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

     The first thing you notice about C.K. Williams are his extremely long sentences. His snaky lines tease and skirt, change direction mid-flow, before returning and finishing along unsuspected paths. This way of writing produces a curious effect. For although his poems come with simple one word titles and subjects, they are densely layered, both by breath and comprehension. As he might say, “a layering of instants”. He shelves his meanings in process, wave after wave, with an artful mixture of taught intention and lax meandering.

     As you become used to his slithery ways, you begin to grasp the full range of his subject matter. Repair is full of intensely meditative poems, poems which are all about the quality of relationships. Not simply inter-personal relationships, but more insistently, the relationship of the poet to the world and to himself. This might seem an obvious point to make, but in the case of C.K. Williams the interface is almost palpable. There is a flavour of confrontation, a startling quality about the way he sometimes meets the world through his poetry.

     There are times when his mind and eye rove in unison, other times where they depart company. Many poems talk about eyes themselves as partitions of consciousness. He delves into the eyes of his seven-day-old grandson and writes of being sucked in by the “propulsive force” of love. Likewise, in ‘Stone’, he considers his own internal visions, the “agonizing plasma” and the “unforgiving eyelids of memory”. His poems explore the connections between the quality of “outsideness” the world presents and how that shapes our own internal landscapes.

     There is something almost devotional about this project at times. In the poem ‘Naked’, Williams describes peeing out of a cottage doorway in the early hours. Not the most prepossessing of subjects, it would seem, but it becomes a moment of magic realization. After describing the Welsh hills, how the scenery is just wild enough “to take you out of yourself for a time”, he changes into another gear altogether when talking of how the breeze feels on his skin: “Sleek, sensitive air languorously/ touching across then seemingly through you/ how not to delight to imagine dawn’s/ first wash moving through you as well”. Suddenly, he inhabits the whole landscape, both waking to it and woken by it. It’s an exciting quality he brings, this “fittingness”, when “vision and its contents coincide”.

     This habit he has of putting himself in the picture, and putting the picture in himself, makes Williams very empathetic towards other human beings. He constantly sets himself alongside others, exploring moral and ethical questions. Often, he puts himself in the position of those less fortunate, seeing in their distress some troubling link to his own condition. ‘The Poet’ is a marvellous study on the necessary relative values of comparison and contrast. We meet Bobby the Poet who, after a mental breakdown, takes to carrying a long carving knife. Williams details, moment to moment, the intricacies and emotional temperatures of their casual encounter. He questions himself through the other “lesser” poet. Bobby’s knife becomes a sort of poem in its own right, one which prompts Williams to ask himself  “are you sure yours are worth more?”.

     He uses the same trick in ‘The Blow’, the story of a man who lashes out at a beggar. Williams considers how the two men might exchange atoms for a moment, “passing beside one another, or through”. In this way, he keeps a constant vigil on what’s within him and what’s without. His is a restless sense of self, ridden by doubt: “self-doubt is almost our definition”, he says of poets in general. It is difficult not to read ‘The Blow’ as a modern reworking of the Good Samaritan parable. Williams’s language is conversational and is littered with contemporary references but this is a ruse that enables him to examine timeless subjects. His chatty, confessional tone enables him to zoom around at different levels, bringing a lightness of touch to his deepest concerns. At times his work reminded me of the work of Szymborska in that Williams has that same quality of bearing acute suffering with great dignity, an unflinching realism, tempered by moments of humour and compassion.

     As a result of jumping nimbly around inside his and other people’s heads, he also displays a preoccupation with pain, cruelty and horror. In ‘The Nail’, he contemplates a particularly disgusting method of execution where nails are driven into the skull. He wishes that such acts of cruelty could be “an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen”. Things and actions can stand for something else, while at the same time, remain themselves.

     In a way, the characters in his poems represent parts of himself. He is both observer and observed. Williams is an expert at describing the internal wrangle that makes up the self and this is what makes his work both psychologically deep and philosophically interesting. He is always challenging himself, looking for answers in himself. He finds them in dreams and images. He admits to “brooding about dreams” – perhaps because, however cryptic the language, they are a way for ourselves to talk back to ourselves.

     Adam Philips recently addressed this point in a lecture on poetry and psychoanalysis. He asked, “Is the dream better than the interpretation? And does the dream need its interpretation or do dreams do our dreaming for us?” Williams slips deftly between images and their meaning, matching and mismatching to thrilling effect. His poetry exemplifies Wallace Stevens’s assertion that words can be “everything else in the world”.