After publishing his second book, "I Am the Bitter Name", Williams said that he had felt like giving up writing. Then he was asked to read at a college of art in Philadelphia, and he decided to read some unfinished poems: “ and I was astonished to realize that they were exactly what I'd been waiting for, though I hadn't known I'd been waiting for anything at all. The poems were long, ragged lines, they had a much more conversational tone than the poems I'd been writing. Most importantly, the new poems, while having a much more narrative structure than the older ones, also had much more direct mechanisms for tracing thoughts, perceptions and emotions ; they gave me a way to deal more inclusively and exhaustively with my own mind than the poems I'd been writing until then. I began to write poetry again, with more conviction than ever, and more confidence, more of a sense of what I wanted to do (…) The scope of the poems, the certainty they gave me that I could deal thoroughly with themes that interested me, were enough to keep me going. They are the poems that were collected in "With Ignorance" and "Tar".”