Unity is shallowest, cheapest deception of all composition. . . . [A]bility in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness. So history of has gone. . . . -William Carlos Williams, An Essay on Virginia (I 322) In his introduction to Imaginations, Webster Schott observes that works of William Carlos Williams collected therein-Kora in Hell, Spring and All, The Great American Novel, The Descent of Winter, and A Novelette and Other Prose-enable us to witness the doctor searching for his art and testing it, artist tasting life and suffering it . . . literary heretic his and anticipating future (xi). These works, Schott suggests, offer different picture than that of the artist commanding his powers, one know [as] titan who created Paterson, as revolutionary miniaturist of 'The Red Wheelbarrow,' or as magnificent autumnal lover of 'Asphodel That Greeny Flower' (xi). But who is this we, this collective knowing subject of Williams's oeuvre? For literary scholars like me who came of professional age in 1990s on tail end of what Jeffrey Williams has dubbed generation, it cannot be presumed that we would know William Carlos Williams at all. As other Williams points out, members of posttheory generation moved through higher education's most decentralized incarnation, period when notion of canonical literary education had fractured into myriad paths of specialized inquiry guided by some localized mix of theoretical principles.1 My primary areas of study concerned ethnic and women writers, genres of autobiography and fiction, and postmodern and trauma theory; as such, study of Williams had little formal place in my graduate training (an irony given that my department was then home to Paul Mariani, Williams's biographer). This is just to say, then, that so much depends on intertextuality. Ultimately, it was postmodern writers I studied who led me to Williams, specifically via their apparent interest in his extraordinary essay collection, In American Grain (1925). In this way, Williams appeared to me as kind of textual refraction, an object in my literary sideview mirror, as it were. From this vantage point, he looks primarily like an essayist and historiographer. While this may be an offbeat construction of doctor-poet, such is value of intertextuality: new literary relations may provide fresh insight into man and his cultural productions. For contemporary ethnic writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Richard Rodriguez, it was precisely early Williams rationalizing his schism who intrigued them as they sought forms that could capture complexities of their experiences as ethnic Americans. Schott's assessment of works assembled in Imaginations could equally describe those by Kingston and Rodriguez: theirs, too, are difficult books [not] to be wished onto desert minds. They churn with giant ideas and powerful feelings, often pursued with fragile butterfly net of intuition (xii). Like Williams, these writers are intensely interested in uses of history and hybrid forms necessary to capture truth of American experience. Kingston has often described her mythic history China Men (1989) as sequel to In American Grain, since her text picks up roughly in mid-nineteenth century where Williams's revisionist history leaves off.2 She cites Williams's final image of Abraham Lincoln as a woman in an old shawl - with great bearded face and towering black hat (AG 234) as particular inspiration. His representation of war-torn nation as a convulsion of bewilderment and pain - with woman, born somehow, aching over it, holding all fearfully together licensed Kingston's own gender- and genre-bending approach to imagining America, as seen in China Men's opening parable of Tang Ao, male immigrant captured in the Land of Women. …