Today would have been the birthday of the great William Carlos Williams (WCW) -- slight amount of bias there but I do love him. I also like how the first line of WCW's Brittanica entry reads:
U.S. poet who succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary....
WCW was a doctor in the small city of Rutherford, New Jersey. His medical practice influenced his poetry and gave him a keener sense of humanity, and while Rutherford was close enough to Brooklyn and Manhattan to allow WCW to visit frequently and be part of the city's artistic energy, it was also still fairly rural at that time. This gave WCW some mental and physical breathing room, so that he could truly look at a patch of Queen Anne's lace or white chickens and red wheelbarrows and immortalize them in his own unique way. And even though if you note how WCW's place of birth and death are both Rutherford, New Jersey, he clearly traveled to many other places beyond through his work. And what he told us about his own small world was fascinating as well.
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge,
the double facet cementing the grooved
columns of air--
William Carlos Williams - b. September 17, 1883
d. March 4, 1963
Rutherford, New Jersey
