Flesh and Blood

by C.K. Williams

Flesh and Blood , the fifth collection by C. K. Williams, was awarded the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review , Edward Hirsch noted that the book's compression and exactitude gave it "the feeling of a contemporary sonnet sequence." Hirsch "Like Berryman's Dream Songs or Lowell's Notebooks , Mr. Williams's short poems are shapely yet open-minded and self-generative, loosely improvisational though with an underlying formal necesity."

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the poems of With Ignorance and Tar before it, the poems of Flesh and Blood are written in the long line form. Unlike the poems of these previous collections, however, the poems of Flesh and Blood adhere to a stricter form. As well as being written in the long line form, the poems of Flesh and Blood are exactly eight lines in length.

The collection is divided into three parts. The poems of the first part contain Williams's signature mix of autobiography and rumination (as in "Repression"). In addition, the first part contains a few poems that will characterize the second part, poems that belong to a sort of loose sequence, distinguished by a title and subtitle (as in "Alzheimer's: The Wife" and "Alzheimer's: The Husband")...

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippage yet, the aches and sad softenings,
I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression,
sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact,
and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have once called lassitude, indifference,
now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions
to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved disciplines, rigors, almost mortifications
I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement days, days when the idea alone of psychic peace,
of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would have meant inconceivable capitulation.
- Repression

She answers the bothersome telephone, takes the message, forgets the message, forgets who called.
One of their daughters, her husbands guesses: the one with the dogs, the babies, the boy Jed?
Yes, perhaps, but how tell which, how tell anything when all the name tags have been lost or switched,
when all the lonely flowers of sense and memory bloom and die now in adjacent bites of time?
Sometimes her own face with suddenly appear with terrifying inappropriateness before her in a mirror.
She knows that if she's patient, its gaze will break, demurely, decorously, like a well-taught child's,
it will turn from her as though it were embarrassed by the secrets of this awful hide-and-seek.
If she forgets, though, and glances back again, it will still be in there, furtively watching, crying.
- Alzheimer's: The Wife for Renee Mauger

He'd been a clod, he knew, yes, always aiming toward his vision of the good life, always acting on it.
He knew he'd been unconscionably self-centered, had indulged himself with his undreamed-of good fortune,
but he also knew that the single-mindedness with which he's attended to his passions, needs and whims,
and which must have seemed to others the grossest sort of egotism, was also what was really at the base
of how he's almost offhandedly worked out the intuitions and moves which had brought him here,
and this wasn't all that different: to spend his long anticipated retirement learning to cook,
clean house, dress her, even to apply her makeup, wasn't any sort of secular saintliness -
that would be belittling - it was just the next necessity he saw himself as being called to.
- Alzheimer's: The Husband for Jean Mauger

As I stated before, the poems of the second part are characterized by poems written in a loose sequence. They are distinguished by a title and subtitle, and, unlike the pairings in the first part, they are longer sequences of as many as ten poems...

The way, her father dead a day ago, the child goes in his closet, finds herself inside his closet,
finds himself atop the sprawl of emptied shoes, finds herself enveloped in the heavy emptied odor,
and breathes it in, that single, mingled gust of hair and sweat and father-flesh and father,
breathes it in and tries to hold it, in her body, in her breath, keep it in her breath forever . . .
so we, in love, in absence, in an absence so much less than death but still shaped by need and loss,
so we too find only what we want in sense, the drive toward sense, the hunger for the actual flesh;
so we, too, breathe in, as though to breathe was was now itself the end of all, as though to scent,
to hold the fading traces of an actual flesh, was all, the hungering senses driven toward all . . .
- Vehicle: Absence

The third part consists entirely of the long poem, "Le Petit Salvié", an elegy for Williams's friend, the poet Paul Zweig...

So quickly, and so slowly . . . In the tiny elevator of the flat you'd borrowed on the Rue de Pondicherry,
you suddenly put your head against my chest, I thought to show how tired you were, and lost consciousness,
sagging heavily against me, forehead oiled with sweat, eyes ghastly agape . . . so quickly, so slowly.
Quickly the ambulance arrives, mewling at the curb, the disinterested orderlies strap you to their stretcher.
Slowly at the clinic, waiting for the doctors, waiting for the ineffectual treatment to begin.
Slowly through that night, then quickly all the next day, your last day, though no one yet suspected it.
Quickly those remaining hours, quickly the inconsequential tasks and doings of any ordinary afternoon.
Quickly, slowly, those final silences and sittings I so regret now not having taken all of with you.
- Le Petit Salvié, 1

Also remarkable are the poems dedicated to other poets, poets that Williams may or may not have known, poets like Elizabeth Bishop (in "The Prodigy") and Anne Sexton (in "Suicide: Anne")...

Though no shyer than the others - while her pitch is being checked she beams out at the audience,
one ear sticking through her fine, straight, dark hair, Nabokov would surely say "deliciously" -
she's younger, slimmer, flatter, still almost a child: her bow looks half a foot too big for her.
Not when she begins to play, though: when she begins to play, when she goes swooping, leaping,
lifting from the lumbering tutti like a fighter plane, that bow is fire, that bow is song,
that bow lifts all of us, father and old uncle, yawning younger brother and bored best friend,
and brings us all to song, to more than song, to breaths breathed for us, sharp, indrawn,
and then, as she bows it higher and higher, to old sorrows redeemed, a sweet sensation of joy.
- The Prodigy for Elizabeth Bishop

Perhaps it isn't as we like to think, the last resort, the end of something, thwarted choice or attempt,
but rather the ever-recurring beginning, the faithful first to mind, the very image of endeavor,
so that even the most patently meaningless difficulties, a badly started nail, a lost check,
nto to speak of the great and irresolvable emotional issues, would bring instantly to mind
that unfailingly reliable image of a gesture to be carried out for once with confidence and grace.
It would feel less like desperation, being driven down, ground down, and much more a reflex, almost whim,
as though the pestering forces of inertia that for so long had held you back had ebbed at last,
and you could slip through now, not to peace particularly, not even to escape, but to completion.
- Suicide: Anne for Anne Sexton

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a pleasure to read a poet who can write on any subject with insight and charm. These eight-line poems come four on each set of facing pages; for variety consider these titles that can be viewed when opened to pages 34 & 35: "Dignity," "Fast Food," "The Orchid," and "The City in the Hills." Some of my favorites in this volume are "Alzheimers: The Wife," "The Past," "Kin," "Vehicle:Circles," and "Vehicle:Violence." The concluding set of poems in memory of Williams' friend Paul Zweig touch on the themes that go through a rational person's mind when losing a loved one--astonishing.

[Isaac Timm · Rating 5 out of 5]

When people drop "I'm not into poetry." or " I don't understand poetry." I want shake them by the collar and scream, "Poetry is about being human, every act and emotion any of us have ever had has been captured in a poem." Saying that they are not into poetry, to me, is like saying the sun is over rated.

The point of the above rant is that poetry can be healing, that the right poem can touch perfectly on what you need. After a painful year, Flesh and Blood is dropped into my hands and it has every poem that I need to hear. Great poetry makes connects to discovery, suffering, and love and connects you to the journey of others had came before you. This book was the healing I needed.

[James Passaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were parts of this book I enjoyed, there were other parts of this book in which the sensuality of his writing served as a reminder of a unconcerned attitude toward things inappropriate or evil. There were definitely strange moments that would prevent me from reading others of his work. It brought up a lot of my concern about lack of restraint and the potential for anger or the attempts at justifications of things that are blatantly dark. He never openly steps over the line in this volume but I often did not feel a sense of beauty in the things meant to be beautiful. Some things are broken and not beautiful and it's okay for us to say that too.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

poetry that mostly paints vivid mental images of the topics for me in many of them.

[Pseudo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un peu prétentieux... Bien traduit.

[Jose Araguz · Rating 5 out of 5]

What's great about this book is how C.K. Williams takes his usual long line and fits into a book of short poems, each one eight lines long. You get to see how the lyrical and intense a longer, narrative, meditative line can be. Standouts include: Elms, First Desires, the Love series, and his elegy on Paul Zweig. I reread this for the moments where the poems move beyond narrative and philosophical rumination into song.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have this book and first read it in 1998. It was recommended to me in Grad school by my advisor, Steve Orlen. He thought I'd love it and learn from it. He told me the poems were "highly charged short incidents." Good description. Ah, Steve, would that you were still here with us.....Anyway, the whole section 2 is amazing. Every time I read it.

[Monica (Niki) Fox Elenbaas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful emotions in exquisite words

Williams captures and illuminates human experience, from the mundane and ordinary to the crushing and dreadful.

This collection began slowly and with a comforting ease for me, then rose, like the surf, to a powerful conclusion as it examined mothers, depression and death.

I am overcome in the best of ways.

[Michelle Hoogterp · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some good poems that I read (and I didn't read the entire book) but overall I just wasn't terribly moved. It was interesting to see a different format of writing and a style, which he clearly has, but I absolutely hated the book's layout.

[Angela Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this in college, and it has since been my favorite volume of poetry. I love the way he formats the poems to give a realistic slice of life with jarring images that force one to confront their own inner demons.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another good one by Williams. This one is short pieces, not the standard Williams long narrative, and they are good as small stories or lyrical pieces.

[Cindy Pineo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gift from a dear friend in 1989, this book pretty much started my relationship with poetry. C. K. Williams is amazing and I love his older work best.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Williams samey style became a bit tiresome.