By Stuart Mitchner

His fearless inventions … quest after the entirety of life: he will include every emotion, every bit of evidence that has a natural claim on our attention. Contemporary life is so rich and vivid in his poetry that by contrast many of the movies and poems we are used to seem pale, spaced-out and insipid. – Robert Pinsky on C.K. Williams

In the special December 27 poetry issue of the N.Y. Times Book Review (NYTBR), after admitting that the Times “has not always treated poets well,” John Williams quotes an unsigned review from 1860 faulting Walt Whitman for seeing “nothing vulgar in that which is commonly regarded as the grossest obscenity.” Whitman is also upbraided for rejecting “the laws of conventionality so completely as to become repulsive,” although it’s noted that on occasion “a gleam of the true poetic fire shines out of the mass of his rubbish.”

Reviewing C.K. Williams’s Selected Later Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux $30) in the same issue, Katy Lederer finds “visceral discomfort … — a sense a human boundary has been knowingly traversed, an intimacy exploited” through “intrusions into others’ private lives” that “feel less acquisitive than desperate.” Williams, who died September 20, is also cited for “subject matter” that “could be pedestrian and at times vulgar,” giving “the impression of a writer” who is “spiritually off-balance.” 

Those remarks follow a litany of Williams’s accomplishments: winner of the “trifecta of American book awards (the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a longtime professor at Princeton University and the recipient of almost every major fellowship and citation available to poets.” While conceding that there are “poems of great beauty” in which she has found “deep pleasure,” the reviewer stresses in the same sentence “failed experiments,” “political opinions” (meaning in lieu of poetry?), and “erudite epics of self-loathing.”

The review’s most resounding negative is Lederer’s unfounded claim that “Much has been made by reviewers through the years of Williams’s essential coldness and remove.” [italics mine]. Readers who know the poetry will be wondering “what reviewers?” The only evidence Lederer can offer is a line from Richard Eder’s 2006 N.Y. Times review of Collected Poems: “Frequently he gives us not the sun but the sundial registering it.” What Eder actually presents is a celebration of Williams’s “intense engagement with what he encounters,” rendered “with meaty force and startling imagery.” And what Eder “makes” of Williams is a long way from “essential coldness and remove” — “a poet of indignant compassion for the left-out; one who would say everything that can be said; one who would contain multitudes” and in whose work “nothing human is alien, nor is much else.” If anything, Eder seems to be describing a poet who has more than a little in common with that producer of “rubbish,” Walt Whitman.

The Virtues of Misreading

The Monday after C.K. Williams died, I received a review copy of his Selected Later Poems featuring his artist son Jed’s striking jacket painting and the blurb from former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky referring to Williams’s “fearless inventions.” The conspicuously out-sized scale of the book and the lettering and the chapter titles reflect, to quote Pinsky again, the poet’s “ranginess of language and big long lines” — “big” like the man himself.

In fact, Williams’s height provides the turn in the title poem from his prize-winning 2003 collection The Singing, where a “black speaking black” and a 6’5 white poet pass by one another on a Princeton street. When the black signals his awareness of the white on the other side of the street (“He shouted-sang ‘Big’”), Williams smiles, amused “to have my height incorporated into his song”; when the other man then chants “I’m not a nice person,” Williams understands it as an advisory, “That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord between us I should forget it.” Because of the new book’s larger format, the poem’s long lines need not be broken as they are in the original collection. Giving each line the benefit of its unpunctuated entirety makes a difference in a poem that includes not only an image of the “big” poet but his awareness of the other singer and his need to fully absorb all the elements of “the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to which we were condemned.” The poem closes with two “big long lines” that reach to the heart of his work: “Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something is watching and listening/Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there.” Fortunately for poetry, C.K. Williams was, is, will always be there.

If nothing else, the Times reviewer’s misreadings are of value as an unintended reader’s guide to the “great beauty” in Williams that Lederer mentions but never discloses; no wonder, since what attracts her particular notice tends to be unbeautiful: “the sexual congress of locusts,” “a dream about a beetle being eaten by a spider,” and a poet who watches vultures “descend upon their territory, projecting onto them his own duplicity and need.” Regarding “My Fly,” a daring, irrepressible flight of fancy in memory of a friend, Lederer quotes only the opening line with its stress on how flies “always look freshly generated from fresh excrement”; no mention is made of the connective audacity of the premise that the poet’s dead friend (the sociologist Erving Goffman) has been “incarnated” as a “pestering anti-angel,” then a companionable entity (“Joy! To be together, even for a time!”): “Yes, tilt your fuselage, turn it towards the light/aim the thousand lenses of your eyes back up at me: how I’ve missed the layers of your attention.” Williams follows the wilfully absurd notion to its exhilarating conclusion, an everyday moment taken to the cosmic limit: “Now you hurl against the window, skid and jitter on the pane: I open it and step aside/and follow for one final moment of felicity your brilliant, ardent atom swerving through.”

Reviewer’s Choice

Confronted with 233 pages representing two decades of poetry, any reader is going to make choices reflecting his or her point of view. Where the Times reviewer sees a projection of the poet’s “own duplicity and need” in “At What Time on the Sabbath Do Vultures Awake?” (one of the hitherto unpublished “new poems”), I see another playful reference to parallel universes, not a fly this time but a vulture who likes to “lie around reading the paper” on a Sunday. I also see “great beauty” in the lines preceding the denouement, “as the light in the dearest distance brightens and moves down over the hillside bedazzled/with late autumn hues and the new winter chill becomes something you can almost ingest.” It’s moving to think of a poet living out one of the last autumns of his life, his eyes fixed on “the dearest distance” as he feeds on the “new winter chill” while the vultures “clamber onto the carcass.” Where’s the “duplicity and need” in a poet devouring the prey of his poem “on a day portending such glorious craving and fulfillment”?

You become alert to the reviewer’s agenda when Lederer equates Williams’s later work with the later novels of fellow Newark native Philip Roth. It’s in this context that she offers her misreadings of “On the Métro,” which develops from a sensory fact of life more subtle than “lust,” and “The Dress,” which is about much more than “cloying maternal ambivalence” (for instance, the sad fact that father and son didn’t “embrace one another,/unless someone had died, and not always then”). “On the Métro” opens with the poet sitting next to a “young woman” with a “strong figure and very tan skin” who, after glancing at the title of the book he’s reading (Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist), “becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before.” When the rocking of the train brushes her bare arm against his, she doesn’t pull it away, which brings “news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.” After making sure we understand that lust has nothing to do with the contact (“in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more”), Williams recalls a girl he’d “mooned for from afar” sitting across the table from him in the school library one day, “our feet I thought touching … with all I craved that touch to mean” — only to find that all he was touching was the table leg. As the girl on the Métro gets up, and crosses in front of him on her way out (“not looking back”), the poet allows himself “the thought” that though he’s “probably to her … as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.”

A Novel in Eight Stanzas

Selected Later Poems begins with “The Neighbor,” another likely source of “visceral discomfort” for the N.Y Times reviewer, what with the neighbor’s “horrid, deformed little dogs,” “her landing’s sickening reek.” This would also seem to be another so-called intrusion “into others’ private lives”: the woman with her “gray-yellow hair, army pants under a nightgown,” “hiding her ravaged face in her hands.” As happens in “In the Métro,” Williams is reminded of a girl from the past, his “first real love” (“til I left her”) who appears when he hears a song coming from the neighbor’s apartment that his “college sweetheart” used to “sweetly” sing along with. For a moment, Williams imagines that his neighbor actually is the girl he long ago abandoned, last seen “drunkenly stumbling, falling, sprawling” at a party, eyes “swollen with tears.” Though he denies it, he persists in the illusion, the tearful girl merging with the neighbor, “ragged coat hanging agape … mouth torn suddenly open” right through to the concluding stanza where he holds the door open for her after she’s made her way down “the littered vestibule stairs, one agonized step at a time”; when she falters “at the step to the street,” she asks “Can you help me?” and takes his arm, “leaning lightly” against him, taking “her wavering step into the world,” whispering “Thanks, love,” leaning “lightly, lightly” against him.

Reading this novel in eight stanzas, I’m thinking how sad that people who take their cues from the NYTBR may never read that poem, or any of the others, let alone open the book and come to know the warmth, presence, and questing intelligence of C.K. Williams.