Richard, I didn’t see your comment earlier. Williams can still look mighty strange: when I teach something like “At the Faucet of June,” my students don’t know what hit them. He’s not the simple guy with the wheelbarrow they might have expected. (Not that “The Red Wheelbarrow” is exactly simple either.)
“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
Don’t look for premiums or coupons, as the cost of the thoughts blended in ORANGE CRATE ART pro- hibits the use of them.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
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Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
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Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
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Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
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Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
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I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
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I’m not afraid to get it right I turn around and I give it one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
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L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
comments: 4
This seems doubly appropriate, as we emerge from an extremely trying winter, and as the world seems to be crumbling a bit at the edges around us.
I've often wondered if this might not be Williams' response to The Waste Land, published in 1922.
What a great way, on an overcast March day, to spend a few minutes (savoring this poem, that is).
Thanks.
--Richard
P.S. How strange Williams' poems must have seemed when they first appeared.
I’d say that it is. WCW’s hostility to TSE is well documented. The phrase “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands” in SaA suggests TSE to me.
Richard, I didn’t see your comment earlier. Williams can still look mighty strange: when I teach something like “At the Faucet of June,” my students don’t know what hit them. He’s not the simple guy with the wheelbarrow they might have expected. (Not that “The Red Wheelbarrow” is exactly simple either.)
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