As it happened, I didn’t get a chance to meet Craig for well over a year and the opportunity that presented itself was circuitous. In my second year of the graduate program, I was roommates with the playwright and poet Sarah Ruhl, and art historian Elyse Speaks. As I recall, Sarah sent one of her plays to Trinity Rep and Craig was the literary manager there at the time. Ultimately, Trinity Rep chose not to produce Sarah’s play then, but Craig sent Sarah a many-page-long letter with a detailed reading of her script and his notes on the play with an offer to meet and talk more about her work. Sarah was stunned by Craig’s detailed consideration of her work, and of course, agreed to meet––and so Sarah and Craig became friends. At some point, Sarah said to Craig, “I think you and my roommate Mark should meet.”
When Sarah extended me the invitation, I tried to play it cool, but inside I was ready to burst with excitement. “Finally!”––I thought. I remember a nervous energy not unlike a job interview, but Craig was so easy to be around with a wicked sense of humor and great laugh that I felt at ease immediately. Being around Craig was, in some ways, similar to reading his poetry: it all just made sense to me.
Craig is the author of close to a dozen remarkable poetry books, including The Asks, Sleepwalking with Orpheus, Reason, and Unsuspended Animation. All of his books land as fully realized, poetic fissures that hum and vibrant from his radiant mind––and there’s a timeless vitality to his lines as if they could have been written last year or five years from now. As Craig tells it in an interview with Chris McCreary for Rain Taxi, he sees “the poem as constellation, first suggested by the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer. Constellations work by what cognitive scientists called the principal of ‘subjective contours’ which is simply the human tendency to see patterns and shapes in the object of the gaze. We make constellations by filling in the gaps.” Extending this cosmological analogy, Craig’s poetry books collide to form new galaxies and multi-dimensional constellations, and the stars within will long continue to emit light.
Two books of his are especially important for me. First, Picture of the Picture of the Image in the Glass, which––along with Anne-Marie Albiach’s brilliant book Ètat––showed me just how potent and capacious silence can be, and just how much of a formal virtuoso Craig was. (Check out Aufgabe #5 and Craig’s response to John Cage’s work, and you’ll see just how dynamically he continued to explore the boundaries of form and what he might be able to create.) It was a privilege to have been part of the memorial event organized by Elizabeth Robinson to honor Craig’s life and work, and to be able to share work from that book in a duet reading with E. Tracy Grinnell, another dear friend. Tracy and I spoke both before and after the event about how present we feel within Craig’s poetry, a shared language that swerves within and around what Jacques Roubaud once called “plagiarism by anticipation.” Tracy and I couldn’t think of a more fitting way to conclude our brief reading than with this couplet Craig wrote in the poem “White Days,” from Picture of the Picture of the Image in the Glass: “And love, like language, lives in pauses and distances, / where the hand impossibly floats among its mutilations.” The second book of his that holds a special place in my heart and mind is True News, which formed the middle part of a trilogy along with the earlier volume Free Will and the later Secret Histories. True News was instrumental in offering me a model for a poetry that can be politically searing, formally robust, and emotionally devastating. The first time I read the book was in a coffeeshop in Bloomington, Illinois, and without really knowing what I was getting into, I read it in one sitting, compulsively scrawling lines and phrases of Craig’s in my notebook, left feeling like I was trying to extract a sip of water from a firehose. Many years later, when my book The Circus of Trust was published, Craig sent me an email with a meticulous reading of that book, his sense of how mathematics continues to inform my work, and how mentally taxing he imagined it was for me to write the book; in addition to thanking him for such care, I had to tell him the book wouldn’t have been possible were it not for True News, a book that continues to be crushingly prescient today.
Craig’s friendship over the past 20+ years was one that I truly cherished: every email was a letter that could make Henry James look like an amateur and, although he seldom dispensed advice, when he did, it stuck. A gem that I’ve never forgotten when I was struggling to find some balance between a flailing sense of self, intense editorial demands, and sputtering creative energies: “The literary life can be a life raft in Hell.” He also wasn’t shy about sharing with me how much his family meant to him and how vital it is to share your life with the right person. Something he said to me after that first meeting in Providence: “Mark, there’s an important difference between somebody who has qualities you find attractive and somebody who is right for you.”
He also offered support to me both in writing and parenthood when my first child was born back in 2018, and he had that rare talent for making much younger poets feel welcome, embodied a curiosity of spirit and a patent rejection of ageism in its myriad forms. It’s difficult for me to imagine a more profound gift, particularly for younger poets: a seat at the table for a lifelong conversation. Although Craig would write me extensive and deeply insightful comments about my poetry books and other creative interests, I learned firsthand that attentiveness was quintessential Craig and took many forms: I once talked with him about music and I mentioned how much I loved the piano as an instrument, that in some clumsy way I saw my typing on a laptop as a form of music. A few weeks later I received a package in the mail with six CDs of various piano composers Craig admired and thought I would enjoy. I was simply floored by his care and generosity.
The last email I received from Craig bears the simple subject header “Grateful.” I can only echo that sentiment: Craig was a truly beautiful man and I’m so incredibly grateful to have counted him as a friend all these years. For being present and funny and ever curious and for writing so many damn excellent books, each distinctive and something nobody else could have written. From his long poem “tar box” from Free Will: “we arrive at the present/ an immaculate sum-of-sums/ and change its name/ to that thing without a veil.”
For reference:
https://www.spdbooks.org/Author/Default.aspx?AuthorId=2341
https://jacket2.org/reissues/aufgabe/
https://artdept.nd.edu/faculty/faculty-by-alpha/elyse-speaks/
https://www.sarahruhlplaywright.com/
https://litmuspress.org/contributor/e-tracy-grinnell/
Two interviews:
https://www.raintaxi.com/architectures-of-absence-an-interview-with-craig-watson/
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/iv-gizzi-watson-ivb-mir.shtml
Craig Watson was the author of eleven books and chapbooks. His
poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals since
1982, including Abacus,
Action Poetique,
Chicago Review,
Hambone,
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Origin,
Paper Air, Shearsman,
Sulfur, and This,
among many others. His book Secret Histories (Burning Deck, 2007)
completes a trilogy that includes Free Will (Roof Books, 2000) and True
News (Instance Press, 2002). Among other considerations, these books
traverse the languages and silences that by turn construct and erase history,
even as its actual subjects struggle to endure. Watson received a R.I. State
Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 2004 and a MacColl Johnson
Fellowship from the R.I. Foundation in 2006. He was also a marketing and public relations
executive; a volunteer firefighter; a visiting professor of poetry and drama at
Brown University, Wheaton College and other schools; a U.S. delegate to the
International Theater Congress; a small press publisher; and a husband and
father to three children.
Mark Tardi is a writer, translator, and lecturer on faculty at the University of Łódź. He is a recipient of a 2022 Fellowship in Literary Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive, 2017). Recent work and translations have appeared in Czas Kultury, LIT, Interim, Text Matters, The Scores, Denver Quarterly, The Millions, Circumference, La Piccioletta Barca, Berlin Quarterly, Notre Dame Review and in Italian translation, Rossocorpolingua. His translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021.