Writers Writing Dying: Poems - Hardcover

Williams, C. K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374293325 ISBN 13: 9780374293321

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Synopsis

Since his first poetry collection, Lies, C. K. Williams has nurtured an incomparable reputation―as a deeply moral poet, a writer of profound emotion, and a teller of compelling stories. In Writers Writing Dying, he retains the essential parts of his poetic identity―his candor, the drama of his verses, the social conscience of his themes―while slyly reinventing himself, re-casting his voice, and in many poems examining the personal―sexual desire, the hubris of youth, the looming specter of death―more bluntly and bravely than ever.

In "Prose," he confronts his nineteen year-old self, who despairs of writing poetry, with the question "How could anyone know this little?" In a poem of meditation, "The Day Continues Lovely," he radically expands the scale of his attention: "Meanwhile cosmos roars on with so many voices we can't hear ourselves think. Galaxy on. Galaxy off. Universe on, but another just behind this one . . . " Even the poet's own purpose is questioned; in "Draft 23" he asks, "Between scribble and slash―are we trying to change the world by changing the words?"

With this wildly vibrant collection―by turns funny, moving, and surprising―Williams proves once again that, he has, in Michael Hofmann's words, "as much scope and truthfulness as any American poet since Lowell and Berryman."

About this title

About the Author

C. K. Williams (1936–2015) published twenty-three books of poetry, including Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Singing, winner of the National Book Award. He lived in New Jersey.

Reviews

Williams has won every major literary award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and published 20 poetry collections, yet he writes, One never is, really, a poet. In this humble yet raging, teasing, sensual, and bittersweet volume, Williams testifies to the maddening quest of writing, portraying himself as forever reading and getting whacked by some great poet/or other. Childhood memories propel the hard-forged Newark Noir, a protest against prejudice, while in Prose, Williams remembers being 19, crouched helplessly in myself like an ape in a cage. Bianca Burning, truly an incinerating whirlwind of a poem, turns a circus in England in 1957 into an arena for sexual terror. In these intense poems, jolting roars from the heart, Williams rails against age and death and humankind’s murderous folly, from torture to television’s sewer-stream, to those who excise complications from textbooks in Texas, to those responsible for the Gulf oil disaster. When Williams writes that we waste world, we feel the full cathartic power of his steely lyricism and truth-telling. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374293325
• ISBN 13: 9780374293321
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80