<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Fellow Poeticians,<div><br></div><div>We are scheduled to have our next session of the WGCP on Friday October 11th from 3PM- 5PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. The focus of this discussion will be Writers Writing Dying by acclaimed poet C. K. Williams. Williams will then join us on Oct 25th for a continued conversation about his work. Photocopies of the book are available on the shelf (I believe along the window) in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. There was some delay in getting copies of the book itself (the publisher is switching from cloth copies to paperback) and so what we have done is copied the book so as to be able to provide this. Be sure to pick up your copy soon, as they do tend to go quickly.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Let me offer you the starred review from Publishers Weekly of Writers Writing Dying:</div><div><br></div><div>Williams, one of America’s most celebrated poets, now in his 70s, has
been thinking out loud about death—his own—concertedly over his past
several books, but this is the first time he’s really having fun, taking
a jaunty stroll toward oblivion, departing a life wasted “Sucking up
another dumb movie on HBO” to reckon with his masters, the poets whose
enduring lines have left him, as he says memorably in the book’s opening
poem “whacked so hard that you bash the already broken crown of your
head.” In a poem about poetry’s capacity to ease depression, he asks,
“Who should I be reading? Let’s see. Neruda? No way, too rich./ Lowell
and Larkin, good god, we’re already in the pits....” In talky lines like
these, thick with self-mocking irony, Williams is able to embody, if
not confront, his growing fear, offering a strong dose of sideways
empathy at the same time. Williams charges ahead, racing to get out of
his own control—”Think, write, write, think: just keep galloping faster
and you won’t even notice you’re dead,” he says in the book’s title
poem—making for his most thrilling book in years. (Nov.) </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Here is a reading that Williams gave about a year ago:</div><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSq4JasDUS8">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSq4JasDUS8</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>And here is a lengthy bio provided by the Poetry Foundation: <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/c-k-williams">http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/c-k-williams</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Remember, the WGCP is open to any interested participants, so do feel free to spread the word.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Thus,</div><div>Richard Deming, Group Coordinator </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><p>Hailed by poet <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4884">Paul Muldoon</a> in the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em>
as “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation,” C.K.
Williams has created a highly respected body of work, including several
collections of original poems, volumes of translations, a book of
criticism and a memoir. Williams is especially known 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. In his later work, Williams has 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. <br> <br> Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey
and educated at Bucknell College and the University of Pennsylvania.
Though he was encouraged by his father to read and memorize poems,
Williams didn’t begin to write poetry until his late teens. He soon
found success, however, and Williams’s early poetry was often promoted
by other poets. His first book, <em>Lies </em>(1969)<em>,</em> was published upon the recommendation of <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6163">Anne Sexton</a> who, according to Allan M. Jalon in the <em>Los Angeles Times,</em> called Williams “the Fellini of the written word.” The book was widely acclaimed: M.L. Rosenthal in <em>Poetry</em>
described it as a collection of poems that portrays “psychic paralysis
despite the need to make contact with someone.” The book’s final poem,
“A Day for Anne Frank,” which had been published separately a year
earlier, was praised by <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7466">Alan Williamson</a> in <em>Shenandoah</em> as “a surprisingly moving poem, one of the best in the book.” <br> <br> Williams’s next three books were also critical successes. <em>I Am the Bitter Name </em>(1972;
reprinted 1992) is largely a collection of protest poems about the fear
and hatred nurtured by America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It is
Williams’s next book, <em>With Ignorance</em> (1977; reprinted 1997),
however, that first shows the development of the poet’s trademark style;
as James Atlas explained in the <em>Nation,</em> “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.” <em>Tar </em>(1983)
employs the same expansive line which allows for philosophical
investigation and qualification. The title poem circles the nuclear
reactor disaster at Three Mile Island in characteristically Williams
fashion, finding dangerous equivalences in as mundane an endeavour as
roofing. <br> <br> <em> In Flesh and Blood</em> (1987) Williams changes
format, but not subject matter. The book is a collection of eight-line
poems, each line of twenty or twenty-five syllables and printed two
poems to a page. <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3201">Michael Hofmann</a>, in the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em>,
pointed out the poems’ subjects 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.” <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3173">Edward Hirsch</a>, writing in the <em>New York Times Book Review,</em>
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. <br> <br> Williams’s first volume of selected poems,<em> Poems 1963-1983</em> (1988), collects selections from <em>Lies</em> and <em>I Am the Bitter Name,</em> and reproduces both <em>With Ignorance</em> and <em>Tar</em>
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.” Williams himself, in a <em>Los Angeles Times</em> interview
with Allan 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.” <em>The Vigil </em>(1997) and <em>Repair </em>(1999) both feature the long, prose-like lines that have become Williams’s signature. <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3295">Richard Howard</a>, reviewing <em>The Vigil</em> for the <em>Boston Review</em> found that “The lines [in <em>The Vigil</em>]
have to array some of the most garish and clunky language assayed in
recent poetry,” but he appreciated their suitability for narration and
description. “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.” <br> <br> Williams’s later work, particularly in <em>Repair,</em> has developed an increasingly intimate tone. <em>Repair,</em> which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the <em>Los Angeles Times</em>
Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, 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, and
the flowered house dresses worn by his mother and the women of her
generation. Yet Williams also includes reminders of his earlier, more
socially-aware and outraged, material, including the title poem, which
points a righteous finger at a tyrant whose “henchmen had disposed of
enemies ... by hammering nails into their skulls.” Critic Brian
Phillips, in the <em>New Republic</em>, acknowledged Willliams’s skills
at observation and description, concluding that “[Williams’s] 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.”</p><p class="author-bio-link">Williams’s collection <em>The Singing </em>(2003) won the National Book Award in 2003. Three years later, Williams’s <em>Collected Poems </em>(2006)
was published. Over 600 pages long, the book received major critical
attention and provided an opportunity for readers to follow the arc of
Williams’s long career. In the <em>International Herald Tribune</em>, <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1233">Dan Chiasson</a>
reviewed Williams’s major achievement: his ability to get the “ratio of
sympathy to detachment…just right” so that “documentary precision and
the wide-angle embellishments of ‘art’ find perfect balance.” In 2012
Williams published his nineteenth book of poetry, <em>Writers Writing Dying.</em></p><p>In addition to his acclaimed memoir, <em>Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself </em>(2000), Williams has also written a work of critical prose, <em>Poetry and Consciousness </em>(1998),
which included Williams’s meditations on psychology, the relation of
poetry to history and the novel, as well as reflections on his own
creative process. A book of essays, <em>In Time: </em><em>Poets, Poems, and the Rest, </em>is forthcoming in 2012. Williams is also a noted translator. His translation of <em>The Bacchae of Euripides </em>(1990)
received wide-spread praise for its plain, vigorous language and
attention to the possibilities of the stage. He has also translated the
poetry of <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7641">Adam Zagajewski</a> and <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5451">Francis Ponge</a>.</p><p>C.K. Williams has been awarded many honors over his long career,
including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, a Pushcart Prize,
the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Award. He
teaches at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris. <a class="author-bio-link" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80601">Averill Curdy</a>, commenting on <em>The Singing</em> in a <em>Poetry</em>
magazine round table discussion, noted that Williams “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.”</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></body></html>