William Carlos Williams: ‘Tract’

 I mentioned William Carlos Williams’s poem “Tract” the other day. I’ve mentioned it before.

Williams was capable of many things, and that early poem was different from the kind that I think of as the Williams poem — the kind with a single sharp image, tightly focused.

“Tract” is not that kind of poem. It begins:

            I will teach you my townspeople

            how to perform a funeral. …

The poem is a harangue on how to do it. He wants a rough wagon, rather than a hearse. And really, why would anyone think that the dead need glass windows in a hearse?

It’s almost a wise guy routine. When I read it, the voice in my head is the voice of a Jerseyman I met as a kid in the Navy.

Williams came back to this kind of poem decades later in a section from “Two Pendants: for the Ears.” The narrator’s mother, Elena, is dying in a hospital, and the poem is a record of the all the inane, zany and tasteless things that are said at the end. 

Both poems are near bonkers — and serious. “Tract” advises that mourners should walk behind the dead, exposed “to the weather as to grief.”

            Or do you think you can shut grief in?

I don’t think we humans can do much with grief. I’m not sure, but I think it’s the strongest force we contend with. I like both poems. 

• Sources: You can find “Tract” at Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45503/tract

I’ve been marveling at Charles Tomlinson’s edition of William Carlos Williams’s Selected Poems; New York: New Directions Books, 1985. “Tract” is on pp. 18-20 and a section of “Two Pendants: for the Ears” is on pp. 187-96.

For more on “Tract,’ see “Marking the Day: W.C. Williams,” Sept. 17, 2022.