A note about the work “Insult” from Martín Espada for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: “Insult” is about poet William Carlos Williams, and the drive to survive, even transcend the “insults” of our lives to carry out our work and make our voices heard. Williams was one of the twentieth century’s most important poets, receiving the first National Book Award in Poetry in 1950 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. He was also a practicing physician in Rutherford and Paterson, New Jersey for four decades. In August 1952, Williams suffered a massive stroke that left his upper right side paralyzed. (The medical term is an “insult to the brain.”) He retired from medicine and spent two months hospitalized for depression from February to April 1953. His appointment as Consultant to the Library of Congress—today’s Poet Laureate—was revoked after an FBI investigation into false charges that he was a communist. The organizations, affiliations, and publications listed in the poem come from the poet’s declassified FBI file. I also quote a May 1953 postcard sent by Williams to Swarthmore College in search of a reading, typed with one good eye and the “wrong” hand. Williams would go on to produce some of his major work in the 1950s, including, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” where he wrote: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” The postcard generated my poem, but so, too, did conversations and emails with friend and Williams biographer Paul Mariani.