"The Mind and the Poem Are All Apiece": William Carlos Williams and the Dysfluent Poetics of Aphasia

Abstract: William Carlos Williams's later poetry engages the mind via a visually striking but critically obscure formal innovation: the variable foot. From the perspective of Williams's late-in-life experiences with post-stroke aphasia and physical disability, the variable foot poems exalt the bodymind's resources for poetic expression while acknowledging the newfound precarity of Williams's own voice, language abilities, and bodymind. In the many recordings of him reading his poetry, we can hear how Williams adjusts his audience's expectations for his dysfluent speech as he employs this signature form as a kind of accessible formatting. Williams's identification in these poems with noisy geese and headless sparrows suggests the potential for dysfluency, rather than traditional eloquence, to push American poetry toward new sonic horizons. Moreover, the composition and performance of Williams's later works highlight the formative role that dysfluency and disability have played in shaping modern American poetry.