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C. K. WILLIAMS C. K. Williams (born Charles Kenneth Williams on November 2, 1936) is an American poet, critic and translator. Williams has won nearly every major poetry award. 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 National Book Award, 2003 and in 2005 Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. C. K. Williams grew up in Newark, New Jersey and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood. He later briefly attended Bucknell University and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn he studied with the romantic scholar, Morse Peckham, and spent a great deal of time in the circle of young architects who studied with and worked for the great architect Louis Kahn. In an essay, “Beginnings,” he acknowledges Kahn’s dedication and patience as essential to his notion of the life of an artist. Williams lived for a period in Philadelphia, where he worked for a number of years as a part-time psychotherapist for adolescents and young adults, a ghost-writer and editor, then began teaching, first at the YM-YWHA in Philadelphia, then at several universities in Pennsylvania, Beaver College, Drexel, and Franklin and Marshall. He subsequently taught at many other universities, including Columbia, NYU, Boston University, the University of California, both at Irvine and Berkeley, before finally becoming a professor at George Mason University, then moving in 1995 to Princeton University, where he has taught poetry workshops and translation ever since. He met his present wife, Catherine Mauger, a French jeweler, in 1973, and they have a son who is nowa noted painter, Jed Williams. He has a daughter from an earlier marriage, Jessie Burns, who is a writer. He lives half the year near Princeton, and the rest in Normandy in France. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His first book, Lies, was published in 1969, and since then he has published many collections of poetry, culminating in his Collected Poems, 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, in a way that dignifies all of our attempts to make sense of the world and of ourselves. C. K. Williams has set a new standard for American poetry.” Another collection, Wait, appeared in 2010, and another, Writers Writing Dying, will come out in 2012. He has written a memoir, Misgivings, which appeared in 2000, a collection of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, 1999, and a critical study of Walt Whitman, On Whitman, 2010. A new collection of essays, In Time: Poets, Poems and the Rest, will be published in 2012. Williams is also an acclaimed translator, notably of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Euripides’ The Bacchae, as well as of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and the French poet Francis Ponge. He has also published several children’s books. APES One branch, | read, of a species of chimpanzees has something like territorial wars, and when the...army, | suppose you'd call it, of one tribe prevails and captures an enemy, “Several males hold a hand or foot of the rival so the victim can be damaged at will.” This is so disquieting: if beings with whom we share so many genes can be this cruel, what hope for us? Still, “rival,” “victim, “will”-don’t such anthropomorphic terms make those simians’ social-political conflicts sound more brutal than they are? The chimps Catherine and | saw on their island sanctuary in Uganda we loathed. Unlike the pacific gorillas in the forest of Bwindi, they fought, dementedly shrieked, the dominant male lorded it over the rest; they were, in all, too much like us. Another island from my recent reading, where Columbus, on his last voyage, encountering some “Indians” who'd greeted him with curiosity and warmth, wrote, before he chained and enslaved them, “They don’t even know how to kill each other” It's occurred to me I've read enough—at my age all it does is confirm my sadness. Surely the papers: war, terror, torture, corruption—they’re like broken glass in the mind. Back when | knew | knew nothing, | read all the time, poems, novels, philosophy, myth, but | hardly glanced at the news, there was a distance between what could happen and the part of myself | felt with: now everything’s so tight against me | hardly can move. The Analects say people in the golden age weren't aware they were governed; they just lived. Could | have passed through my own golden age and not even known | was there? Some gold: nuclear rockets aimed at your head, racism, sexism, contempt for the poor. And there | was, reading. What did | learn? Everything, nothing, too little, too much... Just enough to get me here: a long-faced, white-haired ape with a book, still turning the page. C. K. WILLIAMS HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017562