In his preface toOn Whitman, C. K. Williams says only Shakespeare compares with Walt Whitman in providing him an “inexhaustible” source of inspiration. Yet “with both, but particularly with Whitman, I need a respite, surcease, so as not to be overwhelmed, obliterated. This is more raw than Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence,’ more primitive.”On the dust jacket for the Whitman monograph, Michael Robertson calls Williams “one of our most Whitman-esque poets.” The idea of Williams as a Whitman for our time is not wrong, but it is incomplete and potentially misleading. Yes, Williams arrived in his third collection of poems at a long, sinuous free-verse line that reminds one, at first glance, of Whitman. Yes, one finds in Williams great sympathy for the suffering of others and a willingness to open poetry to a wide range of human experience, including parts of it many of us would rather not see. And like Whitman’s, his poetry is informed with a political awareness, though it lacks Whitman’s pre–Civil War faith in an ideal America.Though critics who accuse Whitman of lacking a sense of evil read him shallowly, it is true that Whitman is not much inclined to reflect analytically on evil, anxiety, and despair. There are moments when his insouciance wavers (for example, the passage in “Song of Myself” that begins “Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!”). He does not so much resolve his doubts as dismiss them by sheer force of will and resume his affirmative stance. For the most part, his response to violence or injustice is to bear witness and move on, not brood on its causality or accuse the violent or unjust. In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, he says, “The poet judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.” As for the rest, “faith is the antiseptic of the soul.” Williams’s temperament, in contrast, is skeptical. Perhaps not all the way down, but Whitman’s disinfectant is not in his first-aid kit. And sometimes he judges as fiercely as William Blake. There is remarkably little anger in Whitman but plenty of it in Williams, directed at political injustice and, sometimes, at the very terms of human existence. “Be not curious about God,” says Whitman, but Williams is, and it’s often a horrified fascination. Williams’s question is Job’s: “Where-fore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?” (Job 21.7)The way Williams’s poems encounter the world also demarcates him from Whitman. Whitman is typically “afoot with [his] vision,” walking abroad in search of every kind of person, animal, plant, or landscape the expanding American nation has to offer and pausing to name and praise it in a line or two before pressing on. In Williams, the world comes to the poet without his seeking it, and sometimes against his will. Typically, he is indoors when something outside insinuates itself into his awareness. “From My Window,” the first poem in Tar (1983), makes as good an illustration as any: two street people, whom the speaker has noticed before, appear beneath his study window; as he watches, a search to infer the history informing what he observes opens outward from that noticing. Whitman strides through the landscape seeking encounter; Williams is pulled, often reluctantly, into engagement with something he has not sought. Like the wedding guest confronted by Coleridge’s ancient mariner, “he cannot choose but hear.”If Williams is our Whitman, he is a Whitman with post-Freudian psychology, prone to lacerating analysis of his own motives and a passion for moral inquiry and clarification. This desire for justice and moral self-knowledge drives an obsessively recursive syntax that sidewinds through hypotactic qualifiers and self-interruptions, so much unlike the paratactic sweep of Whitman’s lines that gather all things equally into anaphoric plenitude. He’s a Whitman with tsuris (problems), whose Jewishness contributes much to his way of attending to suffering and injustice.Williams’s new book, Writers Writing Dying, is probably his angriest and most bitter yet — and this from a poet who called one of his collections I Am the Bitter Name. In part, as the title suggests, the bitterness arises from the poet’s confrontation with his own mortality: he too is a writer writing dying. In “Cancer,” he acknowledges his bout with the illness that took the lives of both of his parents; “fuck you,” he tells the “cancer-fiend,” for all of the poets and friends it has extinguished — the poem is a sort of contemporary counterpart of William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers,” with its refrain of “timor mortis conturbat me” (the fear of death disquiets me). It also amasses a roll-call of favorite poets who have written about death before him — it confronts not just the brute fact of death, but also the problem of finding a way to write about it at all and accepting the inevitable ending of our own lives and the lives of those we love.The other source of anger and bitterness in Writers Writing Dying is the national debasement of ethics and language — two of Williams’s central concerns — in post-9/11 America, which Tom Engelhardt has aptly called “The United States of Fear.” It is not just his own death the poet confronts, but also the deaths inflicted in the name of “the homeland” on uncounted Iraqis and Afghans, as well as victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and who can be sure where else, not to mention the deaths of our own troops. And he mourns the loss of a widely shared public discourse that names, acknowledges, and mourns those deaths. Reading these poems reminds me that the next loss, unless we come to our senses quickly, will be the earth itself.The book’s first poem, “Whacked,” sets up its central concerns. The speaker begins by describing himself as “whacked” by the power of great poets, invoking ten of them by name. Reading them is exhilarating but also intimidating — it makes him question his own gift. So far, the violence is metaphorical, not literal. But then, he remembers that in organized crime, “whacked” also means murdered. The connection suggests that poetry is itself a form of violence (though, unlike getting whacked by the mob, getting whacked by a poem is a desirable — and survivable — experience). But it also suggests that poetry does not inhabit a separate space immune to literal violence. One thinks of Wallace Stevens’s conception of poetry as “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. But in Williams’s version, protection is impossible. The poet must submit his own voice to the language of the violence from without. This practice of letting one’s voice be refracted through circumambient discourse becomes more difficult when that discourse is a smog of mendacity.One can glimpse the difficulty in “Rat Wheel, Dementia, St. Michel,” which begins, “My last god’s a theodicy glutton”: i.e., an excessive justifier of his own tolerance of evil. Unwilling to apologize for the cruelty he has permitted — and, since he has power to stop it, inflicted — the god himself is reduced to iterating “blah . . . blah,” as if there were no language but dismissive nonsense in which to speak of it. The poem describes the fate of prisoners who, underneath the cathedral of Mont Saint-Michel, were locked inside a huge treadwheel, which they had to turn, like rats or squirrels, to convey food and supplies to those above. The wheel, though the poem doesn’t mention it, was installed at the time of the French Revolution and in use until 1863; during that period the cathedral was used as a prison. For Williams, as it would have been for Blake, the conversion of cathedral to prison is not a shocking desecration; rather, it follows as the inevitable consequence of an authoritarian conception of religion.Williams takes on our home-grown, fundamentalist style of religious authoritarianism in “Vile Jelly,” alluding to the blinding of Gloucester by the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear. He complains that “they’re tidying up the Texas textbooks again. / Chopping them down to make little minds stay / the right size for the preachers not to be vexed.” This metaphorical blinding of young minds suggests to him an ancient relief carving of “an ancient king” blinding his captives by inserting a fishhook (ironically suggested by the metaphor of Christ as fisher of men) into their lips to prevent them from averting their eyes from the king’s spear. Then he compares himself to the prince in a fairy tale, imprisoned in an iron stove by a witch’s curse. In Williams’s interpretation, the prince has “locked himself in, welded the lid, / because of all he could no longer bear to behold.” Williams protests versions of religious faith that suppress critical intelligence:Who said: With my eyes closed, I see more? Not me.Who said: I study not to learn but hopingwhat I’ve learned might not be true?Not me again.And yet, to the extent that, like the fairytale prince, he locks himself in because he cannot bear to see what he knows is happening outside, the poet is not entirely immune to such self-imposed blindness. The best he can do is to “peek warily out the door of [his] stove.” He is “writing dying” — and resisting dying — not only of the body, but of the mind and the spirit, and not only in others, but in himself.Not all the poems are so explicitly engaged with harsh political realities, but even in a reminiscent love poem, “Bianca Burning,” the poet’s long-ago affair involves him in crossing barriers of class and observing the damage that class difference inflicts on Bianca’s family. Her parents live in a “caravan” of circus performers. Her father is a clown — and probably a very sad clown, for her mother leaves him each night to sleep with the circus owner. Whether she desires this liaison or, more probably, has no choice but to acquiesce, we are not told.The longest poem in the book, “Newark Noir,” is at once a highly personal memoir and a reflection on history, race, and ethnicity. At first, the “noir” is literal and connected to the sensuous experience of the poet’s childhood: black coal for the furnace, blackboards and ink at school, the black veils women often wore in those days, and the black of dirty snow and bicycle grease. At the end of the fifth stanza, “black” pivots toward the symbolic (“Black Book of Europe, proof of the war on the Jews”), setting up the sixth to turn to the social change that began in the poet’s boyhood with the arrival of African Americans in Newark during the second Great Migration from the South, beginning in the early 1940s. The blacks take over from the Jews as scapegoats, which the Jewish boy experiences as a relief even though he knows that scapegoating blacks is also wrong. He writes:Years pass, and when the poet returns to present-day Newark, he finds it utterly changed. There’s industrial pollution (“Rivers with rainbows of oil on their lids”) and much else besides:The worst derelicts, he suggests, are the holders of political office and executives of corporations who feel no responsibility to the city’s inhabitants.Taking a step back to look at the arc of the collection as a whole, one might consider the first and last poems and the journey traveled between them. “Whacked,” though it touches on violence, ends on an affirmative note, as the aging poet imagines himself as a mare giving birth to “one more, only one more, poor, damp little poem.” The poet affirms his desire, after “fifty years of it,” to continue writing, and the valediction of writing as the source and sufficient ground for happiness.The book ends with its title poem, which opens with a meditation on death, touching especially on the fear of dying while unconscious and thus not experiencing the ending of one’s own story. As for death itself, it’s “crashingly boring as long as you’re able to think and write it.” Writing becomes an attempt to outrun, if not death, than the awareness of death:And yet, death is also a source of poetic inspiration: “Where the hell are you that chunk of dying we used to call Muse?” (One thinks again of Stevens, who twice declares in “Sunday Morning” that “death is the mother of beauty.”)Thinking and writing, at least in the poet’s “dream, of some scribbler, some think-and-write person,” can finally go beyond itself into pure music, having “escaped even from language, from having to gab, from writing down the idiot gab.” Death and life, speech and silence, converge, and it is in this state that one would wish to die, when die one must. The poem ends with an exhortation, addressed perhaps to the poet himself but also to the reader: “Keep dying! Keep writing it down.” This imperative connects the tension between fatal and pleasurable implications of the word “whacked” in the first poem not by resolving it, but by accepting such tension as an unavoidable condition of thinking and writing. The long trajectory of the book is neither purely linear (with a problem at the beginning solved at the end) nor circular (as in Eliot’s “In my end is my beginning”), but a return to the beginning with a difference — a spiral perhaps, rather than a circle.Much as I admire Williams, I don’t want to imply that his work has no faults. He can be long-winded and heavy-handed in his relentless chewing on moral questions — that is the negative obverse of one of his strengths. He has been astonishingly prolific, especially in recent years. One might wish he would write fewer poems and bring more compression to each. But as with Whitman, who can also run on and belabor a point, one forgives these faults for the sake of the best work. If you like Whitman, you’ll probably like Williams, and if you detest one you’ll detest both. Yes, there are many second-drawer poems, but how much does this matter? Should a poet who writes 1,000 pages to get 300 pages of terrific poetry be valued less than a fastidious one who writes 350 pages, 300 of which are first-rate? Don’t we come out in the same place, with 300 pages of cherishable poems?Writers Writing Dying is an extraordinary book, but I would not recommend it as the starting-point for readers unfamiliar with Williams’s poetry. For that, go back to Tar, in which he fully arrived at his mature style, or the relatively terse Flesh and Blood, in which he reined in his expansive lines by allowing only eight of them per poem. If those “whack” you the way they whacked me, you’ll want to explore the others, including Writers Writing Dying and his forthcoming collection All at Once.Very unlike the rage-filled and sorrowful poems I’ve discussed thus far, the central section of All at Once is “Catherine’s Laughter,” a celebration of his marriage (published separately as a chapbook by Sarabande Books, 2013). At first it portrays both partners as susceptible to depression and anger, and the husband as susceptible to jealousy. But just when they are most out of sorts, Catherine’s generous response is to seize on the ridiculous within the gloomy, and her restorative laughter brings the couple back into harmony. The tone is affectionate, intimate, and at times joyful, but Williams does not idealize marriage. “Catherine’s Laughter” is sandwiched between two other book-length sections: “All at Once” and “All at Once Again.” These portions, though not unremittingly dark, shift, for the most part, toward the blue-indigo end of the spectrum. At 182 pages, All at Once is about three times as long as Writers Writing Dying.Farrar, Straus, and Giroux’s publicity notice describes these pieces as “musings,” situated “somewhere between prose poems, short stories, and personal essays.” All of them are unlineated. Some of them tell stories, but many do not; they brood on an idea, an isolated memory, or people and things seen in passing. Some of them could be thought of as very short essays, something like Adorno’s Minima Moralia (but with more metaphor and less abstraction). A few of the shortest read almost as koans — e.g., “Anniversary”:Occasional pieces, such as “The Sign Painter,” work as condensed short stories. The longest piece, “A Bedroom in Africa,” is the one that feels most like an essay. Reading each of the pieces requires taking one’s bearings in relation to its genre — what kind of writing is this an instance of, and how do I know? That challenge can be bracing: it wakes the reader (and perhaps the writer) from the complacencies of a genre’s settled conventions, its recipes for closure. But for a writer who likes to digress, exfoliate, and explore, it has its dangers as well.Williams’s best poems usually draw their power from slow, patient accumulation of implied meanings. But their power is cumulative — I can’t think of a Williams poem for which I feel that only these exact words in this exact order will do, and that to change any part would spoil the whole. They are wonderful poems, but they are imperfect, disproportioned, and perhaps the better for being so. They participate in a broad trend, from the 1960s down to the present day, toward suspicion of strong formal closure as untrue to the opacity and tangledness of experience.Williams’s most concise poems are the eight-liners of Flesh and Blood, in which lineation reins in the temptation to sprawl, while the length of the lines makes room for the fullness of texture and complex syntax he has developed in his longer poems.I’m all for crossing boundaries of preconceived genres, but I’m not sure that “somewhere between prose poems, short stories, and essays” is a good place for this particular writer to be. The miniatures in All at Once don’t have the scope required for the accretion of contexts and minute particulars that animate his best prose and poems. In his powerful memoir, Misgivings, the boyhood world of the poet and the elaborate approach-avoidance dance of his parents rise slowly out of inchoate memory as we read. There are no intentional line breaks, so there can be no interplay between syntax and the line, parsing and pacing the poem as it unfolds. If brevity, of itself, made for concision, the shortest of these new writings would be his most concise. But one can be brief without being concise. The shorter the poem (and I’d risk extending this idea to essays and fictions as well), the more the reader asks why X has been included and Y left out. What is the principle of exclusion that allows only these few words and banishes all others? Williams is not a maker of epigrams, nor would I wish him to be. But his familiar expansive voice often seems a bit cramped in these close prose quarters. Much of All at Once feels like entries from a writer’s journal — a very gifted writer’s journal, to be sure, but more like preliminary sketches than fully realized poems, essays, or short stories.All at Once may be longer and more diffuse than I would wish, yet within it are a number of first-rate writings, whatever genre we may assign to them — enough to make a shorter, more consistent book. The best of the poems to Catherine and, still more, the lovely final piece in the book, “Again,” are balm to any reader still smarting from the harsh truth-telling of Writers Writing Dying.Rather than call the roll of the best items, as poet and critic Randall Jarrell used to do, I’ll close by looking at a few that touch, directly or indirectly, on the vocation of the artist, which in this collection also stand out for their moments of self-forgetting, their reception of another’s experience, another’s being. One might take them as sketches toward an implicit poetics.“The Last Circus,” the opening piece, is in a sense about artistic performance. This is a rather seedy circus, with a “scrawny horse” whose trainer “also plays the clown” but is “not very funny.” The tightrope-walker’s costume is “blotchy.” Behind the tent lie “crumpled pizza boxes, plastic bags, beer bottles, cans, other indecipherable junk.” In the “sparse audience,” only a “disconsolate infant, who’s just woken crying,” is pleased by the clown and “like Shiva, foliates another pair of hands and heartily applauds.” One thinks of Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump,” and Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” In both, the poet can only continue by throwing away the already said (“The dump is full / Of images,” says Stevens. “One rejects / The trash”; Yeats climbs down from his “ladders” of myth and mysticism to reenter the “foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”) Both of those poems conceive of poetic creation as requiring an act of destruction to make room for it, so it is appropriate that, although other Hindu deities also have multiple arms, Williams chooses Shiva, whose “role is to destroy the universe in order to re-create it.”“The Sign Painter” describes what the poet calls “the first real artist I ever met.” The setting is a summer camp “that hired men off the Bowery in New York,” with the result that most of them couldn’t stay sober and left before summer’s end. The sign painter was hired as a dishwasher, but when word got out that “he had once been a sign painter, they commissioned him to paint the camp logo on their station wagon in his spare time.” He fascinates the young poet-to-be and confides in him, sensing perhaps a kindred spirit. He works “carefully, slowly, I suspected too slowly”; his young confidant suspects that this perfectionism and slow pace of production explain why he had stopped being a sign-painter. With the logo half-finished, the sign painter leaves abruptly, arousing the anger and contempt of his employers — and leaving them with a problem, since no one else in the camp has the skill to finish the work. “I had a post-card from him a few weeks later,” the poet recalls,L’art pour l’art in a compulsive gambler’s postcard? Yet this obscure sign painter turns out to resemble Louis Kahn, the famous architect whose “meticulous patience brought him magnificent buildings, but much worldly frustration.” As Williams points out in his poem “Kahn,” the architect “died bankrupt” because his endless revisions “lost many commissions”; many of his best projects were never built, and therefore never paid for. In both poems the artist’s uncompromising dedication to his work is a refusal — perhaps involuntary — of worldliness and the comforts that worldliness can bring.Worldliness and the driven compulsion of the artist appear juxtaposed in “Codes,” which begins with an account of how the famously rich Rothschild family “wrote their confidential business letters to other members of the family in code.” The poem then turns its attention to “Robert Walser, the great Swiss author,” who “after he had gone insane” wrote, according to his translator, on “narrow strips of paper covered with tiny, antlike markings ranging in height from one to two millimeters.” They were deciphered only after his death. In his schizophrenia, he turned against the iconic tool of the writer, the pen; he used only pencils, “painstakingly sharpened.” Williams concludes with a comparison:Single-mindedness devoted to commerce makes one rich; single-mindedness devoted to art, however, is dangerous: it can lead to poverty, perhaps even to madness.The most brutal collision of artistic vocation and commodification comes in “Schulz,” which concerns Bruno Schulz, “the great writer and artist,” a Polish Jew who was shot in Drohobych by a Gestapo officer in 1942. Legend (which, Williams points out, is disputed) has it that Schulz had been “under the protection” of a Gestapo officer, Felix Landau. When Landau shot a Jewish dentist under the protection of another officer, Karl Günther, Günther took revenge by killing Schulz. Meditating on this story Williams says:What especially impresses me is that, for Williams, the greatest cruelty is not the obvious, easily sentimentalized one: “How horrible that this great Jewish artist was arbitrarily killed by a Nazi.” There are two things worse: first, the commodification of both victims, as if Jews were fungible like money, and second, the idea that, because of his accomplishments, Schulz’s life is intrinsically more valuable than that of an anonymous victim. Both of the murdered men were equally — and infinitely — valuable as human beings, but for the Nazis, they were equally valuable as, say, two nickels are equally — and negligibly — valuable, to be saved or spent at whim.Looking at all these pieces together, one finds the familiar notion of the artist as an outsider — the opposite of the worldly, acquisitive person — destined to suffering by the very choice to be an artist. But one finds that notion complexly qualified and stripped of its sentimentality and self-pity. Schulz dies not because he is an artist but because he is a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland. The single-minded concentration of the writer Walser is akin to the single-minded concentration that for the Rothschilds produced great wealth rather than great art. The great architect Louis Kahn is not altogether different from the obscure sign painter too fond of booze and the ponies. (And it may be through their cautionary examples that Williams decided that it is better to write too much than too little.)Williams sees artistic vocation as part of a spectrum of human possibilities, not as something separate from other aspirations. Which brings us full circle to Whitman, who also saw the poet not as a special creature, but as one human being among others, writing, “And what I assume, you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Both Williams and Whitman, at their best, point out for the reader something that, at some level, one has already experienced and known, but not yet made fully conscious. They teach us to know our own minds.