With Ignorance

by C.K. Williams

Poems

Genres: Poetry

37 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

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 4 out of 5]

I have never before begun a review with a quote from a book-jacket blurb, but then there's a first time for everything. In the following quote, the great mid-western poet Richard Hugo—elegist of ruined taverns and abandoned farmhouses—speaks of the particular difficulties—and strengths—of C.K. Williams third book, With Ignorance (1977):

It’s a book that has to be read with attention. The speaker of these poems is going through life for the first (and only time. He is bewildered, groping a big, and hs is learning. The poems demonstrate how we learn from life. Their progression doesn’t conform to established aesthetic ideals, but to the way experience is received by the mind, reacted to and absorbed for all time.

I didn’t like With Ignorance much at first. I decided to read it because I had heard that it was the first book in which Williams used his characteristically long—usually longer than an octameter—verse line. This is true, the line is in full evidence here, but instead of using it to tell stories about his own life and then exploring their implications, he seems to meander obsessively through often inchoate sensory and mythic material, searching for a coherent experience to write about, a useful implication to infer. The result wasn’t the disciplined sort of C. K. Williams poem I am used to; it felt like a bunch of first drafts to me.

Then, during my second reading (after I had thought about the Hugo blurb quoted above), I began to see the book a little differently. The early Williams, as demonstrated in his first book Lies (1969) was sort of a sanguine, earthbound surrealist—Anne Sexton once called him “the Fellini of the written word”—but the new verse line now emerging, as a result of his burgeoning craftsmanship, demanded more than idiosyncratic imagery rooted in the travails of the body: it wanted stories to tell and insights to explore. What the reader hears—or perhaps more accurately overhears—is the echoes of that new verse line looking for its stories.

I’ll include two excerpts here, the first is an example of the sort of down-to-earth story still to come, the second the re-telling of an old Jewish tale that reveals much about C.K.’s mission as a poet. (In order to give the reader a better idea of C.K.’s verse line, I have inserted a space after each.

First, from the poem “Sanctity,” is William’s description of the behavior of the men he met working construction:

. . . Some of them would be so good to be with at work,

slamming things around, playing practical jokes, laughing all the time, but they could be miserable,

touchy and sullen, always ready to imagine an insult or get into a fight anywhere else.

If something went wrong, if a compressor blew or a truck backed over somebody,

they’d be the first ones to risk their lives dragging you out

but later you’d see them and they’d be drunk, looking for trouble, almost murderous.

And from the poem “Spit,” here is the re-telling of a rabbinical legend which explains why Moses was “slow of speech.” When C.K. Williams says “tongue” here, I can’t help but think of his new, often unwieldy, verse line:

. . . when they first brought him as a child before Pharoah,

the king tested him by putting a diamond and a live coal in front of him

and Moses picked up the red ember and popped it into his mouth

so for the rest of his life he was tongue-tied and Aaron had to speak for him.

What must his scarred tongue have felt like in his mouth?

It must have been like always caring something there that weighed too much,

something leathery and dead whose greatest gravity was to loll out like an ox’s,

and when it moved it must have been like a thick embryo slowly coming alive,

butting itself against the inner sides of his teeth and cheeks.

And when God burned in the bush, how could he not cleave to him?

How could he not know that all of us were on fire and that every word we said would burn forever . . .

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

With ignorance begins a knowledge the first characteristic of which is ignorance.
- Kierkegaard

There's a sadness in the poems of With Ignorance, a nostalgia tainted by regret. In fact, many of the poems are written from the poet's perspective, recalling some event from his past...

I thought I was healing, for all I know I might have stayed forever in the grim room I was camped in
but one day some boys who must have climbed up through one of the abandoned tenements
suddenly appeared skidding and wrestling over the steep pitch of the old man's roof
and when I shouted at them to get the hell of, he must have thought I'd meant him:
he lurched in his bed and stopped rubbing himself with the white cream he used to use on his breasts.
He looked up, our eyes met, and I think for the first time he really believed I was there.
I don't know how long we stared at each other - I could hear the kids shrieking at me
and the road-building equipment that had just started tearing the skin from the avenue -
then his zincy fingers slowly subsided against his heart and he smiled,
a brilliant, total, incongruous smile, and even though I had no desire to,
the was afterwards I had no desire to cry when my children were born, but did,
sobbed, broke down with joy or some inadmissible apprehension, I smiled back.
It was as though we were lovers, as though, like lovers, we'd made speech again
and were listening as it gutted and fixed the space between us and then a violent,
almost physical loathing took me, for all I'd done to have ended in this place,
to myself, to everyone, to the whole business we're given the name life for.
- Bread

All my friend did was sit, at home until they found him, then for hours at a time on his bed in the ward,
pointing at his eyes, chanting the same phrase over and over. "Too much fire!" he's say. "Too much fire!"
I remember I was amazed at how raggedy he looked, then annoyed because he wouldn't answer me
and then, when he was getting better, I used to pester him to tell me about that fire-thing.
He'd seemed to be saying he'd seen too much and I wanted to know too much what
because my obsession then was that I was somehow missing everything beyond the ordinary....
- The Cave

Imagine dread. Imagine, without symbol, without figure,history or histories; a place, not a place.
Imagine it must be risen through, beginning with the silentmoment, the secrets quieted,
one hour, one age at a time, sadness, nostalgia, the absurdpain of betrayal.
Through genuine grief, then, through the genuine sufferingfor the boundaries of self
and the touch on the edge, the compassion, that never,never quite, breaks through....
- With Ignorance, 5

Some of the poems are reminiscent of Raymond Carver. The scenes have a genuine quality (in part because, the poet insists, they are genuine). But more than genuine, the scenes play out with the slow build of Carver, the accumulation of idiosyncratic details, the specificity of the details that contributes to the scenes authenticity and the conviction that the author was indeed present to have witnessed the scene...

Once I went home to dinner with a carpenter who'd taken me under his wing
and was keeping everyone off my back while he helped me. He was beautiful but at his house, he sulked.
After dinner, he and the kids and I were watching television while his wife washed the dishes
and his mother, who lived with them, sat at the table holding a big cantaloupe in her lap,
fondling it and staring at it with the kind of intensity people usually only look into fire with.
The wife kept trying to take it away from her but the old lady squawked and my friend said, "Leave her alone, will you?" "But she's doing it on purpose," the wife said.
I was watching. The mother put both her hands on it then, with her thumbs spread,
as though the melon were a head and her thumbs were covering the eyes and she was aiming it like a gun or a camera.
Suddenly the wife muttered, "You bitch!" ran over the the bookshelf, took a book down -
A History of Revolutions - rattled through the pages and triumphantly handed it to her husband.
A photograph: someone who's been garroted and the executioner, standing behind him in a business hat,
had his thumbs just like that over the person's eyes, straightening the head,
so they you thought the thumbs were going to move away because they were only pointing
the person at something they wanted him to see and the one with the hands was going to say, "Look! Right there!"
"I told you," the wife said. "I swear to god she's trying to drive me crazy."
I didn't know what it all meant but my friend went wild, started breaking things, I went home
and when I saw him the next morning at breakfast he acted as though nothing had happened....
- The Sanctity for Nick and Arlene de Credico

He left before the cops came, and before he left he shook my hand and looked into my eyes.
It's impossible to tell how much that glance weighed: it was like having to lift something,
something so ponderous and unwieldy that you wanted to call for someone to help you
and when he finally turned away, it wouldn't have bothered me at all if I'de never seen him again....
- Bob

My friend Dave knew a famous writer who used to have screwdrivers for breakfast.
He'd start with half gin and half juice and the rest of the day he'd sit with the same glass
in the same chair and add gin. The drink would get paler and paler, finally he'd pass out....
- Friends

Other poems employ imagery that is at turns surreal and/or disturbing. Imagery that is characteristic of Williams's earlier collections, Lies and I Am The Bitter Name ...

After this much time, it's still impossible. The SS man with his stiff hair and his uniform;
the Rabbi, probably in a torn overcoat, probably with a stained beard the other would be clutching;
the Torah, God's work, on the altar, the letters blurring under the blended phlegm;
the Rabbi's parched mouth, the SS man perfectly absorbed, obsessed with perfect humiliation....
- Spit

These times. The endless wars. The hatreds. The vengefulness.
Everyone I know getting out of their marriage. Old friends distrustful.
The politicians using us until you can't think about it anymore because you can't tell anymore
which reality affects which and how do you escape from it without everything battering you back again?
How many times will I lie to Jessie about things that have no meaning for either of us?
How many forgivenesses will I need from her when all I wanted was to keep her from suffering the same ridiculous illusions I have?
There'll be peace soon.
They'll fling it down like sick meat we're supposed to lick up and be thankful for and what then?
- The Last Deaths, 3

Life stinks and death stinks and god and your hand touching your face
and every breath, daring to turn, daring to come back from the stop: the turn stinks
and the last breath, the real one, the one where everyone troops into your bed
and piles on - oh, that one stinks best! It stays in your mouth
and who you kiss not knows life and knows death, knows how it would be to fume in a nostril
and the thousand desires that stink like the stars and the voice heard through the stars
and each time - milk sour, egg sour, sperm sour - each time - dirty, friends, father -
each time - mother, tree, breath - each time - breath and breath and breath -
each time the same stink, the amazement, the wonder to do this and it flares,
this, and it stinks, this: it stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.
- Hog Heaven for James Havard

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Working my way through Williams' works: here at last the characteristically long line arrives, and with it a new kind of grace. Lies was visceral and blunt, and quite often profane; I am the Bitter Name was equally profane but felt diffused somehow, meanings harder to grasp, not too dissimilar from the first collection but feeling somewhat less focused and more purposefully oblique. With Ignorance casts aside the earlier approach for a complete reinvention of Williams' mode: consistently long lines used to tell what amount to snippets of short stories. They're observational, often narrative, generally less experimental (with the exception of a few poems, including the lengthy title poem that closes the collection) and more direct than the earlier work. I'm not sure why, but I'm often reminded of fragments of Raymond Carver stories. Details are sharply observed but quite strange, and conclusions are elusive (or, perhaps, illusive). Fantastic collection overall.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread this for the first time since I first read it in my 20s. These lengthy, long-line poems worm their way inside me, with an unnerving energy. I'd put this is in my top ten favorite poetry books.

[Biscuits · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did the feel the insight in these poems that I do in other Williams poems. I still respect the long-line structure, but the content did not strike me as up to par.