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Vol. LXIII, No. 48
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Wednesday, December 2, 2009
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Vol. LXIII, No. 48
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Wednesday, December 2, 2009
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“It was sort of thrilling to be reading to my grandsons now the same story I read to my daughter 35 years ago,” says Princeton University professor and prize-winning poet C.K. Williams, who will be reading his tale about “something named a Nobble” at Labyrinth Books this Saturday, December 5, at 11 a.m.
Given that Williams’s daughter Jessica was his first audience all those years ago, it stands to reason that the real hero of How the Nobble Was Finally Found (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $18) is the little girl who helps the title character make sense of the strange, noisy, illegible new urban landscape confronting him and even helps him meet up with another Nobble. As for whether his daughter might also have contributed to the fun of the lesson on how to say “goodbye” that the little girl teaches the two Nobbles, Williams admits that “all the language play stuff at the end was in the more recent manifestation, for my grandsons.”
The poet’s children, Jessica and Jed, and grandchildren, Owen, Sully, and Turner, have become much more than listeners over the years. Poems are inspired by them, projected through them, and in Owen’s case, dedicated to them. “Owen: Seven Days” begins, “Well here I/go again into my/grandson’s eyes,” and becomes a kind of imagined journey to the interior (“I feel myself almost/with a whoosh/dragged/into his consciousness”) that follows a line as simplified in its questing as the one followed by the Nobble when he ventures into a world he has no words for. Just as the Nobble has to figure out what one says when one answers a knock on a door (guessing “Where when?” “How so?” “Is why?” “Why what?”), Williams has to ponder in similarly elemental terms what Owen’s eyes are saying (“not ‘Who are you?’/but more something/like ‘Why?/Why are you? Out/there? Do you/know?’”).
On the subject of his rapport with infants and children in “The Gift,” a poem from 1983, Williams writes, “I had stories, dreams, ways to confide” and “rituals I’d devised, whisperings, clicks, soft, blowy whistles, a song-voice.” You can hear the song-voice throughout the Nobble’s story, particularly when Williams tells us what the lonely creature does to pass the time (he’s been on his own for “four thousand three-hundred and twenty-three years and three months and fourteen days”): He’d “just take another walk along the veins of the leaves of an elm tree, or on the bumps under the word asparagus, or maybe he’d swim in the river that runs along beneath piano strings.” He also lives “in a place where nobody ever went,” cries in his sleep (he takes his naps “in the bottom rung of the number eight”), and plays “in the space between Wednesday and Thursday” where “there really wasn’t much to see at all, except way off in the distance a little glow like a radio dial that the Nobble decided was probably something even farther away, between Friday and Saturday, maybe.”
Children have always been close to the heart of Williams’s work. Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006) begins with “A Day for Anne Frank” and a reference to children playing in the street (“I thought of you at that age./ Little Sister I thought of you”). Written some 35 years later, the last poem in the book, “Saddening,” begins with a reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “ecstatic hymn to his newborn son, Hartley.” The themes of displacement and isolation in both poems resonate even in the safe storybook world of the Nobble, who has been “hanging around for such a long time without anybody ever finding him.”
Williams’s “song-voice” may be most musically apparent at the end of How the Nobble Was Finally Found when the two Nobbles the little girl has brought together zoom off “through the space of the highest note in your favorite song, then down through the bumpy part of that huge white cloud over your house.” Reading lines like these, you know, if you ever doubted it, that the storyteller is also a poet.
Forthcoming
C.K. Williams has another children’s book in the works. Titled A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things, it’s due for publication next September by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Next spring he will publish a new collection of poems, Wait (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), that he will be reading from at the Princeton Public Library. On Whitman, an introduction to the poetry of Walt Whitman in the Princeton University Press series, Writers on Writers, also has a spring publication date. Williams has published nine other books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Singing, won the National Book Award for 2003. His previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and his collection, Flesh and Blood, received the National Book Critics Circle Award.