'It's because you love language'

 

 

“Poemshave a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a differentkind of music of necessity.  That's, in away, the hardest thing about writing poetry; waiting for that music, andsometimes you never know if it's going to come.”– C.K. Williams

Born in New Jersey in November 1936, poet, critic andtranslator Charles Kenneth “C.K.” Williams won nearly every major poetryaward including the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh andBlood, the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Repair, the 2003 National Book Award for The Singing, andthe Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. 

 

“Whenyou begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry" he said, "the writing of poems becomes incredibly pleasurable and addictive.”  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Williams’,

 

SILENCE

 

The heron methodically pacing like an old-time librariandown the stream through the patch of woods at the end of the field, those greatwings tucked in as neatly as clean sheets, is so intent on keeping her silence,extracting one leg, bending it like a paper clip, placing it back, then bendingthe other, the first again, that her concentration radiates out into thelistening world, and everything obediently hushes, the ragged grasses that risefrom the water, the light-sliced vault of sparkling aspens.

 

Then abruptly a flurry, a flapping, her lifting from thegravitied earth, her swoop out over the field, her banking and settling on alightning-stricken oak, such a gangly, unwieldy contraption up there in thebarkless branches, like a still Adam's-appled adolescent; then the cry, cranky,coarse, and wouldn't the waiting world laugh aloud if it could with glee?

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