"The Pure Products of America Go Crazy"
William Carlos Williams - 1883-1963
The pure products of America
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
devil-may-care men who have taken
out of sheer lust of adventure
and young slatterns, bathed
to be tricked out that night
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
sheer rags-succumbing without
under some hedge of choke-cherry
which they cannot express—
Unless it be that marriage
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
that she'll be rescued by an
sent out at fifteen to work in
some doctor's family, some Elsie—
brain the truth about us—
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
and we degraded prisoners
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
It is only in isolate flecks that
and adjust, no one to drive the car
Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the publisher."
Listen to it read aloud here:
https://poets.org/poem/elsie#