SOURCE: “Poetry Chronicle,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 339–49.

In the following excerpt, Disch offers a positive assessment of Williams's Selected Poems.

Readers with only a casual, or dutiful, interest in poetry seek out poets they can be comfortable with. Shades of the schoolhouse begin to close round such readers when poems require too much deciphering. So, according to their temperaments, they will gravitate to poets of amiability or moral earnestness, whose work they will reward with a knowing chuckle or an approving nod. …

Of all the collections reviewed here, C. K. Williams’ Selected Poems was the one I kept returning to most often, as I might phone a friend who's always home, always welcoming, and always has a new angle on What's Happening. Williams’ signature long, long (eight to ten beat) lines and looping syntax seem to be generated more by a liking for lucidity...