The Last Words of my English Grandmother

(Born Emily Dickenson, at Chichester, England, 1837; died, at Grace Hospital, New Haven, Dec. 1, 1920)

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed -

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat -
They're starving me -
I'm all right - I won't go
to the hospital - No, no, no

Give me something to eat!
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please -
She smiled. Yes,
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please -

V. 1 - 3

# The Cure

Sometimes I envy others, fear them
a little too, if they write well.
For when I cannot write I'm a sick man
and want to die. The cause is plain.

But they have no access to my sources.
Let them write then as they may and
perfect it as they can they will never
come to the secret of that form

interknit with the unfathomable ground
where we walk daily and from which
among the rest you have sprung
and opened fragile to my hand -

W. C. Williams

ny

Dear Whittemore:

I've got a subject, you write, that I don't know anything about. It may have been covered a lot before but it certainly should be covered right now in Furioso. Propaganda in Poetry. Poetry that tries to influence people. In other words, just what is the function of poetry? What has a poetry magazine to do with a war, with a country's policy, with a new bunch of quintuplets, etc? In publishing Furioso I think that's one of the things we've been trying to find out, and so far I haven't found out anything. Pound says that everything he's written has economic implications. Everything (nearly) that Genevieve Taggard writes says "better read Marx". In other words most of the modern poets think they're pointing toward something which they believe is right. And I want to know if they've picked the right medium. Why not write an article for Liberty? My idea is that poetry deals with the generalities of human conduct, with questions that are important for more than ten minutes, with movements greater than the French occupation of the Saar Basin. Then all I can do is say, So what? I wonder what's the good of writing an article for Liberty either, except that we're still a neutral country. I've read several poems of yours that are precisely about what I'm trying to get at. etc. etc. - To all of this my answer would be, Yes.

Take an extreme case, take the concepts that walk around as T. S. Eliot. We know they are completely worthless so that aside from Eliot's being a poet we do not have to pay much attention to him. He is strictly limited even as a poet but for all that we may speak of him as a good poet, good, that is, far beyond his other limitations.

2

That, I think, if true, would leave a certain irreducible
minimum which we may designate as the poetic quantum.

Taggard may entertain certain concepts but these do not by
any stretch of the imagination make her a good writer. Pound, you
say, believes that all his writings have an economic implication. So,
by the way, does the peanut vendor at a ball game. It is obvious that
unless Pound's writings have other implication, the poetic quantum, he
would be of far less use to us as Pound than a lucid text on the sub-
ject he believes he is expounding, the lucid text he is always dream-
ing of. Should his concepts ever clarify themselves, that is to say,
his economic concepts, and he be able to transcribe them . . it
might be the end of him. Horrible thought.

Peter Cooper said a number of years ago, Exorbitant rent
(commonly called interest) silently but surely devours the substance
of the people. - I think this, in one sentence, says more succinctly
than Pound ever dreamed, everything he ever conceived of economics.
But Peter Cooper was not a poet. Pound is a poet, so we forgive him.

We all like to believe that we are master minds. But what
men seldom seem to learn is that the end of poetry is a poem; I don't
know a thing about the value of a poem as such or of a hunk of gold
as such or of a man himself as such but I do know *that*.

Some exposure to the sharp edge of the mechanics of living -
such as blindness, political exile, a commercial theatre to support
and be supported by, a profession out of necessity, dire poverty,
defiance of the law, insanity - is necessary to the poet. It doesn't
matter what the form is, these are all of a class, to give the poet
his sense of precision in the appreciation of values, what is com-
monly spoken of as "reality". They force him to observe and to

3

weigh, they prompt his choice of the means of expression and give
his words pungency and a charge. In themselves they have nothing
to do with poetry.

Notice clearly, this is the sole use of these focusing
stimulae; they are not in any way related to the poet's function
as a poet. He must know this without possibility of a doubt. The
end of poetry is something apart from all that.

A blind singer for bed and board, an altar thief, a starv-
ling - if they for one moment forget, prodded as they may be by
death, disease or economic pressures, that their work as poets is
completely alien to all that - if they permit themselves to be
caught in the snare of their own lives and let that affect their
decisions touching their workmanship in the faintest possible man-
ner - they are lost. It is a balance as to the push of reality's
either stimulating them to excellence or killing them outright -
but they must never forget that the real significance passes be-
yond such incidentals. It lies imbedded indestructably in the body
of the poem itself, if . . . !

This being true the poet who mistakes the function of the
propaganda he practices, taking it over-zealously to heart, is his
own dupe. Let's have no more jerked measures. To the poet it is
plain that all stimulae are and must be one, he is the Jesuit of
his own mind, the end always justifies the means if he produce a
good poem. But he must be more resourceful than all that, he must
still remain a Jesuit even in giving up the Church. No matter what
the propaganda and no matter how it touches him, it can be of no
concern to the poet. To hell with it as soon as he has finished
with it, when it's worn out he'll find some other propaganda.

4

Be the Shakespeare of your own day, write well, skilfully,
covertly, deceitfully, with every faculty under a hood or blanket
concealed from public view, write of that which is nearest to the
skin (to hell with the heart!) but write well.

So what, huh? After all, man being human must believe
himself at times a great conceptualist, (read your Spanish lit.:
"just savages" E.P.) at least for home consumption, or lie down and
die of disgust at the sights he sees about him. I don't blame any-
one for wanting to teach his fellows to "blow hard" when Papa wields
the rag. 's O.K. by me.

Then occasionally we get someone who can write. It's a
double entendre that goes something like this:

See the little angels
Ascend up! ascend up!
O! see the little angels
Ascend up to Heaven!

There's something deeper to it than most people imagine. Ha!

In Sisterly Fashion

The ugly woman clutched
her lover round the neck
her skin was white as snow
as she wept softly to herself
knowing her lack of beauty -
like the sting of death -
by which she praised in
sisterly fashion your fitted
limbs your honeyed breath

W. C. Williams