**CLPRA scripts are working drafts for recording sessions. Recorded performances may vary due to editing for broadcast.** Links key: CLP Atlas Informational (with hover) Online Books CLP Author page CLP Intern

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) http://tinyurl.com/WWilliams

Click the below to hear radio segment.

San Fernando Mission

From The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 1951.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

California's mission past exerts a powerful influence on many out-of-state visitors, but one or two do everything they can to keep their sensibilities firmly anchored in the present.

One of America's most famous avant-garde poets, William Carlos Williams came to California in 1950 accompanied by his wife, Flossie. In the company of a friend, they visited the San Fernando Mission.

One day she took us for a drive to the San Fernando Mission. Hum, hum, hum, hum, hum, hum, hum! And told us of the night twenty years before when the place was still a ruin, before its restoration as a girls' school, that she and Ramon Navarro had visited it by moonlight—he had his guitar along. The place was guarded by barbed-wire fences.

They climbed through the wire, sat at the portico among the old stones before the chapel and sang songs. The day we were there the mimosa tree in the small garden was in flower. I pulled down the branch for Floss to smell it. We walked into the crooked chapel decorated in red and blue, the wood panels irregularly formed,the whole establishment out of alignment. Very old and broken, never having been more than mediocre, it had its own difficult logic. . . .

William Carlos Williams sought to express the extraordinary possibilities in everyday life, perhaps one of the reasons he seemed less interested in the romantic imagery of California's mission era and more interested in California's potential to reject "worn out Europe" and to "embrace the new" possibilities offered by Asia.