William Carlos Williams Quotes

“My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.”
― Frank O'Hara

“Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open." --Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR”
― Philip Levine

“The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage. It spreads its wings and is perched now on the peak of the huge African mountain Kilimanjaro.
Strange recompense, in the depths of our despair at the unfathomable mist into which all mankind is plunging, a curious force awakens. It is Hope long asleep, aroused once more. Wilson has taken an army of advisers and sailed for England. The ship has sunk. But the men are all good swimmers. They take the women on their shoulders and buoyed on by the inspiration of the moment they churn the free seas with their sinewy arms, like Ulysses, landing all along the European seaboard.
Yes, hope has awakened once more in men's hearts. It is NEW! Let us go forward!
The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of "Art", takes the lead! Her Feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass.”
― William Carlos Williams, Imaginations

“Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey, and―
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
―my head is in the air
but who am I . . ?
And amazed my heart leaps at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 1: 1909-1939

“Red

I fucking depended on you and
you left the fucking wheelbarrow
out and it’s fucking raining
and now the white chickens
are fucking filthy”
― Mary Ruefle, Dunce