C.K. Williams

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) in 2011. Photo by Andrei Romanenko. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Charles Kenneth Williams (November 4, 1936 - September 20, 2015) was an American poet, critic and translator. Paul Muldoon described him as “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation.”

Life

C.K. Williams in 2013. Photo by Slowking. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Williams grew up in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, and later studied at Bucknell University and the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, he spent five lonely months in Paris trying to write before realizing he knew nothing about poetry, noting in a New York Times article, that "It was an incredibly important time, not much happened and yet my life began then. I discovered the limits of loneliness."

He returned to Pennsylvania determined to learn something of poetry and begin his writing career. He launched himself as a vehement anti-war poet during the U.S. conflicts in southeast Asia. His first collection, Lies, was politically engaged; 1972 saw his first collection of explicitly antiwar poems.

He met his present wife, Catherine Mauger, a jeweller of French descent, in 1973; they have a son who is now a noted painter. Williams also has a daughter, born in 1969, from an earlier marriage.

He began teaching in 1975, first at a Y.M.C.A. in Philadelphia, later at Drexel University, and then at Franklin & Marshall College.

C.K. Williams - Poets in Person - Episode 4

From 1996, he taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University, dividing his time between Princeton and France.

Williams was an acclaimed translator, notably of Sophocles' Women of Trachis and Euripides' The Bacchae in the classic canon and more contemporarily, of Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and French writer Francis Ponge.

He died of multiple myeloma at his home in Hopewell, New Jersey.

Writing

Williams is known for a poetic style involving long lines of unrhyming free verse. His subjects are modern and predominately urban, his voice that of an 'outspoken liberal.' Anti-war themes pervade his entire writing career. He was highly critical of the Bush administration and the Iraq war, stating in 2005 that "The unreasonableness of war, the killing of children, drives me to distraction. My moral system grows out of this. There has never been a moment in my life when I felt we were in so much danger. I am a father and a grandfather. I have three grandsons. I am afraid for them."

Recognition

He has won nearly every major poetry award. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the National Book Award in 2003. In 2005, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Awards

• 1974 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood
• 1992 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award
• Pushcart Prize
• 1998 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
• 1999 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
• 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Repair
• 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Repair
• 2003 National Book Award for The singing
• 2003 American Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship
• 2005 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Publications

Poetry

• Lies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1969.
• I Am the Bitter Name. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
• With Ignorance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
• The Lark, the Thrush, the Starling. Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1983.
• Tar. New York: Random House, 1983.
• Flesh and Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.
• Poems, 1963-1983. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1988.
• Helen. Washington, DC: Orchises Press, 1991.
• A Dream of Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1992.
• Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1994.
• New & Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1995.
• The Vigil, New York: Farrar, Straus, 1996.
• Repair. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1999.
• Love about Love. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2001.
• The Singing. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2003.
• Collected Poems, 1963-2006. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2006.
• Wait. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2010.
• Writers Writing Dying. Farrar, Straus, 2012.

Non-fiction

• Poetry and Consciousness (criticism). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
• Misgivings: My mother, my father, myself (memoir). New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000.
• On Whitman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
• In Time: Poems, poets, and the rest, 2012.

Translated

• Sophocles, Women of Trachis (translated with Gregory Dickerson). New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Euripides, Bacchae. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1990.
• Adam Zagajewski, Canvas (translated with Renata Gorczynski & Benjamin Ivry). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1991.
• Francis Ponge, Selected Poems (translated with John Montague & Margaret Grissom). Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1994.

Edited

• Paul Zweig, Selected and Last Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Essential Hopkins. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1993.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

C.K. Williams reads 'The Singing'

• Tar, and other poems (cassette). Washington, DC: Watershed Foundation, 1985.
• Frank Bidart & C.K. Williams. New York: Academy of American Poets, 1992.
• C.K. Williams: Wait on Whitman (MP3). Philadelphia: Philadelphia Free Library, 2010.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• C.K. Williams at PoemHunter ("Tar")
• C.K. Williams profile & 6 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• C.K. Williams b. 1936 at the Poetry Foundation
• C.K. Williams (USA, 1936 at Poetry International (19 poems)

Audio / video

• C.K. Williams (b. 1936) at The Poetry Archive (biography and audio poetry recordings)
• C.K. Williams reads poetry of youth and age at TED conference
• Poetry.LA's video of C.K. Williams' reading at the 3rd Area Reading Series, PHARMAKA Gallery, Los Angeles, 3/19/2009
• The National Book Foundation C.K. Williams's acceptance speech for the 2003 Poetry Award for The Singing, reading his poem "The Doves."
• C.K. Williams at YouTube

Books

• C.K. Williams at Amazon.com

About

• Williams, C(harles) K(enneth) at the Pennsylvania Center for the Book
• "C. K. Williams, Poet, Dies at 78; Pulitzer Winner Tackled Politics and Morality" obituary at the New York Times
• C.K. Williams Official website.
• A Poet Watches Himself as He Watches the World New York Times article, December 25, 2006 accessed 2010-02-27
• Poet Marshals His Moral Passion Against the War New York Times article January 13, 2005 accessed 2010-02-27
• 'Song of Himself', review of On Whitman in the Oxonian Review