NYSL: Herbert Leibowitz on "The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams"

Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" provides a new perspective on the life and poetry of the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, a key American writer who led one of the more eventful literary lives of the twentieth century. Friends with most of the contemporary innovators of his era - Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky, among others - Williams made a radical break with the modernist tradition by seeking to invent an entirely fresh and singularly American poetic, whose subject matter derived from the everyday lives of the citizens and poor immigrant communities of northern New Jersey. His poems mirrored both the conflicts of his own life and the convulsions that afflicted American society - two world wars, a rampaging flu pandemic, and the Great Depression. Leibowitz's biography offers a compelling description of the work that inspired a seminal, controversial movement in American verse, as well as a rounded portrait of a complicated man: pugnacious and kindly, ambitious and insecure, self-critical and imaginative.

Herbert Leibowitz is the founder, publisher and editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, one of the important review venues for poetry. A Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate Center, he served as President of the National Book Critics Circle from 1992 to 1994 and is a member of PEN. His published works include The Poetry of Hart Crane: An Introduction, Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography, and, as editor, a collection of love poems by Williams and Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• The New York Society Library
• Herbert Leibowitz
• William Carlos Williams
• 2011
• December