Product Details

• Format: Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Winstar
• VHS Release Date: March 21, 2000
• Run Time: 60 minutes
• ASIN: 1572527978
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #369,955 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Opening with a dramatization of a man driving through a darkened city in an early automobile, stopping to write a poem on a prescription pad, this exploration of the life of the poet-doctor William Carlos Williams is one of the more vibrant in the Voices & Visions series. Williams wrote most of his quintessentially American poetry during the crucial period of 1900 to World War II. This 54-minute video calls upon poet Allen Ginsberg, a critic, a scholar, a fellow doctor, and Williams himself from his autobiography to examine the link between the industrialization of the U.S. and his poems. It also looks at Williams's conviction that poems were built of words rather than representations and the inspiration he drew from paintings. An unusual sequence has people on the street reading the same sequence from one of his poems in their own rhythms. His son William Eric Williams, also a writer-doctor, guides viewers through the family home and offers up old photographs of his young parents. --Kimberly Heinrichs