Tar by C. K. Williams
"Tar" is a poem by C. K. Williams that explores the emotional and psychological impact of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident in March 1979. Divided into three stanzas, the poem begins with the poet’s attempt to distract himself from the anxiety of the unfolding crisis by observing workmen reshingling his roof. This juxtaposition highlights a dissonance between mundane labor and the looming threat of nuclear disaster. As Williams reflects on the work being done, he comes to see it as a metaphor for the precariousness of living in a nuclear age, where everyday activities can evoke deep existential fears.
The poem captures the narrator’s growing realization of the dangers inherent in both roofing and nuclear power, linking the physical hazards of the roof to the potential calamities of a nuclear mishap. Throughout the poem, imagery such as "Dantean broth" and "malignant smoke" serves to intensify the sense of danger associated with both the workmen's labor and the nuclear accident. As the poem concludes, Williams reflects on how the vivid memories of the roofers and their chaotic surroundings encapsulate the pervasive fear of catastrophe. Overall, "Tar" paints a poignant picture of the intersection between human vulnerability and technological peril, inviting readers to contemplate the fragility of safety in modern life.
Tar by C. K. Williams
First published: 1983, in Tar
Type of poem: Narrative
The Poem
“Tar” is a poem divided into three stanzas, set around the poet’s own experience of the Three Mile Island nuclear-reactor accident. In March, 1979, this accident threw many people around the nation (and especially people in Pennsylvania, where the poet lived and where the reactor is located) into a state of alarm over the danger of a full-scale nuclear meltdown that would have unleashed a cloud of deadly radioactive gases over a wide area.
As the poem begins, the juxtaposition of the nuclear accident, mentioned in the first line, with the workmen who are mentioned in the second line seems incongruous, and, in fact, it seems to be this incongruity that has attracted C. K. Williams’s attention. He talks about wandering out to watch the men at work to distract himself from the news that he spent most of the night watching.
As the poem progresses in the second stanza, as the official denials of danger from the nuclear-reactor accident seem to him more confused and less trustworthy, and as he sees that the work the men do on his roof is “harrowingly dangerous,” watching the roofers and their work becomes not so much a way of avoiding thinking about the nuclear accident as a way of confronting it. That is, the dangerous work of reshingling his roof becomes a metaphor for the precariousness of living in the nuclear age.
By the third stanza, the events of this day have convinced him of the inevitability of a disastrous nuclear mishap. “We’d understood,” he says, “we were going to perish of all this…if not soon, then someday.” As the narrator—who is clearly Williams himself—reflects on the whole incident, he tries to understand why these roofers stay so clear in his mind, while the rest of the events have become such a haze to him. Not only did the glitter of the metal they were working with stay in his mind, but the carats of tar that formed in the gutter, “so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air,” became for him an appropriately threatening image of the fear he felt that day, and the graffiti—“obscenities and hearts”—that the children in the neighborhood write with these pieces of tar stays in his mind as an expression of the chaos of this experience.
As becomes clear in the first stanza, when Williams discusses watching the news for long hours, the terror of an accident like this happening nearby is amorphous and hard to grip mentally. By the end of the poem, however, he realizes that his memory has found a form for this terror by selecting images of the whole experience, especially the images of the workmen.
Forms and Devices
C. K. Williams is known for a narrative style of poetry that has an organic and almost casual sound to it. A poem such as “Tar” (and most of the poems in the collection of the same name) does not force language into self-consciously “poetic” forms. Instead, it tries to shape a poem out of the rhythms of natural-sounding speech.
The careful reader, however, will not let the casual sound of the language lull him or her into overlooking the careful shaping of the poem. Although true to Williams’s style of poetry, the central metaphor, in which he thinks of the Three Mile Island accident in terms of the work that was done on his roof that day, is not presented self-consciously as a metaphor, but rather as a coincidence; this metaphor constitutes the heart of the poem. When the narrator says he never realized how “matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous” it is, he is referring literally to the work of tarring and shingling a roof, but there is also a clear figurative level being worked out on which he is referring not only to how dangerous nuclear plants are, specifically, but also to how dangerous life in the nuclear age is.
The things that make the work on the roof particularly dangerous are the decaying materials, the rusty nails that have to be pulled out, the under-roofing that crumbles under the weight of a workman, and the old furnace that is kept burning to heat the tar. The extent to which he sees the crumbling of these fairly simple tools and materials as stand-ins for the nuclear power plant becomes clear when a “dense, malignant smoke shoots up” from the furnace, reminding him of the danger of radioactive gases being released from the nuclear core of the Three Mile Island plant. The furnace is adjusted rather crudely by a workman hitting it with a hammer.
When the poet looks inside the heated tar pot, he sees a “Dantean broth” and compares the tar to the images of hell presented in Inferno (c. 1320). The bubbling tar looks bland, almost like licorice, in the crucible in which it is cooked, but when spilled, it “sears, and everything is permeated.” Again, the comparison to the “crucible” within the power plant is clear; the water that is used both to cool the nuclear core and to convey the tremendous amount of heat it takes to operate the turbines in the plant is innocuous so long as it is kept contained. If this water were to be spilled as radioactive steam, however, it, like spilled tar, would permeate and contaminate everything around it.
The middle stanza ends when the men go to lunch, leaving the air above the roof “alive with shimmers and mirages.” Literally, Williams is referring to the shimmer of heat rising from the hot tar on the roof, but this image also completes the comparison the stanza has been developing by implicitly referring to the cooling tower of the Three Mile Island plant, which, in news reports of the accident, was prominently displayed giving off heat and radioactivity.
Sources for Further Study
Library Journal. CVIII, October 1, 1983, p. 1880.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 22, 1984, p. 3.
The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, November 27, 1983, p. 13.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV, July 22, 1983, p. 126.