C. K. Williams

In a wonderful twist of fate, I meant to click on the "Chess" link in my bookmarks bar and accidentally hit the "TED" link instead. Upon arriving, I decided to take twenty minutes out of my life to listen to one of these always inspirational talks, which I feel have greatly enriched me as a human being over the past couple of months as I've discovered and explored the site. The talk I chose (headlined under the "beautiful" tag) consists of a poetry reading by the wonderful American poet C. K. Williams, who research reveals to me is a professor at Princeton who splits his time between New Jersey and Paris (poets love dichotomies). It's a truly wonderful reading; Williams' stuff is raw and real and beautiful, but not effusively so; rather, it's soft spoken and intimate in a way that a lot of modern poetry is not. The subject of the reading is youth and age.

So end here my banal and prattling prose. Now it is the appropriate time

To turn our attentions to the fluidity and the power of a well-constructed rhyme.