Exercise in Timing

by William Carlos Williams

Oh

the sumac died

it’s

the first time

I

noticed it

Excerpted from “Some Simple Measures in the American Idiom and the Variable Foot,” in Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems: Collected Poems 1950–1962, New York: New Directions, 1962, page 47. This poem would seem to have much in common with haiku, daring to stop. And aren’t all haiku exercises in timing? In writing about this poem in her essay “All the Nothing” (in Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, Grove Press, 2020), Kay Ryan says, “It looks like a poem about a sumac and death but it’s a poem about the mind and the fresh slap of perception. Or rather, it isn’t about perception, it gives us a pleasant tiny slap of it.”       +