The Poet as WITNESS : Molding the Political, the Metaphysical and the Erotic, C.K. Williams Is the Voice of a New Era.

IT’S THE MORNING AFTER BILL CLINTON’S ELECTION. IT’S ALSO THE 56TH BIRTHDAY OF POET C. K. Williams, arguably American poetry’s leading voice for this new Clinton age. * He’s spent some dismaying post-election birthdays these past 12 years, being a liberal Democrat. But this one is a great relief. “It would have been terribly painful,” he says softly, “if there had been another four years of Bush. Very painful. It would have plunged me into one of the worst political depressions of my life.” * Some people might be surprised to find a poet taking politics so personally. But Williams defines his calling as that of a witness, aiming his work at “exactly the relation between the most intimate self and the most public.” And that’s natural for a member of a poetic generation that found its voice in the late 1960s and has faced the complex challenge of bringing that era’s intense social awareness into the future. * Williams is a deeply serious man, though outwardly easygoing. His poems speak with a kind of cultivated naturalness, holding up ordinary speech as an ideal form; and in this way, along with his attachment to writing about daily life, Williams embodies the distinctly Democratic tradition in American poetry that leads back through William Carlos Williams to Walt Whitman. In the words of the distinguished poet Stanley Kunitz, Williams became “the master of the long line. He’s like Whitman in that he is a poet writing in a tradition that is close to prose who really tackles America.” * Williams readily acknowledges this lineage of aspirations, and his place among the writers who see America as “a great laboratory of human experience.” His work is at once political, metaphysical and erotic. It is increasingly influential in poetry circles for widening the psychological and storytelling dimension of the art--which also makes Williams controversial. Some say he pushes the storytelling too far, for a poet. But few deny his power to trap readers in attachments they may not want, in accessible language that one admirer describes as being “weirdly like hearing yourself think.”* His poems testify to events in his own life, while aggressively reaching to explore his relationship to the lives of others:

After the argument--argument? battle, war, harrowing; you need shrieks, moans from the pit-- after that woman and I anyway stop raking each other with the meathooks we’ve become with each other, I fit my forehead into the smudge I’ve already sweated onto the window with a thousand other exhaustions and watch an old man having breakfast out of a pile of bags on my front step.

“He’s always been a psychological poet as well as a poet responding to the character of a country at a given moment,” says Edward Hirsch, a poet and critic who recently reviewed Williams’ new book, “A Dream of Mind,” favorably, and in depth, in the New Republic. “It’s not poetry that tells you how to vote, but it is politically acute in how it tells you to be alive in a given time.” * A sort of anxious groping toward the meaning of events has been at the heart of Williams’ work, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s. His earlier poems had a biting confidence, a distinctly ‘60s-ish moral outrage at wrongs that must be changed. In the 1970s, Williams reinvented his poetry from self-righteousness to self-awareness. Judgmental poems gave way to a more pliant, more openhanded in-gathering of American types, of pals and friends and lovers, of inner-city teen-agers with uncertain futures, Vietnam veterans struggling with day-to-day lives. * These days, the poet’s faith in social change is tempered by his realism about how much change is possible. “I still think that poetry can change people morally,” Williams says. “If I’ve been disillusioned, then it’s about the depth of quick change--but not that change can be made. Some people might think that all we wanted in the ‘60s was to stop Vietnam, but that wasn’t the case. The agenda was also to make a just society. It still is.”

FOR SEVEN YEARS, CHARLES KENNETH WILLIAMS HAS LIVED IN PARIS, the latest of several stops that included Philadelphia, where he started his career, and Brooklyn. His wife is French. Though he is reluctant to put his life abroad in political terms, he once described life in America during the Reagan years as “anguishing.” Still, he visits this country regularly, and now he sits across from me on the top floor of Greenwich Village brownstone belonging to one of his many writer friends in New York. It’s mid-November, a cold wind is blowing. The poet is tall, his face long and sensitive. His generally rangy quality, and a loose, shaggy, gray-brown mass of hair, make me think of a very thin buffalo.

He speaks with a taut simplicity--like that of his poems--about the best and the worst moments of a poet’s life. The best, he makes clear, is the act of writing itself. “It’s mysterious,” he says. “When it happens, it’s the most wonderful thing. All consciousness is mysterious, and it is certainly the most mysterious part of consciousness, because you can’t understand how it happened.

“And the worst thing,” he adds, “is when it’s not happening. You can’t conceive of it happening again. This is something many poets experience: that wonderful moment, then the fear. It’s the hardest thing about my life.”

Some poems come quickly. Most are “strenuously willed,” taking anywhere from eight months to eight years. Often, they surprise him--the words taking shape in bars and restaurants, in bed, in cars, on walks in various cities, the fragments going into the notebooks he is never without.

Williams’ career is notable for its hard-worked progress, how personal crisis yields artistic growth. Yet, the more one knows about the mundane details of his life, the more mysterious his being a poet becomes, especially his becoming so politically sensitive when he came of age in that most unpolitical of places, the American suburb of the 1950s, in this case South Orange, N.J., “not far from William Carlos Williams’ home.”

The family was Jewish. The father, a forceful man who read a lot and whose faith in his son’s literary ambition was “very encouraging,” sold office machines. “We were,” Williams says, “like everyone we knew, I guess, an ambitious family, lower-middle-class working to be regular middle-class, city-dwellers who moved to the suburbs. My father worked hard. It was an America where you had been given a promise that if you worked hard, you could have what you wanted.” His father’s favorite word was concentrate.

“I wasn’t a particularly intellectual kid,” he continues. “What I was was a really bored kid. I read everything I could get my hands on. I never really went looking for poetry. It found me.”

That was in college--at the University of Pennsylvania. A girlfriend asked him to write her a poem and she liked it. Then, drunk on a summer vacation in Florence six weeks later, leaning out of a hotel room at 2 in the morning, “really alone for the first time,” he suddenly spoke poetry.

He’d been reading some T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets.” But the words that emerged were his. “I was saying what I thought were poems. At that moment I realized I would really follow this.”

Philosophy, not English, had been his major. That soon changed. He immersed himself in literature. After a quickly aborted stint in graduate school, he holed up in a small room near Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square to read and write--his apprenticeship as a poet. It was a time, he recalls, of “frustration, uncertainty, and loneliness.”

As Williams offers the details of his life, he occasionally turns reticent, sometimes edgy, a man who has mastered the act of csual appearance for very specific ends. He’s friendly enough, but rather than recounting a story, he often refers me to his poems, refusing to repeat in straightforward speech what the poems were written to convey. And they do vividly show the interplay between the surface and the deeper reality of a man’s life.

In them, he describes his first kiss (and his “amazement that a kiss could be soundless”); his frantic guilt after a teen-age visit to a prostitute (“Why am I doing this?); his pain over his disintegrating first marriage; the resurrecting force of his second, to a jeweler named Catherine Mauger, whom he credits as a muse and the first reader of his work. He pulls a picture of the slender, dark-haired woman from his wallet asking, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

The inner psychic layer revealed by the poems is also the one in which Williams absorbs global events. At 20, he heard for the first time about the Holocaust, which became the subject of what he calls his first professional poem--the first poem in which he had as much passion for the act of crafting the poem as for its topic. The Holocaust, he says, “is something people didn’t talk about, then, the way they do now,” he says. “It was pushed down. It hadn’t been all that long ago--and the memory wasn’t wanted. But it became, though this emphasis is something I’m now critical of, my central experience of what it meant to be a Jew.” In “A Day for Anne Frank,” he addresses the Dutch teen-ager whose death in Bergen-Belsen came to symbolize the millions who lost their lives: “Come with me Anne . . . / Come sit with me here / kiss me; my heart too is wounded with forgiveness.”

The five-page poem took Williams five years to write--”I was learning how to write, I was really struggling with it”--and wasn’t published until 1968, when America was severely testing its witnesses. Poetry in the mid-’60s reflected the nation’s combined sense of urgency and futility, as a mood of constant crisis unfolded, from the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., to the black riots in cities nationwide, to Robert Kennedy’s assassination and, always, Vietnam. Yet the tearing apart of American society gave poetry, with its power to contemplate destruction and evoke cohesion, a far bigger audience than it had before.

Williams’ early poems tended to be unpunctuated, lacking capital letters, almost any kind of order. In one, he describes Richard Nixon as a President who looks like a penis, and the poet imagines him making advances to his daughter in a schoolyard. Often, the poems were obscene in this way, commenting on the sense of violation that entered everyday life, starting with Lyndon B. Johnson’s massive troop buildups in 1965. “I was in a state of implication,” Williams remembers. “That is an important word to me. The sense of being implicated in something you didn’t want to be a part of was terrible.”

By 1968, the year his Anne Frank poem was published, Williams was a veteran of anti-war protests. And he had already spent two years fighting another war that would be essential to the poetry: his marriage. “I had a ‘50s relationship that went into the 1960s--we were very committed to being proper middle-class people, but that turned out to be illusory.”

The marriage started and started to end in the same year, 1966, a tortuous five-year parting toward which he’d only have clarity many years later: “battle, war, harrowing.” Williams went to bars, met women, a frenzy of mostly very brief affairs. “I took advantage of the sexual freedom of the ‘60s. It came with a lot of guilt, and it came into my poems. There was one woman after another.

“There was my political rage about Vietnam and that sense of my own sexual madness,” he explains, “and they were fusing in this crazy way.” His basic perception of the Vietnam era’s chaos is in sexual terms--male sexual aggression and the newly increasing urgency for that sense of wounded aggression to be healed.

Though Williams’ work from that time doesn’t always address the war directly, it’s almost always there. The title of his first book, “Lies,” refers to the problems of knowing personal truth, but inevitably evokes a government that led a nation to war by lying.

somebody keeps track of how many times I make love don’t you god don’t you? and how good it is telling me it’s marked down where I can’t see right underneath me so the next time something unreal happens in the papers I don’t understand it it doesn’t touch me I start thinking everyone’s heart might be pure after all because what the hell they don’t kill me just each other . . .

The late poet Anne Sexton, whom he’d met after a reading at Temple University in 1968, called him “the Fellini of the written word,” and later she persuaded her publisher to take “Lies.”

His bad marriage went to worse. He had more affairs and more guilt. The couple had a baby girl in 1969, but that didn’t help. They soon broke up. “I finally left the marriage for someone else, who then proceeded to leave me.”

Williams, “terribly depressed,” lost faith in his work. “I renounced poetry. I wanted to get rid of it. I thought I’d become a film director.”

IN THE SPRING OF 1972, WILLIAMS WALKED INTO A PHILADELPHIA butcher shop with his little daughter Jessie to buy dinner. An odd feeling overcame him. “I felt the room was going to tilt, and that the light was going to pour out of it. I felt all my tension of being alone and being separated and feeling terrifically guilty.” That night, he wrote out the “very flimsy, ephemeral” version of the strange experience that would prove crucial to him, “more like notes,” he recalls.

He described his odd, dissolving sensation in the butcher shop--beginning with the thought that he might be going insane. As he watched the butcher slice the meat he’d ordered, the normalcy of buying dinner collided with the implied violence of the cutting knife. Though the scene at first seemed filled with extraordinary meaning, in the end the meat is just meat, the butcher an old man who will not hurt him. Yet he felt that the old life that had led him into that store was over, was about to “wink out of existence like a channel changing.” He’d rediscovered normal life within the context of abnormal times.

Williams reworked the notes into a poem a few weeks later--or rather, he says, he let the notes be the poem, let the lines relax across the page, like ordinary talk. When he read the piece at a local college soon afterward, he was delighted to discover that he could start the reading without the audience being quite sure that they were actually hearing a poem. He’d found, in this direct, seemingly unpoetic quality, his mature style, the one for which he’s known.

Before, the poems had looked like most other poems--islands of print in the middle of an open page. Now, they unraveled across the page, clauses and subclauses branching downward, intricate as lacework, and yet somehow easy to follow, the way some people are easy to follow when they are confusing, talking to you, and yet fascinating enough to keep your attention. These poems, weaving analysis, questioning themselves, introducing a character, a memory, dialogue, have the quality of a spiral, a winding deeper and deeper into another life that suddenly turns out to be as familiar as your own.

Williams no longer regards that first attempt, the poem about the butcher shop, as strong enough to publish. But it was basic to his growth. “The important thing was that I’d moved into the long line, that more discursive way of speaking,” he says. “And into a different vision of who I was. I was expanding the heart of the poetry.”

Williams had become a listener, more centered in the experience of other peoples’ lives than he was in his own, more eager to learn than to teach.

Ultimately, he’d write poems like this one:

If you put in enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get to hear every imaginable kind of bullshit. Every long-time loser has a istory to convince you he isn’t living at the end of his own leash and every kid has some pimple on his psyche he’s trying to compensate for with an epic, but the person with the most unlikely line I’d ever heard--he told me he’d killed, more than a few times, during the war and then afterwards working for the mob in Philadelphia--I could never make up my mind about.

The poem, called simply “Bob,” is about a Vietnam veteran who the narrator tells us “gave me his life.” The veteran’s experiences in Vietnam begin to overwhelm the poet, and make him know his own life in a different way. The poet does not judge, but feels. “I always speculated that the divorce sprung loose a degree of pain,” in Williams, says Stephen Berg, founder of the American Poetry Review. “He found an ability to tolerate the pain in himself and then in others.”

In “A Dream of Mind,” his most recent book, about half the poems reflect his extroverted bent, but the stronger focus is deeply inward, the poet as philosopher talking introspectively about passion, jealousy and loneliness. In the poem, “Helen,” thoughts of his wife merge with the Homeric model of ideal desire:

He’d been gazing at her then; in her wise way, she’d looked back at him, and touched him, and he knew she’d long known what was going on in him: another admiration took him, then another fire . . .

The New Yorker praised the book; the New York Times criticized it. It’s hard for me to tell how deeply the Times review, a few days old when we meet, has hurt him. “I wrote a love poem to my wife,” he says, “and (the Times reviewer) said it was about infidelity. How can you be that wrong?”

Williams’ face is many faces; it can turn from serious to playful in subtle flashes. Now, he looks somewhat sad, and tired. We head off for lunch at his favorite kind of New York place, a Jewish deli. Uptown, hands thrust in the pocket of his parka, he says he misses his wife.

In the restaurant, our middle-aged waitress suddenly looks at Williams with interest, after he softly forgives her for making us wait. “Oh, you are a pussycat,” she says. She seems stunned when the face suddenly melts to unusual length, the eyes become commandingly pathetic and he says, taking her into a kind of confidence, “Thank you. I was so lonely until you said that.”

WHEN I QUOTE TO WILLIAMS a line from a poet who said that publishing a book of poetry in contemporary America is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear it fall, he says he does not hang his hopes on a vast, public response to his work. For him, the power of poems is in the intimate way they affect individuals. “I believe it’s a question of affecting people one by one,” he says. “Poetry isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t essential to the culture.

“It’s especially necessary in a time of crisis--as it was in the ‘60s.” And he talks of a poetry world that is, itself, in crisis. “It’s terrifically competitive right now because publishers are not publishing much poetry. Poets who have published three or four books suddenly drop off lists. It’s corporate conglomerization. And poets are being slaughtered by it.”

Yet the impulse driving American poets is strong, and recognition of their value--he cites Maya Angelou at the inaugural--is rebounding. “I see a great contrast to France, where the poetry is almost totally philosophical,” he says. “The drama of American poetry is based very much on experience. It’s coming out of all the different cultures. We’re an enormous nation and we have an enormous poetry.”

As a top-ranked poet, Williams is a rarity, able to make a full career of what he does most passionately. His books are being published: Six collections of poems, one anthology, three translations. He has won numerous awards, including the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award. At a recent reading in New York, every seat was filled; the auditorium, in mid-town Manhattan, only had about 300 seats, but the turnout in terms of poetry readings was large, and committed. Many were themselves writers. “In a good reading year,” he says, he can make up to $15,000. From his books alone, which rarely sell more than 10,000 copies (quite a lot for poetry), he earns little: “I don’t even keep track.”

He spends one semester a year as a tenured professor at George Mason University in northern Virginia, which leaves him half a year to write in his beloved Paris, a “mysterious place, where there is always a special place for outsiders. You’re usually an outsider, anyway, as a writer. But in Paris you can be an outsider yet still belong in a way that I don’t experience in America.”

His Parisian routine is framed by a quick motor scooter ride to an office a few blocks from his apartment. He writes every day, working until lunch. And before returning for more work, usually on essays and translations, he scours the International Herald Tribune for clues to politics in this country. During the presidential race, he’d meet with a fellow Paris-dweller, the American novelist Ward Just, to talk current events.

When Clinton had to run the gantlet over Vietnam, Williams recalls, “I was insulted. Here they were trying to turn it into a liability that he’d protested the war. And to me that was a sign of moral sensitivity.”

So, he says, is Clinton’s clear interest in the arts. “We’ve really lived through 12 years when the government did its best to distance itself from all but the most popular culture. It was a gesture that let it be known that government and culture are in it together.”

After all, “poets and politicians, good politicians, at any rate, have this goal in common: to educate people to the more generous, more inclusive sides of their nature. The truth is,” he says, “I’m becoming hopeful.”