C. K. Williams

Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams (November 4, 1936 – September 20, 2015) was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair 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 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005.

Life The American poet C.K. Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 4, 1936. His parents were Paul B. Williams and Dossie Kasdin. His grandparents came to the US from Kiev, then a Ukrainian city within the Russian Empire, and Lvov, Ukraine.

He went to Columbia High School in Maplewood, attended Bucknell University for one year, then moved on to and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.

He started writing poetry during his second year at Penn, and half-way through junior year he left for Paris. At that time, he wrote "I fell into a period of lacerating loneliness. I'd always been a little shy but now something, maybe my uncertainty about my identity as a poet, my sense of being a pretender, made me all but mute with strangers: I used to stay all day in my hotel room, reading, trying to write, then I'd go out to eat by myself, and take endless, anguished walks." When he returned to Penn, he switched major from philosophy to English. He studied poetry with Morse Peckham, who also mentioned that T.S. Eliot had written that if you wanted to be a poet, you had to write poetry every day, a recommendation Williams applied in his writing life.

C.K. Williams passport ID photo taken on Greek island of Patmos in 1973

After graduating from Penn, he stayed in Philadelphia. His circle of friends included artists, carpenters, poets, a sociologist, photographers, musicians and film makers. He spent time with young architects who worked for Louis Kahn, and later wrote: "I realized that my image of the artist's calling had come almost entirely from Kahn: he was absolutely devoted to his craft, and expected the same dedication from everyone else." Twenty days earlier, he had finished working on the manuscript of his last book of poems, Falling Ill.

Works His first book, Lies, was published in 1969. Much of his early and mid-career work appeared in Poems 1963-1983 (1988). His Collected Poems appeared in 2006, of which Peter Campion wrote in The Boston Globe: "Throughout the five decades represented in his new Collected Poems, Williams has maintained the most sincere, and largest, ambitions. Like Yeats and Lowell before him, he writes from the borderland between private and public life…(His poems) join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, to make sense of the world and ourselves. C.K. Williams has set a new standard for American poetry."

His book Repair won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and in 2003 The Singing won the National Book Award. He also wrote essays, plays, children's books, and did translations. His final collection of poetry was the posthumously published Falling Ill (2017).