10 Comments
Nov 10Liked by Joseph Bottum

I have to confess that I dislike Williams. I assume it's me; I much prefer formal poetry - but there is quite a bit of free verse that I do enjoy. So I don't know. This one really leaves me cold, but its first line did remind me of Shakespeare's "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" . . . which is what I expected it to connect with. But it didn't . . . Ah, well, everyone can't like the same things! I do appreciate your discussion of it, which helps with understanding it.

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Nov 9Liked by Sally Thomas

Thanks for this illumination, Sally. I may have over-read religious S&M notes here.

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Nov 8Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum

When we were dating, I'd find wild stands of Queen Anne's Lace by the side of the road and bring them to my future wife. I still bring them to her when I find them, though we now live in the city. I can usually find them under the elevated train tracks, or in vacant lots...

I wish you would repopulate your podcast feed...

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Nov 8·edited Nov 8Liked by Sally Thomas

Off-topic: here's my blog post about Sally Thomas and Michah Mattix's anthology _Christian Poetry in America Since 1940_.

https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2024/11/sally-thomas-and-micah-mattix-editors-christian-poetry-in-america-since-1940.html

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I don't see a link.

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Duh--I did the ctrl-c but not the ctrl-v. Thank you, it's there now.

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I have an edition of Williams's Selected Poems that I bought fifty-plus years ago and had never done more than browse in. A couple of years ago I decided to read it cover-to-cover, marking the poems I thought I would want to return to. They were definitely a minority, and this was not one of them. Having read your analysis, I respect it more, but still don't especially like it. It has some of the characteristics that I think were mistakes in modernism, notably a tendency to riddle-like obscurity, without compensatory musical appeal. I'm still not sure exactly what "pious wish to whiteness gone over" means.

It probably started to go wrong for me with "wild carrot," because I didn't know that's the name of the plant. So that's my fault.

I think the collection is organized chronologically, and the two poems immediately preceding this one, "Pastoral" and "El Hombre," did make the cut. The latter is one of those sort of cute very short things like the ones that get quoted a lot, the wheelbarrow and the plums (or is it peaches?).

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And the former is just beautiful.

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This is fine work, as usual. Thank you, Sally! But I beg to differ about one thing. The flower with the purple mole at its center is Queen Anne’s lace. "The Queen Anne’s lace “flower” is actually a compound flower with thousands of tiny white flowers in lacy, flat-topped clusters (umbels) with a dark, purplish center."

I decided to investigate because it would mar the poem to think the author made a mistake in the powerful image he used. An image I actually find a bit creepy to think that wherever she is touched his hand leaves a purple bruise.

The article from which the quote is taken has a photo of the purple center: https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/queen-annes-lace-daucus-carota/

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The bruise thing sort of bothered me, too, just in that it didn't quite seem to make sense. Also I'm so unobservant that I never noticed or at least didn't recall the purplish center of the flower. Sorry, compound flower. :-)

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