The cultural presence of William Carlos Williams in the twenty-first century includes my recently published essay “‘What stayed with me’: Art, Conviviality, and Culture in William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder” in the William Carlos Williams Review special issue on William Carlos Williams, American Modernism, and West Coast Culture (2023). The relationship between the poems of Williams and Snyder has surfaced once again on the occasion of Snyder’s ninety-fifth year.
Starting on Snyder’s day of birth, May 8th, the Library America hosted a limited-time screening of the British filmmaker Colin Still’s documentary O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder. On the Library of American web site, Still writes, “O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder was a long time in the making. I’m a London-based filmmaker with an interest in American poetry dating back to my school days, when I encountered the poems of William Carlos Williams.”
The Library of America web site page includes Still’s reflections on the film’s production O Mother Gaia: Director Colin Still Reveals the World of Gary Snyder with a curated selection of excerpts and outtakes from the documentary. The film features Peter Coyote, Allen Ginsberg, Jane Hirschfield, Michael McClure, Carole Koda, and Jack Shoemaker.
Readers, teachers, and students of Williams will be interested in Still’s thirty-minute films on American Poets: Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, & William Carlos Williams—all produced in the 1990s as part of a series for Channel 4 Television. See clips from the Williams films No Ideas but in Things and The American Scene on his web site Optic Nerve.
As Still explains on his web site, the film on Allen Ginsberg, originally called The Windows of the Skull, retitled No More To Say And Nothing To Weep For: An Elegy For Allen Ginsberg, was expanded to an hour for prime time transmission shortly after his death. Abstract Alchemist of Flesh, Still’s film on Michael McClure, won the Grand Festival Prize at the 2013 Berkeley Film & Video Festival, and his still unreleased feature-length films Vot Em I Doink Here?, on Jerome Rothenberg, and Black Mountain Blues, on Robert Creeley, he hopes to launch in the coming year. Finally, his film on the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita was screened at the Chilean Embassy in London, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup, and his feature-length film on Michael Horovitz has also been completed.
Optic Nerve includes a series of forty-eight short films, each dealing with a single poem, that were made to encourage school teachers to look beyond the narrow confines of the National Curriculum in England. The video clips include a reading of a poem followed by critical comments from a number of poets, including Andrew Motion, Michael Donaghy, WN Herbert, Matthew Sweeney, Jerome Rothenberg, Patience Agbabi, Tom Paulin, Clare Pollard, Owen Sheers, Kate Clanchy & Paul Muldoon.
