In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest

Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression, and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and In Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current state of American poetry as a whole.

 

In Time begins with six essays that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to “A Letter to a Workshop,” in which he considers the work of composing a poem. In the book’s innovative middle section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns, including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, “Letter to a German Friend,” which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose, Williams’s essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and politics.

 

C. K. Williams is professor of creative writing at Princeton University. He is the author of eighteen books of poetry, including Repair and The Singing, as well as several books of prose, mostly recently On Whitman.

Preface

PART I Poetry and Poets

Unlikely Likes: George Herbert and Philip Larkin 

Amichai near the End 

Autobiography with Translation 

Lowell Later 

Odd Endings 

Some Reflections on Tragedy 

Letter to a Workshop 

PART II Answerings: Interview Excerpts

PART III The Rest

Two Encounters Early On 

Literary Models of Adolescence 

Paris as Symbol, Idea, and Reality 

Letter to a German Friend 

Nature and Panic 

On Being Old 

Acknowledgments