All of the below are taken from a collection of writings, Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets edited by James E.B. Breslin (1985). First, from an essay, Advice to the Young Poet that originally appeared in View (Oct, 1942):
… Consciously, sitting before a piece of paper with only words as our weapons every trick of the imagination offers itself to defeat us. Our job is to reveal what we are by what we have apprehended. It must be sensual for that is our only contact with the world. And there it IS, crouching within us — a mold packed with the images of ten million minutes before we have learned so much as to drink from a cup.
The art is to get through to the fact and make it eloquent. We have to make a direct contact, from the sense to the object (within us) so that what we disclose is peeled, acute, virulent … But we too easily get to thinking of the effect. The effect! On whom? The effect has nothing whatever to do with the matter. It is an accidental by-product of the work, to focus there is to say that the eye is simply not on the object.
… Avoid scholars but do not avoid their knowledge. Be sure only that it is not conditioned by their assumptions of learning. Infamous blackguards when too far gone “willing” themselves to their maimed attitudes. Remember that as degree men they are no more than clerks locking knowledge in awaiting a master. Get what they have, at your peril! Get it if you have to murder them for it. For without knowledge and its coinage of words, born in you or stolen, you will never raise anything by your abracadabras but straw.
Below was originally in The Harvard Advocate (Feb, 1934):
… I emphasize, it isn’t the mass of difficulties that need unhorse a genius. It is the slipping, sliding wastefulness of useless rushing about. There isn’t much to do. It’s just the flip of a word sometimes. One doesn’t have to live this kind of life, that kind of life. The only thing that has ever seemed to me to be important is never to yield an inch of what is to the mind important — and to let the life take care of itself. Sure, go ahead to Paris. Why not?
“Why not?” Words that have gotten me into more trouble than I care to admit … but which have also gotten me many of the best times of my life.
-Julie
