Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Kora in Hell: Improvisations
    Kora in Hell: Improvisations
    Kora in Hell: Improvisations
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Kora in Hell: Improvisations

    By William Carlos Williams

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Kora in Hell: Improvisations, William Carlos Williams said, "is a unique book, not like any other I have written. It is the book I have enjoyed referring to more than any of the others. It reveals myself to me and perhaps that is why I have kept it to myself...I am indebted to Ezra Pound for the title. We had talked about Kora, the Greek parallel of Persephone, the legend of Springtime captured and take to Hades. I thought of myself as Springtime and I felt I was on my way to Hell (but didn't go very far). This is what the Improvisations were trying to say...."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlackmore Dennett
    Release dateFeb 18, 2019
    ISBN9788832520705
    Kora in Hell: Improvisations
    Author

    William Carlos Williams

    William Carlos Williams was an American author closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician, practicing both pediatrics and general medicine.

    Read more from William Carlos Williams

    Related to Kora in Hell

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      Reservation Dogs

      May 10, 2019

      Reservation Dogs
      9 min read

    • Article

      When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Sound of America

      Aug 21, 2017

      One of the pleasures of Walls’s Thoreau is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist. The post When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Soun

      7 min read

    • Article

      Pilgrim Bell

      Aug 18, 2021

      The self I am today.Involves me.As a lake. Involves.Its cattails.It bears me.Tolerates.My cotton. I would prefer.Not. To be outlived.By anyone. I reserve the right.To refuse. Enchantment. The fables I tell.Always end. Wrong.The good archer.Dead.By a

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Rare and Beautiful Creature: On the Life and Work of Frank Stanford

      Sep 22, 2017

      It seems fair to suggest that the anxiety of influence—a creative necessity for so many poets—may have failed to penetrate the mobile-homed hamlets where Stanford roamed, rambled, mused, and wrote with prolific intensity. The post A Rare and Beautifu

      5 min read

    • Article

      Lady VENGEANCE

      Mar 6, 2020

      Lady VENGEANCE
      8 min read

    • Article

      Raising the Dead

      Jul 3, 2019

      Raising the Dead
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mary McCarthy at the 92nd Street Y

      May 18, 2017

      Chris Kraus reflects on Mary McCarthy’s reading, in November 1963, from her novel ‘The Group.’

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Living Mandelstam

      May 1, 2020

      It is common for English-language accounts of Mandelstam’s life to begin with an account of his death. Consider the first sentence of a twosentence biography that appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2016 to preface a translation by Andrew Dav

      13 min read

    • Article

      Queer Bubbles

      Jul 6, 2017

      Queer Bubbles
      7 min read

    • Article

      White Noise

      Jan 9, 2023

      White Noise
      5 min read

    • Article

      Joseph Cassara Wants His Characters to Break Your Heart

      Feb 1, 2018

      The Puerto Rican drag queen is a recognizable personification of New York in the 1980s, the neighbor (and opposite) of the white, Gordon Gekko-style master of the universe with his slicked-back hair. In The House of Impossible Beauties, debut novelis

      12 min read

    • Article

      Jim Moore

      Jun 8, 2021

      A man in a mask and wearing a fat tank on his back is bent to the door of the parking garage.He is spraying and wiping, wiping and spraying. Another man with no mask and no hair shuffle-dances around him,gives a wave, crosses the street, tries to ope

      1 min read

    • Article

      Something For Everyone

      Mar 4, 2021

      Segora International Writing Competitions 2021 has categories for poetry, short stories, vignettes and one-act plays. The annual creative writing contest is run by Poetry Prose and Plays. • Poetry: Enter original, unpublished poems up to 50 lines. Th

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Kora in Hell

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Kora in Hell - William Carlos Williams

      XXVII

      Prologue

      The Return of the Sun

      Her voice was like rose-fragrance waltzing in the wind. She seemed a shadow, stained with shadow colors, Swimming through waves of sunlight ...

      THE SOLE precedent I can find for the broken style of my prologue is Longinus on the Sublime and that one farfetched.

      When my mother was in Rome on that rare journey forever to be remembered, she lived in a small pension near the Pincio Gardens. The place had been chosen by my brother as one notably easy of access, being in a quarter free from confusion of traffic, on a street close to the park, and furthermore the tram to the American Academy passed at the corner. Yet never did my mother go out but she was in fear of being lost. By turning to the left when she should have turned right, actually she did once manage to go so far astray that it was nearly an hour before she extricated herself from the strangeness of every new vista and found a landmark.

      There has always been a disreputable man of picturesque personality associated with this lady. Their relations have been marked by the most rollicking spirit of comradeship. Now it has been William, former sailor in Admiral Dewey’s fleet at Manila, then Tom O’Rourck who has come to her to do odd jobs and to be cared for more or less when drunk or ill, their Penelope. William would fall from the grape arbor much to my mother’s amusement and delight and to his blustering discomfiture or he would stagger to the back door nearly unconscious from bad whiskey. There she would serve him with very hot and very strong coffee, then put him to scrubbing the kitchen floor, into his suddy-pail pouring half a bottle of ammonia which would make the man gasp and water at the eyes as he worked and became sober.

      She has always been incapable of learning from benefit or disaster. If a man cheat her she will remember that man with a violence that I have seldom seen equaled, but so far as that could have an influence on her judgment of the next man or woman, she might be living in Eden. And indeed she is, an impoverished, ravished Eden but one indestructible as the imagination itself. Whatever is before her is sufficient to itself and so to be valued. Her meat though more delicate in fiber is of a kind with that of Villon and La Grosse Margot:

      Vente, gresle, gelle, j’ai mon pain cuit!

      Carl Sandburg sings a Negro cotton picker’s song of the boll weevil. Verse after verse tells what they would do to the insect. They propose to place it in the sand, in hot ashes, in the river, and other unlikely places but the boll weevil’s refrain is always: That’ll be ma HOME! That’ll be ma HOOME!

      My mother is given over to frequent periods of great depression being as I believe by nature the most light-hearted thing in the world. But there comes a grotesque turn to her talk, a macabre anecdote concerning some dream, a passionate statement about death, which elevates her mood without marring it, sometimes in a most startling way.

      Looking out at our parlor window one day I said to her: We see all the shows from here, don’t we, all the weddings and funerals? (They had been preparing a funeral across the street, the undertaker was just putting on his overcoat.) She replied: Funny profession that, burying the dead people. I should think they wouldn’t have any delusions of life left. W.—Oh yes, it’s merely a profession. M.—Hm. And how they study it! They say sometimes people look terrible and they come and make them look fine. They push things into their mouths! (Realistic gesture) W.—Mama! M.—Yes, when they haven’t any teeth.

      By some such dark turn at the end she raises her story out of the commonplace: Look at that chair, look at it! [The plasterers had just left.] If Mrs. J. or Mrs. D. saw that they would have a fit. W.—Call them in, maybe it will kill them. M.—But they’re not near as bad as that woman, you know, her husband was in the chorus—has a little daughter Helen. Mrs. B., yes. She once wanted to take rooms here. I didn’t want her. They told me: ‘Mrs. Williams, I heard you’re going to have Mrs. B. She is particular.’ She said so herself. Oh no! Once she burnt all her face painting under the sink.

      Thus, seeing the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but with great intensity of perception, my mother loses her bearings or associates with some disreputable person or translates a dark mood. She is a creature of great imagination. I might say this is her sole remaining quality. She is a despoiled, molted castaway but by this power she still breaks life between her fingers.

      Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Arensberg at a small place on 63rd Street I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were about, those roughly classed at that time as cubists: Gleizes, Man Ray, Demuth, Duchamp—all of whom were then in the city. He replied by saying that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise novelty and, since the pictorial artist was under discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation, is good art. Thus, according to Duchamp, who was Arensberg’s champion at the time, a stained-glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ.

      We returned to Arensberg’s sumptuous studio where he gave further point to his remarks by showing me what appeared to be the original of Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase. But this, he went on to say, is a full-sized photographic print of the first picture with many new touches by Duchamp himself and so by the technique of its manufacture as by other means it is a novelty!

      Led on by these enthusiasms Arensberg has been an indefatigable worker for the yearly salon of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. I remember the warmth of his description of a pilgrimage to the home of that old Boston hermit who, watched over by a forbidding landlady (evidently in his pay), paints the cigar-box-cover-like nudes upon whose fingers he presses actual rings with glass jewels from the five-and-ten-cent store.

      I wish Arensberg had my opportunity for prying into jaded households where the paintings of Mama’s and Papa’s flowertime still hang on the walls. I propose that Arensberg be commissioned by the Independent Artists to scour the country for the abortive paintings of those men and women who without master or method have evolved perhaps two or three unusual creations in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1