Pulitzer poet graces Axinn’s Abernethy Room

“One never feels like a famous poet,” said C.K. Williams, a reflexive chuckle quickly falling from his lips. His audience laughs; but while Williams may not feel like a famous poet, his impressive host of accolades tells another story.

Having authored nearly 20 books of poetry and received the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, among others, Williams’ prestige alone would have been enough to fill the Abernethy Room for his reading on the afternoon of March 10. In his introduction of the speaker, D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing Jay Parini joked about the necessity of “crowd control at a poetry reading,” as eager listeners continued to trickle in, resorting to crowding in groups, sitting or standing or leaning in alcoves after each of the 60 seats had been filled.

Often giving context for the poems, Williams nestled anecdotes and glimpses of insight into the life between the words, as if creating a new pattern, a storyline of images and memory canvassing his 73 years. Williams chose both old and new poems, at times leaving their titles by the wayside or interrupting his own beginnings to give his listeners bits of the story behind the lines. His casual straightforwardness and warm reflexive humor made the hour seem less a reading and more a discussion, his audience made up of scores of silent, active conversers.

The poems ranged in subject matter and tone, from the somberness of “Jew on Bridge,” to the playful reflection of “The Singing,” and ended with a piece finished the day before, written in joyful and loving appreciation for his wife.

Each he treated with its own earnest urgency, his tall frame curving down to cradle a book in hand, which at times he read from, and which at times he would depart from and cast his gaze, with lens of the poem, to the audience. He delivered the verse as if its rhythm were occurring to him anew, as if the words themselves held the energy of the events of their inspiration.

In his voice, each word seemed to reach as if balanced in space upon the next, as if leaning on each line. He seemed possessed with “a kind of being in the world spontaneously” that he defined as “grace,” and he inhabited both the reading and the poem with its sense.

The words themselves seemed to exist outside their story, outside their context and just in the moment he delivered them, with the wisdom of assessment and acceptance and the eye of the amused, affectionate and sad.

He sounded constantly as if he were letting the audience in on a secret he felt should be universal, a kind of verbal embrace that could only be described as warmth.

A question-and-answer session followed the reading, in which Williams mostly discussed questions about his writing.

He mentioned that for him, a poem begins with a “sound, idea, [perhaps] the sounds of a few words . . . it’s like a process. I get into it.”

As far as difficulties go, he claims he feels that he’s “in an eternal writer’s block. Except when [he’s] writing,” with a chuckle, he continues, “It’s actually not a pleasant way to live . . . When you’re a poet, the next [poem] is the only thing that exists.”

The reading was hosted by the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English and American Literatures. Williams’ newest collection of poetry, titled “Wait,” will be published sometime this year.