A Favourite Poet

Right away, I’m struggling with the brief. Perusing the collections in my bookcase I can possibly narrow it down to five. Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Michael Donaghy, and that’s just the ones on the top shelf. Truth be told there’s not many poets I dislike, and those I do are mostly contemporaries. For those versifiers I love are either well-established or dead. Many of in which I found by chance, in anthologies like Bloodaxe’s Being Human for instance, or the Penguin Book of American Verse, all of which has led me to some wonderful finds (with the exception of Larkin all of the poets mentioned above). 

If I ever feel my poetic soul is lacking, and the muse is missing, I return to these anthologies. My go to favourite being Contemporary American Poetry edited by A.Poulin and Michael Waters. A book dating from the early nineties. My own copy which is missing a cover and defaced in marginalia is beside me currently. Each and everyone of the seventy poets included have one time or another been my favourite.

I open the book at random to rediscover a gem, C.K. Williams. An American poet who died in 2015 is the eponymous master of the long line, with a standard line being between twelve to twenty syllables. Verging on the prosaic, Williams is a plain spoken philosopher in disguise (an oxymoron I know). In the vein of his namesake and fellow New Jerseyan native William Carlos Williams his voice is simple, his poems plenty, and every inch of his stylistic voice is permeated with the tint of dread: “They are poured into the earth / like nails; move an inch, / they are driven down again. / The earth is sore with them.” 

C. K. Williams

Williams' biggest theme is suffering, especially from those outliers of society: the homeless, the dispossessed etc. He explores their plight, but shy’s away from pontificating. He is a philosopher without a system, merely content just to tell us a story. I get my narrative drive from him. 

There’s no single anthologised poem Williams is known by (maybe The Gas Station). My personal favourite being the poem She, Though from his 1993 collection Some of The Forms Of Jealousy, a twelve page epic, about a pseudo artist, and the couple they attach themselves too. It’s a poem about inspiration and sacrifice and off course jealousy. It reminds me of another blissfully bleak story in Michael Donaghy’s poem Black Ice And Rain. 

There’s nothing I can take out of context from She, Though without wrecking it, so I’m going to close my eyes turn a page and bring down my finger: 

'I’d believed that art was everything, the final resolution of all my insecu-

                rity and strivings. 

Now I realised that in attempting to create a character in art, someone who 

                would live for art, 

I’d turned away from something in myself, some lapse I hadn’t glimpsed, 

                and, more shocking still, 

I knew that architecture, poetry, and painting weren’t the self-containing 

                glories I’d imagined, 

but that they, too, could have evasions lurking in them, grievous cosmic 

                flinching from reality. 

Art wasn’t everything, nothing could be everything, but more crucially, 

                art needed you:' 

Needing art, I flip the book to another favourite.

Jamie.