Someone Ought to Say WilliamsAuthor(s): Marvin BellSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Fall, 1976), p. 83Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20158651 .

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Someone Ought to Say Williams / Marvin Bell

Someone's got to say, "Williams,

your variable foot

has any number of toes,

your triadic stanza

isn't a stanza,

and your American idiom

ain't hardly the speech of

an American idiot, no. Instead

it was always your brain

made these pieces,

an intellect abstracting

finding

the units of

smart movements.

These guys are jerks who took the intellect

out of poetry: 'no ideas but the in-thing.'

They were doctors of poetry, liked your eye

and certain muscles

while you, Jersey,

just tapped your foot and kept your head."

83

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