C.K. Williams is the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who makes lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language.
In Writers Writing Dying, he retains the essential parts of his poetic identity - his candour, his compelling storytelling, the social conscience of his themes - while slyly reinventing himself, re-casting his voice, and in many poems examining the personal - sexual desire, the hubris of youth, the looming spectre of death - more bluntly and bravely than ever.
In 'Prose', he confronts his nineteen-year-old self, who despairs of writing poetry, with the question 'How could anyone know this little?' In a poem of meditation, 'The Day Continues Lovely', he radically expands the scale of his attention: 'Meanwhile cosmos roars on with so many voices we can't hear ourselves think. Galaxy on. Galaxy off. Universe on, but another just behind this one - ' Even the poet's own purpose is questioned; in 'Draft 23' he asks, 'Between scribble and slash - are we trying to change the world by changing the words?' With this wildly vibrant collection - by turns funny, moving, and surprising - Williams proves once again that, he has, in Michael Hofmann's words, 'as much scope and truthfulness as any American poet since Lowell and Berryman'.
C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France, and Princeton, USA. He has published a dozen books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including
New & Selected Poems (1995),
The Vigil (1997),
Repair (1999) and
The Singing (2003) - all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations - followed by
Collected Poems (2006),
Wait (2010) and
Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 2012; Bloodaxe Books, 2013), another Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987,
Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and
The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He published a memoir,
Misgivings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles
Women of Trachis, Euripides
Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. He has published two books of essays,
Poetry and Consciousness (University of Michigan Press, 1998), and
In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and his book on Walt Whitman,
On Whitman, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
