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C.K. WILLIAMS: When I was in school, I think there were maybe two readings, the whole four years I was there. And they were the super famous Robert Frost and EE Cummings, people like that. But now, in almost any good university, any university or college, there'll be a certain number of poets coming in, sometimes local poets, sometimes poets who are more well known. And the students respond very well to it. The students are ready to hear it. It's very nice.

And I always enjoy going into situations in which the younger students are compelled to go to poetry readings. And there, they are a little scared about it. And they don't like going to situations that they're compelled to. And they're always surprised that, in fact, there's something in it that they can enjoy and that they can respond to.

SPEAKER 2: When I go to a bookstore and I look at the poetry section, I sort of feel like the same feelings when I'm in a wine store. Like, I don't really know what makes a good bottle of wine. And I'm not really too sure of what makes a good poem.

C.K. WILLIAMS: That's a terrific analogy, I must say.

SPEAKER 2: Any advice for people like me?

C.K. WILLIAMS: The advice for people like you is to get anthologies. There are several very good anthologies of contemporary poetry. There are many of them. There are some that move a little toward that, to that edge of poetry that is a little difficult. There are several streams in poetry in America. It's such a big country. It's not surprising we have different schools of poetry. But there are several anthologies.

And if you pick up an anthology in the bookstore, and glance through it, and see if there are three or four poets who seem to have poems that say something, then you go home and read them, pick out the ones you like, and come back to the bookstore. And either the books will be there or you can order them. But it's a terrific analogy. I don't feel that going into a poetry store, but I do feel it going into a wine store. And especially now they've learned how to make all the labels look so pretty. So they all look like very important wines.

SPEAKER 2: Exactly. Like judging a book by its cover perhaps. Well, talk a little bit about the life of a poet. We all have stereotypes about what it must be like to write poetry. We think of people sitting under trees, and eating great food, and thinking big thoughts. Is that really what it's like?

C.K. WILLIAMS: Well, there isn't much eating great food, unless you happen to cook well.

[LAUGHTER]

There isn't much sitting under trees. But there is, in my case, I do like to go out and sit under trees when I can. But it's usually after my work hours. I'm a fairly regular worker. So I tend to work a certain number of hours every day, most of the day when I can. But other poets don't. Other poets meet that, more that criteria of someone who's inspired occasionally. And when they're inspired, they can write poems. And it's rather frustrating because you don't know what the true way is. You just have to follow your own way.

My way happens to be that I try to make as regular a routine out of it as possible. Wherever I am, I try to write. And then I carry a little notebook with me. Because the rest of the time, I'm not writing, things will be going through my mind. I swim every day. And often when I'm swimming, I find I'm thinking about problems in what I'm writing. And so when I get out of the pool, I have my notebook. And I quickly write down the things that I've thought in the pool.

SPEAKER 2: C.K. Williams, I'd like to ask you, how did you decide that poetry was the best way for you to express yourself. Do you remember, was there a moment when that came to you?

C.K. WILLIAMS: I was quite surprised when it first happened. I wasn't thinking about expressing myself particularly. I started writing right at the end of my sophomore year in college, right when I didn't have to take any more literature courses or English courses. And I didn't, I can't really say why I did it. I just started it. I actually wrote a poem about it once. It was the first thing in my life I felt that I could really attach to.

So even before I really knew what it was, before I knew what was implied, before I knew what the situation of poetry was in the world, I knew there was something about it that I liked. And there is something very thrilling and addictive about writing poetry. Poets, it's almost a joke. If you get two poets' wives or mates together, spouses, they'll always commiserate at what a manic depressive life it is.

Because if the poet is really working well, then everything is fine. But if we're not working well, then we tend to be very despondent and despairing. And it's because, I think, the actual activity of writing is so exciting. And it's almost addictive, you might say. Then when it doesn't happen, because of course it can't happen all the time, you tend to fall into great pits of sadness and silence. And your poor housemate, whoever it is, it can be very hard on them.

SPEAKER 2: Now, I have been reading one of your books. It's actually a collection of your poems, called 1963 to 1983. And when you look back on some of the work that you wrote close to 30 years ago, are you surprised by the feelings you had back then?

C.K. WILLIAMS: No. Because a poem is really the certification of feelings. It's as much the creation of feelings. I mean, when you think about it, all the feelings you have in your life and the few ways you have of expressing it, those are obviously singular events that tend to end up in poems. And they end up being special events.

And then there's a point at which the poem takes over and the poem becomes the event so that the experience is absorbed into the poem. So there are poems in which one uses, for example, fictional elements. And the poem becomes truer than the events that may have informed it. Because the poem is the realization of events and the resolution, just as any art is. And that's really what art is. It's the certification and resolution of experience, and the isolation of experience, and the intensification of it.

So when I look back on those poems that I wrote some 30, as you say, 30 years ago, I'm not at all surprised. When I read them, I'm feeling the poem of them. And the fact that there's the experience back there, with it, is like an extra treat. But the main experience is the experience of having made this artistic form.

SPEAKER 2: If people are interested in learning about poetry and perhaps trying their hand at poetry, is it the sort of thing where practice does make perfect? Can you start out and not be a great poet at all? And can you work at it and get yourself up to a certain level?

C.K. WILLIAMS: Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER 2: So you don't necessarily.

C.K. WILLIAMS: I think it's like any art form.

SPEAKER 2: You don't necessarily have to be a natural-born poet?

C.K. WILLIAMS: Well, finally, it comes down to this strange thing called talent, which what you never know whether you have, in a way, until the end of the game. Because you can write one great poem in your life, and you can be a good poet. And when is that poem going to happen? You don't know.

But almost the most interesting thing about the life of a poet is that you're constantly educating yourself. You're constantly trying to learn more. You're trying to perfect your craft. And you're trying to perfect your perceptions and your vision of the world so that you can have more to write about and write about it better. And it's one of the things that keeps you going as a poet. Again, there's those two acts, the act of writing, which is so thrilling, and then the act of self-education, which is never ending. So it makes for a very pleasant life process.

SPEAKER 2: Well, I'd love for you to share another one of your poems, if you'd be willing to read us another selection.

C.K. WILLIAMS: Would you like, I'll read that poem, which is a little longer than the last one I read, about my starting to write poetry.

SPEAKER 2: That would be wonderful.

C.K. WILLIAMS: It's called "My Mother's Lips". Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that she not only could, but from the moment I asked her in fact, would stop doing it. My mother, all through my childhood, when I was saying something to her, something important, 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'd 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? All she was really doing, of course, was mouthing my words a split second after I said them myself.

But it wasn't until my own children were learning to talk that I really understood how and understood, too, 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.

That was long afterward, though. Where I was now was just wanting to get her to stop. And considering how I brooded and raged in those days, how quickly my teeth went on edge, the restraint I approached her with seems remarkable, although her so unprotestingly, readily taming a habit. By then, three children and a dozen years old was as much so.

It's endearing to watch us again and that long-ago dusk, facing each other, my mother and me. I've just grown to her height or just past it. There are our lips moving together. Now the unison suddenly breaks. I have to go on by myself, no maestro, no score to follow. I wonder what finally made me take umbrage enough or hard enough to confront her.

It's not important. My cocoon at that age was already unwinding. The threads ravel and snarl. When I find one again, it's that 2:00 o'clock in the morning, a grim hotel on a square, the impenetrable maze of an endless city. When, really alone, for the first time in my life, I found myself leaning from the window, incanting in a tearing whisper what I thought were poems.

I'd love to know what I rave that night to the night, what those innocent dithyrambs were, or to feel what so ecstatically drew me out of myself and beyond. Nothing is there though, only the solemn piazza beneath me, the riot of dim-tiled roofs and impassable alleys, my desolate bed behind me and my voice hoarse and the sweet alien air against me like a kiss.

SPEAKER 2: C.K. Williams reading his poem "My Mother's Lips". Thank you so much. Happy Poetry Month.

C.K. WILLIAMS: Thanks a lot. You too.