“There the thing was, right in front of me”

It's the birthday of poet William Carlos Williams (books by this author), born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). His father was a businessman, born in England, and his mother was Puerto Rican. His mother spoke and read to him in Spanish. He went off to school in Switzerland and France and learned French. But then he came back, went to medical school, and settled in Rutherford, where he was born, and lived there more or less for the rest of his life with his wife, Flossie. He practiced medicine full time and wrote his poems during breaks, on scraps of paper, without time to revise. He was often asked how he had the time and energy to pursue two professions, but he loved them both, and he couldn't imagine writing without medicine. In his Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (1951), he said: "I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me. I could touch it, smell it. It was myself, naked, just as it was, without a lie telling itself to me in its own terms."  (Source: The Writer’s Almanac)

Williams is best known for his shorter poems like "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1962): 

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.