Listening as Care: William Carlos Williams’s Bilingual Clinic

Abstract

Grounded in clinical practice and the study of language as care, this article reexamines William Carlos Williams’s dual identity as physician and poet through the lens of bilingual inheritance and medical listening. Drawing on The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams and “The Practice” in The Doctor Stories, it argues that Williams’s medical and poetic sensibilities converge in an ethics of hearing born of linguistic displacement. Raised in a primarily Spanish- and partly French-speaking home, Williams later developed a clinical ear attuned to the failures of monolingual understanding in immigrant communities like Paterson, New Jersey. Read within an Inter-American frame, his work models diagnosis as interpretive listening, in which the physician’s ear and the poet’s line respond to bodies that speak across languages. The article situates Williams as a precursor to contemporary Inter-American medical humanities and debates on linguistic equity in care, showing how his Caribbean inheritance informs a clinical poetics that is aesthetic, ethical, and quietly decolonial.