In “Songs Among The Ruins,” an essay that he published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, the English poet and critic Ian Hamilton wrote: In the best works of poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath one finds not just a cerebral attempt for the distinguishably United States idiom but an impassioned exploration of whatever chances the imagination still has of making sense of a civilization that is bent on self-destruction, that cruelly cannot fail to involve the poet in its manic processes but demands also that he survive as guardian of what is being killed; to these poets America is distinct from other societies in the sense that it is more efficiently dehumanizing, having abused its promise as it now prepares to abuse its power, and the best that they feel able to attempt is to oppose its abstracting pressures with the full weight of whatever in their own lives seems concretely worth saving. Born in 1936, in Newark, New Jersey, the American poet C. K. Williams belonged to the generation after Lowell, Berryman, and Plath, but to revisit his poetry, not least on the occasion of the recent publication of Invisible Mending, a selection from the entirety of his work, is to confirm that his writing had much of the same drive behind it as that which Hamilton diagnosed in those who went immediately before him. His is a poetry which, in its maturity at least, attempts to forge connections and to counteract loneliness — spiritual, physical, psychic — in settings which often seem to preclude any such attempts at communion. His are poems grounded in a concrete, recognizably modern, reality; urban, sensual, at times mysterious — which proceed from the self, its intimate tangles with experience, thought, and growth, its homesickness for a sort of imagined, or lapsed, purity. They are poems which acknowledge but do not unquestioningly accept a sense of dehumanization, and abuse, at all levels of society — often focusing their eye on the down-at-heel, their Baudelairean street scenes of drinkers, junkies, beggars — “Every misfit in the city, every freeloader, every blown-out druggie and glazed teenybopper” (“Flight” from Tar) — and other of thrusting advancement’s bothersome marginalia. Williams’ early poems appear, on their surface at least, to be his most directly political, written around and out of the Vietnam War, but their often too-straightforward bombast ends up diluting, rather than sharpening, their attempts at forceful urgency. In setting out to lead with a forthright tone, they risk a pile-up of strafing, big feelings, straining for effect rather than trusting the language itself to create an ecosystem of organic meaning and sense. They tend, as in “Being Alone,” to veer into abstraction, to “drift inconspicuously / in the raw dredge of your power.” One finds, in those early works, a poet whose mind is outpacing his stride, catching hints of frustration in the syntax and, occasionally, in direct statements, such as in “Yours” from Williams’ second book, I Am The Bitter Name: “I’m working as fast as I can I can’t stop to use periods / sometimes I draw straight lines on the page because the words/are too slow.” Rather than having to settle for drawing straight lines as his language — and his thought — gallops away from itself, Williams, between books two and three, hit on a far more effective method for letting in contemplation, plot, and diligent nuance. The poems in With Ignorance, in 1977, read like the work of an entirely different writer. Suddenly, through the use of a long clause-laden line, Williams is able to significantly bolster his poetic arsenal; no longer relying only on an abrupt, somewhat spikily Imagist approach, he has access to many of the techniques of the prose writer. Narrative can be added, character development, interior monologue, scene-setting, atmosphere, but without sacrificing the innate compression of poetry, its cinematic juxtapositions and jump-cuts offset by what Michael Hofmann has called “Bellovian fellow-feeling,” creating layered, condensed studies, rich in mood and founded on a speaking tone, rich in the felicities and warmth of the vernacular but maintaining a clarity of vision. These poems have, at their core, a concern with silence, the experience of enduring loneliness and loneliness’ endurance — there is often an attempt at revisiting scenes from the past, dredging up memory, in order to come to an understanding of why these moments, in particular, have outlasted their occasion: All I know about that time is that it stayed, that something, pain or the fear of it, makes me stop the wheel and reach to the silence beyond my eyes and it’s still there: (“Bread”) The morning goes on, the sun burning, the earth burning, and between them, part of me lifts and starts back, past the wash of dead music from the bar, the drinker reeling on the curb, the cars coughing alive, and part, buried in itself, stays, forever, blinking into the glare, freezing. (“The Shade”) The roots of so much of what will come to characterize Williams’ best poems from this point onwards can be found in this first book of long-lined work: the seeking of common ground, the sensual search for justice and radiance in unpropitious circumstance, a constant attempt to exist somewhere in the unsettling gap between decision and resolution. Ongoing, too, is that sense Hamilton talked of in Lowell and Co., the drive towards using the weight of what most needs to be kept, and rescued, from a life and an experience as ballast against the encroaching, steamrolling forces of modernity, their attempts to degrade and debase being met with an urge to look towards radiance and longing; an accounting for simplicity and joy amid the rubble and renovations of a difficult, frequently barbaric, century. That Bellovian empathy that Hofmann touched on can be seen not only in Williams’ poems of human connection, but in those where creatures become the focus of his attention, too; all things feel prey to the same oppressive forces as the
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence