C.K. Williams: New and Selected Poems.
Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £9.95
No poet on either side of the Atlantic can expect to publish on the other before attaining a certain critical mass. When someone’s literary biography grows difficult to ignore, publishers scramble their jets and some representation of his or her career in medias res explodes into being across the pond. The New and Selected Poems format, which samples each successive stage of such a career, has found favour as a delivery vehicle. It offers clear evidence of the poet’s evolution to date - if the book is well-edited, and the poet has in fact evolved. The case of the American poet C.K. Williams benefits not only from sympathetic editors, but from Williams’s remarkably co-ordinated development as a writer.
Williams’s first two volumes, though hardly juvenilia, recall Robert Bly (and occasionally e.e. cummings) more than they anticipate Williams’s own later work. The poems brim with controlled, masculine personality, but often inherit Bly’s political mawkishness (“even the presidents with all their death the congressmen and judges/ I’d give them something”). Little separates these early poems from the more or less generic free verse which the American academy has produced since the 1960s. Although competent and evenly measured, they lack Williams’s formal signature.
In his third volume, With Ignorance (1977), Williams finds that signature: a garrulous, page-spanning line that extends to somewhere between its predecessor and the verset-paragraph used by Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. Rather than energising his lines Whitman-style with repetitive links, Williams builds each one with a discrete rhythmic structure. His success or failure therefore must be judged as much line-by-line as poem-by-poem. Like Whitman, he succeeds most often when the line rolls within itself, lingering over its descriptions:
Peas from a can, bread with the day-old price scrawled over
the label in big letters
and then a bottle that looks so delectable, the way he
carefully unsheathes it
so the neck just lips out of the wrinkled foreskin of paper
and closes his eyes and tilts....
Williams’s powers of narrative and discourse are strong. When his line overextends itself and collapses into prose, the poems become vignettes or miniature essays which are, at least, still interesting. But content can rarely prop up a line that fails to contain its charge of poetry. Without carefully arranged stops and pauses, the poetry escapes; even good prose isn’t poetry:
If you put enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get to
hear
every imaginable kind of bullshit.
Every long-time loser has a history to convince you he isn’t
living at the end of his own leash
and every kid has some pimple on his psyche he’s trying to
compensate for with an epic...
When Williams’s lines vary in length like Ginsberg’s, passages sometimes sacrifice energy for organic balance. A sudden shorter line will spend whatever charge Williams has mustered, either dramatically clashing a cymbal or painfully blowing a fuse. By the title sequence which closes With Ignorance, Williams prefers to contain his energy. Longer lines support each other consistently, and the special effects grow more subtle.
With Williams’s fourth volume, Tar (1983), his lines finally settle into form. They assume a uniform length, three to six words longer than the width of a printed page, so that on paper, short indented “continuation” lines alternate evenly with new ones. This visual structure is instantly recognizable; if Williams’s oeuvre were a film script, his agent could pitch him as “the long lines poet”. But gimmickry this is not. Williams’s lines can support lyricism a narrower formal context would make difficult:
All that held the town now was that violated, looted country,
the fraying fringes of the town,
those gutted hills, hills by rote, hills by permission, great,
naked wastes of wrack and spill,
vivid and disconsolate, like genitalia shaved and disinfected
for
an operation.
Moreover, Williams can catalogue objects or string together adjectives less awkwardly than other poets. His line risks wildness for elbow room - no small risk, and no small reward.
Since Tar, Williams has often built his line into symmetrical structures: regular eight-line stanzas throughout 1987’s Flesh and Blood, shorter stanzas or couplets in 1992’s A Dream of Mind. But in Dream and the thirteen new poems collected here, Williams returns just as often to continuity. In the three middle sections of the new poem ‘Interrogation II’, he uses very short lines of two or three beats, arranged in couplets. The self-announcing ‘Villanelle of the Suicide’s Mother’ shows off rather facile rhymes. Williams may well be tiring of his trademark, or believe its possibilities to be exhausted. If so, these late experiments fall short of replacing it.
Williams’s line is as far from reactionary formalism, or provincial homage to Whitman as Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns is from Arthurian fantasy. It is a genuine innovation, neither gratuitous nor always successful. As the American and British poetry industries continue their trans-Atlantic bombing, we must not defuse foreign innovations with easy dismissal. Try Williams, and hope that Americans reading Hill’s New & Selected attempt similar understanding.
Page(s) 62-64
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