there's something about the human mind that becomes exalted

Student: You're using a line that's not common. In a sense you're at the cutting edge. How much concern do you have for where modern poetry is and where you'd like to push it? Or is it just your own concern about what you want to do?

C.K. Williams: It's more and more just my own concern about what I want to do. One of the benefits of becoming a middle-aged poet is that you really can't worry about that very much. I still have to struggle with the other questions: What have I done? Who am I? What is my audience? Although the basic struggle is always with myself. When I started writing that long line, people said, "That's not poetry, that's prose." And it was futile to argue. First of all, I didn't have the technical means to argue - I probably still don't. I just knew it was poetry. It's very satisfying to me to have people now accept that it is.

...

Pearl London: Let me throw out something that Charles Simic said. I wonder if it disturbs you - as I have to confess it disturbs me. How would you reply to this: "For me , the feel for the line is the most mysterious aspect of the entire process. It took me years to realize that the line is what matters and not the sentence."

Williams: That's not a conflict, that's the history of poetry. That's just Charlie Simic's development. Everybody develops in a different way. The history of poetry is the tension between the line and the sentence, that's how it differs from conventional speech; it organizes language artificially. The line is an absolutely arbitrary unit, and that's what's fascinating about it. Just as in music it's absolutely arbitrary that we have a scale that has eight notes in an octave and some of them are divided into half notes - in India it's divided differently. Once you set up a convention, then there's something about the human mind that becomes exalted in the tension between the normal consciousness and the consciousness that is submitting to these arbitrary conventions. And in poetry the line is an arbitrary convention.

 - C.K. Williams, in conversation with Pearl London and her students in 1988, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).  

sufficiently sublime

Finally, though, however it happens, by whatever complex, forbiddingly imprecise, dauntingly imperfect means, art is created, and beauty manifested. All over the world, if not every day then in every age, beautiful paintings and poems and pieces of music and buildings are generated: one can almost imagine little flaring lights on the surface of the earth, like those seen in photos from space, though they are much more sparse and scattered than the illuminating devices that bespeckle our globe. And then over time these embodiments of the beautiful are harvested, amassed, collected in books, in museums, in concert halls, to be distributed into the lives of individual human beings, to become crucial elements of their existence. Often, our experience of beauty will be the first hint of what each of us at some point will dare call our soul. For don’t those first stirrings of that eternally uncertain, barely grasped notion of something more than mere mind, mere thought, mere emotion, usually first come to us in the line of a poem, a passage of music, of the unreal yet more-than-real image in a painting?

And isn’t it also the case after all that beauty is the one true thing we can count on in a world of insufferable uncertainty, of constant moral conflicts? I’ve wondered sometimes if humans invented gods to have something appropriately sensitive, grand, and wise enough to appreciate these miraculous modes of beauty that are so different in material and quality from anything else in the world. Might gods have first been devised not to assuage our fears and hear our complaints and entreaties, but for there to be identities sufficiently sublime to understand what those first painters and sculptors—and surely, though the words and tunes have been lost, those poets and singers—had wrought?

- C.K. Williams, from "Solitary Caverns: On Globalisation and Poetry" in the March 2009 issue of POETRY. You can read the whole thing, again mysteriously retitled for the web version, here.