Williams was certain his friends and neighbors (and in particular the mentally handicapped young nursemaid, Elsie, who came over from time to time to help Flossie clean house) were out of contact with the "American place," and the image that came into his mind was that of a driverless automobile careening out of control. The doctor's well-known directive, from poem XVII, is to steer clear of empty material aspirations and establish roots in "the earth under our feet":
some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
Williams' grouse "to" Elsie, among those Zukofsky selected for the elder poet's Collected Poems: 1921-31 (1934), prescribes this remedial "grounding" act as an alternative to self-destruction.
|
From "Seeing the Signs: Objectivist Premonitions in Williams' Spring and All." Sagetrieb 8.3