Nicole Holofcener’s slice-of-life movie, set in affluent NYC, is a real gem. She writes terrific dialogue – moving deftly between comedy and pathos – and elicits very fine performances from her cast (Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall and others, all marvellous).
If CK Williams had been a film-maker…. In fact, it also made me think of my brother Anthony, because of its delight in well-observed, comic dialogue, its interest in contemporary relationships and its analysis of the guilt that goes with affluence. In some ways it could be the movie version of Anthony’s wonderful radio play, Cigarettes & Chocolate. They’re both about a middle-class woman in crisis, trying to understand inequality – and the impact of that central collapse on those around her.
Another movie I like in this terrain is the Italian film Caos Calma (aka Quiet Chaos, 2008), based on the lovely book by Sandro Veronesi, in which a bereaved man stops going to work….
It was touch-and-go whether I would make CK Williams in time, and I thought about not trekking across London to Goldsmiths College. A bit of me was thinking: what if he’s horrible? I didn’t want my romantic idea of him as a sensitive, incisive genius to be shattered. And after all, he is only a man; how many famous people does one have to meet before one learns that?
In the end I decided to go, navigating the overland trains in the rush hour, folding myself around my folding bike and enduring the withering glances of London Bridge commuters. I braced myself for disappointment.
When I was young I always wanted to meet Woody Allen. I thought I too was a witty nerd; he would recognise that and we would be mates. Puhlease. I don’t hold with the child-molester view of Allen, the fallen hero. But I do know from reliable reports that Mr Allen is a quiet man who wears his celebrity uncomfortably. He doesn’t want to chatter over dinner with the likes of me, or wander with me down to the 59th Street Bridge, or any of the stuff I had floating around in my jejune twenty-something head. I know, had I met him, that I would have been disappointed. Better to watch Manhattan and enjoy it for what it is, not for whom Woody Allen might, or might not, turn out to be.
I have no doubt that another hero, Van Morrison, whose music is a part of my life, would disappoint me in the flesh. And when I met the folk/blues genius John Martyn (he was recording a track for The Talented Mr Ripley) I was pretty much struck dumb. His heart-stopping ballads are my daily soundtrack, but meeting him has not improved the experience. Similarly, I have had wet dreams (well, not quite!) about Keith Jarrett playing for me. In truth, he is a difficult character. His sublime London concert 18 months ago was marred for me by his autistic over-sensitivity to coughs emanating from the audience. He stopped playing and walked petulantly across the stage to a microphone, from which he berated us, claiming if we were truly listening, we wouldn’t be able to cough. In Umbria in 2007, Jarrett made headlines by abandoning a concert because someone was photographing him using a flashgun. His rage, even before he started playing, is something to behold.
Yet Keith’s capacity to explore the soul with a few black and white keys must be unrivalled in history. His soaring flights, his rampant rhythms, his exquisite, delicate melodies bring me ineffable joy.
This is a long-winded way of saying: don’t meet your heroes. Or rather, appreciate what they do and expect nothing more. Make no assumption about any other part of their lives. Therein disappointment lies.
Should one, then, meet the man behind the treasured poems? The answer, in this case, was yes. CK Williams is the man you’d hope him to be. Tall, softly-spoken, intense. As clever a man as you’ll ever encounter. He reminded me of the best philosophers I have known – the people who do Brainy for a living.
I’ll tell you two things about him, which I saw because I was late. I had to sit on the edge of the audience, and I had a side-on view. Firstly, CK performs his poetry. He has to stand to get himself in the right mood. (At one point, hot from the sun streaming in, he decided to sit. He just couldn’t read that way, and had to stand again.) What’s striking is that despite his height, he raises himself up in mid-flow, straining for more – what? Authority?
If it is authority he wants – and this is the second thing – he gets it. A number of women were in the front row, and from my vantage point I could see how they looked up at him, wide-eyed. As I am two-foot tall, I don’t see that very often. More’s the pity. How wonderful the dilated pupils, every well-wrought word savoured, how intimate and charged, as he teasingly announced yet another “sex poem”, frank and, like Jarrett, soaring, rampant, exquisite… until at one point I thought: this is a fully-clothed blow-job, this relationship between poet and audience, our hero rising and straining and… well, you get the picture.
Afterwards, he was appropriately spent. I was delighted to be invited to dinner, and had a lovely evening but – you guessed it – dinner was not the thing. It was the poetry. It was the performance. I would love to be “Charlie’s” friend – who knows? – but I know also that Charlie’s just a tired guy you have dinner with, a guy who frets about his taxi home. A guy in his seventies who, quite rightly, needs his bed.
Whereas CK Williams is somebody, something else. A shelf-full of insight, a thick volume of wisdom to be carried through life. Precious; perfect; mine.
CK Williams, the American poet, is in London today.
I very much hope to hear him read from his work.
You know when you’re walking down the street, or on the train home, and something happens, something tiny, and you’re not even sure if it was a ‘moment’ or just another bit of life’s white noise? And before you know it, your attention is elsewhere, and all that’s left is that sense of something not quite captured, something lost forever?
CK Williams captures that moment. He does mundane-to-universal in one deft flick of the pen. I adore him.
Here’s one to show you how marvellous he is. (I found it on the net, so I hope I’m not contravening any copyright laws.)
THE SINGING
by C. K. Williams
I was walking home down a hill near our house
on a balmy afternoon
under the blossoms
Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here
every spring with
their burgeoning forth
When a young man turned in from a corner singing
no it was more of
a cadenced shouting
Most of which I couldn’t catch I thought because
the young man was
black speaking black
It didn’t matter I could tell he was making his
song up which pleased
me he was nice-looking
Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously
full of himself
hence his lyrical flowing over
We went along in the same direction then he noticed
me there almost
beside him and “Big”
He shouted-sang “Big” and I thought how droll
to have my height
incorporated in his song
So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing
he looked
in fact pointedly away
And his song changed “I’m not a nice person”
he chanted “I’m not
I’m not a nice person”
No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat
but he did want
to be certain I knew
That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord
between us I should forget it
That’s all nothing else happened his song became
indecipherable to
me again he arrived
Where he was going a house where a girl in braids
waited for him on
the porch that was all
No one saw no one heard all the unasked and
unanswered questions
were left where they were
It occurred to me to sing back “I’m not a nice
person either” but I
couldn’t come up with a tune
Besides I wouldn’t have meant it nor he have believed
it both of us
knew just where we were
In the duet we composed the equation we made
the conventions to
which we were condemned
Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that
someone something
is watching and listening
Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though
no one saw nor
heard no one was there
