Tar: Poems

by C.K. Williams

Dust jacket design by Susan Shapiro. His fourth book of poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

65 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

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 5 out of 5]

Tar (1983) was the first volume of C.K. Williams’ poetry that I encountered, and I am glad that I did, for it kept me coming back for more. It is not the first time Williams made use of his trademark long (twenty-plus syllable) line, but it was the collection in which he brought it to perfection and used it to tell intimate, often grubby, tales about his city and himself, stretching those long lines as far as they would go, until their filaments enveloped each story in the most attenuated threads of significance.

The most celebrated poem in this collection is probably “The Gas Station” (I think it’s a marvelous poem and from what I hear James Franco likes it too) in which Williams tells us about a night in his early adolescence when a Times Square pimp led him and his young friends to a whore in some back bedroom who “took care” of them. Although it has a puzzled desperation and sense of loss peculiar to itself, this poem shares a washed-up, used-up atmosphere with a large number of the poems in Tar:“From My Window” (two drunk army vets, one in a wheelchair), “The Dog” (a walked dog with “a tumor or a blockage of some sort” who “every time he moved his bowels” uttered a “scream of anguish”), ), “Flight” (hippies party in an old building destined to be torn down), “Floor” (an old pornographic tintype), “Neglect” (of a small rural Pennsylvania bus station), The Regulars (two old men named Sam shoot the breeze at the Colonial Lunchionette, “Soon” (a visit to the old neighborhood grammar school), and the poem “Tar” itself (the Three Mile Island disaster compared to the mess left by the roofers).

These are all vivid, memorable poems, perhaps the most easily accessible in the book, but there are other meditative, more oblique efforts that also have value: “My Mother’s Lips” (how mother used to move her lips when he spoke), “Waking Jed” (watching his little boy leave sleep behind)“The Color Time” (a boy awake in an urban bedroom, while woman in an apartment downstairs says “I can’t go on”), “The Gift” (the young poet’s ability to amuse little children, and its dark roots), “On Learning of a Friend’s Illness” (for James Wright, a pastoral with horses), and “Still Life” (a twelve-year-old boy walks with a girl, holding hands).

Two other poems also belonging to this meditative group deserve special mention. First, there is “Combat”—my second favorite poem in the collection after “The Gas Station—in which the poet speaks of his youthful visits to young German girl and her mother, the family a high-ranking Nazi suicide ( casualty of the plot against Hitler), of his fevered bedroom struggles with the shiksa (never consummated), and his speculation that he might have just been “their Jew.” The other poem, “One of the Muses,” the longest in the poem in the book (it takes up one-fourth of its length), in which Williams speaks of an old love affair which began in passion, but from which the lady soon emotionally withdrew, leaving him to spin the web of the affair from the skeins of his own emotional self, a web that eventually became this poem, “One of the muses. The verse is so abstract, so emotionally rarified, that it reminds me of the later prose of Henry James. It begins in psychological insights, but quickly becomes epistemological and then, stubbornly, existential. I don’t think I understand all of it; still, I like it a lot.

Here is a taste of “One of the Muses”:

24

What I’m left with after all this time is still the certainty that something was attained,

though all that remain now are flickers, more and more occasional, more disjointed—

pale remnants of the harsh collabvorations those intermediary silences symbolized so well.

And this . . . I mean this, these lines, constructions, etudes: these small histories,

where did this come from? As I said, there was no dessire to go over all of it again,

but, after all, whatever ambivalence I felt about it, it demanded care,


the need of doing it never quite defined itself: it, like her, came uncalled for.

A tone took me, an impulse toward a structure: I found it interesting, a question of aesthetics.

Of that were so, might there be another way, another mode in which to come to it?

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all the poems in this short book, even the last poem, "One of the Muses," which is so unlike the others: abstract, indirect, written in more noticeably poetic language ("blessèd" and "wingèd" make appearances) than all the previous poems, which are similar in their vivid physical description and compressed narrative structure. "One of the Muses" wasn't my favorite, but it made the book more complete and memorable -- it reveals something of the speaker who observes and reports through the first 50 pages. The first poem is "From My Window," very obviously about looking outward, and "One of the Muses" ends the book by looking in, at length and in strange, complex detail.

My favorite poems are those first 16, which describe ugly things beautifully, because ugliness is very complicated and rich and multifarious. You can really open to any page and find some exciting and/or chilling, funny, etc., detail, e.g. the "palsied elevator" that emits a "spermy, scummy odor of half a century of secret damp" or a boy's testicles with "skin tougher than the soles of his feet," or this amazingly detailed description of a cheap Uncle Sam Halloween costume:

"When I'd had it half an hour, I hated it--even at that age, I knew when I'd been cheated.
Ill-made, shoddy, the gauzy fabric coarsely dyed, with the taste of something evil in its odor,
it was waxy with a stiffening that gave it body long enough for you to get it on,
then it bagged, and clung, and made you feel the fool you'd been to want it in the first place."

What a clear, awful picture of this innocuous-seeming piece of American culture. It seems satirical, but it's not preachy. The long lines have a strong, driving rhythm, with plenty of pauses to let you catch your breath.

I'm ranting. Anyway, I'd recommend this book to anyone. If you don't read much contemporary poetry and are wondering where to start, I'd start here. It has all the pleasure of good prose, but it deserves the attention that poetry demands.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems of Tar, like the poems of With Ignorance , are written in the long-line structure. The long-line structure combined with Williams's narrative-based style results in something that resembles prose poetry...

What I come to now, running over it again, I think I want to keep as undramatic as I can.
These revisions of the past are probably even less trustworthy than our random, everyday assemblages
and have most likely even more to do with present unknowables, so I offer this almost in passing,
with nothing, no moral distillation, no headily pressing imperatives meant to be lurking beneath it....
- "Combat" (from Tar)

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" (from With Ignorance)

Unlike the poems of Williams's other collections, the poems of Tar have a more overtly autobiographic, confessional quality. To varying results. For example, the poems may include personal details or graphic descriptions that may cause the read to feel uncomfortable. Surprising as it may sound, this effect may be sought after by some readers. Furthermore, many of the poems focus on Williams's past romances or sexual development. The most jarring poems are those that juxtapose the graphic and the romantic...

Her dog, a grinning mongrel, rib and knob, gristle and grizzle, wasn't terribly offensive.
The trouble was that he was ill, or the trouble more exactly was that I had to know about it.
She used to walk him on a lot I overlooked, he must have had a tumor or a blockage or some sort
because every time he moved his bowels, he shrieked, a chilling, almost human scream of anguish.
...
I don't recall them too long after that. Maybe the dog died, maybe I was just less sensitive.
Maybe one year when the cold came and I closed my windows, I forgot about them . . . then I moved.
Everything was complicated now, so many tensions, so much bothersome self-consciousness.
Anyway, those back streets, especially in bad weather when the ginkgos lost their leaves, were bleak.
It's restored there now, ivy, pointed brick, garden walls with broken bottles mortared on them,
but you'd get sick and tired then: the rubbish in the gutter, the general sense of dereliction.
Also, I'd found a girl to be in love with: all we wanted was to live together, so we did.
- The Dog

We stood together at the magazine rack for a while before I realized what he was looking at.
Pornography: two naked men, one grimaces, the other, with a fist inside the first one, grins.
I must have flinched: the boy sidled down, blanketed his face more, and I left to take a walk....
- Neglect

Williams dwells on his descriptions of women in a way that I find disagreeable...

A dirty picture, possibly a tintype, from the turn of the century, even before:
the woman is obese, gigantic; a broad, black corset cuts from under her breasts to the tops of her hips,
here hair is crimped, wiry, fastened demurely back with a bow one incongruous wing of which shows.
Here eyebrows are straight and heavy, emphasizing her frank, unintrospective plainness,
and she looks directly, easily into the camera, her expression somewhere between play and scorn,
as though the activities of the photographer were ridiculous or beneath her contempt, or,
rather, as though the unfamiliar camera were actually the much more interesting presence here
and how absurd it is that the lens be turned toward her and her partner and not back on itself.
- Floor

Here's what we've done. We were in Times Square, a pimp found us, corralled us, led us somewhere,
down a dark street, another dark street, up dark stairs, dark hall, dark apartment,
where his whore, his girl or his wife or his mother for all I know, dragged herself from sleep,
propped herself on an elbow, gazed into the dark hall, and agreed, for two dollars each, to take care of us....
- The Gas Station

Perhaps I'm dwelling on these aspects of the collection because overall I didn't find the subject matter altogether interesting. With the exception of the last poem, my favourite poem in the collection, the long poem "One of the Muses"...

Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is . . .
- Plato, Symposium

Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there we should like to say, is a spirit.
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

1.

I will not grace you with a name . . . Even "you," however modest the convention: not here.
No need here for that much presence. Let "you" be "she," and let the choice, incidentally,
be dictated not by bitterness or fear - a discretion, simply, the most inoffensive decorum.

This was, after all, if it needs another reason, long ago, and not just in monthly, yearly time,
not only in that house of memory events, the shadowed, off-sized rooms of which
it amuses us to flip the doors of like a deck of cards, but also in the much more malleable,

mazy, convoluted matter of the psyche itself, especially the wounded psyche,
especially the psyche stricken once with furrows of potential which are afterwards untenanted:
voids, underminings, to be buttressed with the webbiest filaments of day-to-dayness.
- One of the Muses

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another one of the books that every poet should have on her/his bookshelf. Williams is the great master of the long line, the great master of the long narrative arc, and his sensitive, self-lascerating personal narratives are so inclusive as to include everything from environmental disaster to America's disastrous issues with race and gender and class, and not in a pedantic, preachy way--in a human way that gets under your skin.

[GD · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the shape of the long lines, the way they appear on the page, buckled back upon one another. When I first read this some twenty years ago, I was struck by the difference between this and his earlier work. With the narratives and the great earnestness and sadness of the speaker, Tar is a powerful book.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll admit that I haven't thought much about C. K. Williams in the last many years. Even before his death in 2015 I had been distracted by other writers. So when I return to him now, it's almost as if I'm coming to a new writer. The work feels very fresh, different, very alive.

Of course, when poetry readers think of Williams, they think of those long lines, stretching past the margins, and willing to drift into prose. But the syntax, often twisted a bit, keeps the integrity of the lines, makes the lines do some work to help with understanding, even meaning. The subjects of the poems, at least most of the poems in this book, are a battered America, battered Americans who are not all loved, places that have been used and discarded.

The title poem "Tar" is both a poem about the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island and the irony of the poet getting a new roof on the same day. This kind of juxtaposition of the political/global/social with the perfectly ordinary and mundane is central to Williams. I'll type out the concluding lines in normal prose because the long lines would be difficult to capture in this goodreads format: "I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks./But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves./Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light right out of the air./By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts."

But there is also some thinking going on in these poems, often difficult thinking. The final long poem, "One of the Mused," makes the case (I think) that the work itself is the Muse, both the doing of it and the accomplished thing itself.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Working through the Collected Poems chronologically, I found less to love in Tar than past collections. Part of it is an issue of attention and preferences. I find longer poems much harder to sustain interest; short poems are like fishhooks to my eyelids. Here Williams employs his now-signature long line to craft what have the look of rigidly constructed poems but feel like brief short stories, and the line count continually creeps upward, culminating with a 20 page closing poem that failed to hold my restless mind still for more than a page or two at a time.

The other issue for me is feeling disconnected with both language and subject matter. As they drift towards prose, the language feels significantly less lyrical; and the later poems aggressively use commas to introduce what feels like a digressive stutter, where every word must be listed beside it’s alternative, and every aside deserves its own clause, flow be damned. Paired with overly confessional, awkwardly sexualized reflections that populate most of the poems, it just wasn’t what I was looking for in a collection, despite bursts of brilliance. Onward we march.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a hard decision: to give it 3 or 4 stars. There were some amazing poems like "Combat," "Gas Station" and "On Learning of A Friends' Illness, but overall I was not in love with this collection.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

A handful of fine poems in here, a sentiment that would normally garner 3 stars by my standards, but the off ones were so off that my overall estimation of the book fell. Williams touches on wondrous stuff when his elements are in line--poems about vets in wheelchairs, sick dogs or backroom whores--where philosophy and memory seem apropos. But so many of the others linger and distract and talk under their breath for too long.

[Quadrotextual · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite books of poetry.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The conversational tone is marvellous, and the long lines really breathe. He manages to write with a gentle directness, with relatively few affectations. A top read, this.