I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet

by William Carlos Williams

“ I Wanted to Write a Poem is an engrossing book; in its verity and at the same time in having the attraction of fiction––certain fiction.” ―Marianne Moore Subtitled "The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet," this unique volume was the result of a series of informal conversations in the mid-1950s between Dr. Williams, his wife, and Edith Heal, then a student at Columbia University. In the relaxed atmosphere of the Williams home in Rutherford, New Jersey, the three discussed, chronologically, the poet's works as collected on his very own library shelves. "There was an air of discovery about the whole procedure," Miss Heal writes in her introduction, "the poet's excited 'Why I'd forgotten this dedication,' the unexpected appearance of reviews that had been tucked away in the pages of the books, pencilled corrections in the text, scrawled first drafts on prescription blanks." I Wanted to Write a Poem is, then, a brief "talking" bibliography, alive with the Williamses' memories of the circumstances in which the books were brought into being––in Miss Heal's words, "a nostalgic review of the early twentieth-century literary world."

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing, Autobiography, Memoir

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

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

[Dona's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a William Carlos Williams fan, or even just a really serious contemporary poet, you might want to consider reading this book. It's WCW discussing every one of his texts and why he wrote them. It's the closest WCW ever came to a writing memior, it's irreplaceable in the writer's canon -- even though I have a couple of very serious issues with it.

The structure takes a little getting used to, but after a page or two, you'll ease in. It's a loose interview with multiple people represented by different typeface. Edith Heal conceived the design in 1974, so we'll forgive it for being a little old.

Most of the book contains responses from WCW, and occasionally his wife Florence, or "Flossie," about each of his manuscripts. The interview is rigidly presented and, from what I can tell, structured and organized. These standards changed, however, once Mrs. Williams became the subject of the interviews. While Heal interviews WCW, her questions focus on each of his manuscripts. Questions to Mrs. Williams covered a range of topics, few of which had to do with WCW's work.

So, while the interviewer provides ample opportunity for Mrs. Williams to humiliate herself (and everyone else she's ever spoken to)(including Bill), there's very little room for WCW to stray into the woods.

And yet that Bambi-eyed fool does stumble off into the deep brambles in this book. I always hated that expression about giving up heros in adulthood. About how eventually they just tumble from that idealized place you hold them to when you learn they're only just as human as everyone else you know...well...

WCW is human, very human. So is Mrs. Williams. The interviews in this book really reveal the humans they are, brilliance, and ugliness, and all.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The approach was simple if strange. WCW would approach each of his books and recount the effort and activity required: a biography of his bibliography. There’s considerable candor on display and most often his wife, the interminable Flossie, proves to have the better memory. Unfortunately the details wane as Williams began his ultimate decline. Abounding with flourishes and the amber stream of memory, this is a lovely book.

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Editor Edith Heal does a great job of capturing Williams' honest reflections of his entire body of work from the beginning of his career up to the time of the interviews. Williams is open and honest and consistent on his desire to capture the American Idiom in both prose and verse.

Even more insightful are the commentaries from Florence Herman Williams, aka Flossie, the poet's wife. An astute reader and honest voice, these interviews cement her role as the key collaborator behind all of Williams' work.

A must read for any poet who is struggling to find the balance between working full time, fulfilling family obligations, and crafting a body of enduring work.

[Jaek Wraf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not really knowledgeable in WCW ("The Red Wheelbarrow" is by far the poem I'm most familiar with), but this was still pretty fascinating. It's just an intimate conversation with Williams and his wife about his publications (more or less all of them, I think). A personal, honest view of a great poet's struggles and process.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

WCW attempts his own Ecce Homo, a rundown of his publications and explanations of what happened around that time, but his exposition pales compared to Nietzsche's. Several times, WCW says "There's a great story behind that publication", and then he just says two guys scraped together enough money to start a magazine, but they went out of business after a year or so.

The book starts off actually really funny, really witty, and WCW does a great job pulling you in. He states he never really wanted to be a poet, he just kinda fell into it. He admits later in the book "I would rather have been a painter than bother with these God-damn words", which is funny, given that he's considered by many to be one of the most influential, if not one of the best poets of the 20th century.

Anyway, the book starts off like a normal autobiography, but then diverges (in a yellow wood?) at one point where smaller and larger fonts start getting used. I was confused for a while, not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, if I was having a stroke (like WCW had), or what, but then I looked at the preface and it explained what those were (smaller font was his wife, also in the room, larger font was names/dates of publications).

Basically, WCW started off life very idealistic, simping for Keats, writing everything in his style, then getting tempered by Whitman, and this media via is where he ended up in his mature writings. He tried to strike a middle ground between the formlessness of freeverse, which was becoming a massive trend, and the stultifying staleness of the old forms. He then basically created his own forms (the "variable foot").

I was not aware that WCW wrote so much prose and so many essays, novels, and even short stories. Many of his works were first drafts or something near the first draft, and that's quite remarkable. WCW managed to balance being a full time doctor with being a writer, basically writing as soon as he got home in the evening. I don't know how he had time for a wife, but apparently he did. WCW seemed to take a surprisingly 1:1 relationship between his own experiences and his writing. He had a very simple approach to life, observed things very simply and directly, and reflected that in his writing. He admitted that he matured slowly, which I related to, and that he experienced a lot of things later than others, but he made a point to write only about things he really had experienced, heard, seen, etc. (or what people had told him).

WCW seemed to feel deeply the criticisms he got from people, and he was taken aback when someone called his work "Anti-Poetry" (they meant it as a complement). He went out of his way to refute that, "I have never been satisfied that the anti-poetic had any validity or even existed". I think he was forging a new, simple, proletarian path through poetry, he wasn't subverting poetry itself. WCW also got hit hard when he was falsely accused of being a soviet sympathizer, and he said "A poet is used to being misread, but this kind of misreading hurt me deeply". This misunderstanding of his work cost him a post at the library of congress, which sent him into a depression.

This infamy didn't last all that long, as by the mid 50's he was touring various universities, giving readings to rooms packed full of people, which surprised him. He did make a... faux pas? that's too kind a word.... well, I'll let him speak for himself. Basically, he was at some university, and he remarked about how many college girls there were there, and "They were so adorable. I could have raped them all!" (95). Note that he said this in front of his wife, and a college student who was helping to compile this autobiography. This was basically a dictated autobiography, and 1) he thought that funny(?) enough to say, and 2) the editor decided it was fine to keep in the book? It left a really bad taste in my mouth right near the end of the book, and it sullied the deep-feeling, pediatrician, hesitant poet I had built up in my mind. I'm surprised none of the other reviews of this book mentioned it, as it's pretty hard to just sweep it under the rug. Perhaps they didn't finish the book, perhaps they skimmed past and didn't see it. Regardless, I'm not going to judge WCW harshly for it, since he's dead, and "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" is a poem which could cover a multitude of sins, it's that good.

I used to love WCW back in college, and re-visiting him, it seems he's more of a one trick pony than I remembered, but he inspired me and has left his mark, now continued by the likes of Kooser and others. His proletarian approach to poetry is much needed in our drearily academic poetry climate. As WCW said, quoted in the forward:

I wanted to write a poem
that you could understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can't understand it?
But you got to try hard--

[Melanie Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like to read about a famous poet musing on why he started to write, the various collections he's written, and his writing process, then this is the volume for you. It's a slim, one-afternoon read (my copy is from 1978 and is exactly 100 pages).


The anecdotes that WCW provided to Columbia grad student, Edith Heal, who spent summer afternoons in 1957 interviewing him and his wife are insightful and read like a prose time capsule. (Example: They even gave her a key to their home so that she would have access to his private library while they were away for the weekend! Imagine that!) One of my favorite reflections from WCW himself: the infamous "Red Wheelbarrow" was first published without said title.


Yes, WCW namedrops a bit (his connections to HD, Ezra Pound, and painter Charles Demuth), but always for a reason, often either to explain dedications from his collections or because they assisted him in his poetic life at an instrumental time. Often self-deprecating and including some asides from his wife, Flossie, that are classic and funny in the way that couples long-married spar with each other, this is not a collection that analyzes the meanings of WCW's poems. Rather, it reads like spontaneous comments of the poet's choosing about life events while composing some of the poems, his own lack of formal poetic study while in med school compared to many of his famous friends, and a snapshot of a literary luminary near the ending of his life warmly (and sometimes not-so-warmly) reflecting on the quality (or lack thereof) of various works and steps along the way to publication.


I loved the anecdote about how one of his books was a labor of love and didn't sell hardly at all (think: remainder city), so he went around NYC buying copies at a reduced price and sending them to friends.


This volume is organized without chapters but with sections in chronology of his publications, from 1909-1957. The author catalogues the names, places, page numbers, and year of each volume/pamphlet/anthology/prose collection. Partly academic (I wondered if it might have been the author's senior thesis, although it doesn't include much of the author's own analysis or musings--she's interviewing and reporting his responses much more), this volume was exactly what I expected. I finished it with a clearer sense of WCW's personality that his poems often obscure. I also had the sense that he was withholding information from the interviewer, which was both natural and intriguing.


I think either poets who think about putting together their own publication histories (or like reading about others' publishing process) as well as educators would be the main audience for this volume. There are only a few of his poems or excerpts in the text, so general readers may find purchasing an anthology to be a better idea.

[Eric Hinkle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm no Williams fanatic, but some of his poems are fantastic, and he always seemed like a great person. Yet I was surprised at how enjoyable this book is. The whole book is a series of conversations between the author and a student of his, with the author's wife adding here and there. It's a friendly, engaging book, all about his experiences writing these books, his reactions to the work now, and his life at the time of writing. They go through each and every book he ever wrote, and try to talk about all of them. Obviously the audience for this kind of thing is limited, but being a poet myself, and being interested in this era of America (the first half of the 20th century), I found it quite interesting. It also made me want to read a number of his books that I haven't yet.

Note that they don't only discuss his poetry collections, but all of his novels and stories as well.

[Emma McCoy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would give my left kidney to take a class taught by this man’s wife. Not only because she sounds baller as hell throughout these interviews because I also want her take on 1) WCW writing four novels based on her and her family’s lives 2) his running commentary about other women and 3) the fact that when he was on tour at a college he cheerfully said he could’ve “raped all the girls” there.

Wtf?

Two stars because Edith is a great archivist.

[Sur Cur Lengel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each breath:
I'm learning to inhale
And exhale
Without flaring thoughts,
Without jerking about
(impulsive response)
To complete the doing--
No anticipation
(crooked, nervous man)
But slowly
Watching
What I do
And
How I breathe--
Each breath. (4-1-08)

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book for any creative type. W.C. Williams is funny, poignant and clever in this quasi-autobiography about the creation of a poem and his life as he has grown older.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to be WCW.

[David Lumpkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was quite interesting and because it is mostly transcripts of interviews, it make you sense you are sitting and chatting with William Carlos Williams. His insights and remembrances in writing and publishing all these works let you in on what was in his head as he created them.

[Maria Hrickova · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.6

[Maria Paz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cried

[Cristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The brief insight into WCW's thoughts on his projects was interesting to explore.

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual book, an annotated bibliography of a kind, but with Williams and his wife commenting on his published work.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

7/10

[Louis Cabri]

“Free verse was not the answer. From the beginning I knew that the American language must shape the pattern; later I rejected the word language and spoke of the American idiom—this was a better word than language, less academic, more identified with speech” (65).

“Word of mouth language, not classical English” (75).

“We lack interchange of ideas in our country more than we lack foreign precept. Every effort should be made, we feel, to develop among our seriuos writers a sense of mutual contact first of all” (90; from Contact magazine, 1921).

Irving Layton praised, at end.

[Amy Kitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting.