The William-Siegel Documentary
THE WILLIAMS-SIEGEL DOCUMENTARY
Including “Williams’ Poetry Talked About” by Eli Siegel, and “William Carlos Williams Present and Talking: 1952”
Edited by Ellen Reiss and Martha Baird
In his 1951 letter to Martha Baird, William Carlos Williams wrote:
“He [Eli Siegel] has outstripped the world of his time….The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as either great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the breath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new. The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the “authorities” whom I shall not dignify by naming….
I say definitely that that single poem [“Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana”], out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world….We are compelled to pursue his lead. Everything we most are compelled to do is in that one poem.”
From the lecture Williams’ Poetry Talked About, by Eli Siegel, March 5, 1952:
“The line is something Williams has always been interested in. It happens to be an organic thrust. It happens to be a combination of hardness and softness, swiftness and slowness, the visual and the musical, the spacious and the concentrated; and it is shown in what happens to the syllables, the vowels, the consonants, the kind of word used, the rubbing of one word against another, and the landscape of the line—the hills, the plains, the ditches, the chasms, the cliffs, the whole geography in the line.
“The distinction of Dr. Williams’ work is that his lines very often have the surprising and also right quality that energy shown in any field of matter whatsoever has. And when we see it attended by the emotions of a person, we get to something important.” more
About “Portrait of the Author”:
“In this poem, we have a desire to be fair to every human being, a desire to see everything justly from within. That is a noble thing, and it is very hard to stick to.”
About “The Red Wheelbarrow”:
“This is a great poem…. The value of the world depends upon that red wheelbarrow. It is in keeping with Williams’ other ideas, that if one thing can be seen straight, we shall come to a notion of a world truly of us. The technique, however, is what makes it; technique in the best sense.”
From Williams’ comments after the talk:
“I can see your direction through it, and it’s very important….Certainly you’re a rare person. It’s just as important—it’s as if everything I’ve ever done has been for you. You come up with it, and so few people come up with anything. They praise the wrong things, for the wrong reasons very often….When you say it, it’s plain. You make it plain. And it’s very forceful.”
- Read Chapter 2, “Williams’ Poetry Talked about by Eli Siegel, and William Carlos Williams Present and Talking: 1952″
- Read Eli Siegel’s discussion of Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Cloth $14.00
Paper $12.00
ISBN 0-910492-12-3 (cloth)
ISBN 0-910492-25-5 (paper)