Spring and All by C. D. Wright, William Carlos Williams

discover when a work is to be taken as coming from this source and when from that. When discovering a work it would be — If it is poetry it means this and only this — and if it is prose it means that and only that. Anything else is a confusion, silly and bad practice.
    I believe this is possible as I believe in the main that Marianne Moore is of all American writers most constantly a poet — not because her lines are invariably full of imagery they are not, they are often diagramatically informative, and not because sheclips her work into certain shapes — her pieces are without meter most often — but I believe she is most constantly a poet in her work because the purpose of her work is invariably from the source from which poetry starts — that it is constantly from the purpose of poetry. And that it actually possesses this characteristic, as of that origin, to a more distinguishable degree when it eschews verse rhythms than when it does not. It has the purpose of poetry written into and therefore it is poetry.
    I believe it possible, even essential, that when poetry fails it does not become prose but bad poetry. The test of Mariane Moore would be that she writes sometimes good and sometimes bad poetry but always — with a single purpose out of a single fountain which is of the sort —
    The practical point would be to discover —
    I can go no further than to say that poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions, poetry liberates the words from their emotional implications, prose confirms them in it. Both move centrifugally or centripetally toward the intelligence.
    Of course it must be understood that writing deals with words and words only and that alldiscussions of it deal with single words and their association in groups.
    As far as I can discover there is no way but the one I have marked out which will satisfactorily deal with certain lines such as occur in some play of Shakespeare or in a poem of Marianne Moore’s, let us say: Tomorrow will be the first of April —
    Certainly there is an emotional content in this for anyone living in the northern temperate zone, but whether it is prose or poetry — taken by itself — who is going to say unless some mark is put on it by the intent conveyed by the words which surround it —
    Either to write or to comprehend poetry the words must be recognized to be moving in a direction separate from the jostling or lack of it which occurs within the piece.
    Marianne’s words remain separate, each unwilling to group with the others except as they move in the one direction. This is even an important — or amusing — character of Miss Moore’s work.
    Her work puzzles me. It is not easy to quote convincingly.
    XXV
    Somebody dies every four minutes
    in New York State —
    To hell with you and your poetry —
    You will rot and be blown
    through the next solar system
    with the rest of the gases —
    What the hell do you know about it?
    AXIOMS
    Do not get killed
    Careful Crossing Campaign
    Cross Crossings Cautiously

THE HORSES

PRANCED
black
&
white
    What’s the use of sweating over
    this sort of thing, Carl; here
    it is all set up —
    Outings in New York City
    Ho for the open country
    Dont’t stay shut up in hot rooms
    Go to one of the Great Parks
    Pelham Bay for example
    It’s on Long Island Sound
    with bathing, boating
    tennis, baseball, golf, etc.
    Acres and acres of green grass
    wonderful shade trees, rippling brooks
    Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch
    of the Lexington Ave. (East Side)
    Line and you are there in a few
    minutes
    Interborough Rapid Transit Co.
    XXVI
    The crowd at the ball game
    is moved uniformly
    by a spirit of uselessness
    which delights them —
    all the exciting detail
    of the chase
    and the escape, the error
    the flash of genius —
    all to no end save beauty
    the eternal —
    So in detail they, the crowd,
    are beautiful
    for this
    to be warned against
    saluted and defied —
    It is alive, venemous
    it smiles grimly
    its words cut —
    The