C. K. Williams‘s books of poetry include 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 was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim 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.
Poetry
Winter 1992
The Covenant
In my unlikeliest dream, my dead are with me again, companions again, in an ordinary way; nothing of major moment to accomplish, no stains to cleanse, no oaths or debts […]
Poetry
Winter 1992
To Listen
In the dream of death where I listen, the voices of the dream keep diminishing, fading away. The dead are speaking, my dead are speaking, what they say seems urgent, […]
Poetry
Winter 1992
The Crime
From A DREAM OF MIND Violence in the dream, violation of body and spirit; torment, mutilation, butchery, debasement. At first it hardly feels real, there’s something ceremonial in it, something […]
Poetry
Winter 1992
Scar
As though the skin had been stripped and pulled back onto the skull like a stocking and solderedtoo tightly so that it mottled to yellow and ocher, the pores and […]
In Memoriam
The Covenant
KR joins the poetry world in mourning the passing of C. K. Williams (1936-2015). We offer this poem from our archives in memory. From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter […]