To be fair, I read this for a WCW class and had to zoom through 200+ poems in about a week. But so many of them didn't make sense to me. References felt obscure and... well, I just had trouble enjoying most of the poems. My favorites, though, were "El Hombre" and "The Manouevre."

Even when Williams’ poems are well crafted (they usually are) he is among the most boring poets I’ve ever read.

A majority of the work feels laborious in finding meanings within the architectural settings that William Carlos Williams sets up through collage. The line breaks help break down time into a meditative quality similar to building up an impressionistic painting. It felt like he could break up the full second it takes to observe and name an object into half a second and thus progressively more infinitesimal - but by the end of each poem I felt drained, I had been experiencing a range of intimate emotions throughout the span of the minutes reading.

I picked this up from my library because William Carlos Williams was mentioned a lot in a book on writing poetry I had recently read. I can’t say I fully understand his style (and the introduction which the back of the book boasts as “superbly clear and helpful” is full of academic jargon with little to no explanation for someone unfamiliar with this school of poetry) but after going to Wikipedia, I can appreciate what he was trying to do.

The poems includes from “The Desert Music” and “Journey to Love” were my favorites. My biggest issue of this collection was that there were larger works that had been excerpted and in my opinion took away from my understanding of them.

I’ll read any poet that Ezra Pound tells me to. And I’m very fond of William Carlos Williams. Every word counts toward a tremendous effect in his prose and even more so in his poetry. One of our great and underread writers.

This is my favorite time I've read Wiliiams—he's so wiley.