Transcript

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

A friend recently posted a picture of herself as a child on Instagram with the caption “Back to school energy.” She grins widely in pigtails. She and I are in the middle-of-our-lives. That universal feeling of starting a new school year, though, returns us to a youthful headspace.

Looking at the picture, I remember my mother’s late August ritual of shopping for school clothes, new kicks, and fresh school supplies. A serious nostalgia overcomes me whenever I see composition books with the black and white marbled covers and iconic yellow No. 2 pencils.

So much of my wistfulness is tied to seasons. Early fall air or a brisk winter wind or a gentle warm breeze in late May alert my senses to impending change. But isn’t it true that change is always present, or that something is always just over the horizon? To some extent, being on the verge of a rapidly evolving world puts us at its whim; we are simply along for the ride.

Time is the river that never dries up, that is always in motion. Yet, cycles of elections and global conflict appear as if we are going through the same debates and battles again. For sanity’s sake, it helps to remind myself that we are always moving forward, that change is real even if it seems elusive.

“Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams is a long hybrid poem. Williams shares theoretical claims about poetry in prose passages then intersperses that with lineated sections that reassert the possibility of the imagination to renew our world.

To be honest, I have never taught this whole poem. It’s long and baggy. Like many teachers I have discussed “The Red Wheelbarrow,” probably one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, and one of his shortest — yet, it’s really just a short section of “Spring and All.”

If I were to do so, I would discuss Williams’ impact on contemporary poetry, which is evident here. He contributed so much to our understanding of the value of making poetry out of life. He believed poetry should sound like everyday people, that ordinary speech is an idiom that is special for its own sound. Along with his other famous dictum “no ideas but in things,” Williams made poetry less of an elite art yet still rigorous in its creation.

from “Spring and All”
by William Carlos Williams

                                           CHAPTER 2

      It is spring : life again begins to assume its normal 
appearance as of ,, today ’’.  Only the imagination 
is undeceived. The volcanos are extinct. Coal is 
beginning to be dug again where the fern forests 
stood last night. (If an error is noted here, pay no 
attention to it).

                                       CHAPTER XIX

      I realize that the chapters are rather quick in their 
sequence and that nothing much is contained in any 
one of them but no one should be surprised at this 
today.

                 THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM

      It is spring. That is to say, it is approaching THE 
BEGINNING.

      In that huge and microscopic career of time, as it 
were a wild horse racing in an illimitable pampa 
under the stars, describing immense and microsco-
pic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running 
without a stop for the millionth part of a second 
until he is aged and worn to a heap of skin, bones 
and ragged hoofs — In that majestic progress of life, 
that gives the exact impression of Phidias’ frizze, 
the men and beasts of which, though they seem of 
the rigidity of marble are not so but move, with 
blinding rapidity, though we do not have the time 
to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part 
of an inch every fifty thousand years — In that 
progress of life which seems stillness itself in the mass 
of its movements — at last SPRING is approaching. 

      In that colossal surge toward the finite and the 
capable life has now arrived for the second time at 
that exact moment when in the ages past the des-
truction of the species Homo sapiens occured.

      Now at last that process of miraculous verisimi-
litude, that grate copying which evolution has 
followed, repeating move for move every move that 
it made in the past — is approaching the end.

      Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW.

                                              I

By the road to the contagious hospital 
under the surge of the blue 
mottled clouds driven from the 
northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the 
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish 
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy 
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —

They enter the new world naked, 
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined —
It quickens : clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance — Still, the profound change
has come upon then : rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

                                              II

Pink confused with white 
flowers and flowers reversed 
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back 
into the lamp’s horn

petals aslant darkened with mauve

red where in whorls 
petal lays its glow upon petal
round flamegreen throats

petals radiant with transpiercing light
contending 
                                               above

the leaves
reaching up their modest green
from the pot’s rim

and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss.