[In the following excerpt, McDowell comments on the narrative modes of contemporary poetry and offers a favorable assessment of Tar.]

If poets today are up to anything it may be this: recombinations of traditional strategies (or impulses) that define anew our relationships to timeless subjects—love, death, isolation, God and His godless double, anxiety, fear. Whether the poets know it or not, this recombinant impulse has its roots in what happened to narrative after the epic tradition waned.

Nearly twenty years ago, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg¹ called our attention to narrative's post-epic division into two antithetical types: empirical, or realistic, narrative; and fictional, or idealistic, narrative. Furthermore, these branches could be subdivided: empirical narrative into the historical and the mimetic; fictional narrative into the romantic and the didactic. Though Scholes and Kellogg employed this framework to arrive ultimately at an explication of the modern novel, its application also provides a compelling historical context for reading contemporary poetry. It is clear, to this reader, that the narrative types, or recombinations of them, listed above are everywhere present and necessary in the volumes I will consider here.

Believe this and you must believe, as I do, that all poetry begins with a narrative impulse. That is not to say that all poetry—even all good poetry—is narrative. The popular contemporary essay-in-verse demonstrates that the above types can be recombined so that narrative vanishes altogether. Like other strategies, this is sometimes successful, sometimes not. Recognition of this recombinant impulse, more than anything else, provides the key to unlock what is happening in contemporary poetry. It allows us to reject the application to poetry of erroneous popular labels like formlessness and chaos. It encourages us to see the work itself. Informed scrutiny of an individual text will enable a reader to make judgments, but the reader must be aware of the larger historical context in which the text inevitably exists. Awareness of this context sweeps the reader far beyond snap judgments and personal bias and enhances appreciation. …

More than anyone writing today, Bidart legitimizes the notion of a visual prosody. His poems are proof that lines on the page create visual rhythms accurately conveying the sense of hesitations in speech and the gestures and expressions accompanying them. This poetry is meant for the eye as well as for the ear. It enlarges and enhances understanding of our world.

I can reverse my concluding statement about Bidart to express my only reservation about Tar by C. K. Williams. His long, long lines are not so much prosodically relentless as relentlessly long. In other words, the reader of Tar must be prepared to deal with an acute sensation of visual monotony. However, he ought to be prepared to overcome it by trusting his ear.

C. K. Williams succeeds in compressing and depicting the convoluted nature of conversation, the rambling qualities of letters to intimate friends. Decked out in elegant repetitions and the adjectival necklaces of Robert Lowell, these poems yearn for peace of mind—the state of grace before paradox, doubt, and loss of faith started working, keeping one up all night, every night. In “My Mother's Lips,” the speaker remembers his mother's habit of lip-synching his words as he spoke to her.

when I was saying something to her, something important, she would move her lips as I was speaking
so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was saying as I was saying them.
Or, even more disconcertingly—wildly so now that my puberty had erupted—before I said them.
When I was smaller, I must just have assumed that she was omniscient. Why not?
She knew everything else—when I was tired, or lying; she know I was ill before I did.
I may even have thought—how could it not have come into my mind?—that she caused what I said.

Coming back to the present, to the fact of his own parenthood, the speaker recognizes “the edge of anxiety in it, the wanting to bring you along out of the silence, / the compulsion to lift you again from those blank caverns of namelessness we encase.” His paranoia is transformed, becoming the ability to recognize a graceful and compassionate gesture. This is the moment Williams is after, and his talent in rendering it sets him apart from the standard fare of incomplete details, shoddy transitions and sensational assertions. This poet is always in service to his subjects. Through fierce observation he becomes the story he is telling, allowing it gradually to reveal itself through him.

Note

1. The Nature of Narrative, Oxford University Press.