassembling--over the quick leaving-offs and windy

obstacles--

and the surface rippling under the wind's attention--

rippling over the accumulations, the slowed-down drifting

 

                                      permanences

of the cold

bed.

I say iridescent and I look down.

The leaves very still as they are carried.

 

 

There are so many different surfaces in the world. Whether it's rough or smooth, dry or wet, soft or hard. Surfaces hold us, things, everything. I believe they are essential to our survival. In Jorie Graham's poem "The Surface" she combines the surface, the river, with wind. A leave carried in the wind across the water. It's such a simple topic, but yet Graham's writing style is intriguing. The whispering of the wind is a secret message for us humans. The leaves are the messages, flying over the river's surface waiting to get collected and read. But when they hit the surface, they leave holes. The style of this poem is very appealing and new as well. 23 lines, some of them only contain on word. Graham uses a lot punctuation to set a mood for the poem. The various use of caesurae paces the poem. It's different, which I like. The word "iridescent" is italicized in the second to last line. Why? It's a beautiful word. It means the showing of various colors that seen to change when see from different directions. This perfectly applied to the water. The colors of the water change with every new position. That's what makes it so special.

 

Jorie Graham- Sundown

Sometimes the day light winces behind you and it is a great treasure in this case today a man on a horse in calm full gallop on Omaha over my left shoulder coming on fast but calm not audible to me at all until I turned back my head for no reason as if what lies behind one had whispered what can I do for you today and I had just turned to answer and the answer to my answer flooded from the front with the late sun he/they were driving into—gleaming— wet chest and upraised knees and light-struck hooves and thrust-out even breathing of the great beast—from just behind me, passing me—the rider looking straight ahead and yet smiling without looking at me as I smiled as we both smiled for the young animal, my feet in the breaking wave-edge, his hooves returning, as they begin to pass by, to the edge of the furling break, each tossed-up flake of ocean offered into the reddish luminosity—sparks—as they made their way, boring through to clear out life, a place where no one again is suddenly killed—regardless of the "cause"—no one—just this galloping forward with force through the low waves, seagulls scattering all round, their screeching and mewing rising like more bits of red foam, the horse's hooves now suddenly louder as it goes by and its prints on wet sand deep and immediately filled by thousands of sandfleas thrilled to the declivities in succession in the newly released beach—just at the right moment for some microscopic life to rise up through these cups in the hard upslant retreating ocean is revealing, sandfleas finding them just as light does, carving them out with shadow, and glow on each ridge, and water oozing up through the innermost cut of the hoofsteps, and when I shut my eyes now I am not like a blind person walking towards the lowering sun, the water loud at my right, but like a seeing person with her eyes shut putting her feet down one at a time on the earth.

This poem is another unique piece of Jorie Graham's poetry collection. The author of the poem is at the beach walking along, when a man on a horse comes up to her. Again Graham refers to the ocean/ water a lot. It is a reoccurring theme in most of her poems. She goes into details with the seagulls and the sand. This line in the poem, "and when I shut my eyes now I am not like a blind person" reminded me of A Friend Going Blind. She talks about hard subjects, but while connecting them with something calm (like the ocean) it makes it so much easier to  read about. This quote, "water oozing up through the innermost cut of the hoofsteps" is a great image that emerges when reading this line. It's such a simple line, but makes me think about it.