William Carlos Williams (1920s) (nat)

I don't get poetry. I try. I really do. But the little things in my brain that would make poetry work are lost to the darkness with whatever would help me read Cormac McCarthy.

The anthology has two selections from Williams: "To Elsie" and "All the Fancy Things." And that's all I can say about the actual poems.

I do want to take the introduction to Williams for task. Without knowing much about the man or his poetry, I think the information is just plain wrongheaded. It quotes, Julio Marzan's (accent on that last a) "groundbreaking study" The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams. He says that Williams's need to understand and possess America is due to his "mixed ancestry" and that

the 'America' in the question is not narrowly the United States, but the hemispheric America that Columbus stumbled onto. Elena's [Williams's mother] being from Puerto Rico, one of the sites where Columbus is believed to have actually set foot, and from a Spanish-speaking line that mingles its blood with the continent, made that 'America' Williams' legacy. He was an American and a 'pure product of America' because his mother was Puerto Rican.

What? He was American because he grew up in the country. I know the pc connotations of the word and that all North and South Americans are "American." But I think the critic is really reaching for it by making the "because his mother was Puerto Rican" and because Columbus might have "set foot" in Puerto Rico that means Williams is a real American. That's just nonsense. Most immigrant fiction (especially that of children born in the US of immigrant parents) is about trying to be more like the people in the US, to fit in with the clothes, the food, the language. Like any kid trying to be cool and brush off the dust of their parents' generation, the children of immigrants are trying to fit in and, more often than not, trying to sever their roots at their own feet. Puerto Rico, despite being a US territory or whatever it's called, is just not like the mainland of the country. And, despite any of that, the critic fails to pay any attention (at least in this quote, which may have been poorly chosen) to the father, who was of Caribbean (no mention of which country) descent but was born in and immigrated to the US from England. That means he's half British (via the Caribbean somehow), which is most certainly not American. I just think it's an incredibly silly and ill-founded argument to say that Williams is trying to be American because his mother was from a territory (and Columbus really has nothing to do with any of it).