Al Filreis convened Imaad Majeed (in Colombo, Sri Lanka), Irene Torra Mohedano (in Paris, France), and Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué (in Chicago, USA) to talk about William Carlos Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital,” the well-known first poem in the disjunctive, manifesto-like, nonsequential sequence called Spring and All, first published in Paris in 1923. Was this a poem recalling the recent, desperate time of the Spanish flu pandemic? Can “Spring and All” teach us something about our own birthing springtime, emerging eerily without us this time around? Why is this poem taught in medical schools? How lifeless is a thing “lifeless in appearance”?
