C.C.

by Tyrone Williams

Poetry. African American studies. "Williams' intensely moving first book bridges more gaps than many words (and careers) thrice as long: quiet humor to quiet anger; weighty concerns (cybernetics, anthropology, astronomy) to formal invention; brilliant appropriation to startling beauty; street language to a full panoply of sophisticated theory; above all between African American concerns and those of the plain vanilla majority. The reference, as craft and time demand, is ever to mother language"--Nathaniel Tarn. "Slanging each other we drift apart. Maybe there is a war outside. Will web sites continue to explode? The poems in C.C. are tense, troubled, intricately terse. In this powerful collection Tyrone Williams explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history"--Susan Howe.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published June 21, 2002

Reviews

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

from Happy Fault
21 ‘Who beckons
from a fetal,
misshapened, delegged
future “i”?
Who will have
arrived save
for its limp,
glitch and catch’

from I AM NOT PROUD TO BE BLACK

72 'one head e pluribus: Nation of Islam,
Republic of New Africa, NAACP,
Congressional Black Caucus, talented tenths,
capita, subject to the lowercases—
"the great burnings," uprisings, rebellions, disturbances—
subjected ro de—Moore v. Dempsey, Plessy v.
Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education,
Shaw v. Reno: "The New World, if misery
had/a voice would be a rifle cocking."
"What is romorrowlrhat it cannot come/
today?" "Call it a blackman's ghost"
which "they regard as a social disgrace."
"To write a blues song/is ro regiment riots"
rememory "love's austere and lonely offices."'

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

real taken w/the range of reference, form, and tone, from playful "polyentendres" to the melancholy of voice falling into voids . Poetics of dense referentiality~almost geological pressure holding it all together. A favorite tag: "The appetizer: / pre-quilt torn-up hand-me-downs. / The entree: ditto." And lines: "and we know / light as day, the everyday, a dealer: / five-card stud or the five fingers, / it's al just bad hands, bad luck, / these conflicting and overlapping methods, / meterologies and weather reports, / "and" itself the means, obstacle and end, / "and" a better word for us than we, / or a better word for some of us." picked this one up Berl's. been trying to read all of Williams. now I need to talk to a friend to get a better grip on it.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Words and forms are: in play.

:I'm _____
:Hi. I'm ______
:A start, if only.
:And yet we thought it important enough to begin with introductions, aka names, as though they were shell-gifts, hollowed-out presents in which we might hear one another's blood.
:There exists a logic whereby we'd merely divulge information according to the complex parameters of human intimacy and then, and only then, give names.
:As statement, as if in a court of law, as if the moment of giving, there was assertion.
:Violence, then, still. And Always, I suppose.
:Perhaps start again?
:Impossible. It's all out, there.