Tag Archives: William Carlos Williams

Finding God in Silence

By Robin Bates | Published: September 23, 2023

Poet Jennifer Michael gave a talk on finding God through poetry, featuring Berry, Hirshfield, Oliver, and others.

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Shafts of Golden Light

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2020

Easter Sunday For Easter I offer up two April poems that work as a before and after. First, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the “slumbering silence” before everything bursts into flower. Then William Carlos William describes that bursting as almost too much to bear. First the breathless anticipation, then the flowering. In the Rilke poem, […]

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Why Read Lit? Let Me Count the Reasons

By Robin Bates | Published: April 20, 2015

I grapple today about why it is essential to read lit. And what happens to us when we don’t.

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Caution: Don’t Stereotype Immigrants

By Robin Bates | Published: November 11, 2013

William Carlos Williams has a poem that prompts us to see beyond immigrant stereotypes.

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Take Me Out to the Lynch Mob

By Robin Bates | Published: July 27, 2013

A baseball poem by William Carlos Williams captures well the two sides of a crowd.

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Forgive Me for Eating Your Plums

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2011

In my experience, no two people respond to William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” in the same way. More than most short poems, it seems to function as a Rorschach test, with reactions telling us more about the reader than the poem itself.

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Dying Miserably for Lack of Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2009

Today I want to thank Chris Kalb, whose artwork on this blog was installed yesterday.  And also to thank Discovering Oz, my son and his wife’s marketing company, which gave me the idea for setting up this website and blog and then helped me carry it out.   In the illustration you see before you, the […]

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