By Stuart Mitchner

Photo by Tom Grimes

By Stuart Mitchner

After walking in a daze down the brightly-lit aisles of McCaffrey’s, stunned by Monday’s New York Times obit, I find myself in the same check-out line where I last spoke with the poet C.K. Williams, who died at home in Hopewell Sunday. When he and his charming wife Catherine lived on Moore Street, I used to see him often at McCaffrey’s. He was hard to miss. At 6’5, he loomed over everyone else. We would shake hands and I would think how good it is to live in a town where you can shake hands with a great poet while pushing a shopping cart at the market. Life in Princeton ….

The happiest, most productive mistake I ever made was getting Charlie’s name wrong in a book review. That was back in April 2004, before I knew him as Charlie. I’d been writing for Town Topics five months when I typed C.K. Wright instead of C.K. Williams. Although it was only a passing reference in a column about another poet, when I saw the idiotic error in cold hard indelible print, I went straight to Micawber Books and forked over $20 in penance for a copy of The Singing. Even though I’d already been struck by his work in The New Yorker, poems written in the aftermath of September 11 and the Iraq war like wartime dispatches from the homefront, I might not have read the book but for that mistake.

Helping Us Grieve

“Elegy for an Artist” the poem from The Singing that I found so moving, all the more now, was also the subject of our first conversation later that year at Small World, where he told me how much it meant to him when readers of that elegy and others like it thanked him “for helping them grieve.” What impresses me even more now than it did on first reading is the way he’s able to feel for and with the reader, every reader, even as he’s writing a deeply personal poem to a beloved friend. Composing “Elegy for an Artist,” he had to know how deeply and widely it would resonate, as it does now, for me, thinking of him when he writes “I need you to help/me grieve for you,” and in lines like “these counterpoints/of memory and love/unflawed by absence/or sorrow; this music/we hear, this other,/richer still, we are.”

There it is: this other richer music we are. His music becomes our music.

In the closing stanzas he manages to dispense yet another of those crazily serendipitious poetic formations that find and chime with the present moment, here at home where workmen are drilling in the basement even as I read of a “plumber’s/compressor hectically/intensifying.” In the poem, the sound of an oboe practicing scales is heard above the noise, going “on and on,/single-minded, patient/and implacable/its tempo never faltering,” until now, in the moment of reading, the poem and the oboe become one rising above the noise below, going on “as the world/goes on, and beauty,/and the passion for it.” Now it’s all working, this other richer music that we are, “knowing that our consolations,/if there are such things,/dwell in our conviction/that always somewhere/painters will concoct/their colors, poets sing, and a single oboe” — the poem and the oboe — “serenely/mounting and descending/the stairway it itself/unfurls before itself.” Besides showing a sympathetic grasp of the humble “it,” the elegy, like some other poems in The Singing, breaks up the Williams trademark, the “long, unraveled lines that spilled over the boundary of a standard page,” as William Grimes puts it in the Times obituary.

“Saddening”

After that first meeting in Small World, where we’d been talking of death and life and music and Coleridge’s letters, he emailed me a poem about that “poor man, poor giant” titled “Saddening,” a word I’d like to think he coined to describe days like this one, meaning a state beyond the mere mundane reality of being sad, that is, sadness taken to the limit, to the highest power, as of a force unbending and unending. True, the seldom-used word is in the dictionary, but it’s his, nevertheless. He’s claimed it for one of those C.K. Williams creations where you can hear him talking, really speaking to you, face to face, across a table at Small World or the Boro Bean in Hopewell, the way he brings you in, that close to making poetry of conversation, like the poem that inspired him, Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.”

On the Deck

On March 1 2013, I received the email that began “Some news from here not so good” about a routine annual check-up that turned out to be “anything but routine.”

Six months later, I spent an idyllic hour with Charlie on the back deck of the house on Hart Avenue in Hopewell. He fixed me a head-turning cappuccino and as we were talking, a freight train went by, practically through the Williams back yard. As close and loud as it may have been, I remember it as a hushed, haunted poem of a train, something rare and strange, because we were talking about Thomas Wolfe when it happened, and of course Wolfe and trains are like Williams and long lines. Charlie had been telling me he read all of Wolfe during a reading orgy in Paris when he was 20 and living in a small hotel on the Rue Jacob.

At the Hearth

My column about The Singing, which was forwarded to him in France that summer of 2004 and led to our meeting, began by quoting Billy Collins describing the difference between the novelist and the poet. While the novelist resembles a “houseguest” who moves in with you for a few weeks, the poet is someone who just appears: “A door opens and there’s the poet! He says something about life and death, closes the door and is gone.” Billy would leave you laughing. Not C. K. Williams. He’d wait to be invited in. He’d come sit at the hearth, get the fire going again, put Berlioz’s Requiem on the stereo, and give everyone a hug or a handshake before he left. His poetry doesn’t close the door and vanish into the night. You live with it.

As it happens, one of the Williams poems that first drew me in was “The Hearth.” I read it in the March 3, 2003 New Yorker, two weeks before the invasion of Iraq. While the image of a hearth suggests something comfortable and inviting, what you find when you enter the poem is a “recalcitrant fire” that the poet, “alone after the news on a bitter/evening in the country,” is “stirring up” as he follows a course of dark thought (fire blinding and maiming someone, nature devouring its prey) leading to the war and the “more than fear” he feels for his children and grandchildren. Once he has the fire blazing, “its glow on the windows makes the night even darker but it barely keeps the room warm.” By the time you come to the last line (“I stoke it again and crouch closer”), you’re there in the chilly room with him, holding your hands toward the same fading fire.

Adagio Sostenuto

Driving to work Monday, I know what I want to hear. The first time we talked, Charlie told me he played piano — he was on his way to a lesson when we finished. I’m listening to the long slow movement from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, which Wilhelm Kempff calls “the most magnificent monologue Beethoven ever wrote.” When I wrote about it here a few years ago, I spoke of “a series of variations so stirring that all you can think is how thankful you are that you heard it before you died.” I’m sure Charlie heard it. Only a little over a year ago he was reading his poetry with pianist Richard Goode. The poem chosen to go with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28, the one preceding the Hammerklavier, was titled “Beethoven Reinvents the Species Again.” I’m thankful to have discovered the monologues and reinventions of C.K. Williams, and all because of a mistake. Which shows that when poetry is the issue, mistakes can lead to discoveries.