The Poems of Tennessee Williams

762 brian parker university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 The Poems of Tennessee Williams brian parker David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis, editors. The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams New Directions. xxx, 229. $43.99 Tennessee Williams seems to have written poetry obsessively all his life, from his junior high days in St Louis during the early 1920s to his death at the Hotel Elysée (or >Easy Lay,= as he called it) in New York on 24 February 1983, which he had anticipated a few days earlier in a verse beginning, >Why do I want to go away?= that mentions the actual number of the Sunshine Suite in which he died: Never Mind No. 1202 (I think the number is thirteen) Going, going, almost gone B Done my best and travelled on. Essentially Williams was a >lyric= poet, as he also claimed to be a lyric dramatist, less in the sense of writing to be sung B though many of his more formal verses were set to music by his friend Paul Bowles and he also experimented with jazz rhythms B than in the sense of an emotional self-expression that is addressed to a >you= who is always Williams himself. Like his plays and stories, the best poems seem to have been jotted down at speed in an effort to tap directly into the subconscious, then redrafted and revised many times, often resonating with ideas and images he also used in his plays and sometimes incorporated right into them B as Nonno=s poems in The Night of the Iguana recycle work in Williams=s early, more conventional style. Only a small proportion of this verse was published, and the present volume casts its net wide to include everything that ever reached print: two collections published by New Directions under the titles In the Winter of Cities (1956, expanded 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977); uncollected and posthumously published poems; verse embedded in his drama and fiction; early poems published under the name >Thomas Lanier Williams=; and juvenilia from school and university magazines, from his mother=s Remember Me to Tom (1963), and from his own Memoirs (1975). The editors provide an introduction that touches on Williams=s admiration for Hart Crane, his friendship with the owner-editor of New Directions, Jay Laughlin, and the way the poetry treats homosexuality more explicitly than his more public writings. There are explanatory notes (which I would wish to have been much fuller and which should have been keyed to page numbers for easier reference); a list of textual variants; and an index of titles and first lines. The result is a handsome, if inevitably uneven, collection that is valuable both in itself and for the light it sheds on Williams=s more famous work and his own complex and tormented personality. What anyone familiar with Williams=s drama will notice first is how often the the poems of tennessee williams 763 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 poems reflect or anticipate his plays. When he says, for example, that >love=s explosion= in his schizophrenic sister, Rose, >consumingly shone in her transparent heart for a season / and burned it out, a tissue-paper lantern!= (>Recuerdo=), we are immediately in the world of Blanche DuBois. In a later poem we find him echoing Blanche in a desperate plea on his own behalf, >Can magic still, at times, be the order of our existence?= (>Tangier: The Speechless Summer=), which is close to a line in the later Two Character Play; while poems about his early days in New Orleans B >Mornings on Bourbon Street,= for example, or >Counsel,= which gives advice about visiting a brothel B reflect the exotic urban background of Streetcar Named Desire, Vieux Carré, and many other Williams plays and stories. >Counsel= reminds one of the sinister flophouse in Camino Real, one of Williams=s most poetic and seminal plays that is also recalled by an observation in >Orpheus Descending= (which is quite different from the play of the same name) to the effect that >you must learn, even you, what we have learned, / the passion there is for declivity in this...