A life’s lessons in verse
‘THE WAGES OF LOVE’ EARNS CHRISTIE MAX WILLIAMS THE MEREDITH PRIZE
It could be argued that, for 15 years, Christie Max Williams was THE face of poetry in southeastern Connecticut — and not because of his own poetry. Instead, with vision and passion, Williams, as creative director of the Arts Café Mystic literature and music series, produced a world-class series featuring some of the finest poets alive. They included Poets Laureate of the U.S. and Connecticut, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and MacArthur “Genius Awards.” A representative list of participants includes Billy Collins, Philip Levine, J.D. McClatchy, Kate Rushin, Frank Bidart, Margaret Gibson, Xue Di, Marilyn Nelson, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mark Doty, Denise Duhamel and Ocean Vuong.
Now it’s time Willliams’s own work moves to the fore.
His first collection of poetry, “The Wages of Love,” was published on April 20 by Antrim House and was announced as a co-winner of the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry along with Anne Harding Woodworth’s “Trouble.”
On Thursday, Williams will read from and discuss “The Wages of Love” at the Savoy Bookshop & Café.
Williams has in fact written fine poetry for years. Pieces have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies and literary magazines, and individual poems have separately won the Grolier Prize and been selected as a finalist for the National Poetry Series. “The Wages of Love,” though, is a statement unto itself. Certainly, the poems work individually. But they also cohere into a sort of A-Z narrative of wit, tenderness, affection, wisdom and melancholia reflected through a treasure chest of characters, situations, places and memories.
“All these poems are as true as I can make them,” Williams says in a recent interview. He speaks in careful sentences, with thoughtful pauses of reflection, and in a precise diction that echoes another passion — his highly regarded experiences as an actor in theater (he’s portrayed everyone from James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” to Hamlet). “What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it. ‘Truth’ is a sort of fungible quality in the world, it seems to me, so I tell the stories in these poems with all the accuracy I can muster.”
Moments big and small
It certainly helps that what might be described as the source material for these poems is colorful and intriguing and varied as his intellectual appetite. Williams, who lives with his wife, Cate, in Mystic — they have two adult children, Tess and Cody — grew up in California and New York City. He’s worked as a fruit vendor in Paris, a salmon fisherman in Alaska, a Wall Street consultant, a writer for the National Audubon Society and in various leadership roles for non-profit causes he endorses.
Perhaps not surprisingly, these experiences blossom delightfully and poignantly in “The Wages of Love.” The collection is divided into three sections. The first is titled “Love and Death,” followed by “Family Matters” and concluding with a single longer poem, “Bistro
du Nord,” which serves as a witty, thoughtful and melancholy coda to a book that is profoundly eloquent and imbued not just by the author’s gift but his ability to translate his own sense of awe into images and word-tapestries.
Williams ponders the Big Topics that have always inspired artists — and that perplex and charm all of us — and writes through the prism of such experiences as a street fair, childhood epiphanies about mortality and cruelty revealed in everyday activities, the comforts and revelations of intimacy at various stages in a long relationship, small town tragedy, the thousand comforts of a father’s hand, the confident arrogance of youth when it boomerangs, the puzzling delights and anxieties upon becoming a father and watching his children grow up.
Fatherhood and beyond
“I love fatherhood, the whole of it,” Williams says. “Young children, teenage children ... I had not expected to be a father and didn’t think monogamy was in my future till Cate came along. I wasn’t exactly young; I was 40 when my daughter was born and that was a huge advantage and allowed me to be fully engaged with the children as they grew up. I was no longer encumbered by personal ambition or issues about who I was or what I wanted to do; I was not settled but no longer anxious ...
“So when I wrote poems about it, I picked and chose my poetic targets: feelings I wanted to capture because they were unusual material for me. I’ve always been moved by stories that perhaps aren’t often written by a man ...”
As a stylist, Williams explores many poetic forms and isn’t afraid to employ a variety of rhyme schemes in the face of the popularity of free verse. This concept is particularly effective in “Bistro du Shard.”
The poem is based, Williams says, on a true-life experience when he had a solo dinner in a very nice restaurant. Next to him in the closeset floorplan was a well-to-do young couple whose earnest conversation about a potentially life-altering situation meant they were oblivious to Williams’s eavesdropping — which was at first unintentional but then grew too fascinating for our narrator to resist.
The piece is at once a witty, wistful, provocative — and an honest depiction of an older man wisely deciding to not provide, despite an inclination otherwise, unsolicited advice based on his own panorama of experiences. Real-time intrusions by the staff, along with the murmuring ambience of other diners at dinner hour in a fine establishment provide more real-world whimsy to broaden the tableau.
What rhymes with ...?
But what truly provides a distinctive pulse is Williams’s clever and creative rhyme schemes — interior and otherwise.
“I worked hard at the rhyme schemes in that poem. Writing formal verse in the 20th and 21st centuries is a particular challenge because the imperative to achieve an authentic voice in poetry nowadays is every poet’s responsibility,” Williams says. “It’s hard to write a poem that rhymes and sounds like a contemporary verse, so I tried very hard to place the rhymes within the lines.”
“I was also amused by the rhythm of the room — the waiter’ insertion into their conversation asking if the soup’s OK, for example, and they don’t realize this important conversation is taking place,” Williams says.
To accentuate those distractions, Williams utilizes disruptive couplets, written in the form of marketing hype for the restaurant itself. “At Bistro du Nord / we speak of food and wine as seeking a rapport.”
The idea comes, Williams says, from the sort of device T.S. Eliot employed in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with couplets like “In the room the women come and go / speaking of Michelangelo.”
“Eliot created a a sort of cubistic moment ... that comments on the action and yanks the reader up out of the narrative in a fun and loopy sort of way,” Williams says.
Outside influences
It’s natural to wonder, reading “The Wages of Love,” if Williams thinks his role and experiences at the Arts Cafe Mystic helped his own poetry. At the same time, being artistic director for the series required a great deal of commitment that might otherwise have been devoted to his own writing. How did those two dynamics play out?
“The Cafe did get in the way and took an enormous amount of time and work to keep it going,” Williams says. “But it was tremendously useful to read all the contemporary poetry I did — and it was a badge of honor for me to read everything written by each of our poets. I probably have an extraordinary education in post-World War II poetry by the best in our country. To present those poets and hear them read — to learn the sound of poetry — was enormonousy valuable.”
Similarly, Williams’s extensive theater work has had a big influence on his poetry. “Good actors know good lines when they say them,” he says. “Conversely, you know bad when you’re made to say them. I’ve been onstage saying verses for years, and I’ve been writing poetry as long as since I was performing Hamlet. I like to think I’ve developed a feel for cadence, syntax and rhythm that I think is unusual for poets and that more poets could benefit from. It’s no accident that the best poet in our language, Shakespeare, was a man of the theater.”
With “The Wages of Love,” Williams has succeeded on many personal and artistic levels. Most importantly is that, in writing the book, he told the stories he wanted to tell.
“Our own stories are cagey,” he says. “They stick in our minds for one reason or another but they don’t always reveal their meaning or why we remember them. A story in a poem is so compressed that you don’t have to present myriad details to authenticate or substantiate the story. You need to remember what you remember and, if you’re lucky in the process of reflecting on these little stories, maybe you discover the meaning. THEN the trick is to hide them so the reader can discover them, too.”