WILLIAMS, C(harles) K(enneth)

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Nationality: American. Born: Newark, New Jersey, 4 November 1936. Education: Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1955–59, B.A. 1959. Family: Married 1) Sarah Jones in 1965; 2) Catherine Mauger in 1975; one daughter and one son. Career: Since 1972 contributing editor, American Poetry Review, Philadelphia. Visiting professor, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1977, University of California, Irvine, 1978; Boston University, 1979, Columbia University, New York, 1981–85, Brooklyn College, New York, 1982–83, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 1985–95, University of California, Berkeley, 1986, and New York University, since 1995. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1974; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1985 and 1993; National Book Critics Circle prize, 1987; Morton Dauwen Zabel prize, 1989; Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' award, 1993; Harriet Monroe prize, Poetry, 1993; PEN/Voelker Career Achievement award, 1998; Berlin prize, American Academy in Berlin, 1998; American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, 1999. Address: 82 Rue d'Hauteville, 75010 Paris, France.

Publications

Poetry

A Day for Anne Frank. Philadelphia, Falcon Press, 1968.

Lies. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

I Am the Bitter Name. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

With Ignorance. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

The Lark, The Thrush, The Starling. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1983.

Tar. New York, Random House, 1983.

Flesh and Blood. New York, Farrar Straus, 1987; Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1988.

Poems 1963–1983. New York, Farrar Straus, and Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1988.

Helen. Alexandria, Orchises Press, 1991.

A Dream of Mind. New York, Farrar Straus, and Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, both 1992.

Selected Poems. New York, Farrar Straus, 1994.

The Vigil. New York, Farrar Straus, 1997.

Repair. New York, Farrar Straus, 1999.

Recording: Tar and Other Poems, Watershed, 1985.

Plays

Screenplay: Criminals, directed by Joseph Strick, 1994.

Other

Poetry and Consciousness. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Editor, Selected and Last Poems, by Paul Zweig. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1989.

Editor, The Essential Hopkins. Hopewell, New Jersey, Ecco Press, 1993.

Translator, with Gregory W. Dickerson, Women of Trachis, by Sophocles. New York, Oxford University Press, 1978; London, Oxford University Press, 1979.

Translator, The Bacchae of Euripides. New York, Farrar Straus, 1991.

Translator, with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and London, Faber and Faber, both 1991.

Translator, with John Montague and Margaret Guiton, The Selected Poems of Francis Ponge, by Francis Ponge. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest State University, 1994.

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Critical Studies: By Richard Howard in Kenyon Review (Gambier, Ohio), summer 1970, and in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), November 1972; by L.E. Sissman, in Boston Sun-Globe, 18 July 1972; by Morris Dickstein, in Parnassus (New York), fall 1972, and in New York Times, 10 July 1977; by Stanley Plumly, in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), January 1978; by Dave Smith, in Western Humanities Review (Salt Lake City), autumn 1978; by Dan Bogen in The Nation (New York), 30 May 1987; by Linda Greggerson, in Poetry (Chicago), February 1988; by Michael Hoffman, in Times Literary Supplement, 20 January 1989; by J.D. McClatchy, in Poetry (Chicago), April 1989; by Michael Donaghy, in Poetry Review, September 1989; by Ciaran Carson, in Irish Review, September 1989; by Alan Jenkins, in The Sunday Observer (London), 8 June 1989; by Sherrod Santos, in Parnassus (New York), 1991; by Edward Hirsch, in The New Republic, 17 August 1992; by Fred Merchant, in Harvard Review (Cambridge), May 1993; "Mid-Course Corrections: Some Notes on Genre" by Carl Dennis, in Denver Quarterly, 29(2), fall 1994; interview by Keith S. Norris, in New England Review (Hanover, New Hampshire), 17(2), spring 1995.

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In C.K. Williams's best poems the words hold together line by line and sustain the emotion of what is being said. Furthermore, it becomes clear that it is insight, or vision, that is central and that feeling, like the almost ceaseless questioning that takes place in Williams's poems, is a means by which he opens up a space for vision. There is a metaphysical, even spiritual, dimension to Williams's work in the way his poems address themselves to ultimate questions, extreme situations, and moments of vision, and indeed they address themselves to divinity itself in a manner that could be characterized equally as ambivalent and probing. The poems also show an interest in personal being in all of its aspects and possibilities—physical, psychological, and spiritual—and have an ethical, humane concern for the vulnerability of human life, especially in relation to the machinations of political power. The vigor, vividness, idiosyncratic detail, and strong emotional content are partial aspects of a writing that needs to be seen in terms of questioning, questing, probing, and seeing in the sense of seeing with insight. In the long achieved poem "With Ignorance," from the book of the same title, he writes,

What would release be? Being forgiven? No, never
  forgiven, never only forgiven.
To be touched, somehow, with presence, so that the only
  sign is a step, towards or away?

Or not even a step, because the walls, of self, of dread, can
  never release,
can never forgive stepping away, out of the willed or
  refused, out of the lie or the fear
of the self that still holds back and refuses, resists, and
  turns back again and again into the willed.
What could it be, though? The first, hectic rush past guilt
  and remorse?
What if we could find away through the fires that aren't
  with us and the terrors that are?
What would be there? Would we be thrown back into
  perhaps or not yet or not needed or done?

The poem finds a temporary, partial resolution in the notion of blessing:

Willed or unwilled, word or sign, the word suddenly filled
  with its own breath.
Self and other the self within other and the self still moved
  through its word,
consuming itself, still, and consuming, still being rage, war,
  the fear, the aghast,
but bless, bless still, even the fear, the loss, the gutting of
  word, the gutting even of hunger,
but still to bless and bless, even the turn back, the refusal,
  to bless and to bless.

This prepares a space for the final epiphanic movement of the poem:

There was a light in a room. You came to it, leaned to it,
  reaching, touching,
and watching you, I saw you give back to the light a light
  more than light
and to the silence you gave more than silence, and, in the
  silence, I heard it.

Williams's long lines can sometimes be relaxed in pace and rhythm and conversational in tone, but mostly there is a rushed, breathless immediacy to his words, the sentences continuing on and on. At times it is as if there were always more to say, while at other times it is as if the poet wished to keep deferring any kind of an ending. This sense of urgency of Williams's poems becomes the theme, in a fictionalized form, in "Yours," from the collection I Am the Bitter Name. When the poems fail, it is usually because the words are carried along by the emotion in such a way that there are whole passages loosely strung together and unable to embody any effective force. It must also be said that the short poems in the collection Flesh and Blood often seem to end before the anecdotal impulse—also present in much of Williams's other work—has pushed, or been pushed, through to something beyond anecdote. In addition, the language in these poems is too often without the pressure, the intensity, of his best work. A comparison with Charles Reznikoff's personal or observational poems is instructive, because Reznikoff's precise, economical use of language makes Williams's less successful poems look verbose. Too, Reznikoff's eye for telling or charged details is surer than Williams's. These criticisms cannot be made, however, of the long elegiac piece "Le Petit Salvié," which concludes Flesh and Blood. This must be included among Williams's finest poems, together with such pieces as "One of the Muses" (from Tar), "With Ignorance," and the beautiful poems adapted from Issa—The Lark, The Thrush, The Starling.

—David Miller