Writers Writing Dying

Poems

By C.K. Williams

2012

First Published

3.49

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H26M

Audio Length

Since his first poetry collection, Lies, C. K. Williams has nurtured an incomparable reputation—as a deeply political poet, a writer of profound emotion, and a teller of great stories. In Writers Writing Dying, he retains the essential parts of his poetic identity—his candor, the drama of his verses, 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 specter 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.”

Avg Rating

3.49

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

17%

4 STARS

31%

3 STARS

38%

2 STARS

14%

1 STARS

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Author

C.K. Williams

Author · 23 books

C.K. Williams was born and grew up in and around Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and English. He has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, The Singing which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggeheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, the Los Angeles Book Prize, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa. His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.