In Time

by C K Williams

  I don’t know how I’d make my struggles more refined now. It feels as though I’ve somehow burnt off everything but the argument; I don’t feel much promise anymore about what any god I can conceive of might offer me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of Dickinson lately, and her struggles with her god are so much more complex and rigorous and attentive than mine have ever been. Maybe my labor has always simply been of belief, trying to believe, and I’ve given the struggle up for now.

  I love human beings in their relationships with divinity; I’ve always been drawn to Martin Buber’s definition of a miracle as a people believing over generations that there’s been a miracle. I like mantras and mourner’s kaddish, but I don’t believe they have anything to do with the universe. The only way I can seem to conceive of a god who inheres in any real way in my cosmos is to make him so subtle and difficult that he’s beyond my ability to define him. But if I were really able to find a god, I think I’d like him to be unsubtle, concrete, definite, personal. A god who would make the ladder from cosmology to epistemology to ethics as readily apparent as Dante’s does.

  In my early books, I think I postulated a god with those attributes, though I never really experienced him except insofar as he failed to be what I’d asked of him. I felt then that all the spiritual issues I’d been exposed to, about the soul and life and the world, had been overrefined, that the discussions began after the real force had been intellectualized out of them. The god I wanted to talk to then I thought had made an implicit covenant with creation: that it would be if not always perfect, then at least perfectly understandable. And the god I’d developed for myself, one defined by his imperfections, could appear actively malevolent, or indifferent, which was as bad. God as a sort of laissezfaire conservative, who was letting everything go to pot for the sake of some dubious equations, some absurd moral idealizations. He wanted to have it both ways: to be loved as a loving god and to deal with us as an indifferent one. Now, as I say, I don’t really know anymore where he and I are. “It” and I. I don’t feel I’m capable of anything like the relation Buber implied by his “Thou,” even a disappointed one.

  HISTORY

  For a long time I had a sort of block against history per se, the history we learn in history classes and books. In school, I never seemed to be able to absorb the history that goes chronologically, from king to king and war to war: it just went through me. It’s odd that there are many different histories available to us, but that particular genre, which deals with so-called great men and great events, is the only one that’s certified in our culture. I admire Lowell for the way he can take that kind of history and work it into his poems, but I still don’t know how to deal with it except in the broadest, almost algebraic way. What I learned about history was by reading in other fields, literature, of course, or art, or religion, or philosophy. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of economics because it seems impossible to understand our world without understanding at least a minimum about economics, and there’s a great deal of history that I’m picking up from that.

  At the same time, you have to be aware of just how much innocence can be permitted in reflecting on history, and how much ignorance of it we can forgive in ourselves. I once had an experience in Guatemala, during the early sixties, before I began to be seriously politically conscious. I was traveling with two friends of mine who were doctors through a very poor Indian area, and we struck up an acquaintance with a Bahia missionary nurse, who was the only health care available to about a hundred thousand Indians. She did everything from setting bones, to pulling wisdom teeth, to prescribing antibiotics. It still troubles me how unaware I was of what was going on around me on that trip, of the political situation of Guatemala, which was horrible—a bloody civil war was underway—and even of the absurdity of the lack of medical care those poor people had, which I’d seen with my own eyes. I did finally wrote a poem about this, by the way, “Guatemala: 1964,” which was published in Flesh and Blood.

  The long poem “Combat” is also about our naïveté in dealing with history. I seem continually to be looking back into my past and having to revise what I experienced at the time. That’s probably a good part of what our education consists, that revision of faulty perception, but it can so often be dismaying when it happens. We tend to speak about experience as though it primarily has to do with the matters we live in our “real” life, our “outward” as opposed to our “inward” experience, but our lives are obviously an active dialectic between the two things. A lot of my poems that seem to be about “life experience” are actually often created to enact conceptual matters. So many of my poems aren’t about things that “happen” but about ideas that demand embodiment in more concrete experience.

  HOLOCAUST

  There’s no doubt that the Holocaust, and my coming to know about it, played a role in my moral education. I grew up with an edge of city, then suburban, childhood and adolescent obliviousness: you didn’t have to be aware of anything about anything, social, historical, cultural . . . nothing. Plus, my parents’ generation seemed to want their children not to have to know about what happened in the Shoah. They were themselves still stunned by it, I think, and perhaps even ashamed, but whatever the reasons, it was far from being dinner table conversation.

  My awareness of the Holocaust came when I was in college, and just after. I was of course shocked by it, but when I look back now the most interesting thing to me about that time is that my knowledge of the Holocaust came at almost exactly the same time as my recognition of the plight of black people in America. In fact, I’d been struggling for months, longer, trying to write the poem “A Day for Anne Frank,” and one day I read an article by Thomas Williams about the plight of blacks in America, which I found . . . I don’t remember exactly, probably somehow exaggerated. I started to write him a letter and as I wrote I realized that what he’d written wasn’t exaggerated at all, that I was just naïve about what was going on around me, and the strangest thing was that trying to write that letter, then stopping, somehow released me into writing the poem . . . Odd, I’ve probably repeated that anecdote a dozen times; something important must have happened to me that day, that broke down what was left of my ethical complacency . . . If one ever can really say that. We seem to have so many layers of moral obtuseness, it can feel as though one’s whole life is learning to dig your way through them.

  These days I’ve tended to become a little mistrustful about Holocaust literature. Although it’s certainly essential that those horrors be remembered, and honored, if that’s the word, the whole thing has become almost an industry, and I’m hardly the only one who’s come to believe that the Holocaust memory evokes a terribly conservative reaction in regard to Israel’s struggles and its own all-too-often self-defeating policies. I think that reaction is probably more fraught for some Americans, who find Israel’s existence more problematic than Israelis themselves do. I tried to write an essay once—it never worked out—about Jews who are obsessed with the Holocaust; I called them “Miraculists”: people to whom the Holocaust has the same kind of spiritual meaning that the resurrection of Christ was for Christians. The Holocaust becomes the most unique and important event in human history: history ends with it and begins again after it, and nothing will ever be the same ever again from then on. I know I went through a phase something like that myself, when my most profound philosophical emotions revolved around the Holocaust and when everything else in history was measured against it. In the poem “Combat,” I refer to that period as “the adolescence of [my] ethics,” and I still feel that.

  And I don’t believe I’ve been alone in this perception. The Holocaust poem many readers feel is the greatest and most enduring is Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” but by the end of his life Celan was so exasperated at being celebrated almost entirely because of that one poem that he’d no longer allow it to be published in anthologies. About the vast volume of Holocaust poems we have now, particularly of the second and third generation, I don’t th
ink we finally can know which might endure.

  INFLUENCES

  The poets who have stayed with me longest are Baudelaire, Rilke, and Yeats. Those are the three who were there almost at the beginning and are always still there. Over the last years, George Herbert has been very important to me, a few years ago I read him nearly obsessively. Before that, Elizabeth Bishop was most important. If I were to say who I think are the poets who’ve meant the most to me over time besides them, I’d say, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Lowell, Donne, Milton, Keats, Coleridge—it’s really a long list, more than I can keep track of and that’s not even counting many of my near contemporaries. And then, of course, Shakespeare; we tend not to even mention Shakespeare because he’s so obvious, but you can’t write a sentence in English without Shakespeare being there somewhere.

  Influence itself is such a fascinating subject that I certainly don’t think Harold Bloom exhausted it. I tried for a number of years to get an anthology of influence published in which poets would choose the poems that had influenced them over the years, along with one of their own poems. I could never find a taker until I mentioned it to my English publisher, Neil Astley, and I think he’s going to do it himself.

  LANGUAGE

  I know people refer to the language of my poems as colloquial, but I don’t think on the page it really is. The rhythms may come from speech as it’s spoken, but the syntax and vocabulary are quite formal, quite “unnatural.” I’ve used that tension quite a bit in my poems—between the apparently naturalness of the speech sounds and the complexity of the actual language.

  It’s often remarked that the language of much of our poetry these days can be traced to the work of William Carlos Williams because of how devotedly he used ordinary speech. But to take it one step further, I don’t think there really have been more than a few American poets this century who haven’t written in those rhythms. One of the odd misperceptions of American poetry is that there’s a “higher” and a “lower” way of speaking. There were a few years in the fifties when the prevailing mode was a formal verse that seemed quite distinctly removed from ordinary speech, but even then I don’t believe that the language of more than a few good poets were very far from what was spoken in the street. The notion that the American speech rhythms had to wait for Williams to find them I think has to do more with the ways he could use apparently (though not really) ordinary ways of thinking and perceiving to create his poems than with his language per se. Certainly Bishop and Moore and even Stevens worked, each in their own way, with “American” language. But Williams’s experience and thought was so firmly rooted in the life around him that the discoveries of his poetry were as much epistemological as poetic; he exalted the way we think, as much as the way we speak.

  LANGUAGE POETS

  I find most of the Language Poets trivial rather than irresponsible. In their polemic and rhetoric, they speak a great deal of responsibility, of the commitment of art to social ideals, and so forth, but you don’t see much of it in their work. From a technical point of view, if they’re willing to sacrifice the meaning of language to its potential as music, they could be doing a lot more interesting things with the music of poetry than they are. If they’re trying to develop a new system of meaning, they’re not doing anything much different from what the Dadaists did, and they’re much less interesting and zany and inspiring than either the Dadaists or Surrealists. I feel they’re mostly driven by a passion for novelty, by the desire to be out ahead of everybody else, to be more “avant-garde,” but they’re squandering an awful lot in that way.

  They demanded a freedom for themselves that was greater than what they knew how to put to good use, and I think that well may be because their perception of the tradition was prematurely determined by their passion for recognition and novelty. Poetry is always an expression or an embodiment of meaning because if you put two words together, language will distill something of meaning out of them, no matter how badly you might want it not to. But it seems perverse to want not to. Life’s hard enough to keep meaningful, without cultivating incoherence or nonsense. And this in a time in which there have been, as I said, such a great variety of poems, and so many varied notions of what poems can be.

  Of course, I might be speaking here of some poets I don’t mean to, like Leslie Scallopino, whose work I often find fascinating, and whom I’ve heard mentioned along with the language poets, although I don’t find much similarity between her work and the poets who are the core of the movement.

  LINES

  When I first developed the long line I guess I’m known for, it was because I’d felt too constrained not so much by the length of the lines in the poetry I’d been writing as by the conventions of expression that I’d inherited and learned to use. I’ve spoken about this a number of times, but basically I just felt I was leaving too much of myself out in the poems I’d been writing; my inner life, my response to the world, was so much more complex than what I’d been honing myself down to fit in poems. I heard my work once characterized as “the act of the mind in meditation,” and that for me is a good description of what the poems in longer lines evolved to, what I’d unconsciously felt was feasible for them. Perhaps just as important was the fact that the longer lines revealed cadences of thought and observation that weren’t available to me before I began to use them.

  I’m often asked lately, as I suspected I would be, why I stopped using the long line exclusively. I think the reason was that I began to feel I needed more constraint, or a different kind of constraint; I guess I became more interested in particles of language, rather than its sweep, though I still use the long line when the music I’m hearing for a poem has that kind of propulsion. I was reading a Seamus Heaney essay recently in which he refers to the “malleable quatrains” he’d been using at one point in his writing, and I found something very apt in that for me. At some point I began to want something more rigorous, like stanzas of shorter lines, that would still be flexible enough not to lose any of the opportunities for exactness the longer line offered. I have the feeling that the reader sometimes won’t hear much difference finally in the outcome, but it’s been important for me in the process of composition.

  MIND

  In Lies and I Am the Bitter Name, I was especially interested in what I called then disjunctive consciousness: ways of charting movements of mind that were similar to some of the methods of what we call (unfortunately, I think) modernism. I was particularly struck, in those days, by the work of Vallejo and Artaud. But I was equally influenced by Freudian psychology, particularly by what is called “primary process” thinking, and, in the crudest sense, by my not being able to make any real sense of how my own mind went from one place to another. We use the rather feeble term “association” to explain that, but the term barely begins to describe how our minds swoop and hover and move in three directions at once. But I still wasn’t, and still am not now, satisfied by any of the descriptions we have of how or why the mind works as it does. Vallejo was the first poet I found who seemed to accurately incorporate the way the mind actually does move, through its various planes, if we use a geometric analogy, or through its different levels, if we use Freud’s geological paradigm.

  At the same time I was trying out these different approaches to charting the mind, I also felt very strongly that our social and political realms took little account of the real workings of both our individual consciousness and the mind we have in common at any given moment. I still feel this, though I have a much stronger sense of how complicated it all is. We live in social systems whose fundamental assumption is that its participants have intrinsically coherent minds, minds that work neatly and logically along rational paths that are laid out for them by various social prohibitions and conventions. Our consciousness is presumed to consist of various strands of intention and evaluation, and our personal morality is supposed to arise from our judicious selection of those we commit to, and obey. But this has so little to do with how we actually live in ourselves as ours
elves, with what our instinctual needs are, and with all the amazing deviations from the norm we experience right from the beginning of our adult awareness.

  In those first books I think I was trying to take many of those issues head-on, as crudely and truthfully as I could. I wanted the poems to enact all the discrepancies I felt between myself and the social-political world I was trying to live in. I suppose there was some hubris in all of that, but I don’t believe I had an overblown idea of what I was doing; I was ignorant, but I had youth and passion to keep me going.

  In With Ignorance and Tar, I began quite intentionally to bury anything that looked like a systematic purpose or “message,” if you will, in what I call the unconscious of the poem, the area of response that works more subtly, subliminally, on the reader. Such intentions naturally are worked out in a more disorderly, unpremeditated way than that, but I do think I was trying to describe a world that’s closer to the one we experience when we’re not being so analytical—a more undramatic, less ruptured reality, with not so many gashes in it. I tried to enact our intrinsic irrationality—and the gap between it and our social structures that pretend to be so “sane”—in less fraught, more unremarkable attitudes of mind. In a way, I thought of the poems as more “lyric,” that is, more songs of the self I lived in the everyday, and less “scientific,” that is, fewer investigations of reality based on various hypotheses I’d rounded up in my thinking. My verse autobiography, to use Lowell’s term, calmed down, and a lot of the issues I had been confronting directly now became part of a less complicated texture. At the same time, many of these ideas, particularly the embodiment of disparate elements of consciousness, are still in crucial to me. They just function in a different system of composition.