Abstract
The rarity of death, its stunting fragmentations and spectral transformations announce themselves in an experimental sonnet by C.K. Williams. The poem proceeds from images of physical violence to a gesture of a tenuous resistance against trauma and oblivion. It ends not in the void of hopelessness but in a wisp of affirmation of human value. The poem functions as a thin, verbal sieve that, in the space of fourteen meager lines, briefly delays the passage from the material to the immaterial. The image of the vanishing of human life is itself a rarity: it can be glimpsed in Williams’s sonnet in the diaphanous space, hard to scan or notice, between the fragmented and the full pentameter line.
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Notes
William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997), v.ii, 13–15.
C.K. Williams, Selected Poems ( New York: The Noonday Press, 1994 ), 15.
Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire ( Paris: Gallimard, 1955 ), 157.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 117, see also 124.
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© 2016 Harold Schweizer
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Schweizer, H. (2016). The Rarity of One’s Own Death. In: Rarity and the Poetic: The Gesture of Small Flowers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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