CK Williams

CK Williams (2011)

Charles Kenneth Williams (born November 4, 1936 in Newark , New Jersey , † September 20, 2015 in Hopewell , New Jersey) was an American poet who was honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987 for his anthology Flesh and Blood . His later volume of poetry, Repair , was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1999 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2000, while in 2003 he received the National Book Award in the poetry category for the volume of poetry The Singing .

Life

Studies, beginning of the writing career and creative crisis

CK Williams graduated after attending Columbia High School in Maplewood study at Bucknell University and at the University of Pennsylvania , which he in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts graduated (BA). He later accepted a professorship in creative writing at George Mason University and later at Princeton University .

He made his poetic debut in 1969 with Lies , which was followed by the I Am the Bitter Name collection in 1972 . During this time he was committed as a staunch pacifist against the Vietnam War and against the crackdown on student protests in the USA. He combined these themes in poems such as "In the Heart of the Beast" on the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, when the National Guard of Ohio , the student unrest at Kent State University bloodily struck and killed four students and nine other part were seriously injured. This poem begins challengingly with the words: “this is fresh meat right mr nixon?” ('This is fresh meat right mr nixon?'), An accusation against the then US President Richard Nixon .

Then he fell into a prolonged creative crisis and depression - also caused by the divorce of his first marriage - which he himself described as "a combination of divorce depression and poetry depression and post-book depression". He only broke through this crisis in the following years, after he had married his second wife, the French Catherine Mauger, and made various trips to Paris . In 1975 he took over a professorship at a college in Philadelphia and shortly thereafter at Drexel University and at Franklin & Marshall College .

Williams was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2000 and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2003 . In 2012 the film The Color of Time was made about him and he was played by James Franco .

Williams died in September 2015 at his home in Hopewell, New Jersey, of complications from multiple myeloma at the age of 78 .

National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and National Book Award for Poetry

After he had published the anthologies With Ignorance (1977) and Tar (1983), the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning volume of poetry Flesh and Blood was published in 1987 .

For his volume of poetry, Repair , published in 1999 , Williams was honored with the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1999 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2000. This volume received the longer poem "King", to which he was inspired by an event following the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. In it he described how two white police officers provoked "a tall, handsome black man, bearded, an artist" on the way to a memorial service, and he processed this with the words:

“Black man, white man: I can still see us, one standing stricken, the other stalking away;

I can still feel the anger, feel still because it is still in me my helpless despair. "

'Black man, white man: I can still see each other, one standing in position, the other stalking away;

I can still feel the anger, still feel, because it is still within me, my helpless despair. '

In 2003 Williams, who was temporarily supported by a Guggenheim grant , received the National Book Award in the poetry category for The Singing (2003).

Meditations on Dying: Writers Writing Dying

In his book of poems, Writers Writing Dying , published in 2012 , he dealt with meditations on dying . In it he pays tribute to poets such as Robert Frost , Gerard Manley Hopkins , Colette , William Blake , Charles Dickens , Philip Larkin , John Keats , William Butler Yeats , Rainer Maria Rilke , Matsuo Bashō , John Peale Bishop and Pablo Neruda . In the midst of the appreciations it contains for deceased poetic models and vivid memories of first sexual experiences still in memory, he also rummages in the swamp of his own mortality.

In “Poem for Myself for My Birthday” he writes “this time my birthday's a tractor-trailer skidding sideways on ice and I'm noodling by on my bike” ('this time my birthday is a tractor-trailer that slides sideways on the ice , and I noodle past on my bike '), while in “Salt” he notes: “I'm here on the long low-tide beach of age with briny time / licking insidious eddies over my toes” (' Ich bin hier am long ebb-beach of old age with salty time / insidious eddies licking over my toes. ') In "Whacked" he writes: "But, ah, I'd still / if I could lie down like a mare giving birth, arm in my own uterine channel to tug out another, / one more, only one more, poor damp little poem, then I'll be happy - I promise, I swear. ”('But, oh, I would have / if I could lie down like a mare giving birth, her arm in my own birth canal to pull another one out, / another, just another, poor damp little poem, then I would be happy n - I promise, I swear. ')

Publications

• Lies , 1969
• I Am the Bitter Name , 1972
• The sensuous President , 1972
• With Ignorance , 1977
• Tar. Poems , 1983
• Lark, the Thrush, the Starling: poems from Issa , 1983
• Flesh and Blood. Poems , 1987
• Poems: 1963-1983 , 1989
• The Bacchae of Euripides: A New Version , 1990
• Helen , 1991
• A dream of mind. Poems , 1992
• New & selected poems , 1995
• The vigil. Poems , 1997
• Poetry and consciousness , 1998
• Repair. Poems , 1999
• Misgivings: my mother, my father, myself , 2000
• Love about love , 2001
• The Singing. Poems , 2003
• Collected Poems, 1963-2006 , 2006
• How the Nobble was finally found , 2009
• Wait: poems , 2010
• On Whitman , 2010
• A not scary story about big scary things , 2010
• In time. Poets, poems, and the rest , 2012
• Writers Writing Dying , 2012

in German language:

• From now on: poems , translation by Walter Thümler, Leipziger Literaturverlag, Leipzig 2010, ISBN 978-3-86660-098-0 , German and English.

Web links

Commons : CK Williams  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about CK Williams in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about CK Williams at Open Library
• Williams CK in the nndb (English)
• Alan Riding: ARTS ABROAD; American Bard in Paris Stokes Poetic Home Fires . In: The New York Times, October 4, 2000
• Chris Hedges : Poet Marshals His Moral Passion Against the War . In: The New York Times of January 13, 2005 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Book of Members. Retrieved July 23, 2016 . 
2. ^ Members: CK Williams. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 3, 2019 . 
3. ^ William Grimes: CK Williams, Poet Who Tackled Moral Issues, Dies at 78. In: The New York Times , September 20, 2015 (English). Retrieved September 21, 2015.
4. ^ Dana Jennings: Books of The Times: Poets Who Look Death in the Eye. Poems on Mortality by CK Williams and Cynthia Cruz . In: The New York Times, December 31, 2012
5. ↑ William Deresiewicz: To Tell The Truth , Review of The Singing , In: The New York Times, February 15, 2004
6. ^ Dan Chiasson: False Consolations . Review of Collected Poems, 1963-2006 , In: The New York Times, December 24, 2006
7. ^ Richard Eder: A Poet Watches Himself as He Watches the World . Review of Collected Poems, 1963-2006 , In: The New York Times, December 25, 2006
8. ^ Helen Vendler: Singing the Poet Electric . Reviews to On Whitman , In: The New York Times on July 4, 2010