C.K. Williams

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In a lengthy review by the NYTimes titles "False Consolations", C.K.Williams' new "Collected Poems" is examined as both good poetry and anti-poetry. His work spans 35 years and this collection is 680 pages. By virtue of volume alone, there is much outstanding work here.
"One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated from fresh excrement

The only time, I swear, I ever fell more than abstractly in love with someone else’s wife

Willa Selenfriend likes Paul Peterzell better than she likes me and I am dying of it."

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PBS interview with C.K. Williams...transcript. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june00/williams_4-19.html

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Tar
by C. K. Williams


The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain,
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a
hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake
at seven
when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders
shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making
little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance
of order.
Surely we suspect now we're being lied to, but in the meantime, there
are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on
the curb across, gawking.


{first of three stanzas}

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Thrush
by C. K. Williams

Often in our garden these summer evenings a thrush
and her two nearly grown offspring come to forage.
The chicks are fledged, the mother’s teaching them
to find their own food; one learns, the other can’t—
its skull is misshapen, there’s no eye on one side
and the beak is malformed: whatever it finds, it drops.

It seems to regress then, crouching before the mother,
gullet agape, as though it were back in the nest:
she always finds something else for it to eat,
but her youngster’s all but as large as she is,
she’s feeding two of herself—she’ll abandon it soon,
and migrate; the chick will doubtlessly starve.

{first two of five stanzas}

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The following is the first paragraph of this review; in order to give those unfamiliar with his work a sense of the poet's parameters...."C. K. Williams’s poems are broad in scale and narrow in scope. He has been misunderstood as an entirely “social” poet, but his real subject is the mind that attempts, never entirely successfully, to ward off the social world that bombards it from every side. His lines, longer than those written by any other significant English-language poet, suggest a big, Whitman-like appetite for worldly variety. This is not simply the case. Williams is a poet of imaginative composure amid real-world disarray. His fastidious, refined heart camps in the middle of the worldly misery that minimizes its claims."

{copyright NYTimes Sunday Book Review}

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On the Metro


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............
{introductory lines to a great poem by C.K. Williams}

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This NYTimes review of a C.K. Williams collection describes his high ethics and truthfull nature as regards "The Singing", the title poem. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CEFD8133BF936A25751C0A9629C8B 63# {quasimodo1}

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/18/features/poet.php C.K.Williams--cure for jingoism?

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THE INN

Translated by C. K. Williams

Suffering comes from elsewhere,
what matter if is reflected
in each word
he has learned a certain number of
things,
helped by aging,
noteably that it’s necessary to love
who’s with us, who goes before
and awaits us,
seated at the nocturnal inn.

{excerpt...last stanza}

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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june00/williams_4-19.html -- This interview from pbs aired 4/19/2000

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.....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 ...


No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here;
it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen,
something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast;
as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale,
a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must alwas understand
it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail,
drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.
by C. K. Williams

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The Dance

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
she's with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
moving him with effortless grace
into the union she's instantly established with the not at all
rhythmically solid music in this second-rate cafe,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we'd ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we've never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we
misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

~ C. K. Williams ~

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http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-CK.html -----

C.K. Williams

Reading at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania,
March 29, 2001

1. "The Neighbor" (4:19)
2. "First Desires" (1:48)
3. "The Orchid" (1:16)
4. "The Gas Station" (4:34)
5. "Beginnings" (1:38)
6. "Wrath" (1:05)
7. "Shame" (1:11)
8. "On the Other Hand" (1:04)
9. "The Game" (1:27)
10. "Song" (1:52)
11. "You" (2:03)
12. "The Bed" (2:24)
13. "Depths" (2:40)
14. "Biopsy" (1:42)
15. "Oh" (3:17)
16. "Elegy for an Artist" (8:47)

These sound recordings are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2004 C.K. Williams. Used with permission of C.K. Williams. Distributed by PennSound.

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THE SINGING

I was walking home down a hill near our house
on a balmy afternoon
under the blossoms
Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here
every spring with
their burgeoning forth

When a young man turned in from a corner singing
no it was more of
a cadenced shouting
Most of which I couldn't catch I thought because
the young man was
black speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell he was making his
song up which pleased
me he was nice-looking
Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously
full of himself
hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed
me there almost
beside him and "Big"
He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll
to have my height
incorporated in his song {excerpt}

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“The most interesting thing about a poem is that it doesn't exist until it has its music. Every poem has a music. And until it has that, it's not a poem. It's just information or data that's floating around in your head or on your desk.”
–C.K. Williams

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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/poetry/2007/04/16/070416po_poem_williams

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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)

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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-consciousness/q/loc/106/36265739.html

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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"}

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http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/current/2000/091400/cover.html -- Interview by Sandy Smith for U. of P. September 14, 2000

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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/story/0,,1972908,00.html

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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/foundation/release_042005.html

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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}

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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}

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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}

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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}

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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}

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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) http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/CKWilliams.jpg