The document provides an overview of William Carlos Williams' relationship with the visual arts and includes summaries and excerpts of several of his poems, including "The Red Wheelbarrow", "Young Love (IX)", "The Rose", and "This is just to say". It also references several modernist artists that Williams was engaged with like Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Juan Gris and includes reproductions of some of their art.

1. William Carlos Williams
and
the Visual Arts

2. Contact—the art and poetry
magazine

3. Marsden Hartley
Photograph by Alfred
Stieglitz
Marsden Hartley, 1915-1916

4. Marsden Hartley
The Aero, 1914

5. “The Red Wheelbarrow”
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

6. Imagination
In his introduction to Spring and All, Williams
declares that he is addressing his poems to the
imagination. He explains that his approach is
meant to tie the writer and reader together,
when he writes the following:
In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so
long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace,
the classic caress of author and reader. We are
one. Whenever I say, “I” I mean also, “you.” And
so, together, as one, we shall begin. (89)

7. “Pot of Flowers”
Charles Demuth,
Tuberoses, 1922

8. John Marin
Lower
Manhattan:
Composing
Derived
from the top
of
Woolworth,
1922

9. John Marin
Brooklyn Bridge, 1912

10. “Young Love (IX)”
What about all this writing?
O "kiki"
O miss margaret jarvis
the backhandspring
I: clean
clean
clean: yes..New York
Wrigley's, appendicitis, John
Marin:
skyscraper soup--
Either that or a bullet!
Once
anything might have happened
You lay relaxed on my knees--
the starry night
spread out warm and blind
above the hospital--
Pah!
It is unclean
which is not straight to the mark--
In my life the furniture eats me
the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion--
they which alone know everything
and snitched on us in the morning--
What to want?
Drunk we go forward surely
Not I
beds, beds, beds
elevators, fruit, night tables
breasts to see, white and blue--
to hold in the hand, to nozzle
It is not onion soup
Your sobs soaked through the walls
breaking the hospital to pieces
Everything
--windows, chairs
obscenely drunk, spinning--
white, blue, orange
--hot with our passion

11. wild tears, desperate rejoinders
my legs, turning slowly
end over end in the air!
But what would you have?
All I said was:
there, you see, it is broken
stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, I wrapped myself round
you--
I watched.
You sobbed, you beat your pillow
you tore your hair
you dug your nails into your sides
I was your nightgown
I watched!
Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city--
flying apart at his approaches
but I merely
caress you curiously
fifteen years ago
and you still
go about the city, they say
patching up sick school children

12. “The Rose”
Juan Gris
Flowers, 1914

13. “The Rose”
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain–
whither? It ends–
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry–
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses–
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses
It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
What
The place between the petal's
edge and the
From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

14. “This is just to say”
This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
Saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold