141“broken / seedhusks”
Reviving America with William Carlos Williams
hings would really grow for him,” Flossie
said about her husband of fifty years, William Carlos Williams (1883–1963).
He remembered “once when the boys were small taking them in along an old
wood road in our boots from Paterson Avenue among the trees to dig up a wild
azalea. I found a bush and carried it out, the roots and a good hunk of wet sod
resting, in a burlap bag, across my shoulders.”
Unlike Frost, Williams came to style himself an urban pastoral poet, a lo-
cal of Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
During his boyhood and on through World War II, though, Rutherford was
more rural than urban, a small town surrounded by field, farm, marsh, and
woodland. “Imagine!” he says of his early years, “No sewers, no water supply,
no gas, even. Certainly no electricity; no telephone, not even a trolley car. The
sidewalks were of wood... cesspools in the back yard and outhouses... Our
drinking water was rain water collected from the roof.” Willie got a dime an
hour for pumping water down from a wooden tank in the attic.
The poet ’s earliest “thronging memories” preserve his beginnings, his genesis.
From his first year: “Pop was chopping down a small tree. Each time he ’d swing
the axe and I heard it wham into the wood, I’d let out a wild cackle of delight.” He
recalls his uncle shooting a squirrel that fell “bloody, at our feet” from a pine tree,
and unforgettably, a cow running wild that they chased “over the fence, the milk fly-
ing out behind her in our faces.” That sensation alone could breed a budding poet.
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