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Shortly after his collection Repair won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, C.K. Williams was asked what it was he liked about writing poetry — a refreshingly simple question that was answered in the same spirit when he spoke of “a kind of fusion of will and submission and inspiration that’s quite marvelous, where something sometimes — at its very best — seems to be happening through you and to you, rather than you making it happen. And there’s very little in the world that’s like that … coming out of your own consciousness into something else.”
At its very best, which it often is, the poetry in C.K. Williams’s Collected Poems, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, seems to be happening through you and to you. One advantage of reading a life’s work like this in sequence, as it evolved or “happened,” is that you can more clearly observe the way the different groups of poems interact, instigating, reflecting, or supporting one another, as if replicating the process Williams described. Thus, over a span of almost 40 years, you can see the outlines of a career in process, an amplified version of that fusing of will and submission and inspiration. And you can see it happening in “The Sanctity,” the first poem in Williams’s breakthrough 1977 collection With Ignorance. After kicking nicely and explicitly into action, a scene in progress, with street-talking prose like “barrel-assing,” the poem discovers itself in the form of a most unmarvelous cantaloupe a carpenter’s mother is holding in her lap. If the poem were a short story by Chekhov, it would turn according to what the mother’s hands do with the cantaloupe, “fondling it and staring at it with the kind of intensity people usually only look into fires with” and with her thumbs spread “as though the melon were a head and her thumbs were covering the eyes/and she was aiming it like a gun or a camera.”
The contrast with the preceding collection, I am the Bitter Name (1972), is all the clearer because they’re side by side in the same volume so that you go right from one to the other, from unpunctuated, uncapitalized stream-of-consciousness whirlwinds that leave you standing in the dust to the more controlled but no less vehemently diverse narrative course taken by “The Sanctity.” Along the way Williams signals his awareness of the momentum driving the earlier poems when he admits “I’m working as fast as I can I can’t stop to use periods/sometimes I draw straight lines on the page because the words are too slow.”
While it’s fair to say that much of his early poetry seems as likely to repel as to attract the reader, C.K. Williams is ultimately the most readable and companionable of poets. Reading him, you find yourself thinking with him, feeling with him, mourning with him, and brooding and despairing with him under the storm cloud shadows of the dark ages of Nixon/Vietnam/Cambodia and Bush /Iraq.
Like most other readers looking for something to read, I’m not inclined to pick up a book of poems. People are generally more comfortable with prose and more responsive to it. And who can blame anyone for feeling daunted by the extra effort demanded by poetry, not to mention the 664 pages of it collected here?
Not to worry. As I said in a review of his award-winning 2003 collection The Singing, Williams’s poetry “stays with you. You live with it.” One reason you want to go back for more, whether from early years, middle, or late, is that he gives you the best of both worlds, making prose and poetry work as one. Whether you call them poems or essays, dissertations or meditations, observations or confessions, or explosions, what comes through is literature. For instance, one of the poems at the epicenter of his work, “She, Though,” is a soliloquy worth staging; it makes you want to read it aloud; an accomplished actor could do wonders with it. Like a number of these poems, especially the ones in the first two parts of A Dream of Mind (1992), it manages to suggest a novel’s worth of material about relationships in flux, about, in this case, the fate of living in, or trying to live in an “art for art’s sake” no-man’s-land like the one Yeats wrote about in “The Trembling of the Veil.” Another association the same poem suggests is with D.H. Lawrence’s cycle, Look, We Have Come Through, which I also thought of when I was reading “One of the Muses,” an earlier poem centrally relevant to “She, Though,” almost a companion piece, but much longer and much more difficult. Actually, Lawrence’s title came to mind before I even started reading the book. Look at the cover of Collected Poems. This poet has come through and he’s come through with a smile.
The Long Williams Line
Williams introduced his characteristic long lines in With Ignorance, which had to be printed on especially wide paper to accomodate them. If you flip through Collected Poems, you get a sort of aerial view of the Williams landscape, fields and fields of those lines. From what I’ve read, it appears that reviewers greeted the Williams line with kneejerk references to Whitman. While quite a few of these poems were written in and of the city across the river from Whitman’s Camden, the long lines do not make Williams Whitmanesque. Whitman celebrates Whitman and the world in himself. When Williams turns expressly to himself, it isn’t to celebrate; it’s to remember, meditate, dissect, agonize, and analyze, as he does most intensely and extensively in “One of the Muses.”
You can see a distinct move toward the longer lines in the second stanza of “In the Heart of the Beast,” the poem that concludes I am the Bitter Name, a cry of outrage at the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings of students at Kent State and Jackson State. When he says “I don’t want to hear anymore that the innocent farmer in Ohio on guard duty means well,” he’s expressing something that almost demands the framework of a statement rather than the relatively unfettered form carrying many of the preceding poems.
Again, because everything is in one volume, giving you the benefit of a 664-page, 35-year overview, you can also observe the poet’s progress from the raw outrage expressed in the Nixon/Agnew years to the tempered and enlightened awe, horror, and despair of the post-9/11-into-Iraq poems in The Singing and in uncollected dispatches from the homefront like “The Blade,” “Shrapnel,” and “Cassandra, Iraq.”
It may seem perverse to speak of a poet as “companionable” who titles his first three collections Lies, I am the Bitter Name, and With Ignorance, and who is capable of a poem as ruthlessly analytical as “One of the Muses,” a thorny landscape I would warn the unwary traveler from traversing without a guide — if I were compiling a Baedeker to C.K. Williams. Remember that marvelous “fusion” he spoke of when describing the pleasure of writing poetry? Here it sounds like marvelously hard work. It’s tempting to read this protracted struggle, the longest poem in the whole collection, as a sort of sacrificial act, a purging of complex interior material that allows him to get on with the more exterior, accessible poems in Flesh and Blood.
Ah, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. After working your way through the muse’s labyrinth, you come to a series of uniform eight-liners that seem, whee, like fun and games by contrast, almost stunning in their simplicity and intimacy; one refreshingly incidental vignette after another, observations from daily life, domestic insights, his wife singing, his son on the jungle gym, each fluently, simply, openly expressed — so much so that at times you almost find yourself wishing the embattled poet would come back at least long enough to spread his wings beyond eight lines to maybe 18 or 28. You want a bit more of that struggle and pain and intellectual hardship. You almost begin to think the eight-line stanza is constricting or inhibiting him, as though he were looking back to the passage he’d just come through and telling himself, “No more of that. I’m not going down that twisted road again.” Then, just when you begin wishing he would set himself another such challenge or at least construct a thematic home for his eight-liners, you come to Part II, where he does just that, gathering them under headings like “Reading,” “Love,” “Good Mother,” “Vehicle.”
Carried along by the sense that you are now moving between larger, 32 or 40-line islands of poetry, you come to one of his masterpieces, “Le Petit Salvié,” an elegy for another poet and a close friend, Paul Zweig, who died in 1984. Williams is still working the eight-line stanza in this beautifully felt elegy. It’s almost as though he’s been setting you up, getting you used to the form, anticipating your impatience with its seeming limitations before stunning you with what can be done with it over the course of 18 stanzas. The definitive elegy, of couse, is the “Adonis” Shelley wrote for Keats. If those two had been as close as Williams and Zweig, if they’d shared families, outings, evenings, long intimate sessions reading their poetry to one another, if Shelley had actually held the dying Keats in his arms, kissed him goodbye, I wonder if he’d have been able to sufficiently detach himself from his grief. If he’d had the heart to compose an elegy, it might well have been a plunge into his own wound, and we would have had the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” Shelley rather than the author of “Adonis.”
Gifts
Is there anyone in prose or in poetry who can express loss as eloquently as C.K. Williams? Surely the challenge to any writer is to go right at grief and love without going overboard or doing what Keats once famously suggested that Shelley had a weakness for when he told him to “be more of an artist” and “load every rift of his subject with ore.” The subject of loss illuminates a poem in Lies (“Faint Praise”), takes a brilliant turn in “Grief” (about his mother’s last days and the masking of emotion), and is at the heart of The Singing with “Elegy for an Artist.” A great elegy is also likely to be a great love poem. Both of Williams’s great elegies are that, but it’s more than simply love for a friend and fellow artist, it’s love for the soul of a relationship, for the essential humanity and soul-satisfying dialogue of support and understanding between sympathetic beings. As all poems about loss necessarily have to figure out how to deal with it or else to decide that it can’t be dealt with, the poem for Zweig is most moving when it attempts to express that dilemma, particularly in stanzas seven through nine. Reading the words “this unmanly gush I almost welcome,” I thought of Coleridge, who is the subject of one of Williams’s hitherto uncollected later poems, “Saddening” (so Williamsesque a word I thought he’d coined it). What an elegy Coleridge could have written for himself. You could say he even managed to do as much obliquely, in fragments, in various letters and notebooks, which also brings to mind one of the things, among many, that makes Williams a major poet. He has learned how to capture in poetry the sense of casual intimacy that gives us Coleridge and Keats in the living moment in their letters and notebooks. It’s a gift for catching the heart-to-heart quick of the present, that moment when the marvelous “something” simply happens “through you and to you.”