“ . . . I seemed to be able to write poems I wanted to write, in a way that satisfied me, that made the struggle with the matter and form and surface of the poems bearable, and, more to the point, purposeful.”

The World of C. K. Williams
by Shawn Sethi

Biography of C. K. Williams

Charles Kenneth Williams was raised during the horrible Great Depression in Newark, New Jersey. Williams started writing when he was 19 after attending the University of Pennsylvania.
The height of William’s career was when he wrote a magazine article about violence against civil rights activists. It opened him up to new thinking and started his love for poetry because of the strong emotions he felt. Williams also read A Day for Anne Frank which related the civil rights activists to the Holocaust. He said after reading books about the holocaust and civil rights “ . . . I seemed to be able to write poems I wanted to write, in a way that satisfied me, that made the struggle with the matter and form and surface of the poems bearable, and, more to the point, purposeful.” He also read works by William Carlos Williams during his late childhood. C. K. William’s first book was Lies, published in 1969. Some of his more famous works include Flesh and Blood, published in 1987. Flesh and Blood received The National Book Critics Circle Award. And then in 1999, Williams wrote Repair, which received the famous Pulitzer Prize.

Williams also wrote many translations of collections of poems. Some of them were for Francis Ponge and Gregory Dickerson. Another trait of Williams is that he is known for his very long lines and how his poems express love, pain, and just everyday life. Williams is also called the “political poet” meaning that he does not show the clear difference between public life and private life in his poems and books. Many of Williams poems are about ordinary, every-day objects such as a block of ice, and house, and an orange.

He now lives with his wife, part of the year teaching courses at Princeton and living part of the year in Paris. He has won many awards and honors. He won The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pulitzer Prize.

This is a full list of books published by C. K. Williams

Lies (1969)
Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978)
The Lark, The Thrush, and The Starling (Poems from Issa) (1983)
Tar (1983)
Flesh and Blood (1987)
The Bacchae of Euripides (1990)
Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (1991)
I Am the Bitter Name (1992)
A Dream of Mind (1992)
Selected Poems of Francis Ponge, translation (1994)
With Ignorance (1997)
The Vigil (1997)
Repair (1999)
Misgivings (2000)