Al Que Quiere!

by William Carlos Williams, Jonathan Cohen (Editor)

Published in 1917 by Four Seas Press, Al Que Quiere! was William Carlos Williams’s third poetry book—his breakthrough volume—and contains some of his best-loved poems (“Tract,” “Apology,” “El Hombre,” “Danse Russe,” “January Morning,” and “Smell!”), as well as a Whitmanesque concluding long poem, “The Wanderer,” that anticipates his epic masterpiece Paterson. Al Que Quiere! is the culmination of an experimental period for Williams that included his translations from Spanish. The Spanish epigraph of Al Que Quiere! is from the short story “El hombre que pareci´a un caballo” (“The Man Who Resembled a Horse”) by the Guatemalan author Rafael Arévalo Martínez. This centennial edition contains Williams’s translation of the story (made with the help of his father), as well as a fascinating chapter from a book of conversations with Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, in which he comments on the individual poems. 

Genres: Poetry, Classics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

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

[Peyton · Rating 5 out of 5]

just a lot of fun stuff about walkabouts and ladies and mud and silly old people. This book is a good stress reliever.

[Valon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book of poetry I've ever been able to finish, this dude is a genius.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagist poems on urban modernity, often observing it but sometimes overtly transforming/transcending it through art.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The influence of William Carlos Williams on 20th century literature is undeniable.

Three poems are aligned by their content and by the fact that they are both followed by a poem entitled "Pastoral". For their to be two poems entitled "Pastoral" is conspicuous. The poems that precede "Pastoral" are "Sub Terra", "Apology", and "The Old Men". Their alignment is evident from one passage of each...

Where shall I find you,
you my grotesque fellows
that I seek everywhere
to make up my band?
- Sub Terra

The beauty of
the terrible faces
of our nonentities
stir me to it...
- Apology

Solitary old men for whom
we find no excuses -
I bow my head in shame
for those who malign you.
- The Old Men


Who are these grotesque fellows, these terrible faces? What may they have in common with Sherwood Anderson's "grotesques", with Nathanael West's "locusts"? Whether or not the poet directly influenced these authors, a parallel is evident...

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
- Sherwood Anderson, WINESBURG, OHIO

When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hate. At this time Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die.
- Nathanael West, DAY OF THE LOCUST


"Pastoral" is distinguished by the repetition of its title. So, too, is "Love Song"...

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor...
- Pastoral (1)

But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.
- Pastoral (2)

If I say I have heard voices
who will believe me?
- Pastoral (3)

Black branches
carry square leaves
to the wood's top.
They hold firm
break with a roar
shot the white!
- Love Song (1)

Who shall hear of us
in the time to come?
Let him say there was
a burst of fragrance
from black branches.
- Love Song (2)

There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colours
of the whole world...
- Love Song (3)


This repetition of titles creates a pattern and a rhythm, not unlike the rhythm of verse itself. The same approach is present in the poetry of Kenneth Patchen...

69) A NIGHT SONG
Each step down the land to the mailbox is a kind of hell. There in the morning . . . the sun . . . the birds singing all around me . . . everything green and clean-looking . . . No letter from you. - From anyone.

FRIEND THE RABBIT (70
I like to think of him as he looked in his new suit of orange and white checks and pink velvet lapels. Hurrying along, whistling cheerfully, his mule having a smart time keeping pace. A gigantic sunflower behind either ear, a flaming red hat perched well back on his head. Hawking select unburial plots.

71) A NIGHT SONG
You once asked me what I wanted out of life . . . Let's say - No matter.

FRIEND THE RABBIT (72
They were both frowning up at the Tower Room, where sometimes lovely maidens have a hard time escaping the clutches of wicked (but rich) kings. He whispered something to his mule, and - bam!!! no castle.
- Kenneth Patchen, "POEMSCAPES"


The recurrent references to "flowers" belongs to a long tradition of poetry. The specific reference to "daisies" seems to have left its mark on Allen Ginsberg and the other beat poets...

Daisies are broken
petals are news of the day
stems lift to the grass tops
they catch on shoes
part in the middle
leave root and leaves secure.
- Love Song (1)

Pull my daisy
Tip my cup
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts

Jack my Arden
Gate my shades
Silk my garden
Rose my days

Bone my shadow
Dove my dream
Milk my mind &
Make me cream

Hop my heart on
Harp my height
Hip my angel
Hype my light

Heal the raindrop
Sow the eye
Woe the worm
Work the wise

Stop the hoax
Where's the wake
What's the box
How's the Hicks

Rob my locker
Lick my rocks
Rack my lacks
Lark my looks

Whore my door
Beat my beer
Craze my hair
Bare my poor

Say my oops
Ope my shell
Roll my bones
Ring my bell

Pope my parts
Pop my pet
Poke my pap
Pit my plum
- Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, "Pull My Daisy"


There are several poems addressed to "townspeople". These poems, the specificity of their address, the addressing being to "townspeople", and the voice in which they are written resemble the speeches of Zarathustra in Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA...

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral -
for you have it over a troop
of artists -
unless one should scour the world -
you have the ground sense necessary.
- Tract

I wonder, my townspeople,
if Artsybashev looks upon
himself the more concernedly
or succeeds any better than I
in laying the world.
- Foreign

Love is like water or air
my townspeople;
it cleanses, and dissipates evil gases.
It is like poetry too
and for the same reasons.
- Riposte

When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoined the forest, he found may people assembled in the marketplace; for it had been announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people...
- Friedrich Nietzsche, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA


In "Spring Stains", everything is described as "blue-grey". In fact, the colour most commonly attributed to an object in Williams's poems is blue or grey (or both). The same is true of the poems in James Schuyler's HYMN TO LIFE...

In a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds
crowded erect with desire against
the sky -
tense blue-grey twigs
slenderly anchoring them down, drawing
them in -

two blue-grey birds chasing
a third struggle in circles, angles,
swift convergings to a point that bursts
instantly!
- Spring Stains

Standing and watching
through the drizzle
how the mist and further
edge of pond merge
into one grayness, a colour
called drained-of-blueness.
- James Schuyler, "Standing and Watching" (from HYMN TO LIFE)

Down
the valley a
line of far-
off mountains
are deeper,
bluer than the
sky....
- James Schuyler, "Sunset" (from HYMN TO LIFE)

The day is gray
as stone...
- James Schuyler, "The Day" (from HYMN TO LIFE)

After two rainy days, a sunny one
of cloud curds breaking up in blue.
- James Schuyler, Evenings in Vermont (from HYMN TO LIFE)

"Fog,
you may go now. It's time for all
good little angels to go upstairs
and fly" blueward through blue.
- James Schuyler, "Gray, intermittently blue, eyed hero" (from HYMN TO LIFE)


Revolutionary for the time was the poet's use of informal language...

The county physician
is a damned fool
and you
can go to hell!
- Portrait of a Woman in Bed

If I go meeting her
on the corner
some damned fool
will go blabbing it
to the old man and
she'll get hell.
- Portrait of a Young Man with a Bad Heart


My favourite passages...

if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mind
waving my shirt round my head
and singing to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best do!"
- Danse Russe

This house is empty
isn't it?
Then it's mine
because I need it.
Oh, I won't starve
while there's the Bible
to make them feed me.
- Portrait of a Woman in Bed

Observe
how motionless
the eaten moon
lies in the protecting lines.
- To a Solitary Disciple

[Daniel Hagedorn · Rating 3 out of 5]

To him that wants it, or whoever, I might say. As for me, I picked this up at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, Or the morning before Othello. I read a few poems later in the day from this third book of WCW. Some moments of brilliance, that love of language on a Sunday Morning, for example, when the lines sing and you look outside to the wondrous expanse of nature, and in that moment, and mostly only in that moment, that world seems like a fine place.

[Drunken_orangetree · Rating 4 out of 5]

An early (1917) collection. The most famous poem from the collection is probably "Danse Russe": "who shall say I am not/the happy genius of my household?" But, if I'm in the right mood, they're all amazing.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Normalcy punctuated by blinding-beautiful flashes of what might dare to call itself poetry (and it should, because it is). But is it wrong to say that a "poem" is only sometimes a poem? Is filler the necessary mortar holding it all together, or an interruption from the best-tasting morsels?

But isn't that how life is? The few rare things: shocks, surprises, developments all, then the rest, the long stretches abridged blink-short, where we wake up on the other side and almost fail to recognize our new selves. "My flesh is turned to stone. I / have endured my summer." Eliot was wrong: Summer is the Cruelest Month. It only ever lasts a month, but it burns with a heat that hurts. WCW instead gives like the ocean gives: wave after rising-tide wave, then suddenly, an entire ship! I can't help but hear WCW himself calling out to us. So many exclamations, but so little Whitman. Maybe a mini-Whitman: accepting all, but only embracing some.

His best poem has always been the first Pastoral poem in this collection, "When I was younger..." I tried walking around a suburban neighborhood on Holy Saturday with my polaroid camera but was only able to snap two photographs, both of trees in bloom. Otherwise, there was basically nothing to observe, let alone photograph. It was only when I got out of the neighborhood and walked around behind a mall, that I found things worth observing: "roof out of line with sides / the yards cluttered / with old chicken wire, ashes, / furniture gone wrong." Not precisely these, but their essence, certainly. In my case, it was rolled up carpet underlayment in a green dumpster, a depressed pit of gravel, and broken sewing machines piled atop a small trailer. All of them shone in the mid-afternoon light of spring, and all of them affected me.

Perhaps this is some vampiric middle-class sensibility he and I share: these things might not even be noticeable to the lower-class eye. In other words, is this "sensibility of noticing" really an escape from the quotidian and suburban? Or is it some false groping after "authenticity" and "grit?" Does it distract our gaze or sharpen it? I'd prefer to think that these things can break our perception open like an egg, just like the best poetry breaks grammar open and scoops out what it wants. So often we're cowed into a shallow and meandering prose, one which frustrates us in our awareness of how far it falls short of what we want to convey. We handle language like an egg we're scared to break open, when any cook would frown at us, take the egg, crack it, and use it as it should be used. Likewise, poetry is necessary not because of any one tradition or author, but because the best of it awakens us to the potentials of life and language. Language's fragility is also its indestructibility.

Speaking of which, it's worth dwelling upon his several poems named "Pastoral," since none of them describe anything but city life. Maybe the lesson isn't that we have the power to imagine our own ideal pastoral scenes (and thus avoid reality), but rather that we can reclaim our own neo-pastorals, finding space for creation and awe among even (especially?) the cramped and the cracked. In his other classic poem, "Tract," he amends a funeral procession to be less gaudy and ugly. Rather than abiding dogmatically by the inheritance of tradition, he is confident enough in his own moral and aesthetic sense to follow the promptings of the spirit, so to speak. Similarly, rather than dreaming up some impossible utopia, WCW leads by example, using the raw material already abundant around us. he recognized back then that we can never be bored these days. Once we start digging, sifting, and filtering, we find out we have what we need, including our own poetry (some assembly required).

[Dave Franklin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Al Que Quiere!” is a collection of 52 poems by William Carlos Williams, published in 1917. In this early work, Williams is searching for a comfortable mode of expression, employing a variety of tones, but eschewing 19th Century poetic conventions.

In the selections “Tract” and “Apology,” the reader can discern Williams as an incipient Modernist. His efforts here transcend the incoherence and triteness that is evident in several of his early pieces, and the writing is a model of freshness and economy. The poignant language in ”Apology” is a case in point:

colored women
day workers—
old and experienced—
returning home at dusk
in cast of clothing
faces like
old Florentine oak.

An entertaining book for the reader interested in surveying the career of an influential 20th Century writer.

[A. Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

DANSE RUSSE

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
danse naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely.
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

[Siddiq Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Williams in this volume exemplifies the depth and breadth in which lyric poetry as personal address can be taken. A highly intimate volume, he speaks directly to almost everyone and everything in sight, the way a little child does, and yet with the wry voice of a man who has lived a full life with his hands at the pulse of his times, like the physician he was.

[James Hawes · Rating 5 out of 5]

My current favourite of WCW books. Probably his most accessible (at least from the books of his I’ve read) of his books. At the same time the book subtly challenges the reader in the Williams tends to do. The poems addressed to his mother are particularly moving.

[Ali Sackley · Rating 4 out of 5]

danse russe <3

[Brad Bevers · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite poet, another enjoyable collection.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, you should read it. And read Paterson too

[Eliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best when read aloud with a cup of orange and spice tea close at hand. Remind me to do that next time, especially with the more sprawling poems.

[Mary Grace McGeehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of early poems that feels like a stroll with the doctor/poet through suburban New Jersey, where he spent most of his life. The most famous poem is "Danse Russe" ("Who shall say I am not/the happy genius of my household?"), but my own favorite is "January Morning": "The domes of the Church of/the Paulist Fathers in Weehawken/against a smoky dawn--the heart stirred--are beautiful as Saint Peters/approached after years of anticipation." There are too many descriptions of flowers, and I didn't enjoy "The Wanderer," the last long poem in the collection (which includes an anti-Semitic reference). Otherwise, though, it's a wonderful collection.

[A L]

I liked the more mythological pieces, but overall this made me realize that high modernism is losing its appeal for me.