Poetry in the time of Corona Virus
Water Lilies - Photo by Wayne Larrabee

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.)

 

           

To view or add a comment, sign in

More articles by Wayne Larrabee

Insights from the community

Explore topics