The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky
2004; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 50; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoThe Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. Edited by Barry Ahearn. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. 603 pp. $65 liked your poems in Pagany--pity waste work on this land of worms on rainy sidewalks. should say--The delicacy of flavor which each one of us possesses degreee is lost here. It is in us, we use it as it were squirting an atomizerful of perfume out the window stop the stenches of the stock yard. You have it. have it. Balls have it--you may rub it hard you may scrub it well (as he sez the girl) but you can't get rid of that cod fish smell. But what the hell good does it do us.... Any how liked your short poems ... (Letter 108: WCW LZ, February 17, 1931) Williams's early letters Zukofsky abound with salacious writing. He calls Zukofsky alert life and rare as a virgin without cramps in her thighs. He tells Zukofsky his own flesh, even, seethes my cock burns as work prevents him from writing poems. He mentions offhandedly that some women are delicious smell, like buckwheat and some--reek! Jesus! can hardly sit in the office with them. He wonders if he should describe his profession as obstetrician as Collector of Infant's Cock Cheese. One feels that Williams enjoys teasing Zukofsky with an earthly, off-color sensibility and humor. Zukofsky never returns the humor in kind. Williams was forty-five years old when Zukofsky, nineteen years his junior, wrote him at the urging of that master networker, Ezra Pound. The collection opens with a reply of Williams Zukofsky in 1928 and for the first decade or so it is soon apparent that only Zukofsky saved the letters he received. The first letter from Zukofsky appears five months into the exchange. Fortunately this imbalance is corrected. In 1928 Williams was at the height of his medical career. He owned a house that also contained his office. He and his wife Floss had two teenage sons. He was a busy man and even busier as a prolific poet. There are many uncorrected misspellings in Williams's early letters, suggesting hurriedness. One thinks of him writing letters between patients with his typewriter below his office desk, as he once described himself writing poems. One letter Zukofsky is followed by another asking if the first was sent the correct address. In another letter Williams writes a note on the back meant for a different person, but mails it anyway with a quick apology. In another series of letters Zukofsky asks for the return of a manuscript. Williams can't find it. Zukofsky describes it in detail. Nothing. Finally, Williams finds it but must ask again whether Zukofsky wants it returned or whether he should keep it. Many of the letters discuss the business of being a poet--publishing, editing, reviewing, magazine appearances. Almost instantly a theme of casual visiting occurs which will run throughout their entire correspondence of nearly 35 years: Williams asks Zukofsky over to sit around for an hour and talk or eat. Later, after Zukofsky has married, the invitations are mutual. Many such postcards and notes succumbed the telephone no doubt as the years progressed. But these surviving small exchanges help demonstrate that this was a friendship that extended beyond an alliance of poets--a friendship in which interest in each other's spouses and children and personal lives was active and earnest. Williams wrote Zukofsky in 1935: I think that in our friendship there's much more come and for one am in a better position appreciate it today than was yesterday. In the combined capacity then of social and artistic endeavors, and the business of being an artist, Barry Ahearn's editing is commendable. His notations are informative and plentiful. A scholar of both poets, Ahearn wrote a volume on Williams's early poetry, an introductory book Zukofsky's enormous work A, and also edited the selected letters between Zukofsky and Pound. …
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