Bill Williams can do the mash potato better than all of us

Everytime i heard william carlos williams refered to in a letter he was called bill. I tend to read so many of these letters that I start thinking of these writers by the first name. I don't know why. Bill is a doctor. A liver of life. He sees that pain that is so hard to come by with a clean bill of mental health. And he was so gentle. He was like linen. I imagine his poems in the morning or in transit at night. the wheelbarrow is morning, queen anne's lace? not sure, plums, the genius of this house. I guess i say night in transit because when I was younger I saw a documentary about him, and there was alot of stock doctor at night montages going on.

Williams wrote short poems, but he had huge ambition. I see this ambition in paterson. This long poem is powerful and raw. When I was starting writing, there were things in paterson I wanted to learn how to do like:
***
*s*
*o*
*d*
*a*
***
he did it with such ease, as if he didnt even know there was a visual device being created by the text. that is what i envied, like the way I envied olson for his use of the page in maximus (all the white space is inspiring).

I don't really know why bill wrote his whole life. it is against the grain to consistently write, have a fultime job, have love in family and wife, a place in the community. This fact alone, makes williams one of the rare infultrators. He was able to get into the grit of life and communicate it to us poets in our rooms looking for work. He had one foot in real life and one in the world of writing. Powerful man.

He has a sweet voice. I imagine him as the most sincere person I ever met. The kind of guy that was an old man in mind, before the body caught up and his wisdom started to make sense.