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C.K. Williams is the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who makes lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. His latest collection, "Wait", finds Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by 'the conscience-beast, who harries me', and 'riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly'. Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Metro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candour and style.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published April 27, 2010
85 people want to read
About the author
C.K. Williams
70 books72 followersC.K. Williams was born and grew up in and around Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and English. He has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, The Singing which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggeheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, the Los Angeles Book Prize, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
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July 12, 2021
New Poems By C.K. Williams
At the age of 74, the American poet C.K. Williams (b. 1936) published two important books: a study of Walt Whitman, "On Whitman" and the book under review here, "Wait", a new collection of poems. Deservedly acclaimed as a poet, Williams has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award among many other honors during his career. With his long, broken lines of free verse, energy and bravado, and plain, down-to-earth writing, Williams poetry is in the vein of Whitman's and of his own namesake, the American poet William Carlos Williams.
Although this collection of poetry is varied in theme and moods, many of the poems constitute reflections on death and on the poet's own mortality. In the title poem, Williams meditates on the inevitability of death and of the need to keep going and to continue with life. While seemingly morbid in tone, there is a feeling of will and strength in these poems. Thus in "Wait" Williams begins with a speech to a personified time, commenting on its ravages:
"Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax--
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
on part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going slowly, too slowly."
But the poem concludes on a note of affirmation for the passing beauties of life:
"Wait, though wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,
how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.
Please know I love especially you,",
Many of the poems in the collection are astringent and unsentimental parables drawn from metaphors involving various animals. Among these poems are "Thrush", "Cows", "Fish". "Wasp","Ponies", "Apes" and "Zebra". The animal poems I most enjoyed include "Miniature Poodle" in which the poet reflects on his encounter as a young man with an eccentric, middle-aged woman, and "Butterfly", in which Williams compares himself to the Japanese Haiku master,Issa:
"I must be Issa again
because, O butterfly, I say,
addressing the white
one floating beside me
which I'd never do
in my own existence, "
In other poems, Williams revisits moments of his youth, such as in the opening poem "The Gaffe" and in "On the Metro" in which the poet recollects an erotically charged incident of years past. A religious skeptic, many of the poems capture the poet's reflections on questions of philosophy, ethics and faith, such as "Two Movements for an Allegretto" (based on Beethoven's seventh symphony), "Assumptions", "All but Always", "Halo" and "Rash". In only one poem, "Jew on Bridge" does Williams expressly reflect on his Jewishness:
"Do I need forgiveness for my depression? My being depressed like a Jew?
All right then: how Jewish am I? What portion of who I am is a Jew?
I don't want vague definitions, qualifications, here on the bridge of the Jew.
I want certainty,"
Williams has always been a politically engaged writer on the American left. Poems in this collection such as "Shrapnel", "Cassandra, Iraq", "Roe v. Wade" and "Still Again, Martin Luther King, April 4, 2008" succeed as poetry while offering political observations. The poem "The United States" a reflection on a rotting battleship, and "Teachers", Williams fond look at an elementary school teacher who combatted racial prejudice among her charges, are among the better poems in the volume in combining the personal with the political voice.
With thoughts upon death, old age, and memory, C.K. William has written a resilient, tough and inspiring volume of poetry.
Robin Friedman
At the age of 74, the American poet C.K. Williams (b. 1936) published two important books: a study of Walt Whitman, "On Whitman" and the book under review here, "Wait", a new collection of poems. Deservedly acclaimed as a poet, Williams has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award among many other honors during his career. With his long, broken lines of free verse, energy and bravado, and plain, down-to-earth writing, Williams poetry is in the vein of Whitman's and of his own namesake, the American poet William Carlos Williams.
Although this collection of poetry is varied in theme and moods, many of the poems constitute reflections on death and on the poet's own mortality. In the title poem, Williams meditates on the inevitability of death and of the need to keep going and to continue with life. While seemingly morbid in tone, there is a feeling of will and strength in these poems. Thus in "Wait" Williams begins with a speech to a personified time, commenting on its ravages:
"Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax--
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
on part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going slowly, too slowly."
But the poem concludes on a note of affirmation for the passing beauties of life:
"Wait, though wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,
how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.
Please know I love especially you,",
Many of the poems in the collection are astringent and unsentimental parables drawn from metaphors involving various animals. Among these poems are "Thrush", "Cows", "Fish". "Wasp","Ponies", "Apes" and "Zebra". The animal poems I most enjoyed include "Miniature Poodle" in which the poet reflects on his encounter as a young man with an eccentric, middle-aged woman, and "Butterfly", in which Williams compares himself to the Japanese Haiku master,Issa:
"I must be Issa again
because, O butterfly, I say,
addressing the white
one floating beside me
which I'd never do
in my own existence, "
In other poems, Williams revisits moments of his youth, such as in the opening poem "The Gaffe" and in "On the Metro" in which the poet recollects an erotically charged incident of years past. A religious skeptic, many of the poems capture the poet's reflections on questions of philosophy, ethics and faith, such as "Two Movements for an Allegretto" (based on Beethoven's seventh symphony), "Assumptions", "All but Always", "Halo" and "Rash". In only one poem, "Jew on Bridge" does Williams expressly reflect on his Jewishness:
"Do I need forgiveness for my depression? My being depressed like a Jew?
All right then: how Jewish am I? What portion of who I am is a Jew?
I don't want vague definitions, qualifications, here on the bridge of the Jew.
I want certainty,"
Williams has always been a politically engaged writer on the American left. Poems in this collection such as "Shrapnel", "Cassandra, Iraq", "Roe v. Wade" and "Still Again, Martin Luther King, April 4, 2008" succeed as poetry while offering political observations. The poem "The United States" a reflection on a rotting battleship, and "Teachers", Williams fond look at an elementary school teacher who combatted racial prejudice among her charges, are among the better poems in the volume in combining the personal with the political voice.
With thoughts upon death, old age, and memory, C.K. William has written a resilient, tough and inspiring volume of poetry.
Robin Friedman
December 9, 2019
I eyed C. K. Williams "Wait" for about a week, sitting there on the local library's discard shelf, hoping maybe some C. K. Williams fan would like to have such a nice, fresh, I'm guessing from its appearance, unread copy in cloth. But nope, I finally paid my quarter and snatched it up, grimly determined to take on a contemporary American poet (sort of contemporary; Williams died in 2015).
***
Laziness abounds. This from "Peggy" (p. 17)
The name of the horse of my friend's friend,
a farmer's son whose place we'd pass
when we rode out that way I remember,
not his name, just his mare's -- Peggy --
a gleaming, well-built gray; surprising,
considering her one-stall plank shed.
I even recall where they lived,
Half-Acre Road -- it sounds like Frost,
and looked it: unpaved, silos and barns.
I went back not long ago;
it's built up, with rows on both sides
of bloated tract mansions
On lot was still empty,
so I stopped and went through and found
that behind the wall of garages and hydrants
the woods had stayed somehow intact,
and wild, wilder; the paths overgrown,
the derelict pond a sink of weeds.
And on and on it goes. The name Half-Acre Road might sound like Frost, but nothing else about this poem does. This is prose - inept prose - straggling down the page towards a rather predictable conclusion - the triumph of nature over the ugly works of man. By inept I mean: was the mare really "gleaming"? Should that be "glossy"? Was it a "shed" or should that be "stable"? Do I really know what a "bloated tract mansion" is? Not really - it's just a cool, slovenly way to indicate a McMansion. A "wall of garages and hydrants" is just inaccurate, the hydrants being little stubby things, and not enough of them to contribute much to a wall. Are ponds ever "derelict"? This implies it was inhabited by people at some point. This proselike inattention is arranged in line and stanza breaks that are meaningless, as far as I can tell - not that I'm the Sherlock Holmes of puzzling out line breaks, it still seems that something needs to be happening to justify them - especially since Williams is "known" for his long lines - poets such as Williams, who do not really have any single poem that made them famous, are "known" for something or another - a theme, a look, a long line, quasi-surrealism, and so on; Williams is "known" for his longer-than-usual line, which comes very close to being prose, since the act of typing and paper manufacturing pretty much puts everything in a "line" doesn't it?
Sometimes Williams exerts himself - and some of these exertions got published in the New Yorker - five poems in this collection originally appeared there. Here, in "Dust," Williams tries for something less galumphingly prosey than his usual mode (as seen in "Peggy"):
Face powder, gunpowder, talcum of anthrax,
shavings of steel, crematora ash, chips
of crumbling poetry paper -- all these in my lockbox,
and dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust.
Saw-, silk-, chalk- dust and chaff,
the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head
as it dreams its death
slobs out on; dust even from that scoured,
scraped littoral of the Aegean,
troops streaming screaming across it
at those who that day, that age or forever
would be foe, worth of being dust for.
Last, hovering dust of the harvest, brief
as the half-instant hitch in the flight
of the hawk, as poplets of light
through the leaves of the bronzing maples... (p. 115)
There is a feeling of vague dread here - the usual Williams' ploy of current events here is given some ham-handed ironic treatment, that "talcum of anthrax" riffing off "face powder" in a creaky way, "face powder" being something not much used nowadays, but going on a date in 1955 when your young lady had to excuser herself to "powder her nose" seems to have stuck with Williams all these years. And the holocaust, probably, trotted out again for decorative reasons (what else then?). Just to keep in the game, Williams adds that bathetic "crumbling poetry paper" too - whatever that is, exactly - poetry paper is to toilet paper what this poem is to poop? A cheap shot, I know...
Williams, when he gets cooking, displays a real verbal heedlessness:
the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head
as it dreams its death
slobs out on
This astounded me for its inaccuracies: the bull is probably supposed to be actually dying (in the bull ring, I'm thinking I'm supposed to think - man's inhumanity to animals, you know) rather than "dreams its death" - but saying "dream" in a poem is such a dreamy poem-like thing to do. Even worse, I think he means "slobbers" rather than "slob out" - if this is supposed to be a new word or phrase being coined here, Williams only made it about halfway - and why bother? "Slobs out" makes the bull sound as if he has a messy apartment; slobber is a great word - one of the glories of the English language - and here the right word. Then there are those intrusive, pointless, "poplets of light" - this sounds poetic, to the easily-amused I guess, but poplet is another made-up word made up for no good reason. Poets can make up words, of course, but this one seems pretty unremarkable. There might be unintended consequences - when I Googled the word, the first hits where from the Urban Dictionary, where a poplet is:
"Another word for 4 flats. Used by people who barely gets any band in MUET but still tries to throw shades without thinking about their poor IQ knowledge."
Here's Wictionary (German):
"Poplet - Second-person plural subjunctive I of popeln." When I went to "popeln" I found "to pick one's nose." Take your pick (ha ha).
It's as if Williams is bored by his own typing, so he heedlessly juices things up with neologisms of the crudest sort. Yeah, even Homer nods, but Williams pretty much nods off all the time.
***
When American poets run out of plums and light glinting off ponds, they turn to politics. Here is one that indulges in political right-thinking and self-congratulation, using language and imagery that is neither exciting nor fresh. Note the uncharacteristic use of short lines, which seem to be about as random of a choice as Williams' long lines for which he is "known" - known I mean in that itsy-bitsy American poetry way:
RATS
AUGUST 2005
1
From beneath the bank
of the brook, in the first
searing days
of the drought, water
rats appeared,
two of them,
we'd never known
were even there.
Unlike city
rats skulking
in cellars or sliding
up from a sewer-
mouth -- I saw this,
it wasn't dusk --
thee, as blithe
as toy tanks,
sallied into the garden
to snitch the crusts
we'd set
out for the birds.
But still, who
knows in what filth
and fetor and rot
down in their dark
world they were
before? I shouted
and sent them hurtling back.
2
Now the brute
crucible of heat
has been upon us
for weeks,
just breathing is work,
and we're frightened.
The planet all
but afire, glaciers
dissolving, deserts
on the march,
hurricanes without end
and the president
and his energy-company
cronies still insist
global warming
isn't real. The rats
rove where they will
now; shining and fat,
they've appropriated
the whole lawn.
From this close,
they look just like their cousins
anywhere else,
devious, ruthless,
rapacious, and every
day I loathe
them more.
What a lazy, inert, self-satisfied production this is. Williams is just old-fashioned and clueless enough to still think it a good move to use another species as a stand in for "devious, ruthless" behavior, the "filth and fetor and rot" of their "dark world" - where, it should be said, many, many animals dwell. This approach wouldn't pass muster with the campus right-thinking brigades these days, but what I find objectionable is the easy-peasy use of rats as a stand in for, you know, devious and ruthless. What a yawn this is. But while we are at it, what is a water rat, exactly? I don't know - Wikipedia lists a bunch of possibilities - a European water vole (since the dust jacket tells us Williams lived part of the year in France) or a musk rat. Or maybe it is just the country rat version of New York's city rat? Whatever it is, I felt sorry for it, used as it is by Williams to show how concerned the poet is for the whole Global Catastrophe Shebang. Note the 2005 date - this is a post-Katrina poem, with the "hurricanes without end" - I distinctly recall being told that climate change would mean that from here on out, one or two Katrina-sized hurricanes would slam into the USA (I seem to recall the president telling us this). I'm not here to argue climate change, but I am here to say that if a poet feels compelled to address something of this nature - something politically fraught, something big, something specific - that said poet should try to do something beyond small-town newspaper editorial page self-satisfied grandstanding while employing some less-than-cute mammal as a kind of quadruped straw man (straw animal?). I mean, substitute "European water vole" for "rat" and re-read this poem.
***
Here's another one, "Fire." Note the title - most of the poems in this collection are one or two words - "Ponies" "Shrapnel" "Plums" "Frog" "Wood." There is nothing wrong with this, necessarily, but since this is supposedly poetry we are talking about here, we have to go on the assumption that here, words are very important, including both their presence and absence. What, then, does a one-word title indicate about a poem? For me, one-word titles open up the possibility of some real pretentiousness, one word, "Fire" for instance, here standing alone and therefore at least suggesting the elemental, the ideal, the last word (and first) on the subject. Now the poem that follows doesn't have to be taking this approach - I am just suggesting that the stand-alone title has that effect, at least on this reader. Sometimes such a title is meant ironically, or is just the poet being lazy. Here, I just don't know, but Williams' poems seem lazy to me - slack in diction, often sinking below the level of third-rate fiction prose.
Fire
An ax-shattered
bedroom window
the wall above
still smutted with
soot the wall
beneath still
soiled with
soak and down
on the black
of the pavement
a mattress its ticking
half eaten away
the end where
the head would
have been with
a nauseous bite
burnt away
and beside it
an all at once
meaningless heap
of soiled sodden
clothing one
shoe a jacket
once white
the vain matters
a life gathers
about it symbols
of having once
cried out to itself
who art thou?
then again who
wouldst thou be?
Compared to the others, this is one of my favorites of the collection - I actually flinched a little at "the end where / the head would / have been with" because house fires being so... Well, the poem should be telling us what house fires are - what they are, I mean emotionally, when you see the burnt out shell of a home as you drive by. This poem huffs and puffs and strains so hard to conclude things (resorting to biblical wouldsts and thous and arts). "Fire" leads us by the nose to its grim conclusions - the heap is "meaningless" and "vain meanings" and the mattress has a "nauseous bite" taken out of it. Speaking of the mattress, "ticking" is the striped fabric that used to cover mattresses - but not since, oh, about 1970 or so, I'm thinking - I could be wrong, but if I'm not, this is another example of Williams taking his experiences from old movies or detective novels, not the 21st century.
Sometimes Williams plays fast and loose with the senses. Not to belabor the mattress, but here is the passage that for a fleeting moment, gave me a hitch (I mean this as a compliment):
a mattress its ticking
half eaten away
the end where
the head would
have been with
a nauseous bite
burnt away
But that "nauseous bite / burnt away" strikes me as inept - was it a bite or was it burnt away? We already had "eaten away" earlier. Biting and burning are different things, and a poet is allowed to conflate these things to achieve purposes beyond the descriptive - but what is being achieved here? Sometimes Williams poems strike me as having been written by a very precocious sophomore in high school who is just starting to discover big and unusual words. There is nothing definitely wrong here, but again, we are talking about poetry and each word matters - written by, I should add, a veteran, award-winning poet who presumably knows his business.
***
So what is poetry for? we ask, plaintively. I mean if poetry can't be used to fight the good fight - climate change, presidents we don't like, war, poverty, racism - why bother with it? I don't know, but I do know that when poetry is employed to carry the burdens of our on-going societal and environmental catastrophes, the result rarely rises above another ranting blog, letter to the editor, or a Tweet. Just because some person generally recognized as a poet (check her CV!) is typing does not mean what comes out of the printer is a poem. And yet again and again, the keyboard clacks and, for now, handsomely-printed books (in cloth) like this one are published, presumably as a tax write-off. This one is from Farrar Straus Giroux and it is, at least, beautifully produced (I presume I cannot blame them for the cover art, which is a painting - an upclose view, I hope - by Jed Williams, that consists of muddy swatches that I dislike almost as much as I like the book it decorates. Jed is the son of C.K.; he should've written one called "Nepotism".
I first encountered C. K. Williams at a writers' conference almost thirty years ago when a poem of his from Tar was included in a packet of contemporary poems used for one of the classes. I was impressed, if only because I could understand what was going on (in that same class I was also introduced to Medbh McGuckian, who utterly baffled me). Tar, I was assured, is Williams' masterpiece, a book that may well have changed the course of American poetry. But poetasters tend to have shifting masterpieces - around the same time, "everybody" agreed W. S. Merwin's masterpiece was The Lice. Nowadays, neither Tar nor The Lice seem to have anybody in their corner - start with Wikipedia and start surfing the web from there (in Williams' 2015 obituaries, The Guardian gave Tar a glancing mention; The New York Times didn't mention it at all). But American poets measure out their lives in careers, not poems - universities taught at, NEA grants granted, Guggenheims secured. And 25 years later, for 25 cents from the public library's discard rack, you can buy the book in pristine, unread condition.
***
Laziness abounds. This from "Peggy" (p. 17)
The name of the horse of my friend's friend,
a farmer's son whose place we'd pass
when we rode out that way I remember,
not his name, just his mare's -- Peggy --
a gleaming, well-built gray; surprising,
considering her one-stall plank shed.
I even recall where they lived,
Half-Acre Road -- it sounds like Frost,
and looked it: unpaved, silos and barns.
I went back not long ago;
it's built up, with rows on both sides
of bloated tract mansions
On lot was still empty,
so I stopped and went through and found
that behind the wall of garages and hydrants
the woods had stayed somehow intact,
and wild, wilder; the paths overgrown,
the derelict pond a sink of weeds.
And on and on it goes. The name Half-Acre Road might sound like Frost, but nothing else about this poem does. This is prose - inept prose - straggling down the page towards a rather predictable conclusion - the triumph of nature over the ugly works of man. By inept I mean: was the mare really "gleaming"? Should that be "glossy"? Was it a "shed" or should that be "stable"? Do I really know what a "bloated tract mansion" is? Not really - it's just a cool, slovenly way to indicate a McMansion. A "wall of garages and hydrants" is just inaccurate, the hydrants being little stubby things, and not enough of them to contribute much to a wall. Are ponds ever "derelict"? This implies it was inhabited by people at some point. This proselike inattention is arranged in line and stanza breaks that are meaningless, as far as I can tell - not that I'm the Sherlock Holmes of puzzling out line breaks, it still seems that something needs to be happening to justify them - especially since Williams is "known" for his long lines - poets such as Williams, who do not really have any single poem that made them famous, are "known" for something or another - a theme, a look, a long line, quasi-surrealism, and so on; Williams is "known" for his longer-than-usual line, which comes very close to being prose, since the act of typing and paper manufacturing pretty much puts everything in a "line" doesn't it?
Sometimes Williams exerts himself - and some of these exertions got published in the New Yorker - five poems in this collection originally appeared there. Here, in "Dust," Williams tries for something less galumphingly prosey than his usual mode (as seen in "Peggy"):
Face powder, gunpowder, talcum of anthrax,
shavings of steel, crematora ash, chips
of crumbling poetry paper -- all these in my lockbox,
and dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust.
Saw-, silk-, chalk- dust and chaff,
the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head
as it dreams its death
slobs out on; dust even from that scoured,
scraped littoral of the Aegean,
troops streaming screaming across it
at those who that day, that age or forever
would be foe, worth of being dust for.
Last, hovering dust of the harvest, brief
as the half-instant hitch in the flight
of the hawk, as poplets of light
through the leaves of the bronzing maples... (p. 115)
There is a feeling of vague dread here - the usual Williams' ploy of current events here is given some ham-handed ironic treatment, that "talcum of anthrax" riffing off "face powder" in a creaky way, "face powder" being something not much used nowadays, but going on a date in 1955 when your young lady had to excuser herself to "powder her nose" seems to have stuck with Williams all these years. And the holocaust, probably, trotted out again for decorative reasons (what else then?). Just to keep in the game, Williams adds that bathetic "crumbling poetry paper" too - whatever that is, exactly - poetry paper is to toilet paper what this poem is to poop? A cheap shot, I know...
Williams, when he gets cooking, displays a real verbal heedlessness:
the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head
as it dreams its death
slobs out on
This astounded me for its inaccuracies: the bull is probably supposed to be actually dying (in the bull ring, I'm thinking I'm supposed to think - man's inhumanity to animals, you know) rather than "dreams its death" - but saying "dream" in a poem is such a dreamy poem-like thing to do. Even worse, I think he means "slobbers" rather than "slob out" - if this is supposed to be a new word or phrase being coined here, Williams only made it about halfway - and why bother? "Slobs out" makes the bull sound as if he has a messy apartment; slobber is a great word - one of the glories of the English language - and here the right word. Then there are those intrusive, pointless, "poplets of light" - this sounds poetic, to the easily-amused I guess, but poplet is another made-up word made up for no good reason. Poets can make up words, of course, but this one seems pretty unremarkable. There might be unintended consequences - when I Googled the word, the first hits where from the Urban Dictionary, where a poplet is:
"Another word for 4 flats. Used by people who barely gets any band in MUET but still tries to throw shades without thinking about their poor IQ knowledge."
Here's Wictionary (German):
"Poplet - Second-person plural subjunctive I of popeln." When I went to "popeln" I found "to pick one's nose." Take your pick (ha ha).
It's as if Williams is bored by his own typing, so he heedlessly juices things up with neologisms of the crudest sort. Yeah, even Homer nods, but Williams pretty much nods off all the time.
***
When American poets run out of plums and light glinting off ponds, they turn to politics. Here is one that indulges in political right-thinking and self-congratulation, using language and imagery that is neither exciting nor fresh. Note the uncharacteristic use of short lines, which seem to be about as random of a choice as Williams' long lines for which he is "known" - known I mean in that itsy-bitsy American poetry way:
RATS
AUGUST 2005
1
From beneath the bank
of the brook, in the first
searing days
of the drought, water
rats appeared,
two of them,
we'd never known
were even there.
Unlike city
rats skulking
in cellars or sliding
up from a sewer-
mouth -- I saw this,
it wasn't dusk --
thee, as blithe
as toy tanks,
sallied into the garden
to snitch the crusts
we'd set
out for the birds.
But still, who
knows in what filth
and fetor and rot
down in their dark
world they were
before? I shouted
and sent them hurtling back.
2
Now the brute
crucible of heat
has been upon us
for weeks,
just breathing is work,
and we're frightened.
The planet all
but afire, glaciers
dissolving, deserts
on the march,
hurricanes without end
and the president
and his energy-company
cronies still insist
global warming
isn't real. The rats
rove where they will
now; shining and fat,
they've appropriated
the whole lawn.
From this close,
they look just like their cousins
anywhere else,
devious, ruthless,
rapacious, and every
day I loathe
them more.
What a lazy, inert, self-satisfied production this is. Williams is just old-fashioned and clueless enough to still think it a good move to use another species as a stand in for "devious, ruthless" behavior, the "filth and fetor and rot" of their "dark world" - where, it should be said, many, many animals dwell. This approach wouldn't pass muster with the campus right-thinking brigades these days, but what I find objectionable is the easy-peasy use of rats as a stand in for, you know, devious and ruthless. What a yawn this is. But while we are at it, what is a water rat, exactly? I don't know - Wikipedia lists a bunch of possibilities - a European water vole (since the dust jacket tells us Williams lived part of the year in France) or a musk rat. Or maybe it is just the country rat version of New York's city rat? Whatever it is, I felt sorry for it, used as it is by Williams to show how concerned the poet is for the whole Global Catastrophe Shebang. Note the 2005 date - this is a post-Katrina poem, with the "hurricanes without end" - I distinctly recall being told that climate change would mean that from here on out, one or two Katrina-sized hurricanes would slam into the USA (I seem to recall the president telling us this). I'm not here to argue climate change, but I am here to say that if a poet feels compelled to address something of this nature - something politically fraught, something big, something specific - that said poet should try to do something beyond small-town newspaper editorial page self-satisfied grandstanding while employing some less-than-cute mammal as a kind of quadruped straw man (straw animal?). I mean, substitute "European water vole" for "rat" and re-read this poem.
***
Here's another one, "Fire." Note the title - most of the poems in this collection are one or two words - "Ponies" "Shrapnel" "Plums" "Frog" "Wood." There is nothing wrong with this, necessarily, but since this is supposedly poetry we are talking about here, we have to go on the assumption that here, words are very important, including both their presence and absence. What, then, does a one-word title indicate about a poem? For me, one-word titles open up the possibility of some real pretentiousness, one word, "Fire" for instance, here standing alone and therefore at least suggesting the elemental, the ideal, the last word (and first) on the subject. Now the poem that follows doesn't have to be taking this approach - I am just suggesting that the stand-alone title has that effect, at least on this reader. Sometimes such a title is meant ironically, or is just the poet being lazy. Here, I just don't know, but Williams' poems seem lazy to me - slack in diction, often sinking below the level of third-rate fiction prose.
Fire
An ax-shattered
bedroom window
the wall above
still smutted with
soot the wall
beneath still
soiled with
soak and down
on the black
of the pavement
a mattress its ticking
half eaten away
the end where
the head would
have been with
a nauseous bite
burnt away
and beside it
an all at once
meaningless heap
of soiled sodden
clothing one
shoe a jacket
once white
the vain matters
a life gathers
about it symbols
of having once
cried out to itself
who art thou?
then again who
wouldst thou be?
Compared to the others, this is one of my favorites of the collection - I actually flinched a little at "the end where / the head would / have been with" because house fires being so... Well, the poem should be telling us what house fires are - what they are, I mean emotionally, when you see the burnt out shell of a home as you drive by. This poem huffs and puffs and strains so hard to conclude things (resorting to biblical wouldsts and thous and arts). "Fire" leads us by the nose to its grim conclusions - the heap is "meaningless" and "vain meanings" and the mattress has a "nauseous bite" taken out of it. Speaking of the mattress, "ticking" is the striped fabric that used to cover mattresses - but not since, oh, about 1970 or so, I'm thinking - I could be wrong, but if I'm not, this is another example of Williams taking his experiences from old movies or detective novels, not the 21st century.
Sometimes Williams plays fast and loose with the senses. Not to belabor the mattress, but here is the passage that for a fleeting moment, gave me a hitch (I mean this as a compliment):
a mattress its ticking
half eaten away
the end where
the head would
have been with
a nauseous bite
burnt away
But that "nauseous bite / burnt away" strikes me as inept - was it a bite or was it burnt away? We already had "eaten away" earlier. Biting and burning are different things, and a poet is allowed to conflate these things to achieve purposes beyond the descriptive - but what is being achieved here? Sometimes Williams poems strike me as having been written by a very precocious sophomore in high school who is just starting to discover big and unusual words. There is nothing definitely wrong here, but again, we are talking about poetry and each word matters - written by, I should add, a veteran, award-winning poet who presumably knows his business.
***
So what is poetry for? we ask, plaintively. I mean if poetry can't be used to fight the good fight - climate change, presidents we don't like, war, poverty, racism - why bother with it? I don't know, but I do know that when poetry is employed to carry the burdens of our on-going societal and environmental catastrophes, the result rarely rises above another ranting blog, letter to the editor, or a Tweet. Just because some person generally recognized as a poet (check her CV!) is typing does not mean what comes out of the printer is a poem. And yet again and again, the keyboard clacks and, for now, handsomely-printed books (in cloth) like this one are published, presumably as a tax write-off. This one is from Farrar Straus Giroux and it is, at least, beautifully produced (I presume I cannot blame them for the cover art, which is a painting - an upclose view, I hope - by Jed Williams, that consists of muddy swatches that I dislike almost as much as I like the book it decorates. Jed is the son of C.K.; he should've written one called "Nepotism".
I first encountered C. K. Williams at a writers' conference almost thirty years ago when a poem of his from Tar was included in a packet of contemporary poems used for one of the classes. I was impressed, if only because I could understand what was going on (in that same class I was also introduced to Medbh McGuckian, who utterly baffled me). Tar, I was assured, is Williams' masterpiece, a book that may well have changed the course of American poetry. But poetasters tend to have shifting masterpieces - around the same time, "everybody" agreed W. S. Merwin's masterpiece was The Lice. Nowadays, neither Tar nor The Lice seem to have anybody in their corner - start with Wikipedia and start surfing the web from there (in Williams' 2015 obituaries, The Guardian gave Tar a glancing mention; The New York Times didn't mention it at all). But American poets measure out their lives in careers, not poems - universities taught at, NEA grants granted, Guggenheims secured. And 25 years later, for 25 cents from the public library's discard rack, you can buy the book in pristine, unread condition.
June 29, 2025
“And there I was, reading. What did I learn? Everything, nothing, too little, too much…”
An okay collection of poetry. I stumbled across a poem of Williams’ randomly last year and really enjoyed it. I was hoping to feel more drawn to a full collection but I was mostly underwhelmed by everything here.
An okay collection of poetry. I stumbled across a poem of Williams’ randomly last year and really enjoyed it. I was hoping to feel more drawn to a full collection but I was mostly underwhelmed by everything here.
January 22, 2023
As per usual, Williams delivers on the imagery. I love the natural world meditations and settings for these poems. I wondered why the title poem was chosen as the title poem. This is idle curiosity and not in any way a distraction from the work as a whole.
November 15, 2019
*2,5 estrellas
February 9, 2022
There were a few poems I liked but many that didn't do much for me. I don't have the same references as the poet and so much went over or beside my head. Plus, commas.
January 9, 2018
The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn't hear anything more from inside.
The way now sometimes what's in me is silent, too, and sometimes though never really, forgets.
👏👍
The way now sometimes what's in me is silent, too, and sometimes though never really, forgets.
👏👍
July 28, 2010
Aligning with Benjamin and Celan in his seventeenth collection of poems, Williams acknowledges, with great reverence, humility and conviction, a literary lineage and his own responsibilities in the present as a critic of historical violence. Benjamin’s notion that society is built on acts of barbarism, and Celan’s “black milk of daybreak” (“milk” as life contaminated by the “black” of violence in a German concentration camp; “daybreak” referring to a sky stained by the ash of cremated Jews) in his Todesfuge, are evoked in the final poem that expresses the poet’s inability to live with a world that is still wrong (“Oh still Oh again”) in so many ways; so wrong that writers like Benjamin and Celan retreated by committing suicide (Benjamin by morphine; Celan off a bridge) in their own century: “Celan on his bridge…Jew on bridge. Raskolnikov-Dostoevsky still in my breath. Under my breath. / Black milk of daybreak. Aschenes Haar. Antschel-Celan. Ash. Breath.”
Those, like Williams now, who have not died from all that “shame for the humans, / what humans can do to each other” continue to carve breathless, grief-stricken responses against the grain of an ever-darkening present, its darkness too readily hidden by the glare of celebratory, hegemonic accounts of history. Williams' book casts its critical eye far and wide, critiquing both natural and social spheres to expose their shared core of moral emptiness, denial of which is manifested through metanarratives of spiritual destiny and cultural progress in countries like the United States. Williams has no delusions about the actual godlessness that fuels our contemporary world. His occasionally stuttering, mostly urgent and expansive poems do far more than collect and interweave ideas, images and moments for aesthetic to intellectual ends, or to further a literary career. The poet’s desire to write is surely founded on panic and a terror that our world could very well be spinning ruthlessly out of control.
Those, like Williams now, who have not died from all that “shame for the humans, / what humans can do to each other” continue to carve breathless, grief-stricken responses against the grain of an ever-darkening present, its darkness too readily hidden by the glare of celebratory, hegemonic accounts of history. Williams' book casts its critical eye far and wide, critiquing both natural and social spheres to expose their shared core of moral emptiness, denial of which is manifested through metanarratives of spiritual destiny and cultural progress in countries like the United States. Williams has no delusions about the actual godlessness that fuels our contemporary world. His occasionally stuttering, mostly urgent and expansive poems do far more than collect and interweave ideas, images and moments for aesthetic to intellectual ends, or to further a literary career. The poet’s desire to write is surely founded on panic and a terror that our world could very well be spinning ruthlessly out of control.
October 9, 2010
I associate C. K. Williams with a long poetic line. When I was first introduced to his poetry it was partly an attraction to this long-line style. I have whole books of thse reliable poems, all with their lengthened lines requiring stretched breathing and mental attention. They are poems filling the page, huge collected and selected volumes, and volumes of singing, vigilant lines. One is a big volume of love poems made of those long lines so that you wonder how much more praise can be heaped on a woman, what other promises of constancy and devotion. Williams's poems form big blocks on the page, as regular as marching squadrons. As steady and unyielding. Each poem is a world. Those poems were the shape of a ship's sails, and as stark and strong. They were filled, shaped with knowing and for years propelled my learning. But this volume, Wait, is different. He's changed tack to a short line and, often, couplets. Somebody wrote that shorter lines and more spacing make the reader hesitate in order to reflect. The small stanza slows the reader down. That must be what he's trying to do here. But in contrast to the long line allowing him to more easily articulate, these newer poems--by far the majority in Wait--seem minimalist grunts. Rather than jubilees of expressive language capturing emotion and beauty, many of these poems seem shards of thought scattered along the thin shingle of a theme. Empty sails. Doldrums.
January 7, 2013
The poems collected in this book range widely in subject matter, and for the most part, Williams does them justice. "Cows" is a good example of metaphor in poetry, while "Gaffe" and "Fish" are more narrative-like, the latter about a fish head laying on a sidewalk:
"Better stay here, with eyes of glass,
like people in advertisements,
and without bodies or blood,
like people in poems."
Another of Williams's strengths appears in his more philosophical pieces ("Brain", "Teachers", "Ethics", and "Apes"). "The Foundation" is a journey through philosophy and literature to build a knowledge base, with the conclusion that literature is the real teacher:
"the philosophizing and theories, the thesis and anti- and syn-,
all I believed much be what meanings were made of,
when really it was the singing, the choiring, the cadence,
the lull of the vowels, the chromatical consonant clatter..."
Williams is not at his best when his poems turn political ("Rats", "Lies", "Blackbird", "Roe vs. Wade"). While much of his language is very plain and declarative, it stands out in these pieces that do little to further already overstated points. I give Wait 3.5 stars, mostly for the weaker political poems; apart from those, it's a theme-less collection that does well in covering a well-rounded array of subjects.
"Better stay here, with eyes of glass,
like people in advertisements,
and without bodies or blood,
like people in poems."
Another of Williams's strengths appears in his more philosophical pieces ("Brain", "Teachers", "Ethics", and "Apes"). "The Foundation" is a journey through philosophy and literature to build a knowledge base, with the conclusion that literature is the real teacher:
"the philosophizing and theories, the thesis and anti- and syn-,
all I believed much be what meanings were made of,
when really it was the singing, the choiring, the cadence,
the lull of the vowels, the chromatical consonant clatter..."
Williams is not at his best when his poems turn political ("Rats", "Lies", "Blackbird", "Roe vs. Wade"). While much of his language is very plain and declarative, it stands out in these pieces that do little to further already overstated points. I give Wait 3.5 stars, mostly for the weaker political poems; apart from those, it's a theme-less collection that does well in covering a well-rounded array of subjects.
December 5, 2010
Hearing a reading of these poems, and being told by the publisher that the long lines don't really care about linebreaks, I am glad I had a chance to hear Charlie read them aloud in person just before Thanksgiving, in Rochester, NY. The intricacy of a poem like "The Gaffe" which travels from a childhood memory to present where it still chafes, alongside just what it is to live with all these people in oneself, especially the critical one, is delightful and reassuring. I enjoy the sense of humor, which allows yet deep probings such as "Apes" -- so that despair is allowed its place, and yet somehow, the poems give a sense of balance, of having gone somewhere deep, but without losing it completely. I look forward to reading these poems again and again.
September 8, 2011
A very good collection of poems from Williams. I grew bored of some of his more overtly political poems such as "The United States of America" and "Still, Again, Martin Luther King." Im saddened by the fact that our political leaders and climate seem to have worn Williams out and left him with a rage that needed to be released. On the other hand, the collection also includes some increibly beautiful lines that I'll always remember. On line, which gives the book it's title, reads "We, whose anguished will is that our last word not be 'wait'." That line killed me because of its profundity and because of my recent brush with mortality and not being "prepared" for it.
Read
December 4, 2010I was drawn to this book by a review on Tablet (http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-cul...) that focused on the volume's closing poem, "Jew on Bridge." That poem remains, for me, a standout in this volume (indeed, it merits its own section; the book comprises four).
Among the other poems I am likely to remember for a long time: "Prisoners, "Roe vs Wade," and "Shrapnel." I'm especially intrigued by the evident inspiration Williams draws in some of these poems from other literary works.
Among the other poems I am likely to remember for a long time: "Prisoners, "Roe vs Wade," and "Shrapnel." I'm especially intrigued by the evident inspiration Williams draws in some of these poems from other literary works.
Read
August 24, 2010Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading Williams's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!
March 18, 2012
Do not remember reading this poet before. My favourite poem is typical of a teaher/student. It was 'Teachers'. Do we only appreciate our teachers fully in retrospect?
'I used to imagine her admirable wisdom
would magically migrate from her mind to mine'
Very assured writer.
'I used to imagine her admirable wisdom
would magically migrate from her mind to mine'
Very assured writer.
March 30, 2012
Some poems were a 2 to me, some were 4s. Apes might have been a five. My favorite fragment from it, "It's occurred to me I've read enough; at my age all I'm doing is confirming my sadness. Surely the papers: war, terror, torture, corruption— it's like broken glass in the mind."
May 21, 2015
This was a lovely collection of poems. I had so many favorites that I lost track. His writing was the perfect mix between honesty and intelligence. It made me think but it also made my dream.... if that makes any sense. I plan on reading more of his work in the near future.
May 5, 2010
Read my review on New York Journal of Books: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/2010/...
November 11, 2010
I liked some of his poems, but others just made me feel like I was being lectured by an old, liberal English professor. Which I guess I was.
December 5, 2010
C K Williams is one of the premier poets of our time, and this satisfying collection contains poetry that will engage, perplex, and mystify anyone who reads it.
February 18, 2011
This was one of the 2011 RUSA Notable Books winners.
For the complete list, go to http://ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/aw...
For the complete list, go to http://ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/aw...
March 31, 2011
Williams is a philosophical, cerebral poet.
Good stuff...just not so much my thing.
Good stuff...just not so much my thing.
August 1, 2011
Accomplished.
October 10, 2013
I hardly every categorize a book as both philosophy and poetry - but here's one! I'm a recent but ardent Williams fan.
December 19, 2013
A brilliant wordsmith, Williams' poetry covers the gamut of life.
Read
July 12, 2014'I allow myself the thought that though I'm probably to her again / as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.'
- from 'On the Métro'.
- from 'On the Métro'.
July 12, 2015
I see the value in this, but it's just not for me.
August 23, 2015
Always surprising, moving, rewarding.
November 1, 2015
On the metro. Apes. We. Teachers.
The standout poems for me in this collection.
The standout poems for me in this collection.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews