C.K. Williams

So I don't really have anything to say to the world right now.  But I do really like the poet C.K. Williams, and I desire to somehow archive/highlight some of his work.  So here is a poem by him, so that I have it at my disposal.  Stop reading if you're having a good day. It's not chipper. If you're feeling "rainy," read on.

I think this is especially interesting in light of Rollo May's book "The Courage to Create" which addresses in one chapter the idea of creativity and death.  Some of the things he talks about are...

• The urge to create is interrelated with the mortal's yearning towards immortality, and the ability of the mortal to be god-like in the act of creation.
• The gods (God) is/are jealous that humanity ate from the tree of knowledge and fear that we will also eat of the tree of immortality.  Creativity is therefore a sort of confrontation with the gods, using our stolen knowledge of truth.
• "Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world."

 I think it's interesting that Williams' is captivated by death in this poem.  Read on, if you wanna.



The Hearth

1

Alone after the news on a bitter

evening in the country; sleet slashing

 the stubbled fields, the river ice;

I keep stirring up the recalcitrant fire,

but when I throw my plastic coffee cup

in with new kindling it perches intact

on a log for a strangely long time,

as though uncertain what to do,

until in a somehow reluctant, almost

creaturely way it dents, collapses,

and decomposes to a dark slime

untwining itself on the stone hearth.

I once knew someone who was caught in a fire

and made it sound something like that.

He’d been loading a bomber and a napalm shell

had gone off; flung from the flames,

at first he felt nothing, and thought

he’d been spared, but then came the pain,

then the hideous dark—he’d been blinded,

and so badly charred he spent years

in recovery: agonizing debridements,

grafts, learning to speak through a mouth

without lips, to read Braille with fingers

lavaed with scar, to not want to die...

Though that never happened....He swore,

even years later, with a family,

that if he were back there, this time allowed

to put himself out of his misery, he would.

                                                                                                   -

2

There was dying here tonight, after

dusk, by the road: an owl,

eyes fixed and flared, breast

so winter-white he seemed to shine

a searchlight on himself, helicoptered

near a wire fence, then suddenly

banked, plunged, and vanished

into the swallowing dark with his prey.

Such an uncomplicated departure;

no detonation, nothing to mourn;

if the creature being torn from its life

made a sound, I didn’t hear it.

But in truth I wasn’t listening, I was thinking,

as I often do these days, of war;

I was thinking of my children, and their children,

of the more than fear I feel for them,

and then of radar, rockets, shrapnel,

cities razed, soil poisoned

for a thousand generations; of suffering

so vast it nullifies everything else.

I stood in the wind in the raw cold

wondering how those with power over us

can effect such things, and by what

cynical reasoning pardon themselves.

The fire’s ablaze now, its glow

on the windows makes the night even darker,

but it barely keeps the room warm.

I stoke it again, and crouch closer.

                —C. K. Williams, The New Yorker,

                                                  March 3, 2003