The “Elsie” Drawings

These fourteen drawings began with a borrowed copy of The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, which I was slowly making my way through in the spring of 2003. Often while reading I engage the text by looking at it for raw materials. I look for resonant imagery and compelling ideas, which I steal for the purposes of my image-making. Upon reading the first few stanzas of “To Elsie” I knew I was in for a poem I could ravage. Its bold and strange beginning caught my attention immediately: “The pure products of America / go crazy—/ mountain folk from Kentucky [ . . . ]” (CP1 217). As I kept on going I soon realized that this poem was filled with images I wanted. What’s more, I realized that stealing any of them would be lamely illustrative, a crime of pale redundancy against Williams akin to remaking Mount Rushmore out of butter. This poem needed to be treated with a visual interpretation of its THEMES, as wide, wild, and varied as the characters in his scruffy, trafficked version of America. I needed to build on what he had already firmly planted, not repeat images that clearly came from a master. With this in mind, I began my interpretation. The project ended up taking me two years.