Renowned creative writing professor dies at 78

C.K. Williams, acclaimed poet and respected creative writing professor, died of multiple myeloma on Sept. 20 at his home in Hopewell, N.J. He was 78.

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection of poems titled “Repair,” Williams won awards including National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and the 2003 National Book Award. He had taught creative writing at the University since 1996.

Williams was famous for long lines in his poems, but was also admired for his translations, especially of Euripedes’ “The Bacchae,” as well as poems by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and French poet Francis Ponge. He composed a memoir titled “Misgivings: My Father, My Mother, Myself,” which intricately chronicled the inner workings of his family relations. He wrote about political issues and social injustices, and touched on topics including urban life and love.

His second wife, Catherine Williams, said that for as long as she knew him, Williams wrote every morning of his life, from 8 a.m. to noon, no matter what. Her favorite poem of his, she said, is “Invisible Mending,” a poem from “Repair.”

“It’s one of his most beautiful poems. I don’t know if it’s the most beautiful poem, but it’s the one I feel very close to,” she said.

Before his death, around mid-August, Williams left Catherine a manuscript of his last collection of poems, titled “Falling Ill,” which he had been working on for the last two and a half years, she said.

“It’s 52 poems, all the same length, without punctuation, all the same number of stanzas, and it’s all about his illness and being ill,” she said. She added that her husband had asked that the cover be a painting by their son, Jed, who is an artist.

Williams also explored other forms of creative expression during his career, including theater. Robert Sandberg, who directed “Beasts of Love”, one of Williams’ plays, said that Williams loved the collaboration and excitement of seeing people work on his plays. The production, a part of the University’s “Myth in Transformation: The Phaedra project,” was performed at the University Art Museum in February 2014.

“He was really happy,” Sandberg said. “I had the sense that a work of imagination in which he had created was there in front of him.”

He added that that the language in “Beasts of Love” was especially great because it captured the sense of Greek tragedy in terms of heightened and elevated language, and yet it felt contemporary. Sandberg said he felt the same way about Williams’ “The Bacchae” translation, which he had taught in his dramatic literature courses previously.

“You felt like you were in both an ancient and immediately accessible world at the same time,” Sandberg said.

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Williams’ writing was known not only for his signature weaving, long lines, but also for the emotional and inner depth he brought to his writing, according to critics and other authors. Creative writing professor Edmund White, one of Williams’ colleagues whom Williams brought to the University, said that in his poems he would zero in on something and keep massaging and looking at it, turning it over, examining it from every possible angle.

“He has a very acute way of handling abstractions,” White said."He had a very extensive and precise vocabulary."

His writing studied all the details and took nothing for granted, whether it was old age, sickness or love, White noted, adding that he was one of the great love poets.

“His poems to Catherine are very remarkable. They’re not just warm and fuzzy; they’re very penetrating and observant, and psychologically very deep,” he said.

White noted that with students, Williams was neither condescending nor overly ingratiating.

“It wasn’t that he was stern, but he was very matter-of-fact in his approach,” White said. “He was just very direct and simple.”

Susan Wheeler, director of the Program in Creative Writing, who had known Williams as a faculty member and friend, also said that Williams was very uniquely honest with his students.

“He was very, very blunt,” Wheeler said. “He didn’t hide his own vulnerability, and I think he was the first to admit that he could really write a lousy poem, like all of us can. I think he was able to be very blunt without making the student feel like it was a personal failing.”

Sandra Bermann, comparative literature professor, co-instructed Williams’ last course, COM 585: Arts of Imitation – Translation in Theory and Practice, with him in spring 2013, an opportunity Bermann said she was very blessed and fortunate to have had. Bermann, who first knew Williams through his poetry, said that over the years she got to know him as both a colleague and a friend.

“He was serious, yet he would always reveal a sense of humor,” Bermann said. “He was incredibly honest, yet gentle. That’s not an easy combination.”

Williams was someone who was a great poet and a great translator, and he was able to connect those two things in very insightful ways, Bermann remarked.

Bermann noted that Williams’ deep engagement with other people and his sense of dialogue with them distinguished him from other poets. Williams wrote fervent poems on morality and war, and addressed a wide range of issues through a personal and unrestricted manner.

“From the get-go, really early on, he was writing in the most nuanced way; poems that brought in class distinctions and also about race,” Wheeler said.

Williams’ last public appearance was a joint recital with renowned pianist Richard Goode last spring. He read his poems in conjunction with select works by Ludwig Van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Robert Schumann, among others. The program sought to inspire dialogue between various disciplines and highlight their relationship to music.

“Personally for me it’s really sad that we’re not going to have an opportunity to work with him again, because he was a remarkable man and the collaborations that we did were really, really fruitful,” Marna Seltzer, director of the Princeton University Concerts, said.

Having grown up playing the piano, Williams was particularly drawn to the piano and wrote several poems inspired by the music for the performance, Seltzer said. In his most recently published collection, “Selected Later Poems,” Williams dedicates a poem about Beethoven he read during that concert to Richard Goode. Seltzer said that neither she nor Goode realized it until seeing the book.

“That’s exactly the kind of thing Charlie would do, is just kind of be quietly generous like that but not say anything,” Seltzer said.

Up until the very end, he was impatient about personal concerns or the like, always wishing to directly and immediately engage with friends, strangers, new acquaintances, and students, to discuss art or politics — things that really mattered to him, Wheeler said.

“He was incredibly partisan and really passionate about things he felt strongly [about],” Wheeler said.

Born and raised in Newark, N.J., Williams attended Bucknell University, where he played basketball, and then graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He began writing poems when he was 19.

Williams was a wonderful man and a passionate person intensely tied to family, N. Jeremy Kasdin, vice dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Williams’ first cousin, said.

Catherine Williams said that at home, Williams was a very good cook and responsible for many meals.

“He was a wonderful person to live with. He was fun, a very honest person,” she said.

With a large build at 6-foot-5-inch, Williams was a lean, athletic individual who could be seen striding about, like a young man, White said.

“It’s hard to think he’s dead because he always seemed so youthful,” White said.

During his time at the University, Williams divided his time between New Jersey and France.

“I think that the main influence of living abroad — the main influence it had on his writing — was that it made him question almost everything,” White said.

Apart from his wife, son and first cousin, Williams is also survived by a daughter, Jessica Williams Burns, son-in-law Michael Burns, a sister, Lynn, a brother Richard, and three grandchildren.

“It’s a wonderful life to celebrate,” Bermann said.