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C.K. Williams (1936-2015)
I want to recognize the death last week of C.K. Williams, a learned and versatile poet whose work always intrigued me in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and who won virtually every award available to poets, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a MacArthur fellowship, the National Book Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. When his Collected Poems was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2006, Peter Campion wrote in The Boston Globe: "Throughout the five decades represented in his new Collected Poems, Williams has maintained the most sincere, and largest, ambitions. Like Yeats and Lowell before him, he writes from the borderland between private and public life….[His poems] join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, in a way that dignifies all of our attempts to make sense of the world and of ourselves. C. K. Williams has set a new standard for American poetry."
Williams taught at many universities, the last of which was Princeton. In one of his New Yorker poems I recall, he revealed the poets from whom he learned most, and spoke of that deep legacy with a characteristically strong, light and personal voice:
Watch me again now, because I'm not alone in my dancing,
my being air, I'm with my poets, my Rilke, my Yeats,
we're leaping together through the debris, a jumble of wrack,
but my Keats floats across it, my Herbert and Donne,
my Kinnell, my Bishop and Blake are soaring across it,
my Frost, Baudelaire, my Dickinson, Lowell and Larkin,
and my giants, my Whitman, my Shakespeare, my Dante
and Homer; they were the steel, though scouring as I was
the savants and sages half the time I hardly knew it …
One of Williams's last New Yorker contributions − published a little more than a year ago − was not a poem but a moving and eloquent tribute to his friend of many years, Galway Kinnell, who had died on October 30, 2014. Williams begins his tribute:
About the death of any friend one feels sadness; with some, though, that sadness is tempered by gratitude, by a feeling of privilege to have been able to live in the world at the same time as the one who's gone. I knew Galway Kinnell for almost half a century, we were friends for a good part of that time, and that feeling of being fortunate to know him, to be able to be with him, never diminished.
At the end of his tribute to Kinnell, Williams wrote words that, for this reader, are reminiscent of his own spirit as well:
[T]here's no one whose work has so often and with such consistency brought into the world a sense of wonder and exaltation, no one who so often discovered rich new harmonies of poetic language, no one who devised so many metaphors that resonate through so many levels of materiality and spirit, uniting the physical with the moral and passion with thought. In short, there's no one whose work has elaborated so ample and comprehensive a vision of the lives we've lived.
Posted by John Roosevelt Boettiger on Tuesday, 29 September 2015 | Permalink
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