C. K. Williams
C. K. Williams was an influential American poet born on November 4, 1936, in Newark, New Jersey. Educated at Bucknell University and the University of Pennsylvania, Williams became known for his unique style characterized by long, prose-like lines. His poetry often addressed social and political issues, particularly during the Richard Nixon era, with notable works including "A Day for Anne Frank" and "Repair," the latter earning him the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Throughout his career, Williams held various teaching positions, including at Princeton University, where he was a professor of creative writing until 2013.
In addition to poetry, he contributed to the literary world through translations and nonfiction, with notable publications such as "Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself." Williams's later works include the poetry collections "The Singing," "Wait," and "All at Once," showcasing his continued evolution as a poet. He passed away on September 20, 2015, in Hopewell, New Jersey, leaving behind a legacy of impactful literature, with his final poems published posthumously in "Falling Ill." Williams's contributions to poetry and literary education highlight his significant role in contemporary American literature.
C. K. Williams
- Born: November 4, 1936
- Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
- Died: September 20, 2015
- Place of death: Hopewell, New Jersey
American poet
Biography
Born November 4, 1936, in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Paul B. and Dossie (née Kasdin) Williams, Charles Kenneth Williams was educated at Bucknell University and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was graduated with a BA in 1959. In 1965, he married Sarah Jones; they had a daughter, Jessica Anne, who figures in Williams’s personal poems. At the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, he founded a program of poetry therapy and was a group therapist for disturbed adolescents.
A Day for Anne Frank led to the publication of two volumes of poetry in 1969 and 1972 that established Williams as a protest poet of the Richard Nixon era. He was a visiting professor at Franklin and Marshall College in 1977 and at the University of California at Irvine in 1978 before becoming professor of English at George Mason University. In addition, he taught creative writing at various workshops and colleges, including Boston University, Columbia University, and University of California at Berkeley. He joined the faculty at Princeton University as a professor of creative writing in 1995 and continued to teach there until his retirement in 2013.
A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 resulted in With Ignorance, the first book in his new style. The long, prose-like lines that signified this style continued to be featured in works and collections such as Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987), The Vigil (1997), and Repair (1999). While Williams also worked on translations and edited texts during that time, in the twenty-first century he focused mainly on volumes of poetry and nonfiction. After publishing his memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, in 2000, he went on to publish poetry collections that included The Singing (2003), Collected Poems (2006), Wait (2010), and Writers Writing Dying (2012).
All At Once (2015), a collection of prose poems, was Williams's last work published in his lifetime. He died following complications from multiple myeloma at his home in Hopewell, New Jersey, on September 20, 2015, at the age of seventy-eight. His final poems were published posthumously as the volume Falling Ill in 2017.
In 1975, Williams married Catherine Mauger, a jeweler, with whom he had a son. Williams was awarded the Bernard F. Conner Prize for the long poem by The Paris Review in 1983; the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987; the Morton Dauwen Zabel prize in 1989; the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ award in 1993; the Harriet Monroe Prize from Poetry magazine, also in 1993; and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry in 1998. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Repair and in 2005, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Author Works
Poetry:
A Day for Anne Frank, 1968
Lies, 1969
I Am the Bitter Name, 1972
The Sensuous President, 1972
With Ignorance, 1977
Tar, 1983
Flesh and Blood, 1987
Poems, 1963–1983, 1988
A Dream of Mind, 1992
Selected Poems, 1994
New and Selected Poems, 1995
The Vigil, 1997
Repair, 1999
Love about Love, 2001
The Singing, 2003
Collected Poems, 2006
Wait, 2010
Writers Writing Dying, 2012
All at Once, 2014
Selected Later Poems, 2015
Falling Ill, 2017
Translations:
Women of Trachis, 1978 (of Sophocles’ play Trachinai; with Gregory Dickerson)
The Lark, the Thrush, the Starling, 1983 (of Issa’s poetry)
The Bacchae, 1985 (of Euripides’play Bakchai; with H. Golder)
The Bacchae of Euripides: A New Version, 1990
Canvas, 1991 (of Adam Zagajewski’s poetry with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry)
Selected Poems, 1994 (of Francis Ponge; with John Montague and Margaret Guiton)
Edited Texts:
Selected and Last Poems, 1989 (of Paul Zweig)
The Essential Hopkins, 1993 (Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry)
Nonfiction:
Poetry and Consciousness, 1998
Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, 2000
On Whitman, 2010
In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest, 2012
Bibliography
Bawer, Bruce. Review of Tar, by C. K. Williams. Poetry, Sept. 1984, pp. 353–55. Praises Tar for its portraiture, citing “Waking Jed” and “The Color of Time” as the best of the collection. Compares Williams to Walt Whitman, but says the former has more warmth and intensity of feeling. Argues that Tar is a reminder not only of “what poetry is all about, but what life is all about.” An appreciative review.
Coles, Robert. Review of With Ignorance, by C. K. Williams. The American Poetry Review, July/Aug. 1979, pp. 12–13. Likens Williams to Søren Kierkegaard because both stay in the world while “groping for inner truth.” Coles says Williams has achieved in these poems a “humble intelligence” and considers the task in these poems as a journey fraught with challenges.
Grimes, William. "C. K. Williams, Poet, Dies at 78; Pulitzer Winner Tackled Politics and Morality." The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/books/c-k-williams-poet-who-tackled-moral-issues-dies-at-78.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2017.
Howard, Richard. Review of The Vigil, by C. K. Williams. Boston Review, Summer 1997. Although Howard has serious and well-expressed reservations about the formal imposition of an extremely long line, he allows himself to admire those poems and passages in which Williams’s technique works effectively. Howard praises Williams’s successes in rendering “immediacy of sensation.”
Jarman, Mark. The Secret of Poetry. Story Line Press, 2001. The chapter “The Pragmatic Imagination and the Secret of Poetry” compares Williams with Charles Wright and Philip Levine.
Phillips, Brian. “Plainly, but with Flair.” New Republic, 18 Sept. 2000, pp. 42–45. Phillips reviews both Repair and the memoir Misgivings. He objects to Williams’s habit of moralizing and of glossing the beginning of a poem at the end. Williams forces the reader away from direct experience toward a preferred comprehension. This habit undermines his great descriptive powers. Phillips also notes the tension between Williams’s colloquial diction and his erudite range of references.
Riding, Alan. “American Bard in Paris Stokes Poetic Home Fires.” The New York Times, 4 Oct. 2000, p. E4. This flavorful piece of biographical journalism treats Williams’s relationship with Paris as well as the patterns of his writing and teaching careers.
Santos, Sherod. “A Solving Emptiness: C. K. Williams and Charles Wright.” In his A Poetry of Two Minds, U of Georgia P, 2000. In a comparison of mid-career poems by both poets, Santos examines parallel aesthetic experimentation and the determination to overcome despair through art.