Alan Williamson: The poet-critic

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1995 by Williamson, Alan

We write in time: and though the time of the timeless ideal has given way to a fashion of chance, of flaw's fatality, nevertheless time's current is alternating: a flame and a worry, a flourish and wane. It comes and it goes: as Plato says, we owe the god of health a sacrifice.

(p. 52)

I don't think I could have come up with two better examples of what the poet-critic does, for both communities, than these the last year has flung me, almost by chance. They challenge both groups, in effect, to deepen their perspectives. To the intellectual community at large, they recommend forgotten realities--"tragedy" and "fate" in a time of pop-psych optimism, "the present" in the age of Deconstruction. To the community of poets, that affirm that literary standards exist but are never a matter of "paint-by-numbers." Such standards are, rather, radical, in the sense of a root reexamination of the relations between subject and object, poet and reader.

Alan Williamson teaches at the University of California at Davis. A book of his essays, Eloquence and Mere Life, was recently published by the University of Michigan Press. The first section of this essay was given as part of a series of talks by poet-critics, organized by Peter Dale Scott at UC Berkeley.