Sunday, January 13, 2008

the unnatural is natural

A favorite William Carlos Williams poem:

"Lines" (1921)

Leaves are graygreen,
the glass broken, bright green.


That's it. Nothing more. A slight thing, eh?

In 1999 and 2000, when I taught my English 88 course all online, I prepared a 2-minute audio recording of me and the poet Shawn Walker discussing this poem, as a way to get our students to begin to understand Williams' passion for the unnatural as a form of the natural.

The sound file is in RealAudio format: LINK