C.K. Williams Biography

Williams is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including All at Once: Prose Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), Wait (2010), and Collected Poems (FSG, 2007), which traces Williams' career from his apprentice work to the careful, moving, stanzaic focus evident in his new poems. Repair, his previous work, earned the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2000, and The Singing won the National Book Award in 2003. The National Book Critics Circle Award was given to his collection Flesh and Blood. Williams has also translated Sophocles' Women of Trachis, Euripides' Bacchae, and Francis Ponge's poetry, among others, and wrote a memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, and Me, in 2000. Princeton University Press published a prose book titled Williams, On Whitman, in 2010. He has also published two collections of essays, Poetry, and Consciousness (1998) and In Time (2001). (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for the Twentieth Year, an honor presented to an American poet in appreciation of exceptional achievement. The American Academy of Arts and Letters has given him literary accolades, as well as the PEN/Voelcker Career Achievement Award and fellowships from the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he now teaches in Princeton University's Writing Program. Williams began writing poetry at the age of nineteen, shortly after finishing his final English class at the University of Pennsylvania. He remarked, "Poetry didn't find me in the cradle or anywhere near it: I discovered it." "I recognized at some point—very late, it seemed—that I needed it, that it served a purpose for me—or would serve a purpose for me—however hazy that purpose may have been at the time." When writing to a magazine editor about the violence aimed at civil rights activists in the mid-sixties, Williams discovered his voice as a poet. The act of composing this letter taught Williams a new way of thinking, which he used to write the rest of his poems. "A Day for Anne Frank," a meditation that connected the civil rights struggle and the Holocaust, became the opening poem in his debut collection, Lies, as a result (1969). "After the Anne Frank poem...I seemed to be able to create poetry I wanted to write in a way that satisfied me, that made the battle with the poems' topic, form, and surface pleasant, and, more importantly, purposeful," Williams wrote. Williams is noted for his bold formal approach, which combines acute everyday observations with lines that violate lyric poetry standards. His poetry frequently verges on the mundane, prompting comparisons to Walt Whitman's. Williams began his career as an outspoken anti-war activist, and he indicated in a recent New York Times feature that he still feels that way: "It is always there, but it is more subconscious and is no longer on the surface." I don't want to come out as dogmatic." The Singing examines issues related to aging, such as the death of loved ones, the love of grandchildren, and the battle to keep childhood memories alive while coping with the complexities of contemporary events. "They are clear about complex things, which one perceives as somewhat enlarged, like stones on the bank of a very clear stream," John Ashbery remarked about the poems in this book. 'Your truths will seek you, yet you must still / create and comprehend them,' Williams recognizes now more than ever. He accomplishes this with aplomb, tempering the grief that runs through these poems and transforming it into something akin to delight." Williams is now widely regarded as one of the greatest living American poets.

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