…I drew your attention to a great poetry book by posting one of my MFA annotations on here. So, here goes:
The Singing by C. K. Williams
In a 2003 interview with the Pedestal magazine C. K. Williams said this of his work: “A poem can meditate, it can shout, it can cry: it’s what certain people do when their souls become taken with a particular attitude towards the music of their language and culture.” The Singing is full of poems which do these three things in many different ways. There are meditations on everything from race and disabling afflictions to love and grandparenthood, and there are expressions of horror and despair as well as tenderness and joy.
With the title poem C. K. Williams approaches race using a forthrightness reminiscent of Tony Hoagland, as he speaks of “a cadenced shouting/ Most of which I couldn’t catch I thought because the young man was black speaking black.” Yet the poem avoids stereotyping as it probes “the equation we made the conventions to which we were condemned.” Similarly “Lessons” chides the reader for “the way one can find oneself strewn/ so inattentively across life, across time” via reflections on blind women the poet has met, while “The Hearth” overlays a broad outcry at the state of the world’s future upon a more personal recollection of a friend crippled in Vietnam. Many of these poems hint at the disjunction between soul and appearances. Perhaps this is shown more directly in “This Happened,” which tells the story of a student’s suicide: “there’s been so much premeditation where she is, so much plotting and planning,/ there’s hardly a person.”C. K. Williams’ poems are, for the most part, resolutely first person, and thus in his gentler moments we can imagine the real tenderness that inspired them, such as his grandson’s fall in “Sully: Sixteen Months,” or the love poem “Scale: II,” which concludes with the memorable couplet “I just didn’t want ordinary existence to resume,/ as though with you there could be such a thing.”In these small ways the collection, despite moments of dark pessimism in poems like “The Future,” manages to leave the reader with a cautious level of, if not optimism for the human race, then at least the rejection of total nihilism, or as the closing poem “The Tract” puts it: “the reality of others the love of others the miracle of others all that which feels like enough is truly enough.”
After over forty years of familiarity with his poetry, the reader will not be surprised to encounter many examples of C. K. Williams’ idiosyncrasies: strong narrative threads and longer lines. However there are also a surprising number of poems which diverge from that, such as “Night” which has three or four beat lines, and the long poem “Elegy for an Artist” which goes down to two beat lines in places. C. K Williams’ voice, however, is unmistakable. In poem after poem he names difficult humanities in a quiet, civilized tone, becoming almost discursive as he contemplates mourning, for example, in “Elegy”:
never so much absence, though,
and not just absence,
never such a sense
of violated presence,
so much desolation.
Piling abstraction upon abstraction risks evoking a certain detachment on the part of the reader, observable in parts of “Night”, “Inculcations” and “The Clause,” but on the whole Williams’ succeeds by framing his more Latinate stanzas with the concrete, in the way that “Fear’s” ruminations on war are surrounded by the smaller horrors of cockroach infestation.
Thus C.K. Williams is able to make his personal experiences not only relevant to everyone, but also generally applicable on a much larger scale, and he does so with compassion and humility. Here are the concluding lines of “In the Forest”:
Isn’t the ultimate hope just that we’ll still be addressed, and know others are too,
that meanings will still be devised and evidence offered of lives having been lived?
“In the North, the trees…” and the wretched page turns, and we listen, and listen.
