WILLIAMS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS 159Alongside his radical bent, as with nature ’s firstlings in Spring and All,
rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken—along with that biologic revolution, Williams felt political incitement too.
Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution outraged him, and especially the Spanish Civil
War, García Lorca’s murder, then Guernica, so that he chaired his local Com-
mittee for Medical Help to Loyalist Spain. Williams loved García Lorca “stem-
ming exclusively from Iberian sources,” not northern European, and the Chilean
Pablo Neruda “who collected / seashells on his / native beaches.”
The native stimulus always grabbed him, so when in 1950 a Paterson twenty-
three-year-old came seeking “some kind of new speech,” Williams put Allen
Ginsberg’s letter right into Paterson. When Robert Lowell applauded Paterson,
Williams congratulated him on finding “a way to mention local place names”
in poems such as “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” Later Lowell went
to Europe. Williams wrote: “Come back enriched in experience but come back
... The trend has always been toward denial of origins, assertion of origins is
the more fertile basis for thought—and technique.”
All his life he dwelt in one place and spent thousands of days traversing
the region on house calls. Before World War II and long before environment
became a catchword, with suburban sprawl wiping out the semiwild country-
side he loved, Williams put his flexible lines to use in “The Defective Record.”
Developers are cutting a riverbank, “killing whatever was / there before,” crav-
ing land
to build a house
on to build a
house on to build a house on
to build a house
on to build a house on to...This worsened during and after the war. Travelling the Northwest in 1948, he
saw how much “this beast man has devastated.” Near home, highways destroyed
the woods and industrial waste fouled the rivers. A “pustular scum, a decay,
a choking / lifelessness,” he notes in Paterson, “An acrid, a revolting stench,”
though maybe just once
Where the dredge dumped the fill,
something, a white hop-clover
with cordy roots (of iron) gripped
the sand in its claws—and blossomed
massivelySomething, at least, can “grip down and begin to awaken.”