JUST AS THE TITLE OF THE POEM “SPRING AND ALL,” BY WILLIAM Carlos Williams, almost dismissively anticipates the archetypal musings that season begets before subverting those musings, so too do the first six lines of “From My Window” by another Williams from New Jersey, Charles Kenneth, cater to a version of Americana, Norman Rockwelllike, as the arrival of spring, “the first morning,” is announced by leaf-buds, crocuses, joggers, and “kids . . . playing hooky,” all “glorying in the end of the wretched winter,” before subverting its vision with the human wretchedness of war and wounds and the existential wretchedness of “a warped, unclear infinity.”
That long sentence is almost as long as the longest sentence in Williams’ poem, though his sentence, splayed across six spillover lines, smacks less of…