Чарльз Кеннет Уильямс: Жизнь и творчество американского поэта.

American poet, critic and translator (1936–2015)

Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams (November 4, 1936 – September 20, 2015) was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005.

The American poet C. K. Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 4, 1936. His parents were Paul B. Williams and Dossie Kasdin. His grandparents came to the US from Kiev, then a Ukrainian city within the Russian Empire, and Lvov, Ukraine. He went to Columbia High School in Maplewood, attended Bucknell University for one year, then moved on to and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He started writing poetry during his second year at Penn, and half way through junior year he left for Paris. At that time, he wrote "I fell into a period of lacerating loneliness. I'd always been a little shy but now something, maybe my uncertainty about my identity as a poet, my sense of being a pretender, made me all but mute with strangers: I used to stay all day in my hotel room, reading, trying to write, then I'd go out to eat by myself, and take endless, anguished walks." When he returned to Penn, he switched major from philosophy to English. He studied poetry with Morse Peckham, who also mentioned that T. S. Eliot had written that if you wanted to be a poet, you had to write poetry every day, a recommendation Williams applied in his writing life. After graduating from Penn, he stayed in Philadelphia. His circle of friends included artists, carpenters, poets, a famous sociologist, photographers, musicians and film makers. He spent time with young architects who worked for Louis Kahn, and later wrote: "I realized that my image of the artist's calling had come almost entirely from Kahn: he was absolutely devoted to his craft, and expected the same dedication from everyone else." Twenty days earlier, he had finished working on the manuscript of his last book of poems, Falling Ill.

His first book, Lies, was published in 1969. Much of his early and mid career work appeared in Poems 1963 1983 (1988). His Collected Poems appeared in 2006, of which Peter Campion wrote in The Boston Globe: "Throughout the five decades represented in his new Collected Poems, Williams has maintained the most sincere, and largest, ambitions. Like Yeats and Lowell before him, he writes from the borderland between private and public life (His poems) join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, to make sense of the world and ourselves. C. K. Williams has set a new standard for American poetry." His book Repair won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and in 2003 The Singing won the National Book Award. He also wrote essays, plays, children's books, and did translations. His final collection of poetry was the posthumously published Falling Ill (2017).

Misgivings, My Mother, My Father, Myself, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000. Catherine's Laughter, Sarabande Books, 2013.

Poetry and Consciousness; University of Michigan Press, 1998. On Whitman, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2010. In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Women of Trachis, translated from Sophocles, with Gregory Dickerson, Oxford University Press, New York, London, 1978. The Lark, The Thrush, The Starling, Poems from Issa, Burning Deck, 1983. The Bacchae, translated from Euripides, with an introduction by Martha Nussbaum, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1990. Canvas, translation from the Polish of Adam Zagajewski, with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1991. Selected Poems of Francis Ponge, with John Montague and Margaret Guiton, Wake Forest University Press, 1994.

The Selected and Last Poems of Paul Zweig, edited and with an introduction by C. K. Williams, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. The Essential Hopkins, edited and with an introduction by C. K. Williams, Ecco Press, 1993.

How the Nobble Was Finally Found, Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2009. A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska, Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, 2010.

Solitudes, a song cycle, set by Ronald Surak, 1970. Script consultant for a film by David Lynch, The Grandmother. Criminals, a film by Joseph Strick, narrative by C. K. Williams, 1994. Crossing State Lines, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. The Color of Time, a movie produced by James Franco, 2012.

A Piano and Poetry Recital. Richard Goode and C. K. Williams : a Princeton University concert on March 9, 2014, at Richardson Auditorium. The recital was recorded. Dedication of "Garden", a poem by C. K. Williams, in October 2016, in the Poetry Trail of the D & R Greenway Land Trust : 1, Preservation Place, Princeton, N. J. 08540. A Reading and Gathering to Celebrate the Life and Work of C. K. Williams took place at Kelly Writers House at Penn University in Philadelphia on April 11, 2016. Recording available. A Tribute to C. K. Williams took place at The New School in New York City on February 22, 2017. The event was recorded.