The Hot Pink Pussy

Years ago, when I made my first tentative forays into reading modern poetry I really got into William Carlos Williams — a poet whose work is completely obligatory for aspiring American poets. At first I really loved his stuff but, eventually, after a year or two, he fell out of favor with me. I had opted for the obscure intellectual plenitude of Wallace Stevens and his contemporary progeny, such as Ashberry. When W.C.W’s poems were placed beside the latter’s colorful labyrinths, his Imagism simply came to seem shallow and superficial to me; I even developed the idea that his poetic ’shallowness’ was due to the same mind-set that made him so suited to be a doctor, since physicians are, taken as a group, notoriously practical (and I still think there is something to this). But a few days ago I returned to his work for the first time in years and most of it is struck me with fresh and salutary force. It seems like I had never truly read him until now. Indeed, the good doctor is in a league of his own, the supreme word-painter. And what I now find most appealing about his best work is precisely the absence of maddening duality that has been present in all previous Western poetry; unlike with Stevensian poets, the reader doesn’t spend the whole time trying to wrestle himself out of linguistic bramble.

Certainly I had never truly appreciated his The Red Wheel Barrow until yesterday. A long time back, during the first creative writing course I ever took I had a quasi-famous (”fame” is a meaningless description of any contemporary poet) teacher who told me that the poem was actually about language. I tried to make sense of this for a long time, but I now see that he was simply wrong: it’s about the goddamn wheelbarrow. Anyway, while I was showering this morning I was running through the poem in my head and came up with a couple different versions of my own. The one I’ve included below probably wasn’t the best one but is at least faithful to the syllable count.

So much depends

upon

a hot pink

pussy

glazed with warm

fluids

beside the dark

anus.