Like most people, when poets get older their thoughts often turn to death, dying and the past. C.K. Williams is no exception, as the title of Writers Writing Dying indicates. Since the publication of his first collection of poems in 1968, he has had a long and distinguished career, winning the Pulitzer and National Book Award, and continues to excel well into his late 70s.
He's a political poet, an emotional one too: "Are there songs of the soul yet unsung to calm our doubt and despair?" Or, "it can seem only the torturers and tyrants, the venal demagogues and the/ qualmless deceivers,/ stand firm gazing out over the hapless rest of us to decide which will be next... which flash and which yearning will be dragged down and submerged in their political puke." (The long line has always been a stylistic feature of his poetry.)
In "Newark Noir," he writes about the "finally hardly recognizable city; storms of dereliction, of evasion, had all but swept it away." The mood tends to be somber, sad, throughout. In "Cancer," he refers to himself as a "shivering sack of / blood to be spilled," fear "scaling the ice-rungs of my spine." But Williams won't be going gently into a good night anytime soon; he'll be railing and fighting. In his own words: "Keep dying! Keep writing it down!" --Tom Lavoie, former publisher