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.