William Carlos Williams audio

January 10, 2007 7:29 PM

William Carlos Williams audio 1 GB / 19 hours of the poet's lectures, interviews, poetry readings (mp3). Quite a resource at Pennsound.
posted by chymes (20 comments total)

This Is Just To Say

I have ignored
the link
that was in
your post

and which
you were probably
hoping
for praise

Forgive me
it was lengthy
so huge
and so long
posted by sourwookie at 7:43 PM on January 10, 2007

Thanks for the resource! They host readings from so many great writers.
posted by roboto at 7:48 PM on January 10, 2007

I was totally going to post this, damn you.

Yeah, seriously. Pennsound, Ubu, WFMU, and MetaFilter are pretty much the moral of the internet.
posted by roll truck roll at 7:53 PM on January 10, 2007

That's wonderful, sourwookie... lol... I've always loved the original of "This Is Just To Say"...

And chymes, thanks for the post.
posted by amyms at 8:06 PM on January 10, 2007

For the record, I'm not dissing the post. Quality stuff, there.
posted by sourwookie at 8:10 PM on January 10, 2007

Pennsound should do a series of pieces read by others with the same last name:

Kate Daniels as read by Charlie Daniels
Ed Dorn as read by Micheal Dorn
Allen Fischer as read by Harvey Sid Fischer
Richard Hell as read by, uh, Richard Hell

That's some real culture right there, I tells ya.
posted by sourwookie at 8:34 PM on January 10, 2007

T. S. Eliot read by Chris Elliot.
Robert Frost by Sadie Frost.
posted by grabbingsand at 9:10 PM on January 10, 2007

Jawbox's "FF=66" opens with a clip of Williams reading.

Which is awesomesauce.
posted by bardic at 9:12 PM on January 10, 2007

Richard Bach as read by Sebastion Bach
posted by sourwookie at 9:14 PM on January 10, 2007

Good to know my tuition is going towards something worthwhile. (The apparent sarcasm is unintentional-- this is a really great resource.)

Oh, and Katherine Philips read by Emo Philips.
posted by supercres at 9:15 PM on January 10, 2007

Katherine Philips read by Emo Philips.

I'd buy that on iTunes.
posted by roll truck roll at 9:29 PM on January 10, 2007

as a Lit major, WCW was the coolest poet i learned about in college, next to Bukowski, of course

anyways, Williams' Farmer's Daughters is universally overlooked.
posted by tsarfan at 12:04 AM on January 11, 2007

Googling around for Kenneth Koch's fairly funny response to "This is Just to Say" I found it on the web site of none other than our own beloved languagehat.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting. [...]

I'd never seen the pennsound link before. Looks great, thanks!
posted by whir at 3:40 AM on January 11, 2007

I'm reminded of an article by Martin Garnder. Here's an excerpt from Beauty: Why I am Not an Aesthetic Relativist.
--

In my younger days it was almost impossible to pick up a "little magazine" that did not contain a poem by Williams. I always read it slowly, three or four times, hoping to find something of more value than undistinguished prose broken into lines, often so short that I wondered if the little magazines paid for poetry by the inch. Consider, for example, the following banal lines which I have concocted to parody one of Williams's most admired poems:

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze -- or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-- as if that answered anything.

Now compare my crude efforts with this authentic poem by Williams, "The Red Wheelbarow," which I quote in its entirety:

so much can be
learned

from a brown
butterfly

drenched with rain
drops

beside the red wheel
barrow.

Can you honestly say that you find something more worth reading in Williams's much-anthologized lyric than in my parody? It may be there, but it is not there for me. Perhaps it is not there. I do not know.

posted by Wolfdog at 5:16 AM on January 11, 2007

Pennsound is ten kinds of awesome. Thank you thank you. This alone made my day.
posted by gwint at 6:26 AM on January 11, 2007

Thank you, chymes.
posted by damnthesehumanhands at 7:10 AM on January 11, 2007

Awesomesauce.

I am stealing that almost as quickly as I am devouring this link. I actually was just about to put together an AskMe about finding more resources like this.* Thanks, you've provided a great post and saved me from blowing a question.

*The Atwood interview is particularly sweet, done right after she published Handmaid's Tale. She also discusses Pat Buchanan's rumored run for president.
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 7:19 AM on January 11, 2007

Thank you chymes, this is lovely.
posted by jdl at 9:03 AM on January 11, 2007

Um, I don't know anything about Martin Garnder's article [link?], but he (curiously) mis-quotes Williams' poem and misspells its title. Here is the actual text:

The Red Wheel Barrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

--------

I'd make the case that Williams' choice of the word 'depends' versus Garnder's mis-quote 'learned from' is what makes this poem so important. It is a sweeping aesthetic argument -- so much (the best verse) depends upon a red wheelbarrow (clear concrete imagery). Also, Garnder must have a tin ear if he cannot hear the music in Williams' poems, a music made, in part, by the line breaks Garnder mocks. And while I'm on this soapbox, uh, Williams was not an aesthetic relativist, as the poem Garnder mis-quotes attests. Sheesh.

Anyhoo, thanks a lot chymes, this is a great great resource!
posted by verysleeping at 10:45 AM on January 11, 2007

And to up the pedantry here, if you really want to read "The Red Wheel Barrow" in context (along with some of the other poems that, through anthology, made him look like a master of the modernist miniature) you have tog get a copy of Spring and All, the manifesto/quasi-novel in which it first appeared (available in Imaginations).

Which isn't to say Williams wasn't a master of Pounds Imagist dictums, but "Wheelbarrow" and "This is Just to Say" are mere blips within the insane brilliance that is the messy prose sprawl of Spring and All. (And you can also read his The Great American Novel. The protagonist is a car who falls in love.)
posted by bardic at 11:13 AM on January 11, 2007