(HOBOKEN, NJ) -- The Hoboken Historical Museum presents "This is Just to Say: Honoring William Carlos Williams" on Sunday, September 22, 2024 at 4:00pm. This live public event will feature four notable poets celebrating legendary poet William Carlos Williams who made his home in Rutherford, NJ and wrote the 20th Century epic Paterson. The poets Joel Lewis, Catherine Doty, Frank Rubino, and Claudia Serea all reside in New Jersey and have been profoundly influenced by Williams. The event will be hosted by Hoboken Historical Museum’s Poet in Residence Danny Shot.
This event is free and will also be livestreamed on the Hoboken Historical Museum’s YouTube channel and Facebook page. Directions and a schedule of events are available at www.hobokenmuseum.org.
William Carlos Williams was born the first of two sons of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry, and he grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. He was a medical doctor, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. With Ezra Pound and H.D., Williams was a leading poet of the Imagist movement and often wrote of American subjects and themes. Though his career was initially overshadowed by other poets, he became an inspiration to the Beat generation in the 1950s and 60s. He was known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet, in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than 40 years serving the citizens of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: "There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness." – from Poetry Foundation
Born and raised in Paterson, Catherine Doty is the author of Wonderama, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Momentum, which did not, both from CavanKerry Press. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and many other nice prizes, and has taught poetry all over the place for a very long time.
Frank Rubino (@frankrubinopoet) co-hosts a weekly poetry workshop, helps organize monthly readings at The Red Wheelbarrow Poets in Rutherford, New Jersey, and, as one of the Gang Of Six, co-edits the Red Wheelbarrow’s annual poetry journal. Rubino’s poems have been published in Thimble, Chaleur, The Aesthetic Apostle, and DMQ Review, He was The Red Wheelbarrow's featured poet in 2021. His book, Frank’s Lunch Service is forthcoming in 2025. He lives in Montclair, NJ with his wife and works by day as a technology consultant.
Claudia Serea is a Romanian American poet, translator, and editor with work published in Consequence Forum, The Southern Review, Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Oxford Poetry, among others, as well as featured on The Writer’s Almanac. She is the author of seven poetry collections and four chapbooks, most recently In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, 2023). Serea won a Pushcart Prize, the Joanne Scott Kennedy Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia, and the New Letters Readers Award for her poems. She is a founding editor of National Translation Month, serves on the board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets, and co-hosts their monthly readings.
Joel Lewis is a writer based in Hoboken, NJ. He is the author of a bunch of poetry books, the most recent being Well You Needn't (Hanging Loose) which will be out in a matter of weeks. His prose writings have appeared in a lot of places including Poets & Writers, WIRE (UK), Mojo, Utne Reader, Talisman and No Placebos (Australia). Kim Lyons has noted "There is no one writing quite like him. As if Charles Olson and Susie Timmons had a baby."
The Hoboken Historical Museum is located at 1301 Hudson Street in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The title of the event comes from Williams’ iconic sorry/not sorry poem, which has been interpreted in various ways over the years, but may have simply been a note he left for his wife on the refrigerator door.
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