All at Once: Prose Poems

by C.K. Williams

Short, sharp musings on things profound and mundane (and sometimes both) from the Pulitzer Prize winning poetC. K. Williams has never been afraid to push the boundaries of poetic form—in fact, he's known for it, with long, lyrical lines that compel, enthrall, and ensnare. In his latest work, All at Once, Williams again embodies this spirit of experimentation, carving out fresh spaces for himself and surprising his readers once more with inventions both formal and lyrical. Somewhere between prose poems, short stories, and personal essays, the musings in this collection are profound, personal, witty, and inventive—sometimes all at once. Here are the starkly beautiful images that also pepper his a neighbor's white butane tank in March "glares in the sunlight, raw and unseemly, like a breast inappropriately unclothed in the painful chill." Here are the tender, masterful sketches of characters Williams has a sign painter and skid-row denizen who makes an impression on the young soon-to-be poet with his "terrific focus, an intensity I'd never seen in an adult before." And here are a husband's hymns to his beloved wife, to her laughter, which "always has something keen and sweet to it, an edge of something like song." This is a book that provokes pathos and thought, that inspires sympathy and contemplation. It is both fiercely representative of Williams's work and like nothing he's written before—a collection to be admired, celebrated, and above all read again and again.

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2014

About the author

C.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.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Ok apparently I picked a terrible place to start because this is neither popular nor representative of CK Williams' works but I had a lovely time with it all the same!!

So these prose poems are a fun little contrast to my recent strivings with James Tate since JT writes something like magical realism but perhaps you'd describe as absurdist-americana-realism. CKW here is something closer to realism but it feels such a disservice to call them that they're autobiographical they're beautiful and breaking & I need to read more of him sooner rather than later. Talent hums.

It's a long collection but if that last poem Again doesn't hit hard I don't know what to say o my poor unpeeling heart

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

C. K. Williams, well-known for his prolific poetry using the Whitmanian long line, has here moved to an even greater extension with a volume of prose poems. To me they seem more impressions--they're not particularly poetic, nor are they, for the most part, thought-provoking. My favorite of the 3 sections--the only one with a title, "Catherine's Laughter"--contains within its 26 pieces about his wife most of the lyricism of the volume. Otherwise I thought the collection bland and without power or insight.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

All at Once was a generally enjoyable, if somewhat unremarkable collection of prose poems. They floated a little too close to the essay for me most of the time, without the benefit of extended exposition that an actual essay would have allowed. The best part were the poems of "Catherine's Laughter" a series of brief reflections of Williams' wife, how they fell in love, and their life together.

The poems are both deeply felt and competently executed, which is about as much as can be reasonably demanded of any text, but they just didn't stick with me. Perhaps they would mean more if I were straight (there's a lot of Extremely Heterosexual musing on the relation between men and womenn--I don't think he means to be misogynist exactly, but it is hard to forget that he is a Man who is attracted to Women and that the social order that is heterosexualiy--beyond just sex or desire--is shaping the voice of these poems). Or perhaps they would mean more if I were in late middle age. As it stands, a fine book, but not one I can quite recommned.

[Jerome Spencer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I mean, C.K. Williams knows what he's doing. This collection is just boring.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my review in New York Journal of Books first. Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

Books: In All at Once poet C.K. Williams turns to prose

More than two decades ago a creative writing grad school classmate related how a prospective employer told her she would not get the publishing job for which she had applied, because "poets can't write prose." If prose memoirs by poets such as Mary Karr had not already disproved that canard, All at Once, poet C.K Williams' new book of short prose pieces, surely would.

During the middle decades of Williams' poetic oeuvre he used very long lines, lines so long that perhaps it's not that much of a stretch for him to dispense with line breaks entirely in All at Once and switch to prose (after all, novelist David Albahari has shown that paragraph breaks are also dispensable). On the other hand, it might be an interesting creative writing exercise to put line breaks into Williams' prose in All at Once.

There is no consensus on what defines or how to write a prose poem, nor on whether to emphasize the prose or the poetry. In the 19th Century French symbolist poets wrote poetic prose pieces featuring a lyrical voice and poetic imagery. That approach was also favored by the late American writer Carol Novack, the founder of Mad Hatters Review. OTOH, prose poets such as Phyllis Koestenbaum make the prose in her prose poems as prosy as possible. Williams uses both approaches in the varied pieces that comprise All at Once, some of which seem more like essays.

In my New York Journal of Books review of All at Once I write, "It is probably not fair to compare C. K. Williams’ prose in All at Once with his award winning verse poetry books, but it does offer poetry averse readers an opportunity to engage with a perceptive and empathic wordsmith whose work they otherwise would not encounter." See that review for a fuller discussion of the book.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm an admirer of C.K. Williams and his poems, and I am a lover of the prose poem. That said, the pieces in All At Once don't all feel like prose poems and they tend to be the least interesting. At 180 plus pages the book feels indulgent in ways the best if Williams's work isn't. I wish the book were leaner because the best of these (and there are a lot of good prose poems in this) are terrific. One of the joys of a book of poems is the joy of visiting someone else's garden: it's beautiful and put together and someone else has weeded it. This garden of prose poems needs some weeding.