The coincidence of ending my list of favorite writers with Dr. Williams M.D., is appropriate. All but eight of the writers I cite are American, and one of his goals was the establishment of an authentic American voice. Or, as it turns out, voices. And the majority of the writers are from the second half of the 20th century or later.
Williams was an influence on many of them, and he was generous in his encouragement, even if he had met them just once.
I first encountered him as an assignment for a contemporary poetry I was taking at the beginning of my junior year of college. I opened my textbook on a rainy Saturday morning while visiting a friend at another college in Indiana and was soon entranced. The reliance on imagery was unlike anything I’d previously read. Returning to them is always refreshing and unexpectedly surprisingly.
I have a fondness, too, for his short prose, often drafted on a hidden typewriter between patients back in an earlier era of medical care. I’m not sure I’d call them short stories, not in the sense of being deeply crafted like those of Dubus or Lee I’ve mentioned or of being abstracted from real individuals, but they are direct flashes of humanity.
What makes him stand apart from the other big figures of the emerging American poetry – Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Edward Arlington Robinson, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, among them? His form, for one thing, openly reflected American voice patterns, as did his subject matter, arising from everyday circumstances of the common people, for another. I appreciate Kenneth Burke’s insight that poetry was, for Williams, “equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.” I’ll extend that to the fiction I love, too.
Looking at his upbringing, filled with Spanish and some elite schooling, I more fully appreciate the fact that he is the one who worked to free us to listen to our own voices rather than some nasal, high-pitched affection for our culture.
Jnana's Red Barn 