C.K. Williams

C.K. Williams (born November 4, 1936, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.—died September 20, 2015, Hopewell, New Jersey) was an American poet who was known for his moral passion and for his lengthy meandering lines of verse, though his early work was characterized by short lines and an acid tone. For his work, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many other prestigious honors.

Williams was educated at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania) and the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1959). In 1972 he became a contributing editor for American Poetry Review. He won critical acclaim with the collection Lies (1969), which contains lyrical yet vituperative poems railing against human callousness and dishonesty. I Am the Bitter Name (1972) is an overtly political collection that addresses issues surrounding the Vietnam War, including the American military-industrial complex. His mature style first appeared in With Ignorance (1977), which is an exploration of the American psyche rather than a diatribe, and its long-lined conversational poems have a dramatic and investigative quality. Later works include Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987), A Dream of Mind (1992), and The Vigil (1997). Following a series of brief interludes at various universities, Williams began teaching creative writing at Princeton University in 1996.

Williams threaded political and social issues with observations of quotidian moments and meditations on the self—and further engaged his penchant for stylistic experimentation—in Repair (1999), for which he received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; The Singing (2003), which won the 2003 National Book Award for poetry; Wait (2010); and Selected Later Poems (2015). In Writers Writing Dying (2012), he wrestles with memory and mortality.

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Williams also wrote the memoir Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself (2000). He ventured into children’s literature with the tales How the Nobble Was Finally Found (2009) and A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things (2010). Poetry and Consciousness (1998) treats the intersections of psychology, history, and verse, and In Time: Poems, Poets, and the Rest (2012) contains essays on poetry and on personal topics such as aging. Williams also translated poetry by Adam Zagajewski and Francis Ponge.

Williams’s numerous honors included the 1998 PEN/Voelcker Award for career achievement in poetry, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1999), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2005). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, and he served on the board of chancellors of the American Academy of Poets from 2004 to 2010.