Tuesday 6 April 2010

William Carlos Williams: Porous


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http://www.oac.cdlib.org/affiliates/images/omca/omca_LNG36014.2_1_2.jpg





Cattail fluff
blows in
at the bank door,

and on wings

of chance
the money floats out,

lighter than a dream,

through the heavy walls
and vanishes.





http://www.oac.cdlib.org/affiliates/images/omca/omca_LNG34008.1_1_2.jpg





Porous: William Carlos Williams, 1938 (from Poems 1936-1939)

San Francisco Social Security Office: photo by Dorothea Lange, 1937 (Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California)
Thirteen Million Unemployed Fill the Cities (Unemployed men, San Francisco): photo by Dorothea Lange, 1937 (Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California)

4 comments:

  1. Tom,

    Two beautiful (and little known) Williams poems here, next to Dorothea Lange's beautiful (and local) photos, truly "epiphenomenal." Thanks for such a great focus of attention. . . .

    4.6

    white line of jet trail in pale blue sky
    above ridge, white half moon above trees
    in foreground, waves sounding in channel

    something each time present,
    seemed to be finished

    look at corner, the picture
    plane, gesture toward

    sunlit white clouds to the left of point,
    tree-lined green of ridge across from it

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  2. Thank you Steve. It's funny about the historical, and how the foaming of the epiphenomena is starting to look and feel so strangely familiar, as if all this had all happened before, perhaps in a dream...

    something each time present,
    seemed to be finished

    (This, I think, as the person who has seen the ending yet forgotten it, said, is where I came in...)

    ReplyDelete
  3. only to reappear
    in the deepest
    pockets.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Annie,

    Yes, it's odd, that dematerializing and rematerializing, is it not -- almost like magic, almost like clockwork.

    We must have seen this movie before.

    ReplyDelete