MICHAEL COLLIER
567
111
Other Words
is a spacious book. It is May Swenson's seventh
volume of poetry and unfortunately her last. (She died in 1989.) Appear–
ing more than two years ago, it has received scant attention yet it is a
book that deserves to be read widely, for it contains a vision of incredi–
ble integrity, a vision that "lives in bodies of words."
C.K. Williams's
Poems:
1963-1983
brings back into print his first
four books of poems
(Lies,
1969;
I Am the Bitter Name,
1971;
With Igno–
rance,
1977; and
Tar,
1983). The volume also includes lovely versions of
the late-eighteenth-century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. Although the
Issa versions were published in 1983, Williams places them between
I Am
the Bifter Name
and
With Ignorance.
As such the Issa serves as both a di–
vider and bridge between the early and later work.
With Ignorance
and
Tar
arc characterized by long-lined narratives
dramatized by elliptical and anecdotal meditations. The diction is collo–
quial, conversational; its rhythms wind through the length of a poem
rather than being fenced off by line breaks and caesuras. The poems, with
titles like "Spit," "Neglect," "The Dog," arc inclusive and expansive,
almost Whitmanesque in their eagerness to declare all experience a suit–
able domain for poetry. Williams writes in "With Ignorance": "Imagine
a space prepared for with hunger, with dread, with power and! the
power! over dread which is dread, and the love, with no space for itself,
no! power for itself,! a moment, a silence, a rising, the terror for that,
the space for that'! Imagine love."
In contrast to this speculative "imagining" and prose-like
discursiveness, which controls and presents a poem's passion and emotion,
C.K. Williams's early work -
Lies
and
I Am the Bitter Name
-
is imagistic,
often syntactically fragmented, and is filled with an emotional anger and
violence, petulance and self-laceration. "I am going to rip myself down
the middle into two pieces," he writes in "Halves ," and in
"Downwards," " ... I am rolling, fragile as a bubble in the upstream
spin,! battered by carcasses, drawn down by the lips of weeds! to the
terrible womb of torn tires and children 's plastic shoes! and pennies and
urine . I am no more, and what is left,! baled softly with wire, floating!
like a dark piIIow in the hold of the brown ship, is nothing."
It would be too easy to say that Williams's work changes because
his own character matures, though certainly this is true. In a poem from
Tar,
he writes, "What else did I have then? Not very much: being alone
most of the time,! retrospectively noble,! but bitter back then, brutal,
abrasive, corrosive - I was wearing away! with it like a tooth." As
" Halves" and "Downwards" show, the early work docs not lack
substance or turbulence and is, in a raw emotive way , extremely
powerful, but a reader will feel that the idiom and diction of Williams's
