ck effluvia

C.K. Williams fell in love with poetry on the slim experience of the writing of a single poem near the end of a required English class in college. He liked it so much he decided it was something he could do for a living. His first move was to quit school, get some money from his dad, and go to live in Paris to starve and suffer a bit, so he’d have something to write about.

(What an astonishing thing to do, and so like a poet! Jim Harrison and Franz Wright made similar moves, though I don’t know what inspired Harrison to be a writer, nor whether his main gig is poetry.)

He soon realized he had nothing to write about, or that’s how he puts it, but was fortunate to discover a bookstore nearby with lots of poetry to learn from.

You could put that a different way. He was bored and lonely, and really too scared to write, with no gravity to anchor him in the world, and luckily he found a good bookstore full of books in which to escape his predicament. At the same time, reading could be rationalized as work, since he surely did need to educate himself in the realm of poetry if he was serious about becoming a poet.

It does show a romantic streak, and explains, at least in part, why his first poems are so bitter and dark, so full of outrage. He needed to be dark, as that is the traditional stance of the young poet.

CKW’s article on the novel and on form in poetry is nothing more than his projection of his own history and evolution onto a fictional drama—pitting the novel (and other narrative forms, and their popularity) against poetry (with it’s “artificial” forms, it’s dauntingness to the average reader, and the “beauty” of, within those forms, the combination of technical skill with actual embodiment of some emotion or experience such that a reader is there).

In describing form as what makes poetry, at times, “beautiful”—participating momentarily in the radiance that is to be found in the world if one is open—Williams says that form is “artificial”, and uses music as an example, as well as the rhythm of sound in poetry (although all writing has rhythm; it’s part of voice, mood, character, pacing, etc.). Though the word art roots artifice, artificial has come to have a different meaning—more or less it means false. The paradox of art is that when it works it is anything but false, but it can also actually be false—it can leave out what isn’t pretty, or it can leave out what doesn’t fit the intention—whether to glorify or to wallow in despair—and commit the crime of seducing its perceivers into a false view.

What art is, is participation in the radiance of being, is elaborating on that radiance, expanding it, so that there is more radiance, so that the radiance is more seen, more experienced. It is finding beauty and lighting it, tuning in to it, sensing it and conveying the sensation, artist as instrument. Beauty is not necessarily pretty. There is beauty in everything, radiance in everything. There is nothing that cannot be radiant. That’s the work of the magician/alchemist; finding the beauty.

In other words, what makes any art radiant is in part form, but form is an element, like gold, and to work the gold is to reveal it’s beauty, to find one of the infinite expressions of the form that releases it.

This requires play and experimentation and attention. It requires culture, the history of a place and people, the centuries of experience and play. It requires others, an audience.

But most of all it requires feeling, a wholeness embodied in the art (or is it the other way around?). It requires a knowing that isn’t formal at all. The form is the shape, but what is created is beyond the shape. The form by itself is not alive, not radiant.

In any case, Williams objects to the “generic modern novel” as too gloomy, basically lacking in vision, and in a sense really lacking in the sense that the author takes responsibility in the role of “story teller” for providing readers with a transformative journey. Unwilling to get his or her hopes up, as hopes have been disappointed in perhaps a new way in the last century or two, the novelist simply says, here, take another look at how fucked up we are, even though we can send a rocket to the moon, etc.

I would say, though, that Williams is himself guilty of the same thing. His gloom and cynicism far outweigh his awareness of radiance, as far as his poetry goes. In his life, I’m sure he’s quite a lot happier than his poetry would imply. At least his latest poetry, which is concerned with much that is wrong—development, war, the way everything decays and dies—and seldom arrives at the moment when life bursts forth renewed and brilliant.

Williams defines the kind of beauty he is talking about as the “ successful union of form and expression” and compares it to nature, which does not, he seems to think, combine form and expression, and which does not employ “superfluous and unnecessary” “absurdities” --one has to ask, how familiar is this man with the natural world? Does he live only in his head, does the world have to pass through a C.K. Williamsizer before he can be aware of it?

Saying this I imply that some of us see the world “as it is” without a filter of perception, when anyone knows that the body and brain are in fact a filter that strains out a tiny fraction of “all that is” so that we can be aware of it and ourselves as existing.

But there is a sense that some of us can indeed at least see “the world” as other without completely papering it over with old accepted wisdom (to attribute emotion to animals is to anthropomorphize, for example, when in fact to not attribute emotion to animals is to deny our own experience, as we too are animals), or with our own image.

That is, nature is nothing but form and expression, nothing but absurdity and unnecessary flourishes. That’s where we get it from, that’s where we find our ability springs, because we are also that.

If he wants to diss the contemporary novel, he ought to refer to specific works and authors, and define just what it is he objects to. His article (only a quarter of which I’ve read) seems to be a weaselly way of avoiding that kind of confrontation by using generalities and grand abstractions, something he occasionally does in his poetry—those are his most lifeless poems. He has a great ability to examine his own experience, but his artifice—when he employs it self-consciously—is not beautiful.

Williams nearly always seems to be looking at himself in a mirror, which in some ways is brave, but can also result in artifice that is merely artificial.