C.K. Williams quotes

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)
If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, you're wasting it. View quote
C.K. Williams
A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part. View quote
C.K. Williams
Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens. View quote
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. View quote
C.K. Williams
Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I'm speaking or trying to speak Dear reader who may or may not be with me I still remember how once you weren't here at all so I'd make up a mythical listener and there were good sides to that because I myself could choose the degree of your presence the level of your attention from zero to fifty but then before I knew it you were somehow actually with me though it's still a mystery as to why you decided to join me. View quote
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. View quote
C.K. Williams