Poetry in the time of Corona Virus
My Shelter in Place days were good for writing a few poems- here is one I wrote towards the end of our Quarantine-
Begin Again-
On this slow, sleepy
Sunday afternoon
our shelter in place days
are almost done.
Water lilies float
on shadows
of clouds and masts-
Now sounds
the sudden slap
of beaver tail-
Awaken my friends
Awaken.
My own "mentor" (although I never met him) at the intersection of poetry and medicine was William Carlos Williams. Many of you know him but for those who don't here is a brief introduction. He really spoke to me as I had time to think about both medicine and poetry during these strange times. In many ways this "time out" from the hectic pace of medicine provided a needed space to rest and reflect on the paths we have chosen to follow.
William Carlos Williams
Physician/Poet
Many physicians have a passion for the arts and some become artists themselves. Few, however, manage to become great artists and continue work as physicians. William Carlos Williams was on such individual. I believe he was successful because his poetry and medical practice was so intertwined. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) lived an outwardly ordinary life, but in his journeys of the imagination created the form and subject of 20th century American poetry. It was ultimately not Wallace Stevens with his crystallin images nor Ezra Pound with his symphonic sounds, but Williams who struggled and was midwife to a truly American, a truly democratic, modern poetry.
Williams was a physician and a poet. He lived both lives simultaneously and with savage intensity. He practiced medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey, among the poor and working class inhabitants of this faded industrial town. He saw by his count a million and a half patients and delivered 2,000 babies in his active medical years between 1910 and 1951.
He wrote in his autobiography:
Time meant nothing to me. I might be in the middle of some flu epidemic, the phone ringing day and night, madly, not a moment free. That made no difference…Five minutes, ten minutes can always be found. I had my typewriter in my office desk. All I had to do was pull up the leaf…and I was ready to go…I worked at top speed. If a patient came in the door while I was in the middle of a sentence, bang would go the machine – I was a physician. When the last patient had been put to bed, I would always find time to bang out 10 or 12 pages. In fact, I couldn’t rest until I had freed my mind from the obsessions which had been tormenting me all day…
Having scribbled, I would rest.
He found no mystery in his role as doctor and poet and when questioned about it in an interview in 1932 with The New York Herald Tribune said that it was not particularly unusual. Chekhov had been doctor…and Oliver Wendell Holmes…and Keats. It was, he explained, a natural reaction to turn from the materialism of medicine to the imaginative world of literature.
His son, William Eric Williams, M.D. recounts the intensity of his life in poetry and medicine. Williams kept a small red notebook in which he kept his public health records as school doctor, but also recorded the sharp images he later turned to poetry in the heat of the night. One such prescription for himself.
If I did not have
verse
I would have died
or been
a thief
(or)
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Although his family undoubtedly suffered for this dual profession, the recollections of his son demonstrates a sympathy with his driven father. “It was at night that he would call on his apparently endless stores of energy, the tattoo of his typewriter providing a reassuring lullaby to which my brother Paul and I slept and awoke throughout childhood. I can recall the projection of his mood brought to me by the cadence of the keys – the smooth andante when all was happy and serene, the interrupted staccato when the going got rough, the carriage slamming, the paper ripped from the roller, baled and heaved in the direction of the wastebasket. Night was his time to roar.”
The ultimate reason Williams has prevailed as the major figure in twentieth century poetry is not his skill with words but his love and understanding of the ordinary people in one ordinary place, Paterson, New Jersey. This understanding is inextricably bound to his role as their physician and friend.
Spring and All XVIII
(To Elsie)
The pure products of America
go crazy-
mountain folks from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheet lust for adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rage –succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of chokecherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—
unless it be that marriage
perhaps
With a dash of Indian blood
Will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she’ll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs—
some doctor’s family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
Williams most beautiful poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”, a long love poem to his wife, Floss, was written at the finale of his struggle to create a new American meter, the variable foot.
Of Asphodel, the greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
For I too am concerned
And every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
V(Ed. Note: Materials presented above were reproduced from various books by William Carlos Williams with the kind permission of the publisher, New Directions Publishing Corporation. Dr. Larrabee presented this essay as part of a poetry-reading put together by physicians and presented at Swedish Hospital. This was reported in the King County Medical Society Bulletin. Another reference was a Williams’ biography, A New World Naked, by Paul Marian published by Norton press.)