Prompt: Imagination and Observation
“my heart stops amazed at the thought of love vast and grey yearning silently over me” — William Carlos Williams
Amazing responses to the last prompt, The Music of Dreams, thank you all!
Since then, thanks to inspiration by Lisa Tomey, I’m doing a bit of study on William Carlos Williams.
I started with Improvisations: Kora in Hell, which was definitely the worst place to begin an introduction to Williams!
Improvisations is 27 “chapters” consisting of brilliant verses sandwiched between atrocious ones. It’s a bit like fishing — completely possible to catch something beautiful, but still requires the effort of buying a rod and reel, hooks, and a carton of worms and spending a day getting one’s feet wet.
What I am struck by in Improvisations, though, is Williams’s veneration of the imagination and his ability to mix and match disparate details. He has an almost psychadelic thought process that I really enjoy.
It also does also give me hope, that Williams’s greatness is not in absolute perfection, but in consistency and continuing to write and write and write, turning out diamonds and coal all at once. Not every poem has to be perfect. . .in fact, I think sometimes the harder we try, the less we succeed!
Success in my exploration arrived in the huge collection of Williams’s work on All Poetry. I’m sure that each person will respond to different elements of such a vast body of work, but I resonate with the simplest poems on nature and his observations of people. He has a peerless attention to detail and a very understated way of relating scenes that I love. It quite is possible to say something profound through the description simple and ordinary.
For this prompt, try to mix the real, precise elements of your world with imagination. What elevates them, transforms them? What makes the ordinary into something greater?
Below my favorite of the Improvisations and several other poems I think you’ll love.
I look forward to seeing what you create!! — David
XXVII.
1
The particular thing, whether it be four pinches of four divers white powders cleverly compounded to cure surely, safely, pleasantly a painful twitching of the eyelids or say a pencil sharpened at one end, dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass: the gist of poetry. D. C. al fin.
2
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose-red grasses and you — in your apron running to catch — say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings to your heels, at your knees.
3
Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging branch long since and summer: they scurry before a wind on the frost-baked ground — have no place to rest — somehow invoke a burst of warm days not of the past nothing decayed: crisp summer! — neither a copse for resurrected frost eaters but a summer removed undestroyed a summer of dried leaves scurrying with a screech, to and fro in the half dark — twittering, chattering, scraping. Hagh!
Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fulness. It is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it must build its perfection. The gross summer of the year is only a halting counterpart of those fiery days of secret triumph which in reality themselves paint the year as if upon a parchment, giving each season a mockery of the warmth or frozeness which is within ourselves. The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piece from one end to the other.
An old willow with hollow branches slowly swayed his few high gright tendrils and sang:
Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood’s edge.
Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
Her body is not so white as anemone petals nor so smooth — nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand’s span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over — or nothing.
All those treasures that lie in the little bolted box whose tiny space is Mightier than the room of the stars, being secret and filled with dreams: All those treasures — I hold them in my hand — are straining continually Against the sides and the lid and the two ends of the little box in which I guard them; Crying that there is no sun come among them this great while and that they weary of shining; Calling me to fold back the lid of the little box and to give them sleep finally.
But the night I am hiding from them, dear friend, is far more desperate than their night!And so I take pity on them and pretend to have lost the key to the little house of my treasures; For they would die of weariness were I to open it, and not be merely faint and sleepy As they are now.
Vast and grey, the sky is a simulacrum to all but him whose days are vast and grey and — In the tall, dried grasses a goat stirs with muzzle searching the ground. My head is in the air but who am I . . . ? — and my heart stops amazed at the thought of love vast and grey yearning silently over me.
Previous Prompt:
Responses:
Guérin Asante Sylvia Wohlfarth Dennett Anna Rozwadowska Lindsay Lonai Linegar Carver Bain Michelle Muses Aaska Ejaz Chiedza Kikumi LB Blue Fences kurt gasbarra
Jo Ann Harris FILZA CHAUDHRY Suwimali Bandara Kurt Gasbarra Crystal E.Wild Flower Sarah Book Amy Jo Reynolds antoinette nevitt Dennett Joe Váradi Austin Briggman Dana Sanford Shringi Kumari Anisesh Tracy Aston wimpy af Ashwini Dodani Vaishali Paliwal Leah J.🕊 Tapan Avasthi Maymuuna Seth Cason Brian Fehler Simon Heathcote Sonam Arora Nadine Morsch Ngang God’swill N. Lisa Tomey Shobha Roy D. E. Fulford poetsarah Gretchen Lee Bourquin 💗POM-poet!💗 Joey L. Sara Stasi
