Tender, melancholy observations on the inner life

Ever since the Romantics, we’ve tended to think of poetry as a solitary art, a singular vision. Surely no committee has produced even a syllable of deathless verse. Yet some of our greatest poets have made playful arguments to the contrary. Czeslaw Milosz chalked up his oeuvre to a kind of multiple personality: “Our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will.” James Merrill, of course, claimed an entire Dead Poets Society as his constant collaborator, courtesy of the Ouija board. Now C.K. Williams takes a similar tack in “The Singing,” his first collection since winning the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for “Repair.”

Williams, it should be said, has no tin-can telephone to the beyond, nor does he take dictation from what Milosz calls an inner daimonion. He’s very much a materialist for whom the workings of the mind are subject to the rules of quantum physics. Still, his consciousness seems to house a growing population of stowaways. As he asks in “Lessons”:

How even know in truth how much

of mind should be memory, no less

what portion of self should be others

rather than self?

Some of these “others” are, not surprisingly, the dead: Williams now is 68, an age that turns most poets into elegists by default. In “Oh,” he recalls the late Harold Brodkey, who died before Williams could mend a final breach in their long, tempestuous friendship. Yet the poem is neither a lamentation nor a posthumous portrait. Instead the presence of this brilliant phantom serves as an index of human failure, forcing the reader to confront “how ridden you are with unthought regret, how diminished, / how well you know you’ll clunk on to the next rationalization, the next loss, the next lie.” Perhaps Williams is being hard on us. On the other hand, few poets have subjected their own evasions to such merciless, molecular scrutiny: By sliding ours under the same microscope, he pays us a kind of compliment.

In any case, it’s not only the dead who have made themselves at home in Williams’ imagination. There’s also the blind woman he escorts across a busy intersection in “Lessons” and the teenage suicide in “This Happened.” There’s a young stranger he encounters in “The Singing” whose “cadenced shouting” -- a blast of urban aggression, really -- strikes a resonant chord in the poet.

And there are, of course, those he loves. In “Night,” one of the strongest pieces in the collection, he first ponders the destruction of a pear tree by a freakish storm:

I saw the branches helplessly

flail, the fork of the trunk

with a great creak split,

and the heavier half start

down, catch on wires,

and hang, lifting and subsiding

in the last barbs of the gale

as though it didn’t know yet

it was dead.

From there Williams digresses. We follow him along a typically associative flight path, from Ivan Karamazov to human salvation to an ecstatic landscape once glimpsed from a stalled train.

In the end, though, the tree returns, now a figure for the poet and the self he hopes will survive him:

... others are always with me,

others I love with my life,

yet I’ll leave them scant

evidence of my care, and little

trace of my good intentions,

as little as the solacing shush

the phantom limbs of our slain

tree will leave on the night.

Not every poem in “The Singing” takes up this conception of mind as a means of mass transit, crammed with more and more strap-hanging selves. To some extent, however, most explore the pitfalls and puzzles of identity. (It’s no accident that the songbirds in “Doves” awaken the poet with their “maddeningly vapid who, who-who” -- if Williams were a bird, that’s undoubtedly the song he would sing, although the performance would be anything but vapid.)

And in this sense, there’s an obvious continuity with his work of the last decade. After establishing himself during the 1980s as a gritty narrative genius -- our great bard of American squalor -- he began infusing his poetry with an almost Jamesian focus on psychological nuance, curlicue, filigree. “The Singing” represents yet another step into the cognitive hinterlands.

In other ways, though, the book is something of a throwback. First of all, Williams has ditched his trademark line, with its lengthy, hypnotic, freight-train accumulation of qualifying clauses. It makes an occasional appearance here -- in, for example, “Inculcations,” where it seems to notch increasing degrees of suppression and sadness. Mostly, though, he has simplified matters, limiting himself to the loose three- or four-beat rhythms that characterized his first two books. For his longtime fans, such pruning entails a certain sacrifice: There’s less momentum, less critical mass. In return, though, he has gained a welcome clarity, which puts a piece such as “The Hearth” on par with his most memorable creations.

“The Hearth” echoes his apprentice work in another way too. It’s not merely a meditation on matter, spirit and mortality but an explicitly political statement that finds the poet thinking of “radar, rockets, shrapnel, / cities razed, soil poisoned / for a thousand generations; of suffering so vast / it nullifies everything else.” Granted, this is an apocalyptic, nonpartisan nightmare. But in a collection so focused on the inner life, there’s a surprising and paradoxical dose of protest the likes of which Williams hasn’t expressed since the Nixon era, when he regularly whipped up such Molotov cocktails as “In the Heart of the Beast: May 1970: Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State.” In this blacker time, perhaps, the personal has become political once again -- irresistibly so.

And where does “The Singing,” which won the 2003 National Book Award for poetry, stack up in the poet’s career? It’s a spottier collection than “Repair,” with several damp fizzles notable mainly for their perverse sense of challenge: I doubt that any poet could go eyeball-to-eyeball with Rembrandt, as Williams does in “Self-Portrait With Rembrandt Self-Portrait,” and come out on top. Even the heartfelt “Elegy for an Artist,” addressed to the painter Bruce McGrew, pales somewhat in comparison to “Le Petit Salvie,” the agonizing memorial to Paul Zweig that appeared in “Flesh and Blood.” Still, there are a number of poems here that catch Williams at his very best -- tender, melancholic and eerily observant -- and for these the only possible responses are gratitude and the reader’s equivalent of the checkered flag. *