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So Much Depends: Printed Matter, Dying Words, And The Entropic Poem, Clark Lunberry

English Faculty Research and Scholarship

Growing up in Rutherford, New Jersey, in the 1940s, Robert Smithson would periodically visit his pediatrician, William Carlos Williams, who had his home and medical practice across town at Nine Ridge Road. There were, no doubt, the routine checkups, the childhood ailments and inoculations, the doctor looking into the mouth, the ears, the eyes of the little boy. Many years later, in 1958—Williams by then retired and Smithson a young artist—they would once again meet informally at the poet’s home.1 Nearing the end of his long life, Williams—no longer practicing medicine—was nonetheless still very much practicing poetry, laboring away at …