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Collected Poems
Collected Poems brings together nearly four decades of C. K.Williams's work: more than four hundred poems that, though remarkable in their variety, have in common Williams's distinctive outlook―restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in the drive to find words for the truth about life as we know it today.
Williams's rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and in these pages we watch them unfold from his confrontational early poems through the open, expansive Tar and With Ignorance . His voice is both cerebral and muscular, capable of both the eightline poems of Flesh and Blood and the inward soundings of A Dream of Mind ―and of both together in the award-winning recent books Repair and The Singing . These poems feel spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which they sing; open to life, they chafe against summary and conclusion.
Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement. C. K. Williams is one of them.
Williams's rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and in these pages we watch them unfold from his confrontational early poems through the open, expansive Tar and With Ignorance . His voice is both cerebral and muscular, capable of both the eightline poems of Flesh and Blood and the inward soundings of A Dream of Mind ―and of both together in the award-winning recent books Repair and The Singing . These poems feel spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which they sing; open to life, they chafe against summary and conclusion.
Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement. C. K. Williams is one of them.
- GenresPoetry
704 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
26 people are currently reading
226 people want to read
About the author
C.K. Williams
70 books72 followersC.K. Williams was born and grew up in and around Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and English. He has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, The Singing which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggeheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, the Los Angeles Book Prize, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 4, 2016
Without quite knowing it, you sit looking for your past
or future in the couples strolling by,
the solitaries stalking by, saddened that you never seem
to find what you’ve been looking for
although you’ve no idea or at least you tell yourself
you don’t what you might be looking for,
you only have the vaguest, vagrant sense that it would
be someone you knew once, lover, friend,
and lost, let drift away, not out of your life, for they
were meant to drift away that way,
but from some portion of your meaning to yourself, or
from the place such meaning should reside:
the other would recuperate essences, would be the link
from where you were to where you would be,
if consciousness were able, finally, to hold all of this
together, even not quite ever knowing why.
or future in the couples strolling by,
the solitaries stalking by, saddened that you never seem
to find what you’ve been looking for
although you’ve no idea or at least you tell yourself
you don’t what you might be looking for,
you only have the vaguest, vagrant sense that it would
be someone you knew once, lover, friend,
and lost, let drift away, not out of your life, for they
were meant to drift away that way,
but from some portion of your meaning to yourself, or
from the place such meaning should reside:
the other would recuperate essences, would be the link
from where you were to where you would be,
if consciousness were able, finally, to hold all of this
together, even not quite ever knowing why.
August 28, 2015
His collection is over 500 pages of verse. That's gotta say something about his talent. He writes about everything, anything. Friends and relatives, conversations, farms, birds, deer, dogs, war, love, cunts, gods, poets, death, philosophy. Nothing turns me off from a poem more than starting it out by talking about an animal. Animals and long-lines guarantee that I won't be reading it. Still, it's C. K. Williams, and he's a good poet.
As I skimmed, I marked off the poems that struck me as the ones I wish I'd written. Not surprisingly, they're the shorter-lined, several-stanza verses. "The Other Side," "Ashes Ashes We All Fall Down," "Trash," "After That," "Becoming Somebody Else," and "Yours" are all from his earliest collections. I've learned that I like early CKW. I did surprise myself by reading through and actually liking "The Shade," which is a long-lined poem that also mentions sparrows. Shocking.
I tried to skip around and find other gems--"This Happened" and "Wood" from his later works popped out with semi-long lines.
Poems are not all about line-length. My motivation to read them is. CKW uses language, abuses language, makes language his proverbial bitch; he concocts images that have never existed. He speaks of rooms with no gods, being ravaged and ravished, women becoming wood and steel, and cellophane, which is one of the greatest words in the English language.
So for me, I can take CKW in small doses. Reading the entire collected poems was a large undertaking. I much prefer the mini-collection I made by marking off pages and going back to them. Finishing the entire collection did not happen. Too many long lines. I am too lazy.
As I skimmed, I marked off the poems that struck me as the ones I wish I'd written. Not surprisingly, they're the shorter-lined, several-stanza verses. "The Other Side," "Ashes Ashes We All Fall Down," "Trash," "After That," "Becoming Somebody Else," and "Yours" are all from his earliest collections. I've learned that I like early CKW. I did surprise myself by reading through and actually liking "The Shade," which is a long-lined poem that also mentions sparrows. Shocking.
I tried to skip around and find other gems--"This Happened" and "Wood" from his later works popped out with semi-long lines.
Poems are not all about line-length. My motivation to read them is. CKW uses language, abuses language, makes language his proverbial bitch; he concocts images that have never existed. He speaks of rooms with no gods, being ravaged and ravished, women becoming wood and steel, and cellophane, which is one of the greatest words in the English language.
So for me, I can take CKW in small doses. Reading the entire collected poems was a large undertaking. I much prefer the mini-collection I made by marking off pages and going back to them. Finishing the entire collection did not happen. Too many long lines. I am too lazy.
September 22, 2019
Williams was a prolific poet.
His work is relentlessly structural, to the point of being stylized. He’s in love with lines that are almost the same length, and too long for the page. In too many of his Collected Poems, Williams allows every line of text to stray down to the next line, thus abandoning most of the dramatic effects of artful enjambment.
Williams has over-engineered his poetry, for my taste. I tried reading the poems aloud, but that tiresome exercise confirmed my ennui instead of adding some vitality.
For me, whatever Williams was trying to say has been lost in the dusty storeroom where he has neatly boxed and labeled his poems.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
His work is relentlessly structural, to the point of being stylized. He’s in love with lines that are almost the same length, and too long for the page. In too many of his Collected Poems, Williams allows every line of text to stray down to the next line, thus abandoning most of the dramatic effects of artful enjambment.
Williams has over-engineered his poetry, for my taste. I tried reading the poems aloud, but that tiresome exercise confirmed my ennui instead of adding some vitality.
For me, whatever Williams was trying to say has been lost in the dusty storeroom where he has neatly boxed and labeled his poems.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
February 6, 2016
Deeply thoughtful and innovative poet.
Read
December 27, 2020600 pages of C.K. Williams.
What a remarkable thing, to read a poet from the first to the almost last. To see their obsessions come, go, return. For Williams, it is war, women, his own vanity, and the short line. He started with it. He ended with it, but oh, in the middle, he stretched the line, his meanderings, his repetitions. And beautifully for it. That said, I prefer the later but not latest Williams, and it's obvious why "Repair" won all the awards it did.
Now, I spend the next week sort of going over what I read....
What a remarkable thing, to read a poet from the first to the almost last. To see their obsessions come, go, return. For Williams, it is war, women, his own vanity, and the short line. He started with it. He ended with it, but oh, in the middle, he stretched the line, his meanderings, his repetitions. And beautifully for it. That said, I prefer the later but not latest Williams, and it's obvious why "Repair" won all the awards it did.
Now, I spend the next week sort of going over what I read....
August 29, 2020
I started reading this collection a year after C.K. Williams died, and have been edified and moved by his poems over the past four years. He is a poet of depth and honesty, someone who confronts life's big questions and someone who brings to his work an original understanding of this floating opera that carries us all along. I'll miss you, C.K.!
August 30, 2020
This author won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 with the collection, "Repair." Some deep-imagery and poetic leaps. Conversational with subverted elements of craft. What's remarkable about this collection?
August 22, 2021
The master at work.
Want to read
June 1, 2025Cutting is for A Day for Anne Frank
By C.K. Williams
Another cutting is for The Last Deaths
By CK Williams
By C.K. Williams
Another cutting is for The Last Deaths
By CK Williams
March 3, 2010
I'd like to give this one 4.5 stars. I really liked at least 60% of it, and that's saying a lot, considering this is much of a lifetime's output. Some of these poems are truly amazing and leave one speechless. Williams has a tremendous ability to go deep within and explicate the workings of the human mind in all its convolutions and insecurities and meanderings, without losing the poem's thread, grandstanding, or veering into boring or pointless territory. He's a master of drawing out a thought further and further with great delicacy and insight, while making the entire process look and sound completely natural, and then coming around to endings and insights that reflect life itself, not always with a clear lesson to be learned (though he does that well), but always thought-provoking. He truly understands humanity and our foibles and ugly tendencies, as well as the beauty to be found in the details of everyday life and emotion and the love of friends and family.
I'm not such a fan of the earlier poems in this book -- he seemed to have an early fascination with underwear and genitalia. And not such a big fan of the last ones in the book, either, particularly those written in 2003 and later, but many of the poems in Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987), and A Dream of Mind (1992) grabbed me, especially all of part 2 of Dream of Mind, "Some of the Forms of Jealousy". Those poems blew me away. Perhaps, then, it's true that a poet really matures in his/her 40s and 50s. (Hope so! Something to look forward to!), but regardless, this is an impressive volume and absolutely worth reading and savoring and thinking on.
I'm not such a fan of the earlier poems in this book -- he seemed to have an early fascination with underwear and genitalia. And not such a big fan of the last ones in the book, either, particularly those written in 2003 and later, but many of the poems in Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987), and A Dream of Mind (1992) grabbed me, especially all of part 2 of Dream of Mind, "Some of the Forms of Jealousy". Those poems blew me away. Perhaps, then, it's true that a poet really matures in his/her 40s and 50s. (Hope so! Something to look forward to!), but regardless, this is an impressive volume and absolutely worth reading and savoring and thinking on.
July 12, 2010
Williams' poetry is written for the ear, as poetry should be, but it seems I have a tin ear. I've been trying for some time to unlock the riddle of poetry, but I've had no success. I suppose I'll just have to give up. (sigh).
June 29, 2008
Wow. What a unique and powerful voice. His poetry is among the most urgent sounding you will ever read. A stark look at human suffering, but a powerful affirmation in the transcendence of love.
September 22, 2009
I simply cannot put into words how much I adore Williams work.
This edition is a magnificent collection of his brilliancy.
This edition is a magnificent collection of his brilliancy.
September 13, 2011
Very interesting and moving and covers a wide range of his poems
February 22, 2012
C.K. Williams is a formidable poet and poetry professor. His compassionate insight can ground lightning.
August 5, 2014
too long, didn't finish. ck williams' short-line poetry touched me more than his long-line. some really really golden bits in this thing though, stuff that'll really stick. he's good.
July 6, 2015
Fine poet.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews