Lies

by C.K. Williams

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

C. K. Williams—one of my favorite 20th Century poets--is best known for his idiosyncratically long verse line and the way he used it to tell stories about his life and explore their moral implications. But Lies (1969), his first book, is still eight years away from With Ignorance (1977)—the first fruits of that long verse line—and, although I find more than a few poems I like here—I find little of the unique C.K. Williams I have come to revere.

I find echoes of a few other poets—the big city voice of David Ignatow, the isolated romanticism of Robert Creeley, the precision of W. C. Williams—in these passionate, lonely cries, but few of the poems stand out for me, except for the often anthologized “Hood” (a short monologue by a high school rebel of the ‘50’s) and the moving elegy “A Day for Anne Frank,” the work that C.K. Williams often said taught him how to write poetry.

Since both of these works are included in Williams’ Selected Poems, I will include here two others I liked almost as much but that didn’t make the cut:

AFTER THAT

Do you know how much pain is left
in the world? One tiny bit of pain is left,
braised on one cell like a toothmark.
And how many sorrows there still are? Three sorrows:
the last, the next to the last and this one.

And there is one pormise left, feeling
its way through the poison, and one house
and one gun and one should of agony
that wanders in the lost cities and the lost mountains.
And so this morning, surrering the third sorrow

from the last, feeling pain in my last gene,
cracks in the struts, bubbles in the nitro,
this morning for someone I’m not even sure eixsts
I waste tears. I count down by fractions
through the ask. I howl. I use up everything.


PENANCE

I only regret the day wasted in no pain.
I am sorry for having touched bottom
and loved again.
I am sorry for the torn sidewalks
and the ecstacy underneath, for the cars,
the old flower-lady watching her fingers,
my one shoe in the morning
with death on its tongue.

In the next yard a dog whines
and whines for his lost master
and for the children who have gone
without him. I am sorry
because his teeth click on my neck,
because my chest shudders and the owl cries
in the tug of its fierce sacrament.

I repent God and children,
the white talons of peace and my jubilance.
Everything wheels
in the iron rain, smiling and lying.
Forgive me, please.

[Dave Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a world that uses its soldiers and widows / for flour, its orphans for building stone, its legs for pens. / In that place, eyes are softened and harmless like God’s / and all blend in the traffic of their tragedy and pass by / like people.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems of Lies appear to be heavily influenced by Surrealism. Indeed, many of the poems have a general dream-like quality (as in "Don't"). Some make specific reference to the act of dreaming (as in "The Hard Part" and "Trash"), or dreams as an abstract entity, a place, a possession (as in "The Man Who Owns Sleep" and "From Now On")...

Everything washes up,
clean as morning.
My wife's wet underpants in the sink -
I unsay them,
they swallow me
like a Valentine.
The icebox is growing baby green
lima beans for Malcolm Lowry.
The house fills with love.
I chew perfume
and my neighbor kissing me good morning
melts and goes out
like a light.
- Don't

Do you remember when we dreamed about the owl
and the skeleton, and the shoe
opened and there was the angel
with his finger in the book, his smile like chocolate?
- The Hard Part

I am your garbage man. What you leave,
I keep for myself, burn or throw
on the dump or from scows in the delicious river.
Your old brown underpants are mine now,
I can tell from them
what your dreams were....
- Trash

Who is this man
who's cornered the market
on sleeping?
He's not quite finished.
He bends over with a hand on his knee
to balance him
and from the other side they see
that clear eye in the wall
watching unblinking.
- The Man Who Owns Sleep

the mouths in our mouths don't tell us
the sorrowful faces in our tears not
touch us nothing holds us nothing reaps
us we are not lived we are not suffered
the dreams come for us but they fail
- From Now On for Murray Dressner

Williams dwells as much in the realm of dreams as in the realm of nightmares, several of his poems featuring particularly disturbing imagery...

In December the mare
I learned to ride on died.
On the frozen paddock hill,
down, she moaned all night
before the mink farmers
came in their pickup
truck, sat on her dark
head and cut her throat.
- Sleeping Over for Dave and Mark Rothstein

there are people whose sex
keeps growing even when they're old whose
genitals swell like tumors endlessly
until they are all sex and nothing else nothing
that moves or thinks nothing
but great inward and outward handfuls of gristle
- Saint Sex

there was this lady once she used to grow
snake in her lap

they came up like tulips
from her underpants and the tops
of her stockings and she'd get us
with candy and have us pet
the damned things
- Tails

In the poems of Lies, Williams favors the use of simile over metaphor. And I must say, his use of simile may not be inventive but at least he uses it sparingly (as in "In There", "The World's Greatest Tricycle-Rider", and "Beyond")...

Here I am, walking along your eyelid again
toward you tear duct. Here are you eyelashes
like elephant grass and one tear
blocking the way like a boulder.
- In There

The world's greatest tricycle-rider
is in my heart, riding like a wildman,
no hands, almost upside down along
the walls and over the high curbs
and stoops, his bell rapid firing,
the sun spinning in his spokes like flame.
- The World's Greatest Tricycle-Rider

Some people,
they just don't hate enough yet.
They back up, snarl, grab guns
but they're like children,
they overreach themselves;
they end up standing there feeling stupid,
wondering if it's worth it.
- Beyond

My favourite passage from the collection...

Tell me again about silence. Tell me I won't,
not ever, hear the cold men whispering in my pores
or the mothers and fathers who scream in the bedroom
and throw boxes of money between them and kiss.
- Patience Is When You Stop Waiting

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

As perfect a collection I could imagine, at least for my cracked sensibilities. Sharp-tongued, visceral and often profane. With a mix of playful experiments and outright horror drawn from times of war and unrest, Williams brings an old soul's ear for language and observation and pairs it with a young (male) writer's brash confidence, just brimming with piss and vinegar. It's wild to think this was his debut. I gather his signature long-line form doesn't appear for a few more books, but I'm perfectly content with this initial stab.

[Colin]

“It’s horrible, being run over by a bus / when all you are is a little box turtle.”

Not without its bare patches, but joyfully stranger than I expected Williams to be! Hoping this isn’t the mark of younger books, to be squashed later

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

His early poems are raw, brutal, powerful. The final poem, a multi-page tribute to Anne Frank, is almost devastating.