David's Reviews > Selected Poems

I read William Carlos Williams in the early 70's and didn't like his poetry much. I had to go back to an Original Poet---Walt Whitman, whom I hadn't thought I'd like but was mesmerized by "Leaves of Grass". I think William Carlos Williams and his ilk tried to do that also but rarely reached the level of Whitman.

One summer I locked myself in a dark storage room, with a single light bulb in back of the house of relatives in a Greek mountain village. It was cool, quiet and out of the way. There I wrote the first poems that would be published and made myself read writers like Whitman whom I had neglected to appreciate during college.

I read a collection of Freud’s writings, a few Shakespeare plays, “The Divine Comedy”, a selection of Yeats and so on. I tried WC Williams as well. I learned from reading him what I was expected to like as an American, but instead of embracing what the faculty at famous colleges were espousing, I turned away and said to myself, “It’s okay not to like Carlos’ poetry. Just go your own way without embracing a style you instinctively dislike and without reacting to it. Just read whatever you like and say what you have to say the best way you can in the only language you can.”

I’ve rarely looked at Carlos’ poetry again. But maybe I should. (I would love to go back to that little room in that house in Greece and extend my stay there for a couple of years--maybe for life. Unwrap time and place altogether.)