Introduction

Abstract

The past above, the future belowand the present pouring down: the roar,the roar of the present, a speech—is of necessity, my sole concern—William Carlos Williams, PatersonWilliam Carlos Williams and West Coast Culture: We might begin with a brief reflection on the San Francisco Bay Area as a “culture region” by Robert Hass, who observes that Kenneth Rexroth’s first book In What Hour“Seems” is precisely right. Rexroth’s “invention” is certainly part of a tradition of populist and progressive writers in and around the growing northern California Bay Area area, writers such as Ina Coolbrith, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Joaquin Miller—as well as the Oakland poet Edwin Markham, whose 49-line blank verse poem of social protest, “The Man with a Hoe,” first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1899.1 At the same time, Rexroth’s West-Coast culture drew inspiration from the poetry of William Carlos Williams—who offered an alternative to the exclusive literary culture Rexroth associated with the East Coast mainstream of American modernism.2 That is, as Alan Soldofsky writes, Rexroth considered his “working class, San Francisco-rooted, left-leaning anarchistic sensibilities” aligned with “Williams’s working-class Rutherford, New Jersey, plain speech poetics” (276).We might follow all of this with now established lore: the “New American Poets” on the West Coast, in Donald Allen’s gathering, who picked up Williams and absorbed what he called his “extracurricular” interest in the arts.3 “Up from the gutter, so to speak. Of necessity. Each age and place to its own” (SE 257), Williams boldly announced in his “Introduction” to the 1944 collection The Wedge. By mid-century, too, Williams’s impressions, critical admonitions, and convictions about literary and social values were circulating widely through correspondence with poets on the West Coast—Theodore Roethke, Rexroth, Phillip Whalen, Lew Welch, Larry Eigner, among many others.4 Meanwhile, between 1947 and 1955, Williams made four trips West, where restless young poets were already breaking from the detached and genteel formalism of their modernist inheritance. Williams shared his ideas about poetry as a featured poet at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1947. The following year, in July of 1948, Williams attended a poetry conference in Seattle organized by Theodore Roethke, where he read the Second Book of Paterson and presented “The Poem as a Field of Action.” Then, on his third trip, in 1950, with his wife Flossie, his itinerary included extended visits at the University of Washington, Reed College, and the University of Oregon, as well as a poetry reading in Los Angeles at UCLA during which Williams elaborated his views on the poetic rhythms and cultural significance of colloquial speech: “The minute you turn a phrase over to fit a meter and you can’t get what you want to say into that meter, never change your phrase, change the meter! Then you’ve started, then you’ve started,” he insisted. “[Y]ou’ve started to create a culture, in your place, where you are. Until you do that, you’re lost” (“Reading”).5This special issue of the William Carlos Williams Review explores Williams’s place in the creation of a distinctive West-Coast literary culture through the second half of the twentieth century. From Southern California to the Pacific Northwest—in communities of poets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle—the creative work of Williams enriched literary and cultural communities up and down the West Coast. The articles in this issue invoke numerous poets and critics, among them Donald Allen, Alan Holder, Ron Silliman, Michael Davidson, and David Schneider, in recognizing Williams’s transformative presence. This existing scholarship on Williams and the West includes detailed accounts by Alan Soldofsky and Paul Cappucci, as well as presentations at the annual Modern Language Association conference—including a 2008 panel sponsored by the Williams Society in San Francisco, California, “William Carlos Williams, the Beats, and the San Francisco Scene” and a panel at the 2020 MLA in Seattle, Washington, also sponsored by the Society, “William Carlos Williams, American Modernism, and West Coast Culture.” One of the presenters at the 2008 MLA session, Alan Soldofsky, also author of an article in the Review on Williams’s influence on the “Bay-Area genome,” opens this special issue with an account of Williams’s use of ordinary speech and autobiographical and discursive poetics in the later poems of Desert Music and Journey to Love in relation to the poems of Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger. In “The Zen-infused cosmological imaginations of William Carlos Williams and Alan Watts,” Enaiê Mairê Azambuja aligns the Zen Buddhist principles in Williams and Watts through a shared a “vision of the imagination as a cosmological force capable of merging the material and transcendental dimensions of reality.” Azambuja’s article presents a reading of Williams’s theory of the imagination in Spring and All in a broader argument that Williams and Watts share cross-cultural interests and an experimental approach to poetics and spirituality. William Mohr and Kevin Craft, in the articles that follow, expand our understanding of Williams’s presence in other regions of the West. In “Mentoring Mavericks: The Influence of William Carlos Williams on the West Coast Poetry Renaissance,” Mohr turns to the correspondence of Williams and Grover Jacoby, Jr., editor of Variegation magazine, published in Los Angeles from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, and then elaborates Williams’s importance for Harold Norse, Charles Bukowski, Paul Vangelesti, Ron Silliman, Alice Notley, Rae Armantrout, Kit Robinson, and Larry Eigner. Then, in “Journey to Love: William Carlos Williams in the Pacific Northwest,” Craft traces the enduring influence of Williams on poets writing in the Pacific Northwest—from his first visit in the late 1940s to his imprint on poems of Denise Levertov, who relocated to the Pacific Northwest in her later years, and on her student, Rae Armantrout, who recently settled in the Seattle area. Finally, in “‘What stayed with me’: Art, Conviviality, and Culture in William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder,” I trace the presence of Williams in the work of Snyder from his studies at Reed College to his later recognition of the transformative ecological potential of Williams’s poetics of everyday experience and plain speech.Together the essays in this special issue explore Williams’s presence among West Coast poets who recognized and re-envisioned the literary and cultural potential of his modernist poetics. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, it was as if his generative experiments with language and poetic form were ready made for poets and writers on the West Coast—whether in the Bay Area or among poets based in Los Angeles or the Pacific Northwest. Moreover, as these essays suggest, Williams’s embrace of the vernacular as a poetic resource, and his attentiveness and responsiveness to the immediacies of time and place, offer an enduring resource for new generations of West Coast poets seeking to enter the open field of American poetry and poetics.