Dear Ignatow:
 |
 |
I wrote you an indifferent letter today. It meant well but didn’t say anything, I going to give you criticism of your poems. You may know but I doubt if you know how good they are—I was going to say how good you are getting to be. I doubt that you fully get it. You don’t get to be a poet by wishing it—nor by “telling the truth”. You get to be a poet by writing poems, small machines that don’t have waste parts to them but that hit hard at the mark and are therefore beautiful”.
My real interest began to pick up when I read “To a Friend Who has Moved to the East Side”. That stopped me cold. But then you ran off again into patter. No good.
But toward the end of Part 4 you really started to click. My Neighbor. Nurse. You begin to feel your materials in these poems. I didn’t much care for the “nothing” poems to do nothing. To be lazy. That’s secondary stuff. It’s all right. Sort of Chinese philosopher mood but—nothing to me. And toward the end I got not to like Steiglitz, couldn’t go all the adulation (“not that he asked for it but neither did he drive it away from himself) I got fed up. I think you fool yourself not a little there.
When you got to Part 5: Come—you really began to make. Those are first rate pieces of work. They are really “made”—you really begin to put words together and make them move—to a purpose.
I live in a matrix of theory. I know it is theory, but I know it is important. It mustn’t get mixed up with poems and I’m not going to mess you up with my personal biases: but I know why you are getting good and let me tell you one thing: it does NOT live in conventional patterns. You have, earlier in the book, a tendency to slip over into conventional drivel. It’s all right. If you want to sing, to sing. I understand the urge. But, hell, you gotta sing “New” not old stuff. You do sing.
Your excellence is the new. That’s all I’m going to say. If you feel that you have been helped by my work, so much the better for both of us. I’ll say here that I have been helped by this book of yours. We’ll meet sometime and maybe there’ll be a chance to say more. Something is growing up around here.
You’ll write when you feel like it. Write more, it is a great pleasure for me to read your best work. Thank you.
Sincerely
(signature) Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to writing, Williams was a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital’s chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known as St. Mary’s General Hospital, paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states “We walk the wards that Williams walked”.[1]
David Ignatow was a American poet and teacher, born in Brooklyn, New York on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, aged 83, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego. Ignatow’s many honors include a Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the John Steinbeck Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award “for a lifetime of creative effort.” He received the Shelley Memorial Award (1966), the Frost Medal (1992), and the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) of the Poetry Society of America.[4
Used by permission of the William Carlos Williams MD Estate in care of the Jean V. Naggar
Literary Agency, Inc. (permissions@jvnla.com)