Imaginations

Four early poetry/prose books of the late William Carlos Williams, republished in original and complete forms, appropriately by the publisher through whom Williams found his American readership. All early Williams is maddening, frustrating, mind-exploding - like listening to beautiful material through static at an unreal five o'clock in the morning. ". . . the thing (the reader) never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. . . . And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. . . " Williams wrote in Spring and All (1923); and the moment, with Williams, is of a singular intensity, mingling experiential, fragmented cognitions with a raunchy, clear, American idiom. ("Why man, Europe is YEARNING to see something come out of America. In a soup of passion they would see a little clam. . .") In Kora in Hell (1920) Williams in his prologue has some cocky comments on contemporary poetry, including Eliot: "On (an admiring critic's) filet Eliot balances his mushroom." His anti-novel, The American Novel (1923) is indeed "delicious" upon second reading, as editor Schott suggests. Beginning with satirical irreverence, Williams made good, rummy mincemeat out of a nation of unappetizing oddments. A Novelette (1932) is again a total fusion of Iris life experience (as a doctor, husband, poet, etc.) moment by "eternal moment." With a fine introduction and commentary by Webster Schott. (Kirkus Reviews)