C.K. Williams > Quotes

“This is the wisdom of art, the knowledge that beauty perhaps is the one undeniably unique attribute of the human.”
― C.K. Williams

“I believe how you looked was supposed to mean, something graver, more substantial: I'd gaze at my poor face and think, "It's still not there." Apparently I still do. What isn't there? Beauty? Not likely. Wisdom? Less. Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us? All I see is the residue of my other, failed faces.
But maybe what we're after is just a less abrasive regard: not "It's still not there," but something like "Come in, be still.”
― C.K. Williams, Repair

“Sometimes I almost go hours without crying,
Then I feel if I don't, I'll go insane.
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

She tried so hard, then she tired of trying;
Now I'm tired, too, of trying to explain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.

The anxiety, the rage, the denying;
Though I never blamed her for my pain,
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

And mine was struggling to save her; prying,
Conniving: it was the chemistry in her brain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.

If I said she was easy, I'd be lying;
The lens between her and the world was stained:
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

But the fact, the fact, is stupefying:
Her absence tears at me like a chain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

- Villanelle for a Suicide's Mother”
― C.K. Williams, Villanelles

“Wasn't I rapt?
Wasn't I ravished?”
― C.K. Williams

“Maybe shy is when you're lonely and you don't think anybody can help you.”
― C.K. Williams, How the Nobble Was Finally Found

“Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck
the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was
scribbled with obscenities and hearts.”
― C.K. Williams, Collected Poems

“I envied the sons their life in the country. I wasn’t even jealous of how at home they were in the fields and woods and barns; of how they could do so many things I couldn’t, drive tractors, take apart and fix motors, pluck eggs from under a hen, shove their way into a stall with a stubborn horse pushing back: I just marveled at it all, and wanted it. They and the boys who lived on farms near them were also so enviably at ease in their bodies: what back in the city would be taken as a slouch of disinterest, here was an expression of physical grace. No need to be tense when everything so readily submitted to your efficiently minimal gestures: hoisting bales of hay into a loft, priming a recalcitrant pump … Something else there was as well, something more elusive: perhaps that they lived so much of the time in a world of wild, poignant odors—mown grass, the redolent pines, even the tang of manure and horse-piss-soaked hay. Just the thought of those sensory elations inflicted me with a feeling I still have to exert myself to repress that I was squandering my time, wasting what I knew already were irretrievable clutches of years, now hecatombs of years, trapped in my trivial, stifling life.”
― C.K. Williams, All at Once: Prose Poems

“Last year in the region where we live part of the year there were violent windstorms, whole forests were leveled, two- and three-hundred-year-old trees torn up by the roots and tossed aside, houses sliced almost in half by the once-sheltering giants flung down through their roofs. Yesterday another storm, powerful but less so, took down no trees. The ground, though, is littered with leaves, as though autumn had arrived, but the leaves are still green, still alive, many torn away in clumps, with the twigs still intact that attached them to their branches. There’s something disconsolate about them—the desiccated leaves of autumn always appear to have found the place to which they’ve been destined, but these don’t seem to grasp what’s happened to them: they lie on the ground at awkward angles, like things wounded that haven’t completely given in to death and don’t know yet they must.”
― C.K. Williams, All at Once: Prose Poems

“Neither that I picked my nose compulsively, daydreamed through my boring classes, masturbated, once in a condom I stole from my father’s drawer, enraptured by its half-chemical, half-organic odor; nor my obsessions with smells in general, earth, dead rats, even my baby sister’s diaper shit, which made me pleasantly retch; nor that I filched money from my mother for candy and so knew early on I was a thief, a sneak, a liar: none of that convinced me I was “bad,” subversive and perverse, so much as that purveyor of morality—parent, teacher, maybe even treacherous friend—who inculcated the unannulable conviction in me that the most egregious wrong, of which I was clearly already despicably, irredeemably guilty, was my abiding involvement with myself. Even now, only rarely am I able to convince myself that my reluctance to pass on my most secret reflections, meditations, theorizings, all the modes by which I manage to distract myself, arises from my belief that out of my appalling inner universe nothing anyway could possibly be extracted, departicularized, and offered as an instance of anything at all to anyone else. An overrefined sense of generosity, I opine; an unwillingness to presume upon others by hauling them into this barn, this sty, where mental vermin gobble, lust, excrete. Not a lack of sensitivity but a specialization of that lobe of it which most appreciates the unspoken wish of others: to stay free of that rank habitation within me I call “me.” Really, though: to consider one’s splendid self-made self as after all benevolent, propelled by secret altruism? Aren’t I, outer mouth and inner masticating self-excusing sublimations, still really back there in my neither-land? Aren’t I still a thief, stealing from some hoard of language trash to justify my inner stink? Maybe let it go, just let it go.”
― C.K. Williams, All at Once: Prose Poems

“I am your own personal verb now.”
― C. K. Williams

“Lost Wax"

My love gives me some wax,
so for once instead of words
I work at something real;
I knead until I see emerge
a person, a protagonist;
but I must overwork my wax,
it loses it's resiliency,
comes apart in crumbs.

I take another block;
this work, I think, will be a self;
I can feel it forming, brow
and brain; perhaps it will be me,
perhaps, if I can create myself,
I'll be able to amend myself;
my wax, though, freezes
this time, fissures, splits.

Words or wax, no end
to our self-shaping, our forlorn
awareness at the end of which
is only more awareness.
Was ever truth so malleable?
Arid, inadhesive bits of matter.
What might heal you? Love.
What might make you whole? Love. My love.”
― C.K. Williams, Repair

“Sometimes I almost go hours without crying,
Then I feel if I don’t, I’ll go insane.
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

She tried so hard, then she was tired of trying;
Now I’m tired, too, of trying to explain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.”
― c.k. williams, Collected Poems

“Neither that I picked my nose compulsively, daydreamed through my boring classes, masturbated, once in a condom I stole from my father’s drawer, enraptured by its half-chemical, half-organic odor; nor my obsessions with smells in general, earth, dead rats, even my baby sister’s diaper shit, which made me pleasantly retch; nor that I filched money from my mother for candy and so knew early on I was a thief, a sneak, a liar: none of that convinced me I was “bad,” subversive and perverse, so much as that purveyor of morality—parent, teacher, maybe even treacherous friend—who inculcated the unannulable conviction in me that the most egregious wrong, of which I was clearly already despicably, irredeemably guilty, was my abiding involvement with myself. Even now, only rarely am I able to convince myself that my reluctance to pass on my most secret reflections, meditations, theorizings, all the modes by which I manage to distract myself, arises from my belief that out of my appalling inner universe nothing anyway could possibly be extracted, departicularized, and offered as an instance of anything at all to anyone else.”
― C.K. Williams, All at Once: Prose Poems

“The term “mystical” isn’t heard all that much anymore, but in American intellectual culture for a period well on into the twentieth century, it was the highest praise that could be bestowed on an artist or thinker. It”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“The contrast between “prosaic” (though it isn’t really) moments like this and the flamboyance of often adjacent passages make both tonal realms more effective, more affecting. And, most crucially, they maintain an enduring freshness, a sense of improvisation—more than with any other poet’s, Whitman’s words sound as though they’re being generated as they arrive on the page, spontaneously, with no premeditation, no plotting.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Bridge to everything! Highway to everything! Your omnivorous soul, Your soul that’s bird, fish, beast, man, woman, Your soul that’s two where two exist, Your soul that’s one becoming two when two are one, Your soul that’s arrow, lightning, space, Amplex, nexus, sex and Texas, Carolina and New York, Brooklyn Ferry in the twilight, Brooklyn Ferry going back and forth, Libertad! Democracy! The Twentieth Century about to dawn! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“It’s essential to keep in mind that in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else: until the poem has found its music, it’s merely verbal matter, information. Thought, meaning, vision, the very words, come after the music has been established, and in the most mysterious way they’re already contained in it. Without the music, there’s nothing; thought, merely, ideation; in Coleridge’s terms, not imagination, just fancy; intention, hope, longing, but not poetry:”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“He was very debilitated as time went on by the series of strokes that had come to him so prematurely, then near the end by bladder problems, constipation, failing eyesight. Near death, he was in a wheelchair, then mostly in the chair and bed in the bedroom of the small house he’d bought in Camden. He complained of becoming more sensitive to the cold. His room, though, was apparently knee-deep in paper, those unanswered letters, notes for poems, scribbled manuscripts—pleasant to think of him afloat on it all. He never had much money, and when contributions came to him from wealthy friends and admirers, of which he had quite a few, he saved it up for his grand cemetery monument.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“His hopes for us were limitless; he even postulated, in the poems and in Democratic Vistas, a certain physique for the American, a certain degree of health. He often, too often perhaps, speaks of “health,”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“And yet “I celebrate myself” has to be seen as more than a conventional prelude to a lyrical aesthetic event: it is a proclamation of poetic independence and uniqueness. “And what I assume you shall assume” is a confrontation, really a challenge, a dare: what is being implied here is that the ordinary relationship between reader and poet, lyrical speaker, lyrical “I,” will not be in effect. Something else is happening, something which, on the face of it, is presumptuous. An impertinence which is absurdly reinforced by the notification of a communion unlike any other in poetry: you are not merely listening to me, overhearing me—you are to be taken into my poem with me in a way no other poem has done.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“writers.—Lumber the writing with nothing—and let it go as lightly as a bird flies in the air—or a fish swims in the sea. Be careful not to temper down too much.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Whitman’s reticence, or outright deceptiveness, later in his life on the subject was inconsistent, to say the least. It’s often been pointed out that male love, not necessarily homosexual love, was accepted during that time in a way not many decades later it wasn’t: men embracing, kissing, calling each “lover,” was apparently commonplace. In fact, when Leaves of Grass was “banned in Boston,” it was because of the passages of heterosexual eroticism, not the portions that could be construed as being homosexual. There’s no question that Whitman later on did clearly want to temper the frankness that informed so much of the passages of homosexual experience that he’d recorded during those first years of the poems, but the words are there.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root— Let there be commerce between us. That “commerce” found its fruition in the Cantos in the same kind of dissociative structure as Eliot’s and Whitman’s. Pound’s pact was in truth between both Whitman and Eliot,”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Politically, he could sometimes be called radical, at other times conservative. He was anti-abolitionist, then not. Pro-war with the Mexican War, then anti- when the Civil War was looming. He was generous in his poems toward blacks but sometimes expressed in conversation the reflexive, denigrating racism of his time. He was almost everything, then not, or then at last.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun…. there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor look through the eyes of the dead…. nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. The promise, the promise in much of the work, is that the vividness and grandeur of the poetic self who is making this poem will be so gravitationally magnetic that he will make poets of us all; we will not only be accounted for, we will learn to account for ourselves, and for everything else. We will be again first persons adequate to our greatest selves.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“I was not only not popular (and am not popular yet—never will be) but I was non grata—I was not welcome in the world.” But the fantasy of Leaves of Grass being finally widely accepted made him laugh a little to Traubel: “I wouldn’t know what to do, how to comport myself, if I lived long enough to become accepted, to get in demand, to ride on the crest of the wave. I would have to go scratching, questioning, hitching about, to see if this was the real critter, the old Walt Whitman—to see if Walt Whitman had not suffered a destructive transformation—become apostate, formal, reconciled to the conventions, subdued from the old independence.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Waiting response from oracles…. honoring the gods…. saluting the sun, Making a fetish of the first rock or stump…. powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, Helping the lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols …
Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife—beating the serpent-skin drum; Accepting the gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine …”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Many friends, many people he expressed love to, and for, mostly males. Was he homosexual? Surely, though later in his life some of his more narrow-minded admirers denied it, and he in an oft-quoted letter once did too, but there’s no question that in the poems his most emphatic erotic passion is for men, even if sometimes it was sublimated to a kind of exalted comradeship between males. And there’s certainly evidence that at least early in his life he had had homosexual experiences. Did he have affairs with women? He said so, and there’s one letter from a woman that seems to imply it, but it’s finally very unlikely.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately…only when he speaks somewhat wildly.” Which certainly Whitman did: there had been no poem in literature before him that had anything approaching the wildness of Whitman’s language and structure.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“If there’s any poet with whom I would pair Whitman, it would be Baudelaire: both of them redefined the elemental project of poetry, and both, to a great extent, indicated the direction, the opportunities, and the parameters of what we now call the modern. The similarities between them are striking: they were born two years apart and incredibly enough were doing their best work during precisely the same period, publishing their seminal books within two years of each other, Leaves of Grass in 1855, Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman