Rest in Peace, C.K. Williams, 1936–2015

He was born Charles Kenneth Williams in Newark in 1936 and went on to become one of the most significant voices in contemporary American poetry. We learned this morning that C.K. Williams died at the age of 78. He had taught at Princeton since 1996. More:

C. K. Williams, whose morally impassioned poems addressing war, poverty and climate change, as well as the imponderable mysteries of the psyche, won him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, died on Sunday at his home in Hopewell. N.J. He was 78.

The cause was multiple myeloma, his wife, Catherine Mauger Williams, said.

Mr. Williams first made his mark in the late 1960s with short poems that addressed, in quick, jolting lines, the torments of love and politics. His verse could be, by turns, intensely personal, or public-spirited, taking on the Vietnam War and a long list of social injustices, expressed in hot language. “This is fresh meat right mr nixon?” begins one of his best-known poems, “In the Heart of the Beast,” a response to the fatal shootings of student demonstrators at Kent State University in 1970.

In the mid-1970s he began experimenting with long, unraveled lines that spilled over the boundary of a standard page, allowing for a storytelling style that could be disarmingly casual and colloquial.

“A few nights ago I was half-watching the news on television and half-reading to my daughter,” begins “The Last Deaths,” in his 1977 collection “With Ignorance.” And again, from the poem “Near the Haunted Castle”: “You don’t have to think about it, it’s make-believe./It’s like a lie, maybe not quite a lie but I don’t want you to worry about it.”

The long line could be dense and impacted, like a sentence out of Henry James, or loose, capacious and Whitmanesque. Either way, it freed him.

“For a long time I had been writing poetry that leaves everything out,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It’s like a code. You say very little and send it out to people who know how to decode it. But I then realized that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt. I wanted to enter areas given over to prose writers, I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose.”

Mr. Williams, in this new phase, tackled themes of social injustice, the complexities of lust and love, and the intricate workings of the mind as it perceives and processes — “how we take the world to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself,” as he put it in “The World.” [...]

More at The New York Times.