Tuesday

Sep. 17, 2002

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

by William Carlos Williams

TUESDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2002
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Landscape With The Fall of Icarus," by William Carlos Williams from Collected Poems: 1939-1962, Volume II (New Directions Publishing Corp.).

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning


It's the birthday of country western singer and guitarist Hank Williams, born in Mount Olive West, Alabama (1923).

It's the birthday of Robert Brown Parker, born in Springfield, Massachusetts (1932). He was the author of the "Spenser" detective stories. His first novel, The Godwulf Manuscripts introduced the famous Spenser character, who is a Boston policeman turned private eye investigator after being fired for insubordination. Spenser is also a gourmet chef, and many of Parker's books include descriptions of his dishes. They include: "duck breast sliced on the diagonal and served rare, onion marmalade, brown rice, broccoli tossed with a spoonful of sesame tahini," "buffalo tenderloin marinated in red wine and garlic served with fiddle head ferns, corn pudding, and red potatoes cooked with bay leaf," and "German sausages with green apples sliced dipped in flour and fried in the sausage fat. Served with coarse rye bread and wild strawberry jam."

It's the birthday of Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, born in La Junta, Colorado (1935). In high school he was an accomplished wrestler. He was voted "most likely to succeed." During his young life he was very interested in anything to do with surrealism. He learned magic, ventriloquism, hypnosis, and eventually got into mind-altering drugs. In college, at Stanford, he participated in experiments run by the psychology department. The experiments involved taking certain drugs such as psilocybin and LSD. After the experiments, he worked at the psych ward of the Veterans Administrative Hospital, where his drug experiences caused him to hallucinate about an Indian sweeping the floors. This character ended up being central in his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, about a sane man who enters a mental hospital in order to escape a prison sentence.

It's the birthday of poet William Carlos Williams, born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. HE fell in love with poetry when he was a boy, decided he would become a doctor so he could earn a living. He was a writer. Went to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, met Ezra Pound there. Did his postgraduate work in Leipzig, Germany and then became a pediatrician in his hometown of Rutherford. He was in practice for over forty years; he delivered about two thousand babies. He brought a typewriter to his office and wrote in between appointments. His patients, mostly blue-collar workers and their wives. About his patients he said, "I lived among these people. I knew them, and saw the essential qualities, the humor, the basic tragedy of their lives, and the importance of it. Nobody was writing about them, anywhere, as they ought to be written about."


Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

«

»

  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show