|
English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
||
|
|
Partial Consolations
C. K. Williams. The Singing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 72 pp.. $20, paper.
By Jeff Westover, Howard University
In The Singing, C. K. Williams continues to use the long meditative lines that have characterized his poems since he published With Ignorance in 1977, but he also continues the formal variations he introduced in Repair, his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of 1999. The Singing, which won the 2003 National Book Award, extends the formal innovations that Williams began in Repair, but the new book does so in a more dramatic way, for a higher proportion of the poems in The Singing have shorter lines and more varied stanzas. Many poems display the long lines of Williams’s previous work, including the title poem, “This Happened,” “Oh,” “Inculcations,” and “The Tract” (the poem that closes the volume), but Williams adopts quite different forms in such poems as “Gravel,” “Lessons,” and “Flamenco.” While this collection features the demanding honesty that critics have noted in his earlier work, it also expresses tenderness and grief in compelling new forms.
Or compelling forms that remake old ones—for The Singing features poems that masterfully adapt traditional lyric forms. “The Doe,” for example (the poem which begins the book), gathers its lines into two quatrains and two tercets in a way that echoes the Italian sonnet, with its dramatic turn at the sestet, though without its end-rhyme and regular meter. While the line lengths approximate tetrameter and pentameter, Williams develops a supple, fluid rhythm for a lyrical voice that quietly confesses its grief and describes a shared moment with the doe of the title. The first two stanzas situate the speaker and the doe in a moment of charged intimacy, the second stanza culminating in a luminous image of nascent life:
All that moved was her pivoting ear the reddening sun shining through transformed to a color I’d only seen in a photo of a child in a womb.
In this brief communion, the speaker experiences a fleeting moment of solace rather than an epiphany, for after the doe bolts, his anguish returns with renewed vigor. The last stanza of the poem poignantly offers and withholds consolation:
The part of my pain which sometimes releases me from it fled with her, the rest, in the rake of the late light, stayed. (3)
This elegant closing sentence expresses a conflict that marks much of Williams’s work, the conflict between the need for consolation and the pain of its evanescence.
“Self-portrait with Rembrandt Self-portrait,” “Of Childhood the Dark,” “Elegy for an Artist,” and “The Singing” are especially effective in this regard. “The Singing” revisits the possibility of communion through a meditation on music, but it acknowledges the racial and personal differences that separate the black singer from the speaker who admires his singing. Believing himself “incorporated” into the singer’s improvised lyrics, the speaker smiles, but the singer turns “pointedly away” and shifts to a more aggressive register: “‘I’m not a nice person’ he chanted ‘I’m not a nice person.’” In the face of this response, the speaker realizes that “if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord between us I should forget it.” This matter-of-fact conclusion infuses the poem with a bracing humor, but Williams also laments “the conventions to which we were condemned” and articulates a powerful sense of lost opportunity in the lines that close the poem:
Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something is watching listening Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there (5)
Offering a rapper as a latter-day image of the American poet, “The Singing” ends on a note of longing and lament that echoes the closing lines of William Carlos Williams’s “To Elsie” (“No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car”).
“Self-portrait” combines the self-dramatizing and arty wit of the title with passionate curiosity and the gravity of suffering in four elegantly arranged stanzaic sentences. The mirroring syntax and repeated lines of the poem give it the haunting quality of a villanelle, and the poem’s final sentence articulates a potentially redemptive wisdom in a gesture that echoes the paradoxical giving and withholding of comfort at the end of “The Doe”:
whatever it is beyond dying and fear of dying, whatever it is beyond solace which remains solace eludes me, yet no longer eludes me. (9)
In ending with an affirmation, these lines emphasize the hopeful side of Williams’s outlook.
A similarly recursive, paradoxical language marks the series of poems that comprise “Of Childhood the Dark.” These poems of five couplets display the sly comic irony, philosophical questioning, and taut wordplay of Emily Dickinson. The first (“Here”) deals with the raw facts of existence and self-awareness in the riddling manner of a koan:
Uncanny to realize one was here, so much came before the awareness of being here.
Then to suspect your place here was yours only because no one else wanted or would have it.
A site, a setting, and you the matter to fill it, though you guessed it could never be filled.
Therefore, as much as a presence, you were a problem, a task; insoluble, so optional, so illicit.
Then the first understanding: that you yourself were the difficult thing to be done. (29)
The pleasure of this poem lies partly in its swift shift from the heady meditation of the first couplet to the amusing insight of the second. That shift undercuts the narcissism inherent in such meditations (a phenomenon Williams wittily comments upon in the long-lined epigram “Narcissism”). So does the paradoxical perspective that balances “presence” against “problem” and the deft comedy of “illicit,” a word that spices its line with irony and surprise. The impact of this surprise derives from the line’s combination of similarity and contrast: on the one hand, “illicit” is semantically opposed to “optional,” an antithesis reinforced by the parallel syntax of the phrases in which the words appear. On the other hand, the connotations of “illicit” overlap with those of “insoluble,” and the l-sounds of all three adjectives tie them together. In addition, the deliciously off-kilter end-rhyme between “illicit” and “fill it” intensifies the surprise.
The Singing also features poems (“War,” “Fear,” “The Hearth,” “Low Relief”) that reflect Williams’s habit of interpreting politics and the human capacity for violence in historical terms. As in the poem “Allies: According to Herodotus,” which appears in the 1992 collection A Dream of Mind, Williams meditates on barbarities from the past to sort out the ways poetry and history represent human experience. Whereas in “Allies” Williams tells an ironic story from Herodotus in order to reflect upon “the moment when history begins” (Dream 8), in “War” he considers the tragedy of September 11th in the contexts of classical Mayan and Greek culture. In the final section of this poem, Williams shifts to the context of the natural world in powerfully singing lines:
Fall’s first freshness, strange; the seasons’ ceaseless wheel, starlings starting south, the annealed leaves ready to release, yet still those columns of nothingness rise from their own ruins,
their twisted carcasses of steel and ash still fume, and still, one by one, tacked up by hopeful lovers, husbands wives, the absent faces wait, already tattering, fading, going out. (52)
In the first two sections of “War” Williams finds parallels between indifferent Mayan warriors depicted on a mural and the “bomber pilots in our day . . . who soar, unheard, unseen, over generalized, digital targets that mystically ignite,” but in the final section of the poem he turns to nature and litany to commemorate the dead. Noting the age-old theme of the brevity of human existence, Williams notes a painful paradox about the relationship between violence and the sacred:
These things that happen in the particle of time we have to be alive, these violations which almost more than any ark or altar embody sanctity by enacting so precisely sanctity’s desecration.
In remarking that “these violations . . . almost . . . / embody sanctity,” Williams confesses the inadequacy of the premise at the same time that he ventures it. He acknowledges both the sacred value of human experience and the tragic consequences of its violation, but he also notes that while the stark contrast between violation and the sacred may seem to define the latter, that contrast actually makes loss all the more unbearable. The poem ends in an act of painful naming that mourns the deaths of the victims in the face of unanswerable despair:
These broken voices of bereavement asking of us what isn’t to be given. These suddenly smudged images of consonance and peace. These fearful burdens to be borne, complicity, contrition, grief. (52)
Instead of offering false consolation, Williams voices grief and guilt.
The troubled consciousness that characterizes the closing lines of “War” also appears in several of the poems in the last section of The Singing. “Fear” expresses both the apocalyptic terror of American life after September 11th and a critical awareness of the ethical and political dilemma of recent events:
Yes, we have antagonists, and some of their grievances are just, but is no one blameless, are we all to be combatants, prey? (54)
The final word of that question reappears in the dream-fable of “Chaos” (in which a spider “devours its still so sadly brilliantly hued prey”), while the key word fear recurs in the midst of plague and famine in the nightmarish “Future.” Williams voices his misgivings about fear, “the politics of terror” (54), and war in “The Hearth,” a poem that muses on the deadly landscape of a world gone awry:
I was thinking, as I often do these days, of war; of radar, rockets, shrapnel, cities razed, soil poisoned for a thousand generations; of suffering so vast it nullifies everything else.
I stood in the wind in the raw cold wondering how those with power over us can effect such things, and by what cynical reasoning pardon themselves. (66)
In the wake of recent questions about the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq, many readers will find they share Williams’s pointed question.
Williams, C. K. A Dream of Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.
---. The Singing. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
|
|