Paul Wilson was born in Lacombe, Alberta and in addition to his five collections of poetry, has contributed to his city of Regina, Saskatchewan and beyond as a key cultural worker, editor, and publisher.
Sarah Dowling, Michelle Taransky, and Central California.
Poets Sarah Dowling (until recently of Philadelphia; now of Seattle; originally of Regina, Saskatchewan) and Michelle Taransky (of Philadelphia; originally of Camden, New Jersey) used Google Hangout to visit my William Carlos Williams class last month to talk about their relationship to WCW, modernism, and Spring and All.
The 1923 edition, left; and the 1970 edition, right, courtesy of Silliman's Blog.
I take this commentary post title from Robert Duncan, but I write this as I reread William Carlos Williams’s 1923 long poem Spring and All for class tomorrow. Since I am teaching Williams within a teacher training program this summer, we tend to pay special attention to what Williams has to say about education and the academy. Spring and All’s attack on the “age of copying” is of interest this week. Near the end of the poem, the rules of standard punctuation and capitalization break down as Williams considers how knowledge is transmitted to the student in what he calls a “dead state”:
The whole field of education is affected — There is no end of detail that is without significance. Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge — in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it. This would clarify his field at once — He would then see the use of data But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative. nothing could be more ridiculous. To data there is no end. There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the use of knowledge — It is the imagination that —
Geomantic riposte: 'The Invisible Library'
Paul Wilson was born in Lacombe, Alberta and in addition to his five collections of poetry, has contributed to his city of Regina, Saskatchewan and beyond as a key cultural worker, editor, and publisher.