Transcriber’s Note: Following the author’s intent, this e-text preservesthe original’s spelling and stylistic features, including extra spacingbetween words (created using the U+2003 EM SPACE character ( ) three timesin a row).
IMPROVISATIONS
By William Carlos Williams
- The Tempers
- Al Que Quiere!
- Kora in Hell
Drawing by Stuart Davis
KORA IN HELL:
IMPROVISATIONS
BY
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Boston
The Four Seas Company
1920
Copyright, 1920, by
The Four Seas Company
The Four Seas Press
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
TO FLOSSIE
PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
THE RETURN OF THE SUN
The sole precedent I can find for the broken style of myprologue is Longinus on the Sublime and that one far-fetched.
When my mother was in Rome on that rare journey foreverto be remembered, she lived in a small pension near the Pinciogardens. The place had been chosen by my brother as onenotably easy of access, being in a quarter free from confusionof traffic, on a street close to the park and furthermore the tramto the American Academy passed at the corner. Yet never didmy mother go out but she was in fear of being lost. By turningto the left when she should have turned right, actually she didonce manage to go so far astray that it was nearly an hour beforeshe extricated herself from the strangeness of every new vistaand found a landmark.
There has always been a disreputable man of picturesquepersonality associated with this lady. Their relations have beenmarked by the most rollicking spirit of comradeship. Now it hasbeen William, former sailor in Admiral Dewey’s fleet at Manila,then Tom O’Rourck who has come to her to do odd jobs and tobe cared for more or less when drunk or ill, their Penelope.William would fall from the grapearbor much to my mother’samusement and delight and to his blustering d