Abstract In his 1923 poetic manifesto Spring and All, William Carlos Williams explores the creative process of poetry, proposing two key stages: the crystallization of imagination and the dynamization of emotions into a distinct form. This article examines these stages within Williams’s concept of “Poem-Work,” paralleling Sigmund Freud’s “Dream-Work,” which explains image formation in dreams through condensation and displacement. Building on Freud’s ideas of fragmentation, dream censorship, and allusion, this article argues that imagist poetry reflects specific characteristics after undergoing poem-work. The analysis culminates in a close reading of two contrasting catalogues from Williams’s Paterson: one with a meticulously crafted list of flowers and another with a simpler enumeration of daily objects devoid of versification. Using critical perspectives on mimesis, rhythm, and the concept of the Instant in poetry—from sources as varied as Aristotle’s Poetics and Ezra Pound’s “A Retrospect”—this article highlights how these catalogues embody Williams’s poetic vision, transcending traditional forms.

In October 2009, I was asked by the late and much-missed Bryce Conrad, when the journal was still published at his university, Texas Tech, if I would take over from him as editor. The circumstances of his approach were very sad as he wished to step away from his responsibilities due to the terminal illness he had been diagnosed with and so devote his remaining years to being with his family. He died in 2017. Bryce was a gentleman, an inspiration, and a friendly guide as I sought to learn the ropes from him, and that moment when he asked me in person to be the one to take on the editorship remains the proudest of my academic career. I am very happy to have managed to guide the journal for the subsequent 16 years, and I hope I have lived up to the faith Bryce showed in me.I do wish now, however, to make this my last issue as editor and hand over to someone I completely trust to improve the journal and add fresh impetus to it. To this end I was very pleased when Mark Long expressed his interest in taking over when I voiced my wish to him. Mark is well-known to the Williams scholarly community, having served as the Williams Society president and been an enthusiastic and dedicated friend to any who have worked with him. The journal is thus in good hands, and I know he will have the support of the journal’s board and its readers.

Abstract A twenty-year-old Allen Ginsberg published a review of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson Book One in a local New Jersey newspaper in 1946. Reprinting the review as an appendix here sheds light on, and raises questions about, the beginning of the relationship between Williams and Ginsberg, which would go through many vicissitudes in the following years. It also provides an occasion for reflecting on the reception of Williams’s poem by the citizens of Paterson, among whom Ginsberg somewhat uncomfortably counted himself. Ginsberg’s discomfort was part of a larger struggle to find his own voice as a writer, a struggle that Williams’s example helped him resolve.

Abstract This article addresses the question of stylistic transformation in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, examining the role of the concordance and, more recently, natural language processing, as tools for use in the course of stylometric analysis, and presenting Williams as an ideal candidate for consideration and comparison of early and late styles, giving due attention to Williams’s formative literary influences, the influence of the visual arts more generally, and Williams’s grammatical tendencies regarding adverbs, articles, conjunctions, and pronouns, both with reference to poetic peers and across his early and late work, with special attention devoted to poems including “This Is Just to Say” (1934) and “The Ivy Crown” (1955). In contesting the critical tendencies to demean or to minimize Williams’s stylistic shifts, this article addresses a number of significant and substantial transformations in Williams’s poetics, tracing them to specific aesthetic commitments and biographical circumstances, and hailing Williams as a disruptive figure who stood as a key innovator not only in early career, but also in late career, unafraid to change, or to be influenced by younger poets, and whose culminating disruption was to disrupt the prevailing modernist preference for disruption.

The 16-word title suggests that there is a lot going on in this peripatetic, promiscuous, and ambitious book. It is organized around the author’s professional journey: from Northwestern to Boston University, and Brandeis (where Morris studied with Alan Grossman and Frank Bidart), to Harvard (where Morris taught in the History and Literature Department), to Purdue University where for 30 years Morris taught as a professor of English. It is a story of a poet and critic engaging in regional cultures of the experimental arts while navigating the inevitable parochialisms of intellectual life.The intellectual range of these 16 essays and interviews is delightfully engaging. Morris includes discussions of, among others, Kathleen Spivak, Allen Grossman, Louise Glück, Norman Finkelstein, Barrett Watten, Tyronne Williams, Hannah Weiner, Daniel Y. Harris, Adeena Karasick, Amiri Baraka, Tom Fink, Peter Dale Scott, with a penultimate chapter on Phillip Guston, the influential American painter who was the subject of Morris’s job talk at Purdue in 1994, and to whom Morris returns in 2002 at the Philip Guston Now retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Together, the essays and interviews offer a kind of grand tour of the more (as well as less) familiar narratives of American poets, poetry, and poetics, both in and outside the classroom. Readers can expect fresh and at times surprising connections among poets and ideas—from the experimental literary cauldron of modernism through the experimentalist projects of objectivism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, conceptualism, posthumanism, and multimedia poetics.Not incidental to this intellectual chronicle is the formative (and generative) presence of William Carlos Williams. He was one of two poets Morris read in graduate school “with devotion” (the other was Louise Glück). In fact, Morris wrote a dissertation on Williams that would appear as his first book, The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self (1995). In this collection, the essay “Preserving William Carlos Williams: Populism, Curation, and late Avant-Gardism in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Duchamp Is My Lawyer and Thomas Lux’s ‘Refrigerator, 1957’” offers an account of how two contemporary poets preserve Williams’s modern poetics. Morris argues that Williams “encourages readers to focus on parts of the world that they might otherwise ignore” (50). To make his case, he begins with a commentary on “Between Walls,” a poem from the 1930s in which Williams attends to “the back wings / of the // hospital where / nothing // will grow” (CP1 453). For Morris, the distinctiveness of Williams as an “urban modernist” is his application of “form and language to curate a place where ‘lie / cinders // in which shine / the broken // pieces of a green / bottle’” (50).What follows is a brilliant reading of Williams alongside the conceptual poet and critic Kenneth Goldsmith––who, not incidentally, is founder of UbuWeb, a website repository for visual and concrete and sound poetry artifacts—and Tom Lux’s poem “Refrigerator, 1957.” Morris demonstrates how poetry “serves the late avant-gardist function of providing a conservational space of archival memory” (56). Reading the chapter, one can imagine Morris guiding his Purdue students through the rewards of an inter-textual and meta-textual method of reading. “By reframing the material culture of everyday life, Duchamps’s ‘Fountain,’ Goldsmith’s transcription of the entire September 1, 2000 issue of the New York Times in Day (2003), and Williams’s forgive-me note in ‘This is Just to Say’” (55), alongside Tom Lux’s “Refrigerator, 1957,” Morris explains, we come to appreciate more fully “Williams’s imagistic gambit: [that] well-managed language can offer preservationist value to what is precious, vanished, and vanishing” (60).In the final elegiac essay, entitled “Conclusion: Goodbye Heavilon Hall,” Morris concludes his 30-year creative writing workshop with a heartfelt in memoriam for recently deceased poets and critics before turning to an autobiographical retrospective on the occasion of the demolition of the building that housed the English department at Purdue. This coda to the book registers not only the end of a 30-year career but the erosion of a once-thriving department—the latter, of course, an indicator of the unsettling cultural precarity of literary studies and the humanities.The mood of this final essay will not be unfamiliar to the generation of academics who have dedicated their lives to teaching and scholarship in the first decades of the twenty-first century. For these readers, Morris’s intellectual retrospective will resonate as a deeply ethical project: a redemptive chronicle of the struggles and rewards in a life-long commitment to poetry and poetics, the history and culture of ideas, and the art of pedagogical practice, all of which come together in this story of a poet and critic who has fashioned a convincing and consequential intellectual life.

Abstract This article seeks to mobilize Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of perception—more specifically, his contention that imbrication in a knowledge relationship with the perceived object precedes registration of the percept in consciousness—toward reconceiving some stale debates in Williams studies, namely: what is meant by the famous dictum, “No ideas but in things.” For Williams, this statement does not mean placing poetic priority on objects, particulars, or concrete reality. Instead, ideas and things exist in a relationship that is itself ontologically prior to either things or ideas. Proprioception, an embodied form of knowledge that does not require conscious awareness, becomes a crucial tool for interpreting Williams’s ostensibly object-centered shorter poems, which this article suggests dramatize a critique of the subject/object distinction by portraying perception without a perceiver. This philosophical framework serves to deepen the possibilities of engagement with deceptively simple poems, and to argue for the philosophical complexity of Williams’s poetry more broadly.

Abstract This article contends that the city of Paterson, New Jersey, is more than a convenient backdrop for Williams’s epic poem Paterson. The relationship between city and poem is one of “neighboring”: a word that names both a geographic and a philosophical dynamic of proximity and distance. In charting this relationship of neighboring, the article also recovers the poem’s philosophical and ecological stakes—both of which are often overlooked. Paterson models a relationship to the more-than-human environment that upends philosophical dualisms and that requires proximity while refusing mastery.

Abstract William Carlos Williams has often been regarded as a prototypical modern elegist, stripping sentimentality from poetic treatments of death. Similarly, his training in the emerging field of modern scientific medicine has led scholars to focus on his so-called “clinical” or “objective” style. Yet a more complex picture emerges from elegiac poems he wrote for his paternal grandmother and mother. Many of these poems were written while their subject was still alive and therefore have not been read as elegies. Yet these preemptive or anticipatory elegies draw on traditional tropes of pastoral elegy, while also critiquing modern medical approaches to end-of-life treatment. In the process, these poems form a new subgenre of elegy made possible by medical advances that lengthened lifespans in the twentieth century, while at the same time sharing the ethics of care over cure that would motivate hospice reformers such as Dame Cicely Saunders and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the decades after the poems appeared. While medical humanities sometimes treat literary texts as instruments for establishing standards of medical ethics and empathy, attention to these poems should encourage us to reverse that approach and instead understand medical humanist texts as expressing ethical lessons that emerge from the hands-on practice of medical professionals themselves.

Abstract T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams formed one of the more interesting literary rivalries of the modernist period, and their two most influential projects, The Waste Land and Spring and All, respectively, are key indicators of their aesthetic differences. This article seeks to show how bringing these two projects in conjunction under the umbrella of “symbolism” can demonstrate how there are two distinct temporalities underlying their projects, with The Waste Land’s symbolism representing a traditional, spatial conception of time that Eliot navigates through his idea of demonstrating how “tradition” can apply to the present, whereas Spring and All counters this conception with something more reminiscent of Henri Bergson’s la durée: a concept that aligns more with process philosophy in the sense that time is also rooted in sensation and experience. This article will show how Eliot’s characters embody tradition while Williams avoids it in order to fully emphasize the possibilities existing within the “moment.” Moreover, it considers how these aesthetic choices represent their particular brands of modernism and how they position the reader in relation to their poetry.