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Thread: C.K. Williams

  1. #16
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    C.K. Williams in the New Yorker

    The United States
    by C. K. Williams
    April 16, 2007 The rusting, decomposing hulk of the United States

    is moored across Columbus Boulevard from Ikea,

    rearing weirdly over the old municipal pier

    on the mostly derelict docks in Philadelphia.



    I’d forgotten how immense it is: I can’t imagine

    which of the hundreds of portholes looked in

    on the four-man cabin five flights down

    I shared that first time I ran away to France.



    We were told we were the fastest thing afloat,

    and we surely were; even from the tiny deck

    where passengers from tourist were allowed

    our wake boiled ever vaster out behind.



    That such a monster could be lifted by mere waves

    and in the storm that hit us halfway across

    tossed left and right until we vomited

    seemed a violation of some natural law.



    At Le Havre we were out of scale with everything;

    when a swarm of tiny tugs nudged like piglets

    at the teat the towering mass of us in place,

    all the continent of Europe looked small. ... {excerpt}

    http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poe..._poem_williams
    Last edited by quasimodo1; 06-06-2008 at 11:55 PM. Reason: link

  2. #17
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    C.K. Williams on Emily Dickinson

    C.K. Williams on Emily Dickinson
    Posted on October 11, 2007
    Filed Under Poetry, Reading |

    One of the functions of criticism is to let us read familiar poems with new eyes / ears. I was reading C.K. Williams’ essay, “Poetry and Consciousness” yesterday for the paper I’m working on and was deeply affected by his treatment of this Emily Dickinson poem:

    I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
    And Mourners to and fro
    Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
    That Sense was breaking through –

    And when they all were seated,
    A Service, like a Drum –
    Kept beating – beating – till I thought
    My Mind was going numb –

    And then I heard them lift a Box
    And creak across my Soul
    With those same Boots of Lead, again,
    Then Space – began to toll,

    As all the Heavens were a Bell,
    And Being, but an Ear,
    And I, and Silence, some strange Race
    Wrecked, solitary, here –

    And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
    And I dropped down, and down –
    And hit a World, at every plunge,
    And Finished knowing – then –

    This is poem 280 from the Collected Poems & I have known the poem since I was a teenager. Known it so well I didn’t know it anymore. Here is what Williams writes about the poem:

    What is it that Dickinson knows, and finishes knowing, at the end of the poem is almost too frightening to consider. She has confronted, in her investigation of a single emotion, the annihilation of consciousness, the loss of reason in its harrowing proximities to nothingness. She has enacted the terrifying closed system of depression, in which content, sense, reality all became functions of that closure. The images that occur, once the system has been impelled, after the vehicle of the funeral has been established, still partake of the kind of arbitrary mental event that I tried to sketch before, but their apparent arbitrariness only contributes to the tension and despair of the mental experience. A “Service, like a Drum”: there is no drum in the funerals of life, only in the rituals of depression, in which the heart itself seems to become the enemy of the organism and of consciousness. [. . .] And the plank: is it the plank that a pirate’s victim must walk, or a plank covering a dry well, the well of inexistence? The ambiguities are as crucial as the precisions: the layering of meaning and potential meaning in the poem are the very layers of consciousness. That this dire experience could be put into words, that the voice of the mind could make it cohere, that the language of the experience could, what’s more, be organized into rhythm patterns, that there could even be rhyme, all the while upholding the dark integrities of the experience itself: this is not the product of mind, this is mind, and emotion, and the human soul alive to itself. [Poetry and Consciousness, 1998] http://www.sharpsand.net/ (Joseph Duemer's blog)
    Last edited by quasimodo1; 06-08-2008 at 06:23 PM. Reason: link

  3. #18
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    C.K. Williams

    Poetry and Consciousness (Hardcover)

    Author: C. K. Williams

    "Poet and teacher C. K. Williams meditates on the

    world of poetry and of poets, tracing the curious

    forces that generate the deeply rooted but richly

    unfamiliar language of verse. Addressing a broad

    audience, these essays examine the very structure

    of consciousness and suggest ways to apply the art

    of poetry for better understanding both self and

    others."

    Format: Hardcover
    ISBN: 9780472096725
    Publisher: University of Michigan Press http://www.buy.com/prod/poetry-and-c.../36265739.html
    Last edited by quasimodo1; 06-15-2008 at 07:10 AM. Reason: link

  4. #19
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    C.K. Williams

    So much crap in my head,
    So many rubbishy facts,
    So many half-baked
    theories and opinions,
    so many public figures
    I care nothing about
    but who stick like pitch;
    So much political swill.


    So much crap, Yet
    so much I don't know
    and would dearly like to:
    I recognize nearly none
    of the bird songs of dawn-
    All I'm sure of is
    the maddening who,
    who-who of the doves.

    And I don't have half
    the names of the flowers
    and trees, and still less
    of humankind's, myths,
    the benevolent ones,
    from the days before ours;
    water-plashed wastes,
    radiant intercessions. ... {excerpt from a poem, "Doves"}

  5. #20
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    C.K. Williams

    http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/curren...400/cover.html -- Interview by Sandy Smith for U. of P. September 14, 2000

  6. #21
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    C.K. Williams

    Tantrum by CK Williams


    Saturday December 16, 2006
    The Guardian


    A child's cry out in the street, not of pain or fear,
    rather one of those vividly inarticulate
    yet perfectly expressive trumpet thumps of indignation:
    something wished for has been denied,
    something wanted now delayed.
    So useful it would be to carry that preemptive howl
    always with you; all the functions it performs,
    its equivalents in words are so unwieldy,
    take up so much emotive time,
    entail such muffling, qualifying, attenuation. {excerpt} http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/s...972908,00.html

  7. #22
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    C.K. Williams

    Poetry
    October-November 1997

    Shock

    Furiously a crane
    in the scrapyard out of whose grasp
    a car it meant to pick up slipped,
    lifts and lets fall, lifts and lets fall
    the steel ton of its clenched pincers
    onto the shuddering carcass
    which spurts fragments of anguished glass
    until it's sufficiently crushed
    to be hauled up and flung onto
    the heap from which one imagines
    it'll move on to the shredding
    or melting down that awaits it.

    Also somewhere a crow
    with less evident emotion
    punches its beak through the dead
    breast of a dove or albino
    sparrow until it arrives at
    a coil of gut it can extract,
    then undo with a dexterous twist
    an oily stretch just the right length
    to be devoured, the only
    suggestion of violation
    the carrion jerked to one side
    in involuntary dismay. .... {excerpt} -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foun...se_042005.html
    Last edited by quasimodo1; 07-05-2008 at 11:28 AM. Reason: link

  8. #23
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    C.K. Williams

    Archetypes


    Often before have our fingers touched in sleep or

    half sleep and enlaced,
    often I've been comforted through a dream by that

    gently sensitive pressure,
    but this morning, when I woke your hand lay across

    mine in an awkward,
    unfamiliar position so that it seemed strangely

    external to me, removed,
    an object whose precise weight, volume and form

    I'd never remarked:
    its taut, resistant skin, dense muscle pads, the

    subtle complex structure,
    with delicately elegant chords of bone aligned like

    columns in a temple.

    Your fingers began to move then, in brief, irregular

    tensions and releasings;
    it felt as though you were trying to hold some

    feathery, fleeting creature,
    then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to

    your hands and knees,
    and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair

    tangled down over your face,
    until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you

    abruptly let yourself fall
    and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest,

    your head turned away,
    forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised

    you to that defiant crouch. ... {excerpt}

  9. #24
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    C.K. Williams

    Blackbird


    There was nothing I could have done—
    a flurry of blackbirds burst
    from the weeds at the edge of a field
    and one veered out into my wheel
    and went under. I had a moment
    to hope he’d emerge as sometimes
    they will from beneath the back
    of the car and fly off,
    but I saw him behind on the roadbed,
    the shadowless sail of a wing
    lifted vainly from the clumsy
    bundle of matter he’d become.

    There was nothing I could have done,
    though perhaps I was distracted:
    I’d been listening to news of the war,
    hearing that what we’d suspected
    were lies had proved to be lies,
    that many were dying for those lies,
    but as usual now, it wouldn’t matter.
    I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s,
    “ . . .You can’t fool all of the people
    all of the time. . .” how I once
    took comfort from the hope and trust
    it implied, but no longer. {first 2 of 3 stanzas}

  10. #25
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    C.K. Williams

    Dissections



    Not only have the skin and flesh and parts of the skeleton
    of one of the anatomical effigies in the Musée de l'Homme
    been excised, stripped away, so that you don't just look at
    but through the thing—pink lungs, red kidneys and heart,
    tangles of yellowish nerves he seems snarled in, like a net;

    not only are his eyes without eyelids, and so shallowly
    embedded beneath the blade of the brow, that they seem,
    with no shadow to modulate them, flung open in pain or fear;
    and not only is his gaze so frenziedly focused that he seems to be
    receiving everything, even our regard scraping across him as blare;

    not only that, but when I looked more closely, I saw he was real,
    that he'd been constructed, reconstructed, on an actual skeleton:
    the nerves and organs were wire and plaster, but the armature,
    the staring skull, the spine and ribs, were varnished, oxidizing bone;
    someone was there, his personhood discernible, a self, a soul. ... {excerpt}

  11. #26
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    C.K. Williams

    On the Metro
    by C. K. Williams
    On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
    she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
    I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers
    to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is,***
    becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself***
    to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark
    her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)
    She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;
    she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,
    achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

    {excerpt, one of two stanzas}

  12. #27
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    C.K. Williams

    From The Oxford Book of American Poetry
    (chosen and edited by David Lehman)

    MONEY

    How did money get into the soul; how did base dollars and cents ascend
    From the slime
    To burrow their way into the crannies of consciousness, even it feels like
    Into the flesh?

    Wants with no object, needs with no end, like bacteria bringing their
    Fever and freezing,
    Viruses gnawing at neurons, infecting even the sanctuaries of altruism
    And self-worth

    We asked soul to be huge, encompassing, sensitive, knowing, all-knowing,
    But not this,
    Not money roaring in with battalions of pluses and minus, setting up
    Camps of profit and loss,

    Not joy become calculation, life counting itself, compounding itself like
    A pocket of pebbles:
    Sorrow, it feels like; a weeping, unhhealable wound, an affront at all costs
    To be avenged.

    {excerpt}

  13. #28
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    C.K. Williams

    The Nailby C. K. Williams

    Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
    the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
    that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
    Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath,
    mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,
    feels the way you do with your nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed;
    the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more ...


    {excerpt}
    C. K. Williams, “The Nail” from Repair. Copyright © 1999 by C. K. Williams. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

    Source: Repair (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999)
    Last edited by quasimodo1; 06-27-2010 at 11:43 PM. Reason: reposted plus photo

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