William Carlos Williams' "January"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2024

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

"There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness."

-via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.0	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, January 4th, 2024.
0:09.8	Today's poem is by William Carlos Williams, and it's called January.
0:16.7	Appropriately enough.
0:18.5	I'll read it once, offer a comment or two, and then read it one more time.
0:25.1	January.
0:28.6	Again, I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fifths of derision outside my window.
0:35.4	Play louder. You will not succeed.
0:38.6	I am bound more to my sentences,
0:41.1	the more you batter at me to follow you.
0:44.0	And the wind, as before,
0:46.4	fingers perfectly,
0:47.9	its derisive music.
0:58.4	Characteristically brief,
1:02.9	this poem from William Carlos Williams is also characteristically a bit of an enigma,
1:08.6	but maybe less so than some of his other poems.
1:12.3	Williams was great at painting an isolated scene that suggests a much broader world just beyond the edges of it.
1:27.8	And so we get a very tight, limited moment here.
1:33.2	Winds blowing outside the window.
1:37.4	Not just blowing, but running chromatic
1:41.1	fifths of derision. And then a man at work just inside the window.
1:48.0	What's he at work on?
	...

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