Thursday, July 16, 2009

Poems, "made of words"

"Now you notice what I said: there is no subject that the modern poem cannot approach. There is no selected material. It's what you do with a work of art. It's what you put on the canvas and how you put it on that makes the picture. It's how the words fit in. Poems are not made of thoughts, beautiful thoughts. It's made of words, pigments, put on. Here, there, made, actually."

William Carlos Williams, to an audience at Harvard University, December 4, 1951
PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania is an audio archive for poetry. It offers, among other treasures, what appear to be all extant recordings of William Carlos Williams.

{The above passage is my transcription.]

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