Flakes in the black oak nerves, Memories in the hard cold body, Scrawled spine arching for absent fingers, Bach and forecasts of snow with radio static, And a cardinal's red daub twisting and turning In the wind’s maw.

This past week's NYT Book Review touches upon a book that I plan on looking up on my next bookstore foray: C.K. Williams's "Collected Poems". I first read Williams's work around three years ago when his book "The Singing" won the National Book Award. Subsequently, I have had the opportunity to meet him in person after a reading he gave with his Parisian friend, Adam Zagajewski in Atlanta.

In my rambling literary conversations with my friend C, I often posit the question as to how a writer can map the bland commercial realities of living in urban America with its never ending processes of consumption and disposal, and their side effects on the post-modern man's morality, religiousity, and psychiatry into words, and even if such work is worth doing in the first place.

Williams' work answers these questions affirmatively, with seemingly effortless ease, as he writes about one man's ability to make sense of his encounters with a world, which mocks deep-time activities such as reading, through his long loping lines. Take, for example, these lines from the poem "The Singing" that begins as a description of an everyday street encounter with a black kid rapping:

"When a young man turned in from a corner singing no it was more of a cadenced shouting Most of which I couldn't catch I thought because the young man was black speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell he was making his song up which pleased me he was nice-looking Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself hence his lyrical flowing over"

and after the poet's smile is rebuffed by the kid by a chant: "I am not/ I am not a nice person", the poem ends as a meditation on racial memory:

"No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions were left where they were It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice person either" but I couldn't come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he have believed it both of us knew just where we were In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to which we were condemned"

Williams' poems abound in such everyday happenings ricocheting off of an old intelligence. Here is a section from another such delicious poem, "On the Metro":

"She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg."

Williams also has some interesting things to say on his influences, his methods of writing etc in this recent interview with Alice Quinn, poetry editor at The New Yorker.

[1] Reading certain scenes in Bellow’s novel “The Adventures of Augie March” in which Augie supports his next door neighbour Mollie through botched abortion attempts by back alley quacks, my heart’s screws tighten an extra bit for living in America, especially as an immigrant, is to be closer to certain weathers of loneliness.

Making it in (and also being unmade by) a city is one of the themes of this novel, and this makes it appropriate to read as I leave a city of trees (and also of final inertia) for a city of glass and power (and also of grime, grit, human-herring exhalations, and solitude).

[2] In the musty and boxed main reading room of the Jersey City Free Library, sitting among a few homeless hobos sheltering from the cold, black kids dressed in prison fashion reading the sporting papers, old retried white men with slack open mouths dozing off their lunch in this time of afternoon siestas, I find the latest copy of “Poetry” in the magazine racks, and on reading a poem that speaks of riding into the New York City through the cattails, the sludge heaps, the newly minted towers of New Jersey, and the tunnels in the belly of the Hudson river, I feel a tiny tremor of excitement.

[3] Staying with an old friend from middle school days, you wonder how was it that in those days you could effortlessly fill all those hours of companionship, hours that both of you find hard to fill with anything other than a stream of Bollywood movies, and scattered talk that revolves around making it, getting ahead, and the facts of life in America.

Observing the satisfactions that seem to derive from replicating a version of Indian middle class life in America with its cargo of a wife, a car, a house, a bank balance, a fund for the kids’ college educations, occasional vacations into the sprawling American immensities, few dinner parties, Indian movies with their fixity of plot lines, romances, tragedies, song and dance, I wonder, I do wonder, if it is my wanting to live a life of the mind that precludes (or will preclude) me from this version of happiness, if not real, an acceptable facsimile.

[4] A poet was buried, after his beheading as a heretic, for reciting only the first half of the creed, the kalimah, “there is no god” (La Illaha) - he claimed since he had thus far directly experienced only the first half of the creed, it would be really hearsay to complete it by saying “but god” (il-lallah) - at the entrance of one of the largest mosques in the world, Delhi’s Jama Masjid. The tyrant-emperor’s tomb, who ordered his execution, lays forgotten somewhere in the middle of a rocky plateau while this poet’s (Samard's) dargah continues to be drenched with flowers, swards of red velveteen, and the hands of the faithful who seek solace. I discover this in America, and chant this Armenian-Iranian immigrant’s (who somewhere on the mercantile byways into India, stumbled upon intoxicating love, and burst into poetry) verses:

I have been appointed to the office of Love I have been made oblivious to asking from creatures Like a candle I have been melted in this world Due to my burning I have become Love’s confidante!