Published in Issue 64.1: Winter 2025
You can purchase our Winter issue here
For William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
Stroke: insult to the brain, leaking blood; insult to the right eye, now blind;
insult to the right hand, now dead; insult of the X-rays, lighting up the skull
like a bulb; insult of doctors telling him what he already knew, the poet-doctor
who brought three thousand infants to light by the river and the silk mills
of Paterson; insult of the black bag open and empty after the last house call;
insult of the bills clogging up the mailbox, sliding off the kitchen table.
The report of Loyalty Data in his FBI file had its own beats, words like
the stutter of tommy guns in the G-man movies of Hoover’s imagination:
Chairman of the Local Committee for Medical Help to Loyalist Spain,
State Committee of the New Jersey Civil Liberties Union, American
Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, Free Speech Rally Wednesday
at Carnegie Hall for the Hollywood Ten, New Masses, Partisan Review.
A friend told the G-men: His charitable nature would explain his membership
in doubtful organizations. The radio demagogue railed about the poet
who jumped on the I Love Russia Trolley and stayed aboard for the ride.
The G-men interrogated the chief of police, the editor of the newspaper
in his hometown, his neighbors on Ridge Road. The appointment as
Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress melted away, delay after
delay, the poet waiting for word as if lost again in the labyrinth of hospitals.
May 1953: The poet glanced at the white sheet in the typewriter, the blank
calendar on the wall, nowhere but ice to plant his feet, nowhere but ice to fall.
He struck the keys left-handed, one finger at a time, cursing all the typos
and the strikethroughs, not for a poem but a gig, tapping out the signals at sea
to Swarthmore College. To whome it may concern: Since hearing from the man
charged with securing XXXX speakers for coming events. I have mislaid his name
and don’t XX know how to establish communication with him. There is I am
told a Professor Hoffman on your English faculty who might be able to help me.
I would appreXciate, other means failing, being put in contact with him. Thank you.
He left the letter e at the end of whom; he could not turn that wanderer away.
At the foot of the postcard, he carved his name in poet’s ink left-handed,
the tall W in William, the hunchbacked C in Carlos, the shaky W in Williams,
one man speaking poems, one man walking on a cane, one man sitting down.
Two years later, from his insulted brain would swim the words: It is difficult /
to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what
is found there. The doctor knew about the strokes to come, that his brain would
one day stop speaking to his body, like furious lovers sleepless back-to-back.
The poet knew about the wrong hand rapping the keys, one eye burning all night,
the typos, the strikethroughs, the curses, the gig, the poem, the poem, the poem.
Purchase our Winter 2025 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books. His latest collection of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has also received the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His forthcoming collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows, will be published by Knopf in 2025.
