Williams, C.K. 1936–

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Williams, C.K. 1936–

(Charles Kenneth Williams)

PERSONAL: Born November 4, 1936, in Newark, NJ; son of Paul Bernard and Dossie (Kasdin) Williams; married Sarah Dean Jones, June, 1966 (divorced, 1975); married Catherine Mauger (an editor), April 13, 1975; children: (first marriage) Jessica Anne; (second marriage) Jed Mauger. Education: University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 1959. Hobbies and other interests: Piano, guitar, drawing.

ADDRESSES: Home—82, Rue d'Hauteville, 75010 Paris, France; 71 Leigh Ave., Princeton, NJ 08542. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Poet. Columbia University, New York, NY, professor of writing, 1981–85; George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, professor of literature, 1982–95. Visiting professor of literature, Beaver College, Jenkintown, PA, 1975, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, 1976, University of California at Irvine, 1978, Boston University, 1979–80, Brooklyn College, 1982–83; Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, Mellon visiting professor of literature, 1977; Halloway lecturer at University California—Berkeley, 1986; lecturer at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 1996–.

MEMBER: PEN, Poetry Society of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship, 1974; Pushcart Press Prize, 1982, 1983, and 1987; National Endowment for Arts fellowships, 1985 and 1993; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1987, for Flesh and Blood; Morton Dauwen Zabel Prize, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1989; Harriet Monroe Prize, 1993; Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest grantee, 1993; Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 2000, for Repair; National Book Award for poetry, 2003, for The Singing; Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Poetry magazine, 2005.

WRITINGS:

POEMS

A Day for Anne Frank, Falcon Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1968.

Lies, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1969.

I Am the Bitter Name, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1972.

With Ignorance, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1977.

The Lark, the Thrush, the Starling, Burning Deck (Providence, RI), 1983.

Tar, Random House (New York, NY), 1983.

Flesh and Blood, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1987.

Poems 1963–1983, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1988.

Helen, Orchises Press (Washington, DC), 1991.

A Dream of Mind, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1992.

Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1994.

New & Selected Poems, Bloodaxe, 1995.

The Vigil, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1996.

Repair, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1999.

Love about Love, Ausable Press (Keene, NY), 2001.

The Singing, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2003.

Collected Poems, 1963–2006, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2006.

TRANSLATOR

(With Gregory Dickerson) Sophocles, Women of Trachis, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1978.

Euripides, Bacchae, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1990.

(With Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry) Adam Zagajewski, Canvas, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1991.

(With John Montague and Margaret Grissom) Selected Poems of Francis Ponge, Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1994.

EDITOR

(And author of introduction) Paul Zweig, Selected and Last Poems, Wesleyan University Press (Middle-town, CT), 1989.

(And author of introduction) Gerard Manly Hopkins, The Essential Hopkins, Ecco (Hopewell, NJ), 1993.

Also contributing editor of American Poetry Review, 1972–.

OTHER

Poetry and Consciousness (criticism), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1998.

Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself (memoir), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: Hailed by poet Paul Muldoon in the Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most distinguished poets of his generation," C.K. Williams has created a highly respected body of work, including not only several collections of original poems but volumes of translations, editions of poem collections, a book of criticism, and a memoir. Readers and critics alike esteem him as an original stylist. His characteristic line is extraordinarily long, almost prose-like, and emphasizes characterization and dramatic development. His early work focused on overtly political issues, such as the Vietnam War and social injustice. Though often admired, this scathing material was sometimes considered "ruthless, even cruel," as reported in a retrospective sketch in the New York Times in 2000. In his more later work, Williams shifted from a documentary style toward a more introspective approach, writing descriptive poems that reveal the states of alienation, deception, and occasional enlightenment that exist between public and private lives in modern urban America.

Williams's early poetry was first promoted by other poets. His second book, Lies, was published upon the recommendation of confessional poet Anne Sexton who, according to Allan M. Jalon in the Los Angeles Times, called Williams "the Fellini of the written word," and the book received strong critical acclaim. M.L. Rosenthal, reviewing the book in Poetry, described it as a collection of poems that portrays "psychic paralysis despite the need to make contact with someone." Fred Moramarco in Western Humanities Review noted that the poems "sound the grim notes of [William Blake's] Songs of Experience," where "paradox is a quality central to almost each poem in the volume." The final poem in the book, "A Day for Anne Frank," which had been published separately a year earlier, was praised by Alan Williamson in Shenandoah as "a surprisingly moving poem, one of the best in the book."

Williams's next three books all met with continued critical success. I Am the Bitter Name, the title of which, as Jascha Kessler pointed out in Poetry, "is meant … to stand for Death," is largely a collection of protest poems about the fear and hatred nurtured by America's involvement in the Vietnam War, culminating in a long, final poem, "In the Heart of the Beast," about the shooting of students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. In this poem, John Vernon stated in Western Humanities Review, "the language is like a whip that lashes out."

Williams's With Ignorance, however, shows the first development of the poet's trademark style, where, as James Atlas explained in Nation, "the lines are so long that the book had to be published in a wide-page format, like an art catalogue," giving the poetry "an eerie incantatory power." Indeed, these long lines, which have drawn comparisons to the work of Whitman and Ginsberg, have generated much critical comment throughout Williams's career.

Flesh and Blood exhibits a change in format, but not in subject matter. The book is a collection of eight-line poems, each poem of twenty or twenty-five syllables and printed two poems to a page, making them comparable, as Michael Hofmann suggested in the Times Literary Supplement, to "[Robert] Lowell's sonnets, or [John] Berryman's Dreamsongs." The poems' subjects, the critic pointed out, are "the by-now familiar gallery of hobos and winos, children and old people, lovers and invalids; the settings, typically, public places, on holidays, in parks, on pavements and metro-stations." Edward Hirsch, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented that while these poems "lack the narrative scope and sheer relentless force of Mr. Williams's longer poems … together they have a strong cumulative energy and effectiveness." Hirsch described Williams's poetry as having a "notational, ethnographic quality" that presents "single extended moments intently observed." Even though these poems sometimes read "like miniature short stories, sudden fictions," Hirsch continued, they always present people in situations where they are "vulnerable, exposed, on the edge." The book won Williams the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987.

Poems 1963–1983 collects selections from Lies and I Am the Bitter Name, and reproduces both With Ignorance and Tar in their entirety. Muldoon called it "the book of poems I most enjoyed this year," finding Williams to have "an enviable range of tone" and to be "by turns tender and troubling." Hofmann claimed that the book "has as much scope and truthfulness as any American poet since Lowell and Berryman."

A Dream of Mind received mixed reviews. William Logan criticized the book in the New York Times Book Review as one in which Williams's long-line style has "decayed" from his earlier works into "continual repetition, pointless variation and the automatic cloning of phrases," making the poems "little Xerox machines of technique" in which Williams is "most successful when purely voyeuristic, less when confessional, and least when meditative." Lawrence Norfolk, however, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, lauded Williams for his "stubbornness or refusal to turn away" from "uncomfortable or harrowing realities," such as those presented in "Helen," a husband's account of his wife's decline and death. Michael Dirda, writing in the Washington Post Book World, favorably judged Williams's "often plain language" that "keeps the reader fascinated as much by his storytelling power as by his telling phrases."

Selected Poems replaces the early poems with work from Flesh and Blood and A Dream of Mind, and contains thirteen new poems. Ashley Brown, in World Literature Today, suggested that "Williams has learned from [French novelist Marcel] Proust how to make the power of memory operate to maximum effect." Williams, in a Los Angeles Times interview with Jalon, stated that he believes "the drama of American poetry is based very much on experience. It's coming out of all the different cultures. We're an enormous nation and we have an enormous poetry." Stephen Dobyns, writing in Washington Post Book World, described a characteristic Williams poem as one in which there are "variations of meaning pushing toward the increasingly precise."

A Publishers Weekly contributor, in a review of The Vigil, observed that Williams's "stanzas extend to and from the book spine like knobby, elongated hands grabbing for God, for relief from pain and for love," while Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, found the poet's long line "an admirable instrument indeed … an Offenbach Baracole of a line." On the Boston Review Web site, Richard Howard related Williams's lines to color-field painting, pointing out that such a technique creates a "field" so wide that it cannot be taken in by the viewer/reader, but instead takes the viewer/reader in. Though Howard found that "The lines [in The Vigil] have to array some of the most garish and clunky language assayed in recent poetry" and employ a "clattering languor and … mock-Jamesian cadences," he appreciated their suitability for narration and description, if not for philosophical or intellectual matters. "So vivid are Williams's successes with immediacy of sensation and of narration, so overwhelming his virtuosity … in revving up his chosen, his imposed machine," Howard concluded, "that I am most of the time transfixed by his gift." However, Brian Phillips, reviewing Williams's eighth collection, Repair, in New Republic, commented that "his long poetic line often dips its toe testingly into the waters of the prosaic," showing that line breaks work efficiently but "cannot be said to have much of a felt impact on the aesthetic experience of reading the poem."

The poet's later work, particularly in Repair, has developed an increasingly intimate tone. Repair, which won Williams the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 2000, is often personal and introspective, the poems consider such subjects as the birth of the poet's grandson, the death of a friend's child, love, or something as mundane as the flowered house dresses worn by his mother and the women of her generation. Yet Williams also included powerfully social material, such as the title poem, in which he points a righteous finger at a tyrant whose "henchmen had disposed of enemies … by hammering nails into their skulls/ …—how not to be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap … /the way you do with your nail when you're fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed." Boston Globe critic Cathleen Calbert cited this poem as an example of "the Jewish sense of tikkun olam (to repair or make whole the world)," noting that "there is a deathly meaning to this kind of 'fixing something,' which Williams will not smooth over." Despite finding Repair an extremely bleak book, Calbert admired its "exact, bewildering, slant rendering of raw emotion and careful thought" and its unflinching honesty. Phillips, however, found the book often prosaic and almost didactic, suggesting that the poet's "inspections of motive and meaning seem more fit to offer moral instruction than to summon aesthetic intensity." Acknowledging Willliams's skills at observation and description, though, Phillips observed that "his work reflects the moral self-questioning of Herbert, the plain-spokenness and the yearning toward nature of Wordsworth, the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart of the later Yeats." In addition to winning the Pulitzer, Repair was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Though his praise for Repair was qualified, Phillips expressed wholehearted admiration for Williams's prose memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself. "In his memoir, Williams plumbs few deep truths," he observed, "but he emerges as one of the most authoritative psychologists (or pop-psychologists) in contemporary prose." The book presents mostly painful memories of Williams's authoritarian and emotionally cold father and his ineffective mother. In each chapter, the poet sketches a memory, then sharply questions his parents—both deceased—on their behavior. In the process, according to Phillips, Williams "creates an increasingly vivid portrait of both parents, who become fully realized and plausible human beings." A contributor to Publishers Weekly, however, faulted Williams for only "faint attempts to be sympathetic to his parents," and dismissed the memoir as a "tedious" list of grievances that "come off as both petty and inflated." David Kirby, writing in the Library Journal, praised the volume for its poetic nuance, complex understanding, and powerful emotional images.

In his volume of poems The Singing, which won the National Book Award in 2003, the author "continues in his new collection to give voice to fleeting moments of domestic rapture and despair that seem to always arrive wrapped in mortality," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. Williams's long-lined poems appear in the collection often, although other poetic forms are also present. While the theme most often detected in the work addresses that of aging and death, the topic of love is also addressed. Reviews of the collection were positive; a Booklist contributor commended Williams's "bracing command of language." Averill Curdy, commenting on The Singing in a Poetry magazine round table discussion, noted that the author "is one of the poets of his generation who is still singing, who hasn't retreated into a pokey nostalgia or silence. His poems remain vital to me in their attempt to address the contemporary world, and I find the attempt itself moving."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Clark, LaVerne Harrell, editor, Focus 101, Heidelberg Graphics (Chico, CA), 1979.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 33, 1985, Volume 56, 1989.

Contemporary Poets, fifth edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1991.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

Hamilton, Ian, editor. Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Williams, C.K., Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2000.

PERIODICALS

America, October 30, 1993, Andrew J. Krivak, "Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets," p. 17.

American Poetry Review, May-June, 1994, Alan Williamson, "Poems including Politics," p. 17.

Booklist, June 15, 1992, Frances Woods, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 1803; October 1, 1994, Elizabeth Gunderson, review of Selected Poems, p. 232; December 1, 1996, Ray Olson, review of The Vigil, p. 640; January 1, 2004, review of The Singing, p. 774.

Boston Globe, September 12, 1999, Cathleen Calbert, review of Repair, p. C1.

Critical Survey, May, 1997, Maurice Rutherford, review of The Vigil, p. 164.

Economist, September 6, 1997, review of Vigil, p. S19; March 18, 2000, "Whose Voice Is It Anyway?," p. 14.

Georgia Review, winter, 1983, p. 894; fall, 1993, Judith Kitchen, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 578.

Hudson Review, winter, 1988, Robert McDowell, review of Flesh and Blood, pp. 680-681; summer, 1995, Thomas M. Disch, review of Selected Poems, p. 339.

Library Journal, October 1, 1983, review of Tar, p. 1880; May 1, 1987, Thom Tammaro, review of Flesh and Blood, p. 72; June 1, 1990, p. 130; May 1, 1992, Louis McKee, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 86; June 1, 1999, Rochelle Ratner, review of Repair, p. 120; March 1, 2000, David Kirby, review of Misgivings, p. 92; January 1, 2001, Fred Muratori, review of Love about Love, p. 112.

Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1993, Allan M. Jalon, "The Poet as Witness," p. 30.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 22, 1984, Clayton Eshleman, review of Tar, p. 3.

Nation, June 18, 1977, James Atlas, review of With Ignorance, pp. 763-766; May 30, 1987, Dan Bogen, review of Flesh and Blood, pp. 734-736.

New Republic, August 17, 1992, Edward Hirsch, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 46; January 25, 1993, Robert Pinsky, review of Canvas, p. 43; September 18, 2000, Brian Phillips, review of Repair and Misgivings, p. 42.

New Statesman & Society, December 23, 1988, Robert Sheppard, review of Flesh and Blood, p. 36; December 4, 1992, David Herd, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 40.

New Yorker, January 11, 1993, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 111.

New York Times, October 4, 2000, Alan Riding, "An American Bard in Paris Stokes the Poetic Home Fires," p. E1.

New York Times Book Review, November 27, 1983, Louis Simpson, review of Tar, p. 13; August 23, 1987, Edward Hirsch, review of Flesh and Blood, p. 20; March 13, 1988, p. 34; November 15, 1992, William Logan, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 15; October 8, 2000, Laura Ciolkowski, review of Misgivings, p. 23.

Parnassus, August, 1990, Sherod Santos, reviews of Poems: 1963–1983 and Flesh and Blood, p. 115; fall, 1993, Bill Marx, review of Canvas, p. 100.

Partisan Review, summer, 1991, Michael Collier, review of Poems: 1963–1983, p. 565.

Poetry, November, 1971, M.L. Rosenthal, review of Lies, pp. 99-104; February, 1973, Jascha Kessler, review of I Am the Bitter Name, pp. 292-303; September, 1984, Bruce Bawer, review of Tar, pp. 353-355; February, 1988, Linda Gregerson, review of Flesh and Blood, pp. 431-433; April, 1989, J.D. McClatchy, review of Poems: 1963–1983, p. 29; December, 1993, Ben Howard, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 164; May, 1997, Bruce Murphy, review of Selected Poems, p. 95; August, 1999, Christian Whitman, review of Poetry and Consciousness, p. 286; August, 2001, Ian Tromp, reviews of Poetry and Consciousness and Repair, p. 288; October, 2004, Dan Chiasson and Averill Curdy, review of The Singing Poems, p. 53.

Publishers Weekly, July 22, 1983, review of Tar, p. 126; May 11, 1992, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 58; August 29, 1994, review of Selected Poems, p. 66; November 25, 1996, review of The Vigil, p. 71; March 13, 2000, review of Misgivings, p. 72; October 27, 2003, review of The Singing, p. 59.

Salmagundi, spring-summer, 1997, Frederick Pollack, review of The Vigil, p. 205.

Shenandoah, summer, 1970, Alan Williamson, review of Lies, pp. 89-93.

Times Literary Supplement, December 2, 1988, Paul Muldoon, review of Poems: 1963–1983, p. 1342; January 20, 1989, Michael Hofmann, review of Flesh and Blood, p. 59; February 12, 1993, Lawrence Norfolk, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 11; October 8, 1993, Michael Parker, review of Canvas; October 3, 1997, Jamie McKendrick, review of The Vigil, p. 25; March 10, 2000, William Logan, review of Repair, p. 23.

TriQuarterly, winter, 1988, Reginald Gibbons, review of Flesh and Blood, pp. 224-225; spring-summer, 1991, Alan Shapiro, "In Praise of the Impure," p. 5.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1992, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 27; winter, 1993, review of A Dream of Mind, p. S27.

Washington Post, July 23, 2000, Debra Dickerson, "The Parent Trap," p. X06.

Washington Post Book World, January 3, 1993, Michael Dirda, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 10; July 30, 1995, Stephen Dobyns, review of Selected Poems, p. 8.

Western Humanities Review, spring, 1970, Fred Moramarco, review of Lies, pp. 201-207; winter, 1973, John Vernon, review of I Am the Bitter Name, pp. 101-10.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1989, Michael Leddy, review of Poems: 1963–1983, p. 685; winter, 1989, Ashley Brown, review of Flesh and Blood, p. 104; autumn, 1992, Joachim T. Baer, review of Canvas, p. 746; spring, 1993, Bernard F. Dick, review of A Dream of Mind, p. 387; autumn, 1997, Ashley Brown, review of The Vigil, p. 794.

Yale Review, October 1999, Carol Muske, review of Repair, p. 154.