What We’re Reading: C.K. Williams

• Flesh and Blood, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1987, 82 pp.
• The Vigil, Noonday Press, 1997, 78 pp.
• The Singing, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003, 72 pp.

Recently, in looking at my overstuffed bookshelves, I discovered that I own three collections by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner C.K. Williams, whose work I had never read. Paul Muldoon has called him “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation,” so I thought I’d give his work a shot.

Though Williams has won many major writing awards and is a well respected poet, I found his work to be lacking. Williams tries, with utmost sincerity, to make poetry from every day life, which is wonderful. But it shows. Every poem feels like an exercise in making vague what was straightforward and clear, or turning something mundane or gritty into something “poetic.” In the poem “Secrets” from The Vigil, he writes, “The councilman on the take, the girl upstairs giving free oral sex, the loansharks and addicts—” and you can feel how desperately he wants the reader to understand that this place is seedy, but doesn’t want to be too vulgar in describing it. Toward the end of the poem when he writes of a murdered acquaintance, “It was never established who did it, or why; no one but me was surprised it had happened[,]” the surprise is lost on the reader.

Perhaps that’s the point: the persona remains the only one surprised by the death of this man, but that begs the question, why write the poem? If the poem is about how seedy this place is, then why not use language that evokes that grit—show, don’t tell. However, if the poem is about the surprise, the “secrets” the title refers to, then why not surprise the reader with the death, thereby showing us how gritty the place is, while taking us on an emotional journey with the persona.

One of my favorite lines of poetry is from Sonnet 47 of “Astrophil and Stella” by Sir Phillip Sidney. It reads, “I may, I must, I can, I will, I do[.]” Each word is more fitting than the last, but each one is necessary to track the persona’s emotional arc from thought to resolve to action. Williams attempts to employ this trick in many of his poems, to much lesser effect. In “Resentment” from Flesh and Blood he writes:

My slights, affronts: how I shuffle and reshuffle them, file them, index, code, and collate.

Justification, accusation: I permutate, elaborate, combine, condense, re-focus, re-refine.

I mull, ponder, convince, cajole; I prove, disprove, accomplish, reaccomplish, satisfy, solve.

Much has been written about Williams’ long, prosaic line, but it strikes me as a product of his repetition. It’s no wonder Williams’ line is long, considering the amount of language he packs into each poem.

Early in his career, Williams developed a line that fit his content well, and was praised for it. Reading his work retrospectively I can understand the praise he received for that development, but I remain frustrated that he never experimented with what that line can do, or how his content might work better with a shorter line. I want to find Williams pushing against something, not settling into something. Unfortunately, settling into his line is exactly what Williams did.

As I was reading Williams’ poetry, friends would ask why I continued if I dislike his work. I felt, to some extent, that I owed Williams the time. Perhaps the next poem would land and I would “get” it, but that never happened. Flesh and Blood has a spark of energy, brought about by the 8 line limit Williams imposed on each poem, but I still found myself wishing he would just get to the point or do something interesting.

As readers, we don’t necessarily owe any writer our time, even if that writer is as lauded as Williams. There’s so much writing out there to explore, it seems a shame to waste energy on writers we don’t like. Give a writer a shot, but if, after reading some of their work, you don’t like it: don’t sweat it. I don’t like the poetry of C.K. Williams, and that’s fine. I still have overstuffed bookshelves of books I haven’t yet read.

Who are the poets you’ve read out of a sense of duty, but not enjoyed?