C. K. Williams Quotes & Sayings

The more I write, the more the silence seems to be eating away at me. — C. K. Williams

If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, you're wasting it. — C. K. Williams

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by. — C. K. Williams

I am your own personal verb now. — C. K. Williams

I believe how you looked was supposed to mean, something graver, more substantial: I'd gaze at my poor face and think, "It's still not there." Apparently I still do. What isn't there? Beauty? Not likely. Wisdom? Less. Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us? All I see is the residue of my other, failed faces.
But maybe what we're after is just a less abrasive regard: not "It's still not there," but something like "Come in, be still. — C. K. Williams

One becomes a grandfather and one sees the world a little differently. Certainly the world becomes a more vulnerable place when one has a grandchild, or now I have two. And I think that possibly there's some tenderness that came out of just time and age and being a parent and grandparent. — C. K. Williams

This is the wisdom of art, the knowledge that beauty perhaps is the one undeniably unique attribute of the human. — C. K. Williams

Lost Wax"

My love gives me some wax,
so for once instead of words
I work at something real;
I knead until I see emerge
a person, a protagonist;
but I must overwork my wax,
it loses it's resiliency,
comes apart in crumbs.

I take another block;
this work, I think, will be a self;
I can feel it forming, brow
and brain; perhaps it will be me,
perhaps, if I can create myself,
I'll be able to amend myself;
my wax, though, freezes
this time, fissures, splits.

Words or wax, no end
to our self-shaping, our forlorn
awareness at the end of which
is only more awareness.
Was ever truth so malleable?
Arid, inadhesive bits of matter.
What might heal you? Love.
What might make you whole? Love. My love. — C. K. Williams

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come. — C. K. Williams

Maybe shy is when you're lonely and you don't think anybody can help you. — C. K. Williams

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing. — C. K. Williams

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens. — C. K. Williams

Last year in the region where we live part of the year there were violent windstorms, whole forests were leveled, two- and three-hundred-year-old trees torn up by the roots and tossed aside, houses sliced almost in half by the once-sheltering giants flung down through their roofs. Yesterday another storm, powerful but less so, took down no trees. The ground, though, is littered with leaves, as though autumn had arrived, but the leaves are still green, still alive, many torn away in clumps, with the twigs still intact that attached them to their branches. There's something disconsolate about them - the desiccated leaves of autumn always appear to have found the place to which they've been destined, but these don't seem to grasp what's happened to them: they lie on the ground at awkward angles, like things wounded that haven't completely given in to death and don't know yet they must. — C. K. Williams

A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part. — C. K. Williams

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive. — C. K. Williams

I don't like denial. I don't like repression. — C. K. Williams

I don't think of reflection on dark things as necessarily dark. — C. K. Williams

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world. — C. K. Williams

Wasn't I rapt?
Wasn't I ravished? — C. K. Williams

Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck
the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was
scribbled with obscenities and hearts. — C. K. Williams

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't. — C. K. Williams