Creeps and Bastards: C.K. Williams as Voyeur

Abstract

I have suggested that Robert Lowell and John Berryman are both, in their different ways, exceptionally conscious of the gender issue for men of their generation. C.K. Williams (born 1936) is a man of the generation after theirs and was still young as the women’s movement gathered momentum. It’s not surprising, then, that Williams, more than either Lowell or Berryman, is preoccupied with what is gendered in his own responses, that he gives the issue more explicit priority than either of them. The unease about masculinity which Lowell starts to express in mid to late career, especially in ‘Near the Ocean’¹ is a component of Williams’s outlook from the start and becomes important as early as his second volume I Am the Bitter Name² whose horrified vision of violence and suffering is obsessively expressed through sexual imagery juxtaposed with references to the oppressiveness of state institutions in a manner that suggests a loosely Reichian outlook:

the nations have used up their desire the cunts of the mothers the cunts of the bad daughters stinking of police stations of the sisters and generations of men saying look cunt what about me

(67)