Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

C.K.Williams has an enviable reputation and it’s not hard to understand why. His poems, often though not always long-lined, poke and prod at their subjects and though they seem to start in the most ordinary ways they usually end by raising questions about human behaviour. After Auschwitz is almost mundane when it begins:

We’d wanted to make France
but by dusk we knew we wouldn’t,
in a Bavarian town
just off the autobahn,
we found a room, checked in,
and went to look around.

But by the end it has built up into a passionate debate about how the routines of everyday life can co-exist with memories of what happened at Auschwitz. But they do, of course, and the poet has to struggle to make sense of it all.

     Williams varies his subjects, just as he varies his lines, and he has a poem in which a lady, bending over a magazine table in a waiting-room, lets loose a little fart, which makes him think of his dog jumping when it’s startled by a car backfiring, which takes him back to a horse bucking and farting when it was mounted. And so on. There’s another, shorter-lined poem, which tells how the poet’s grandmother washed his mouth out with soap when he used a word she didn’t like. I found this particular poem one of the most satisfying in the book, and it started a slight nagging in my mind about how and why Williams uses long lines in many of his poems. I began to wonder if they were really necessary and whether or not the ideas expressed could just as easily have been dealt with in a different way. Two of the longest poems, King and The Poet, though both very readable, could have worked just as well as prose statements. But perhaps the line between poetry and prose is growing fainter all the time and it really doesn’t matter, provided there’s some rhythmic value in the words? And Williams does have rhythm. He’s a good poet to read and his poems say something worth listening to.