Journey to Love: William Carlos Williams in the Pacific Northwest

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the legacy of William Carlos Williams among poets living and working in the Pacific Northwest. It takes up the question of a “regional poetics” that often surfaces in discussions of the Northwest, favoring an expansive definition of place as “elsewhere” in the twenty-first century American experience. In the Northwest, wilderness is the substantive elsewhere that informs regional identity. Examining the consequential relationship Williams had with Theodore Roethke and others such Denise Levertov, and his influence among subsequent generations of poets such as Rae Armantrout and Heather McHugh, I argue for a poetics of regeneration commensurate with wilderness values to preserve the vitality of land and language alike.