Filed by Lance at 1:48 pm under General, The Arts

New Year’s has always been a time to look back and think to myself, “So… what have I done with my life this year?”

It’s easy to get discouraged that we’re all still in the trenches, working every week so we can pursue a separate career, but in my reading this week for The Meaning of Anthology, I ran across this, and was reminded that others have been here, and conquered:

W[illiam] C[arlos] W[illiams] didn’t like Stieglitz much, any more than [Williams' wife] Flossie liked that “little tin god.” Stieglitz was a big promoter of art on the New York art scene, several years WCW’s senior, a man who brought the best-known European modernists like Picasso to New York for display in his Fifth Avenue gallery called “291″ (”291″ was the gallery’s street number). “291″ was a big thing and WCW was not. The magazine camera work was partly a front for “291″ and for Stieglitz as art-benefactor. WCW was sitting in Rutherford[, New Jersey], commuting to the city regularly but as an outsider, could see the scope of the Stieglitz enterprise, could watch the big names entering and leaving, could feel neglected, not a part of the glitter when he wanted to be unhappy about his career — and he did want to. From 1910 to 1917 he had plenty of time to want to. He was trying to find his way in either poems or plays, but he was finding that he was not finding it. He was seeing that he was just a young doctor in Rutherford who happened to be on the arty side and who kept going in to shows and parties in Manhattan after a day at the office. It is an important fact in the history of WCW’s morale that a poem by WCW never appeared in Camera Work, though dozens of very bad poems did appear there including some by his friends. And it is also an important fact in that history that when Alfred Stieglitz asked nearly a hundred persons to contribute to the next-to-last issue of Camera Work he did not ask WCW.

from William Carlos Williams, Poet from Jersey, by Reed Whittemore

Stieglitz had his success and even his importance, sure, but that’s about all. WCW worked and fought his entire life, basing his work in his struggles as a doctor. As WCW grew older, he found that he had found it, after all, and that those who recognized what he had found celebrated his accomplishment.

Happy New Year. May it take us all one step closer to finding it.