Writers Writing Dying by C. K. Williams

Abstract

Patrick Roth Starlite Terrace Krishna Winston, tr. Seagull Books Four residents of a shabby apartment complex in Los Angeles tell the stories of their complicated existence. Encounters with iconic actors and musicians provide a recognizable historical framework as the narrators reveal details of their often bizarre lives. Patrick Roth, originally from Germany, has worked as a film journalist in LA for over thirty years. march–april 2013 • 153 Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp The Russian Folktale Sibelan Forrester, ed. & tr. Wayne State University Press Based on a series of lectures delivered by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp at Leningrad State University, The Russian Folktale ranges from the history of folklore studies to heroes’ motivations in what the author terms “Russian wonder tales.” Whether focusing on folklore or Russian culture in general, this translation proves to be enlightening and authoritative. Nota Bene writing.” Shi Zhi’s tragic self-identification takes the form of furious social criticism that exposes the incurable wounds inflicted by the crimes of a chaotic and tyrannical age. Shi Zhi’s postscript reviews both historical and psychological conditions of his poetic writing during five periods of his life: the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1965–68), his first sojourn at a mental hospital in 1973, the first dozen or so years after the Cultural Revolution (1976– 89), his second and longest stay at an insane asylum (1990–2002), and the period following his release from mental institutions (2002–present). Jonathan Stalling’s acknowledgments explain the strategies that he has adopted in translating Shi Zhi’s poems into lyrically charged free verse with minimal punctuation. Stalling’s rendition provides readers of English with a window through which to observe Shi Zhi’s unusual life story and spiritual landscapes. Winter Sun is a long-overdue collection of one of the leading figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. I will close with an excerpt from one of Shi Zhi’s notable poems, “Oh, Nietzsche”: “Through so many sleepless nights he endured the torture of disease / Yet nurtured the poetic longing of solitude and indifference / An infant thought undergoes the trauma of birth / To finally cry out in an earthshattering voice.” Hua Li Montana State University C. K. Williams. Writers Writing Dying. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. isbn 9780374293321 Despite his many accomplishments, including a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, C. K. Williams begins this book humbly, avowing in “Whacked” that “one never is, really, a poet. Or I’m not.” Happily, the remainder of Writers Writing Dying proves him wrong. Ample evidence can be found in Williams’s use of his famously long line. Such lines are derived from Whitman, but whereas they are usually written to evoke breathlessly the ecstatic or prophetic tone, as in most of Allen Ginsberg’s poems, Williams has fashioned the long line into a surprisingly versatile poetic instrument . Often he uses it to suggest a line of thought worked out by a consciousness in time, as in “Mask”: “Didn’t Yeats have his file of fake Willies ? His Anti-Self, his Cuchulain, his Michael Robartes? / Why couldn’t I then? Why was I stranded like the insole of a shoe in this face glued on so tightly?” At other times, he uses the length to suggest persistence, for instance the persistence of sexual desire in “Bianca Burning,” in which he says, “The sexual terror lions are roaring into my ears as I make my way between their cages / at the Bertram Mills Circus in England in nineteen fifty-seven when I’m twenty,” or the persistence of literary engagement in “Prose,” in which we read, “So maybe the novelists do save me, maybe Lawrence and Mann, Dickens and Melville and Greene, / even the landslides of Thomas Wolfe that go through me like castor oil release 154 World Literature Today reviews me from myself.” In both cases, the length of the line is more than a stylistic tic; it is thematically essential to most of Williams’s poems. Matching length of line to length of life, Williams writes with humor and poignancy about aging, as in the moving and bold “Salt,” in which he admits to finding it “Abashingly eerie that just because I’m here on the long...