Visit by Poet C.K. Williams,
National Book Award Winner

National Book Award-winning poet C.K. Williams will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday Jan. 25 for a reading of his work. The public portion of the program begins at 6:45 p.m.; seating is free, on a first-come basis.
The late Stanley Kunitz, former poet laureate of the United States, described Williams as the "authentic American tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, who tells uson every pagewhat it means to be alive in our time."
Of his craft, Williams himself has remarked, "The most interesting thing about a poem is that it doesn't exist until it has its music. And until it has that, it's not a poem. It's just information or data that's floating around in your head or on your desk."
Williams is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Singing (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), which won the National Book Award, and Repair (1999), winner of a Pulitzer Prize. His other titles include The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969).
He began writing at 19 on the heels of his last required English class at the University of Pennsylvania. "Poetry didn't find me, in the cradle or anywhere near it," he has said. "I found it. I realized at some pointvery late, it's always seemed that I needed it; that it served a function for me, or someday would, however unclear that function may have been at first."
Williams' interest and passion further developed in the mid-1960s when he wrote to a magazine editor about the abuse and violence against civil rights activists. In A Day for Anne Frank, a meditation that became the opening poem of his first collection, Lies, he linked the civil rights movement with the Holocaust. The process of writing that particular poem would help find and define his creative voice. "I seemed to be able to write poems I wanted to write," he said, "in a way that satisfied me, that made the struggle with the matter and form and surface of the poems bearable, andmore to the pointpurposeful."
Williams' numerous awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Twentieth Annual Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; and a Pushcart Prize. In 2003, Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and teaches in the writing program at Princeton University. Vanessa Carter '08