More Even Than Itself

On Restlessness

I was doing yoga, restless, as always, in final relaxation pose, when a thought came to me: C. K. Williams’s poems never relax, even in their stillest moments—and that’s one reason I like them so much. Take, for example, “The World,” first published in 2002, in which Williams relaxes, sort of, in a garden in France:

Splendid that I’d revel even more in the butterflies harvesting pollen
from the lavender in my father-in-law’s garden in Normandy
when I bring to mind Francis Ponge’s poem where he transfigures them
to levitating matches, and the flowers they dip into to unwashed cups;
it doesn’t work with lavender, but still, so lovely, matches, cups,
and lovely, too, to be here in the fragrant summer sunlight reading.

In this first of four sestets that make up the poem, a happy man ruminates in a beautiful setting—a song of lavender and pollinators and life. But soon the man retreats to his mind, thence into that of Francis Ponge (whom Williams translated), whereupon the butterflies become tiny conflagrations self-dousing in flowers. It’s a typically startling Ponge metaphor, yoking the fullness of life and its snuffing; Williams won’t stick with it, instead critiquing its accuracy to the present moment. The quibble acts as an escape hatch, from the room of Williams’s mind back into the garden. You believed this a moment of stillness?

In the second stanza, disquiet and the intellectual imagination again pair, as the poet reads, in the newspaper Le Monde (“The World”!), an essay about an 18th century oil sketch in which a woman offers her daughter as an artist’s model, opening the girl’s bodice as the painter lifts her skirt with his cane. In the following stanza, Williams describes the sketch’s visual shorthand (“the girl’s disarranged underslips / a few quick swirls, / the mother’s compliant mouth a blur”) then imagines what’s in the mother’s mind (“how crucial this transaction is to her, / how accommodating she’d be in working through potential complications”). If Ponge’s butterfly metaphor created a poem within a poem in Williams’s mind, then in my mind, the sketch acts as an enlarged detail inside Williams’s “painting” of the Normandy garden. As Williams’s earlier quibble vis-à-vis flower shape returned us to the garden, this detail will return us there too, reiterating that things—fabrics, gardens—aren’t merely themselves:

                                       a smear of fabrics spills from a drawer,
a symbol surely, though when one starts thinking symbol, what isn’t?
 
Each sprig of lavender lifting jauntily as its sated butterfly departs,
Catherine beneath the beech tree with her fathers and sisters, me watching

What is reality if there’s a symbolic level to its every instance? Or, which reality: Garden? Mind? Beloved wife? Unspoken darker human ones outside the garden? “Catherine” (also the name of Williams’s real-life wife) is the closest thing to a still point in this Mobius strip of a poem, but it goes right past her, in a transcendent, rest-refusing, change-embracing finale:

... everything and everyone might stand for something else, be something
            else.
Though in truth I can’t imagine what; reality has put itself so solidly
            before me
there’s little need for mystery ... Except for us, for how we take the world
to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.

On Change and Continuity

If you’re reading this, then you already love Williams and want to spend more time with that feeling, and you want to find out if you should buy Invisible Mending (FSG, 2024), the new, posthumous collection of his poetry, since you already own lots of his work (as you should). Or you discounted Williams during his lifetime for reasons accidental or temperamental, but are curious to see what might be said about him now, nine years after his death. Or you never liked his work and are hoping I’ll corroborate your disfavor (nope, but who doesn’t love to hate-read a review). Or you never heard of Williams because you’re young in poetry and most of what gets talked about anymore is either the long-ago dead or this year’s flavor and you’re starting to realize that a more varied diet is a fine idea.

Previous editions of Williams’s selected poems are limited, drawn from his early work (1996), his late work (2015), or from his love poems (2001). A Collected came out in 2006, after which Williams produced five more books of poems. Invisible Mending, then, is the only sampler that spans his five-decade career from beginning to end, from the short-lined Lies (1969) through his long-lined narratives to the final, austere 15-liners that he appears to have written compulsively while ill with blood cancer. Invisible Mending (named after a poem in which three women, modern day Fates, sew violently, tearing apart seams in fabrics in order to mend them—a typically complex and irreducible Williams trope) is a loving and important portrait of the man through his poetry.

Williams’s major themes are on display in Invisible Mending: politics and power; urban and, later, suburban landscapes; human behavior; family; art; writing; war; romantic and sexual love. Then there’s the Holocaust, a subject difficult to explore well in poems, for such magnitude of suffering is easy to trivialize when approached from a position of simple lyric subjectivity. “A Day For Anne Frank,” published in 1969, begins, as so often with Williams, with the poet observing his immediate surroundings: “... tough weeds and flowers ... the usual filth spilling from cans ...” His gaze settles on children

... playing with turtles—
skimming them down the street
like pennies or flat stones,
and bolting, shouting, after the broken corpses.

This minor monstrousness leads Williams to imagine “gestapo children” playing in mountains of dead Jews’ hair, and then to a jolting address to Anne Frank:

Little Sister,
you are a clot
in the snow,
blackened,
a chunk of phlegm
or puke [...]

Little Sister
I am afraid of the flowers sprouting from you.

Simple declarations of feeling and cognition (I look ... I thought of ... I am afraid) set off darkly stagy moments, but exclude the self-probing exposition that became Williams’s signature.

The poem’s moral questions—What’s innocence? What’s guilt? How do they develop, and in whom?—recur throughout Williams’s work. By the time of Tar (1983), he had invented his long, baroque, thrusting line to dramatize the way the mind moves as it narrates, analyzes, and revises stories within stories. Tar feels haunted and sometimes shattered by 20th century harms (nuclear plant meltdown, industrialized warfare). In “Combat,” a boxer interviewed on TV reminds Williams of “a girl I knew once, a woman,” and the poet produces this portrait of welterweight and girl that also reads as self-portrait:

               ... Moira was her name
and the same quality in the expression of unabashed self-
                involvement, softened at once with a grave,
almost oversensitive attentiveness to saying with absolute
               precision what was to be said

Williams recalls visiting Moira and her mother at their home, and describes them in their apartment, eventually divulging that they are German refugees from Nazi Germany, and that Moira’s father committed suicide after a plot against Hitler, with which he conspired, failed. Impressions, memories, analyses, scenes of violence, comedy, eroticism, confusion, embarrassed awkwardness: Williams presents all of these over eight pages of hyper-complex syntax—and it’s involving, a good read. “I was young, and terrified, and quibbled everything,” he writes. He remembers finding fault with Moira’s body. “[N]ow, no doubt, I’d find her perfect. / In my mind now, naked, she’s almost too much so, too blond, too gold, her pubic hair, her arm and leg fur.... / ... we struggled on that narrow bed, twisted on each other, mauling one another like demented athletes.” People often talk about chiseled verse, but this writing is built, each line a load-bearing wall, so that Williams can travel, in a sentence or two, from physical critique, to a memory of disquieting (Aryan?) erotic perfection, to a young couple in sexual wrangle, welterweights themselves on display. What’s the poet after? Among other things, he’s working out, in novella-like psychic dimensions, “if I might have been their Jew ... // they’d have wanted to be categorically and finally shriven of it.”

Indefatigable self-studier, woman-loving man, ethical puzzler of volatile moods submerged in a river of discursion and dramatization: this is the most familiar Williams. Later, he grew restless with the long line. In the typographically narrow “After Auschwitz” (1999), the poet stops overnight in Bavaria on his way back to France, and sleeps poorly, as one might after a visit to a death camp. What keeps him awake isn’t nightmares. “At Auschwitz,” he writes, “there was nothing / I hadn’t imagined beforehand.” This is, in its way, a tourist poem, a genre often given to mere emotional reaction to temporary experience. Williams isn’t sure what, or if, he feels. The gap he dramatizes, between the magnitude of genocide and the individual’s ability to reconcile past and present, makes the poem. “All that shocked me was // to find” the camp so “unoccupied ... / so many silent spaces, / bereft, like schools in summer.” Delivered dispassionately, the simile is quietly startling. Children are happily absent from school in summer. Murdered children are also absent. The poet’s imagination, populated by previous Holocaust narratives, is now replaced by the blankness of the real place, its ghastly function turned into museum, memorial, or mausoleum. As always, Williams switches focus as he moves the poem along. Here he does so employing terser language in brief, discrete stanza-chunks, as distance and safety contain him. But the chill remains; the poem feels a bit like a refrigerator, where things may be preserved, and also rot.

Later still, in “Jew on Bridge,” first published in 2010, longish lines return, now composed of short sentences and sentence fragments. The poem is nearly devoid of Williams’s wry playfulness, and I enjoy it very little, but it’s important as a stuttering meditation on hatred, literature, identity, antisemitism, the individual’s place in history, and the writer’s responsibility (or lack thereof) to all of that material. Here’s Williams, late in life, imagining Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov miserable and sleepless: “In his brain, something like white. / A wave stopped in mid-leap. Thick, slow, white. Or maybe it’s brain. / Brain in brain. Old woman’s brain on the filthy floor of his brain.” Scab-picking agitation, restlessness that never lets up. It’s not what everybody wants all of the time from poetry, including me, but it’s what we sometimes need.

On Replication and On Beauty

In On Beauty and Being Just (1999), the philosopher Elaine Scarry understands artworks as attempts to replicate the beauty we perceive in the world. “What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of [beauty]?” she asks, and then answers herself: “It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication ...  Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”

The urge that drives Williams is surely replicatory, for he’s always trying to show the whole stew of experience. But though he pauses often enough to note something beautiful, (as when, say, in “Silence,” he observes a heron’s “great wings tucked in as neatly as clean sheets”) his poems seldom get called beautiful, interested as they are in beauty’s opposite. “From My Window,” published in 1981, begins as the poet watches a man push his drunk, “paraplegic Vietnam Vet” friend wildly down the street until the wheelchair “skewers, teeters, / tips, and they both tumble,” after which the friend hauls the disabled man “partly upright ... / ... and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him,” exposing “thick, white coils of belly blubber, / the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted ...”

Williams turns his gaze to an office down the street where real estate agents watch the same scene “through the golden letters” of the business’s logo and are “not, at least, thank god, laughing.” This, of course, confesses that laughter is a possible, if ugly, response to abjection. The partial perspectival switch rescues Williams from an alienating display of piety or sentiment. Along with the gilt suggestion of the shelter trade, this POV change implies that the collusion of money, callousness, and war’s aftermath helps us recognize the amorality of beauty (as in the poem’s final words, of snow at dawn: “glittering … relentless, unadorned”). 

In the milder, briefer conflict of “Hooks,” a girl with an artificial hand of “intimidating twists of steel” reacts to strangers’ stares by gazing at the hand herself, “a bit askance, with an air of tolerant, bemused annoyance, / the way someone would glance at their unruly, apparently ferocious but really quite friendly dog.” Down to its deliberately awkward string of modifiers for that figurative dog, this is not a beautiful poem in sound or attitude—after all, it’s about staring, in public, at a disabled woman. If that sounds, in contemporary mores, like a cancellable offense, in fact, it’s the opposite. Why? In On Beauty, Scarry is interested in the errors we make about beauty, including the “error of withholding,” wherein we wrongly find lacking something that is, in fact, beautiful. Scarry’s own example is of palm trees, which she “ruled out ... as objects of beauty.” Then she notices a palm tree in moonlight that “waves and sprays needles of black, silver, and white; hundreds of shimmering lines circle and play and stay in perfect parallel.” Later she sees a large owl, “stationed in the fronds, woven into them” by the wings, safely sleeping there into the dawn. “Beauty always takes place in the particular,” writes Scarry, deciding that her “error of withholding” arose from “from making a composite of the particular.” From the harsh and frightening final beauty of “From My Window,” to the gentler, clumsy, yes, beauty of regards in “Hooks,” Williams’s rigorous replication of the non-composite particulars of experience renders his work beautiful.

Scarry also notes our sense, with great artworks, that the “something, or someone” that gave rise to them remains “silently present in the newborn object.” Williams’s poems, remixed in this Best of, certainly conjure Williams’s presence nine years after his death. I’d like to end this piece by conjuring—or getting help in conjuring—Williams as well. I especially love the poems in Flesh and Blood (1987), in which “Hooks” first appeared, for their sturdy brevity, quick payoff, and the pressure of each poem’s eight lines against their own containment. It may have been during that same yoga session when I suddenly wondered what made Williams (called Charlie by those who knew him) change from long story-poems to these briefer gems. Relieved to pause my own restless meditation, I opened the Gmail tab on my laptop:  

Feb 27, 2024, Daisy Fried to Alan Shapiro (poet, friend of C. K.  Williams, author of Invisible Mending’s excellent introduction):

I’m wondering if Charlie ever told you or whether you know in some other manner what made him switch from the long complex narratives of Tar to the condensed investigations of Flesh and Blood? I can guess, from the result, what it was he wanted to learn and achieve, but wondered if there was any expressed intent that you’re aware of.

Feb. 28, 2024, Alan Shapiro to Daisy Fried:

I spent several months in Paris in the mid eighties while Charlie was writing those eight line poems. He was writing two or three of those a day, mostly while outdoors ambling around the city, noticing this or that, often while out with friends. On more than one occasion we’d be at a café and he’d pull out a notepad and scribble down something that he’d observed. These were one off poems, poems of observation of social moments of the life around him, condensed and at their best intensified versions of the longer narrative-meditations of Tar and With Ignorance. A condensed continuation of the same project. All he had to do was look around him, and there the poems were. Low hanging fruit. I’d never seen anyone so blissfully productive. Like a jazz musician exploring a new instrument.

That seems a golden place where one could rest.