“Space That Sees: A Posthumous/Preposthumous Dialogue between C. K. Williams and Alan Shapiro”

Poetry faculty member Alan Shapiro was recently featured in TriQuarterly. Read an excerpt of Shapiro’s “Space That Sees: A Posthumous/Preposthumous Dialogue between C. K. Williams and Alan Shapiro,” below:

Space That Sees: A Posthumous/Preposthumous Dialogue between C. K. Williams and Alan Shapiro – Part 1

This is part one in a three-part essay by Alan Shapiro.

1.

The cell phone rang in the middle of a poetry workshop I was teaching at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Charlie’s name popped up on the screen. I had heard just days before that his cancer treatment had been discontinued and he’d gone into hospice. I excused myself and went outside to take the call. Though his voice was weak, almost otherworldly with fatigue, Charlie got right down to business as he always did on the phone. He was dying, he said, matter-of-fact-ly, without a trace of self-pity. He was calling to say goodbye. I tried to disguise my shock and sorrow by joking, “But you’re my reader, Charlie, my audient! Who am I going to show my poems to now?” He deadpanned, “Find a younger reader.”  

2.

Since the mid-1980s, my two closest poet friends have been Charlie Williams and Tom Sleigh. In fact, in the thirty-some-odd years we’ve known each other, and until Charlie’s death in 2015, I don’t think I’ve written a single poem that Charlie and Tom haven’t helped with—that wasn’t shaped or influenced by their judgment and imagination. All poets work alone in some ways, but in other, maybe even more important, ways I was never alone when I worked, not just because I showed my early drafts to Tom and Charlie, but because I think I so internalized their different ways of looking at language and at life that I could feel them watching over my shoulder as I wrote. The process of composition was (and with Tom still is) more collaborative than solitary. But here’s the thing: the recognition I received from them (and by “recognition” I don’t mean praise, I mean the respect of serious critical attention) was so much more durable and fortifying than the ersatz recognition of a fancy publication, review, fellowship, or prize, nice as those things are, or so I’ve heard. To a significant degree, having found my ideal audience insulated me from the worst aspects of “fame envy,” which Milton calls “the last infirmity of noble mind.” The respect of their attention gave me just enough protection from the marketplace and the crippling sense of irrelevance I still experience, for instance, when I go on Facebook or when I step foot inside the great hall of the AWP book fair. While it’s hard not to feel sometimes that all we’re doing when we write is sitting in a room talking to ourselves, what a poetry friendship can do, or has done for me at any rate, is connect the practice of the art to its beginnings in a premodern, even pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer, past when agents and publicists did not exist. It has given me a kind of freedom from the expense of spirit in a waste of shame that has accompanied the art’s professionalization —and it has shown me how poetry, even while drenched in a market economy, still has its roots in older, more intimate forms of human belonging. 

Read the piece in its entirety, as well as Part Two, at TriQuarterly.