WILLIAMS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS 155Yet Williams never saw this tree. His sycamore rises bodily from an Alfred
Stieglitz photograph made in New York City, “Spring Showers” (1901). So the
poet wasn’t scribbling words on paper while embracing a tree trunk, en plein
airlike Van Gogh in a wheat field daubing chrome yellow, cobalt blue, crow
black marks. But does this disillusion us—that art should intervene between a
sensuous urban sapling and its vivid written counterpart? In both arts, visual and
verbal, what counts is making it new, as with Cézanne, Matisse, Joyce, Woolf,
Stieglitz. “The objective is not to copy nature,” which is already there, says
Williams, “but to imitate nature” in livening words. Since apathy toward the
physical world is not an option, his young sycamore goes “undulant... waning
... hung with cocoons... bending” to an unstopping end.
Commonplace human nature as well, especially during the Depression years,
can stir with new life. A kind of phased repetition gives the savor of plums
To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her...“In a poem,” said Paul Celan, “what ’s real happens.”
What ’s real happensin “Iris,” where a willful momentum plays off against
oddly uniform stanzas.
a burst of iris so that
come down for
breakfast
we searched through the
rooms for
that
sweetest odor and at
first could not
find its
source then a blue as
of the sea
struck
startling us from among
those trumpeting
petals