Flesh and Blood by C. K. Williams

First published: 1987

Type of poem: Book of poems

The Poems

One hundred thirty poems make up Flesh and Blood, C. K. Williams’s fifth book of poetry and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. There are three parts to the book; it would not be far from the mark to say that the first ninety-six poems represent chaos, the next thirty-three order, and the final long poem harmony. The long first part contains individually titled stanzas, and except for a few pairs (back-to-back “Alzheimer,” “Snow,” and “Drought” poems), little at first suggests an arranged sequence. Instead, the themes are disparate and the poems stand alone.

The thirty-three poems of part 2 are also titled stanzas, but thematic keys are given as well. The first half of each title gives one of five themes: “Reading,” “Suicide,” “Love,” “Good Mother,” and “Vehicle.” The second part of the title, following a colon, renders the poem more specific, as in “Reading: The Gym” or “Suicide: Anne.” Of the five thematic groupings, there are six poems in the first, three in the second, ten in the third, and seven each in the fourth and fifth. With these themes in mind, the reader can identify poems in part 1 that correspond to themes in part 2. “Girl Meets Boy” and “Experience” are “Love” poems, while “Easter” extends the Good Mother theme to include a father. The “Vehicle” poems are speculative, and many poems in part 1 are also of this type. In “Herakles” and “Cowboys,” for example, Williams speculates on the nature of heroism in myth and movie. In part 2, “Suicide: Anne,” he explores the psychological ground of poet Anne Sexton.

Part 3 is a single poem of 144 lines, “La Petit Salvié” (the small redemption). It is an elegy to scholar and poet Paul Zweig, Williams’s friend who lived in France as a semi-exile, dead at age forty-eight. These final stanzas, less than a seventh of the book, rise to a high pitch both as a speculative instrument and as a “flesh and blood” record. (Flesh and Blood is dedicated to another Paul—Paul B. Williams, the poet’s father.)

One of the two most notable formal aspects of the poems is the fact that each poem in the book is eight lines long. Flesh and Blood therefore consists of 147 stanzas that appear very similar to one another and are usually presented 2 to a page. The other is Williams’s use of a very long poetic line—so long that it virtually always wraps around onto the next line on the page. Without a flexible line of great length, 147 eight-line stanzas could easily induce ennui, sinking the project. Williams, whose lines vary from 18 to 30 syllables and whose stanzas vary from 174 to 215 syllables (as an analysis of 15 stanzas shows), uses diverse kinds of language, varied themes, and a plethora of tones and moods to strike the emotional and intellectual quality of his verse. A typical stanza from Flesh and Blood (190 syllables) is one-third longer that a typical sonnet, and the extra room often gives the stanza-poems a wider and deeper reach.

The materials for the poems come via the poet’s eye as an observer of the human species. The best poems are the nonspeculative ones that show humans in situations with well-defined character motivation in postmodern settings. Linda Gregerson, writing in Poetry, sees the poems as “an impassioned essay on the moral life of urban humanity.” This characterization certainly holds true regarding the Good Mother series in part 2. Williams is able to show, with use of fine detail, the treatment children receive from unwitting parents. “Good Mother: The Plane” is an example; a mother is waiting for a flight, hours late, with a child in tow, and she “finally loses patience.”

Forms and Devices

Just before Williams’s first book (Lies, 1969) came out, Anne Sexton was asked to write something for the cover. Her words on the inside front flap describe the writer as “a demon” and a “master of metaphor.” One of Williams’s masterful metaphors is in “Suicide: Anne,” in which he uses the phrase “a badly started nail” to stand for Sexton’s emotionally aberrant life. This ingenious metaphor contains two braided truths as well as an impersonal exactness. An unstraight nail is incorrigible, an obdurate life unyielding. In “Regret,” the metaphor “in its cold coils” works at a similar level.

A metaphor sometimes waits awhile before it is completed in Flesh and Blood. The first poem, “Elms,” for example, becomes a metaphor for the last. The trees of the avenue are chain-sawed down until “naked facing buildings stare.” One at a time “the winds of time” destroy all living things. Zweig’s death, like the loss of the elms, exposes Williams to his unprotected thoughts. In stanza 15 of “La Petit Salvié,” he writes about “Clearing clumps of shrubs” from Zweig’s small, crumbling estate in the Dordogne at a time when Zweig is weak with fever. He tells of “sawing down a storm-split plum” and of “malevolently armoured maguey:/ their roots are as frail as flesh,” “The winds of time” become in stanza 2 “a perfect breeze” that washes across Zweig’s bed.

In “Sixteen: Tuscany” Williams likens young men drawn to his teenage daughter to bees. There are, among others, “two vacationing Sicilian bees.” The last line, “The air is filled with promises of pollen,” translates as possible romance, sexuality, and fecundity. Williams often prefaces a metaphor with the two-word device “the way…,” as in “Hooks.” Here bus riders look at a pretty girl’s artificial hand “[t]he way someone would glance at [an] unruly, apparently ferocious but really quite friendly dog.”

Flesh and Blood is the third of Williams’s books to use the long line, which has developed a characteristic quality and has become his trademark. With his third book conversational and his fourth book narrational, his long line came to display a language that challenges the traditional view that poetry is concise, tight-knit, and economical. Particularly interesting is the use Williams makes of polysyllabic abstract words and long adjectival clusters. The result is a prosody heavy with unstressed syllables, capable of cadence and incantation, not far from natural speech (although natural speakers never show such lexical wealth), charged semantically to a degree usually found only in compressed verse forms.

In “Guatemala: 1964” phrases such as “implacable, picturesque aloofness” and “disconcertingly beyond suspicion” conjure more than they define. Williams seems to enjoy sewing strings of conjecture into sentence fabrics. In “Herakles” he wonders if the hero’s “feats and deeds be not exemplary but cautionary.” A prose writer might find the assonance unsuitable, whereas a traditional lyricist might complain of prosy, abstract diction. Williams is plainly exploring the limits and challenging norms.

“First Desires” contains such turns of phrase as “ardent arpeggios” and “chromatic dissonance.” An indigent person who traces texts in a public library, in “The Critic,” has “blood-rimmed eyes as rapt as David’s doing psalms.” The words “inconceivable capitulation,” in “Repression,” beg more questions than they pin down. “Reading: The Cop” describes an armed guard’s weapon as “a large-caliber, dull-black stockless machine gun,” and “Souls” says that carnival teddy bears are “unrelentingly filthy, matted with the sticky, sickly, ghastly, dark gray sheen/ you see on bums.”

Besides adjectival phrases and abstract diction, the poems include foreign words and phrases (usually French), European place names, musical terms (as in “Junior High School Concert: Salle Rosini”), and mythological names. The effect is that Williams takes his poetry in directions that seem to defy such traditional descriptions as narrative and lyric. Gregerson probably misses as many descriptive terms as she includes in her list of Williams’s genres: “didactic fables, documentaries, confessions, indictments, portraits, billet-doux.” The poems’ speculation, satire, sketches, and situations contain a broad spectrum of humanity: lover, child, parent, cleric, professional, laborer, aged person, invalid, criminal, politician, cultural leader, artist, and hero.

Sources for Further Study

Library Journal. CXII, May 1, 1987, p. 72.

The Nation. CCXLIV, May 30, 1987, p. 734.

The New York Times Book Review. XCII, August 23, 1987, p. 20.