The Pink Church

by William Carlos Williams

A very short book of poetry containing:

- Choral: The Pink Church
- The Lion
- New Mexico
- A Rosebush in an Unlikely Garden
- Song
- The Words, the Words, the Words
- Venus over the Desert
- "I would not change for thine"
- Mists over the River
- The Love Charm

Genres: Poetry

9 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Williams defends sexual desire from its repression by religion. I’m on his side.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very slim volume of poetry on the harshness of lust from the title poem Chorale: The Pink Church on:

Come all ye aberrant,
 drunks, prostitutes,
 Surrealists-
 Gide and- 
Proust's memory (in a cork
 diving suit
looking under the sea
 of silence)
to bear witness:

Man is not sinful . . . unless
 he sin!

The Lion scales up savagery as it confounds lust and anthropophagy, woman as prey:

...the lion 
flings the woman, taking her
by the throat upon his gullied
shoulders 
[...] a chastity packed with lewdness, 
a rule, dormant, against the loosely 
fallen snow -the thick muscles
working under the skin, the head
like a tree-stump, gnawing: chastity
to employment, lying down bloodied
to bed together for the last time.

This vein runs through most of the poems, in Mama:

Kitten! Kitten! grown woman!
you curl into the pillows
to make a man clamp his jaws
for tenderness over you [...]

or "I would not change for thine"

Shall I stroke your thighs,
having eaten?
Shall I kiss you,
having drunk?

or The love charm

Take this, the nexus
of unreality,
my head, I detach
it for you. Take it

in your hands, metal
to eat out
the heart, if held
to the heart[...]

sometimes receding into paid love, as in A rosebush in an unlikely garden

The stillness
of this squalid corner this
veined achievement is 
yours

or The words, the words, the words:

Your eyes, thighs, breasts -rose pointed,
money is their couch, their room,
the light from between lattices

or denouncing the hypocrisy of religious protestations as in Venus over the desert

If I do not sin, she said, you shall not
walk in long gowns down stone corridors
[...]I lie in your beds all night, from 
me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh
clings to your bones. What use is holiness
unless it affirms my perfections, my breasts,
my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips
the doors to my pleasures? [...]

In my opinion, one of the least interesting of Williams' poetry volumes.

Williams himself describes this volume as:

...the poem is anti-Catholic, anti all that the Bible damnation theorem symbolizes. It is anti-Eliot, anti-Church of England -anti all the biblical shit of the church and all the usual churches and anything that postpones the perfectibility to 'heaven' and all that heaven implies
[...]
It is, however, a protest poem, a protest against palpable abuses against reason.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pink as a dawn in Galilee
whose stabbing fingers routed
Aeschylus and murder blinked . . .

- and tho' I remember little
 as names go,
the thrust of that first light
 was to me
 as through a heart
 of jade -
as Chinese as you please
but not by that - remote.

Now, 
 the Pink Church
 trembles
to the light (of dawn) again,
 rigors of more
 than sh'd wisely 
 be said at one stroke,
singing!
 Covertly.
 Subdued.

 Sing!
transparent to the light
 through which the light
shines, through the stone,
 until
the stone-light glow,
 pink jade 
- that is the light and is
 a stone
and is a church - if the image
 hold . . .

as at a breath a face glows
 and fades!

Come all ye aberrant,
 drunks, prostitutes,
 Surrealists -
 Gide and -
Proust's memory (in a cork
 diving suit
looking under the sea
 of silence)
to bear witness:

Man is not sinful . . . unless
 he sin!

- Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire
 the saints
 of this calendar.

Oh ladies whose beds
 your
husband defile! man, man
 is the bringer
 of pure delights
 to you!

Who else?

 And there stand
 the-banded-together
 in the name of
 the Philosophy Dep'ts

wondering at the nature
 of the stuff
 poured into
 the urinals
 of custom . . .

O Dewey! (John)
 O James! (William)
 O Whitehead!
 teach well!

- above and beyond
 your teaching stands
the Pink Church:
 the nipple of
a woman who never
 bore a
 child . . .

Oh what new vows shall
we swear to make all swearing
futile:
 the fool
 the mentally deranged
 the suicidal?

- suckled of its pink delight

And beyond them all whine
the slaughtered, the famished
and the lonely -
 the holy church of
their minds singing madly
 in tune, its stones
sibilant and roaring -

 Soft voiced . . .

To which, double bass:

A torch to a heap
 of new branches
 under the tied feet of
 Michael Servitus:
 Be ye therefore perfect
 even as your
 Father in Heaven
 is perfect

And all you liveried bastards,
 all (tho' pardon me
 all you who come 
 rightly under that holy
 term)

 Harken!

- perfect as the pink and
 rounded breasts of a virgin!

Scream it in
 their stupid ears -
plugged by wads of
newspulp -

 Joy! Joy!
 - out of Elysium!

- chanted loud as a chorus from
 the Agonistes -
Milton, the unrhymer,
 singing among
 the rest . . .

like a Communist.