Thursday, April 03, 2008

Howsa 'bout We Just Skip April This Year? . . . (or the whole history of May)




The Locust Tree In Flower
[First Version]

Among
the leaves
bright

green
of wrist-thick
tree

and old
stiff broken
branch

ferncool
swaying
loosely strung—

come May
again
white blossom

clusters
hide
to spill

their sweet
almost
unnoticed

down
and quickly
fall




The Locust Tree In Flower

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again


A couple of days ago I had the first two words of the final version of this William Carlos Williams poem jump into my head. And they were there for a little while like when you get a song stuck in your head and you just enjoy it being there until you realize that it's a song, and that you have to figure out just what song it is or you won't be able continue living. So I was all "Among of", . . . Among of what? . . . "Among of" . . .

I quickly realized that it had to be from a Williams poem and I was pretty sure that those were the first two words of the poem so that I could easily look up that poem. Thankfully they were and from one that's a particular favorite not to mention timely as to the newish season. One of the things I particularly love about Williams is that since he lived all of his life in Rutherford New Jersey the flora and fauna that are in his poems is pretty much the same as what I see everyday (except for maybe the seagulls). It's the locust trees in his writing that always gets me though. Locust trees are a major part of my personal cosmology, I've been thoroughly enjoying them my entire life.

On a similar note, I had a whole post (that I never wrote) on the (to my ears) misreading of the word 'cinders' in the Williams poem "Between Walls" that I noticed in a discussion I listened to somewhere online this past winter. I could tell that the people talking about that poem weren't from the northeast by how they didn't realize that Williams' use of 'cinders' in the poem had nothing to do w/ fire but just referred to a common ground covering.


Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle



. . . Anyway, I wanted to add Dr. Williams' commentary/explanation of the two versions of "The Locust Tree In flower" b/c I love it -

"It's the recurrence of the season—the whole history of May. . . . I cut out everything except the essential words to leave the thing as simple as possible and to make the reader concentrate as much as he can. Could anything be plainer?"


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