I wouldn't even try to argue with any of what you say here, Mark. And I 
agree, although Perloff makes a good argument for a sly subtlety in 
'The Young Housewife.' As to how he behaved, well, yeah, pretty bad, & 
who can say differently?

I admit I have never read the plays....

I think there's a rough as well as subtle humor at play in a lot of the 
poems, though, such as all of Spring & All, etc.

And I also suspect that 'we' (& certainly a lot of younger people) miss 
a lot of the social etc context out of which many of those poems emerge 
(not just his, but general work from the early 20th century etc).

Doug
On 29-Oct-05, at 9:47 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:

> Williams was something of a prick about women, even by the standards 
> of his own day. The Young Housewife has always bothered me in that 
> regard. That he's probably aware of what he's doing doesn't make it 
> any prettier.
>
> Rochelle Owens does a pretty savage take on Williams in relation to 
> women in his W.C. Fields in French Light, in New and Selected Poems 
> 1961-1996, published by yours truly.
>
> Far stranger than The Young Housewife is his play The Stain of Love, 
> in which a doctor/poet living with his wife in New Jersey has a heart 
> attack while screwing a patient and dies. The patient has to call the 
> wife to tell her the bad news. The wife becomes a recluse, apparently 
> schizophrenic out of grief, until the poet's ghost comes to her and 
> gives her permission to flirt with the milk man.
>
> Stranger still, Williams' first heart attack, which almost killed him, 
> happened precisely that way, and his lady friend was the one to call 
> Flossie. One can imagine Flossie's reaction in the audience at the 
> play's opening. We tend as writers to forget that those we love may 
> want their private lives to remain private. This seems to me an 
> extreme case.
>
> At 11:13 AM 10/29/2005, you wrote:
>> An interesting point, Mark, that there is a subtle sense of humor 
>> there. Drawn out, so to speak, demanding taking the whole of the 
>> thing in. I don't tend to think of his work in such terms, but, 
>> yeah....
>>
>> On the other hand, Williams could be subtly funny too, only much of 
>> how he is is now lost, apparently, to politically correct (& just 
>> historically ignorant) young readers, if Marjorie Perloff is correct 
>> in her discussion of teaching Williams's 'The Young Housewife' is 
>> anything to go by (in her recent Differentials).
>>
>> Doug
>>
>>
>> On 27-Oct-05, at 5:10 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:
>>
>>> Yup, very much the same club, tho I think there's a great deal of 
>>> humor in Stevens, and not just in The Emperor of Ice Cream and 
>>> Ploughing on Sunday, but check out Peter Quince at the Clavier--in 
>>> fact, a tongue-in-cheekiness is pretty pervasive. A point I can't 
>>> demonstrate with citations, I hasten to add, as Stevens reposes in 
>>> storage with the rest of my non-Cuban books for the nonce.
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>>
>>> At 11:27 AM 10/27/2005, you wrote:
>>>> Well I think both Mark & I are too, Stephen. WCW is the one I 
>>>> return to to read more often. But there are a few poems in the 
>>>> Stevens oeuvre that insist on being granted a sense of greatness by 
>>>> me. On the other hand, I never think of 'humoir' & Stevens at the 
>>>> same time....
>>>>
>>>> If only he'd gone further with the '13 Ways' vision & practice...
>>>>
>>>> Doug
>>>> On 27-Oct-05, at 8:37 AM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> I.... but I also
>>>>>> love Ideas of Order, which includes The Idea of Order at Key 
>>>>>> West. I
>>>>>> treasure a very tattered copy of the first edition which I 
>>>>>> happened on in a
>>>>>> used bookstore years ago.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Mark
>>>>>
>>>>> Not to be "gratuitous frivolous", but given the recent path of 
>>>>> Hurricane
>>>>> Wilma, "The Idea of Order at Key West" today has an odd irony 
>>>>> about it -
>>>>> probably en situ an idea that is on everybody's mind. Governor Jeb 
>>>>> Bush
>>>>> probably has a copy in his office, and the FEMA Director, too.  I 
>>>>> suspect
>>>>> the Jar in Tennessee is flooded, maybe even broke, as well.
>>>>>
>>>>> Every time I try to read Steven's I tend to exhausted by the 
>>>>> work's formal
>>>>> beauty - even the humor, "The Empress of ..." seems like a Circus 
>>>>> without
>>>>> manure stains on its tarps. Of he same era, in the same country, I 
>>>>> am much
>>>>> more at home with Williams.
>>>>>
>>>>> Stephen V
>>>>> Blog: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>>>> Douglas Barbour
>>>> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
>>>> Edmonton  Ab  T6G 0B9
>>>> (780) 436 3320
>>>>
>>>> The blank page
>>>> as merely an interval or
>>>> an intrusion. We could not rescue it
>>>>
>>>> nor could we huddle, as if the page were
>>>> big enough.
>>>>
>>>>                 Kathleen Fraser
>>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
>> Edmonton  Ab  T6G 0B9
>> (780) 436 3320
>>
>> The blank page
>> as merely an interval or
>> an intrusion. We could not rescue it
>>
>> nor could we huddle, as if the page were
>> big enough.
>>
>>                 Kathleen Fraser
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton  Ab  T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320

The blank page
as merely an interval or
an intrusion. We could not rescue it

nor could we huddle, as if the page were
big enough.

		Kathleen Fraser