College Mourns the Loss of CK Williams, Former Faculty Member

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is saddened to learn of the death of a former faculty member, Charles (C.K.) Williams, at his home in New Jersey.

Professor Williams worked at Mason from 1982 until 1995, supporting countless MFA students. He was greatly respected as a poet; his many accolades include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize.

Professor Roger Lathbury, faculty member in the Department of English, offered an eloquent reflection of Williams’s work at Mason:

Charlie Williams (C. K. Williams) was a good friend while we were at Mason together. I published one of his books at my press, Orchises: Helen, a signed, limited edition (priced at $50, a bargain nowadays and then); he was kind to let me have it. I had wonderful times with him, talking about [poets Czeslaw] Milosz and Emily Dickinson.

There was a lunch with Charlie and Allen Ginsberg, on campus for a reading. Ginsberg was in the Whitmanic tradition of Charlie's inclusive, meditative verse. Charlie thought Allen was a great poet (as he was). Like Allen, whom I came also to know, Charlie was deceptively intellectual, modest and offhand in personal demeanor, with an inexhaustible reservoir of reading that gave his remarks authority, canniness, force. I loved him for his candor, his openness, his tender-hearted honesty, his abrupt and dismissive refusal to do what he thought stupid or trivial, his abiding love of craft, and his talent. It flowed out of him and made him seem accessible, as though you could do it, too (but you couldn't), although it was all his own.

When he didn't like someone else's work, you knew it. I can't name names without betraying his confidence, and that I won't do.

He liked finding the talented and encouraging them. That's what you want in an MFA program: someone who has what Hemingway called "a built-in shit detector." Those whom he could support he nourished and worked closely with and read attentively. Some of them, like Allison Funk, he pushed into success. I remember his fondness for an undergraduate student we both found enthralling and impossible. Charlie said, "How can you not like someone who comes up to you and says, 'I've got all the disadvantages and I write poetry: I'm ugly, have spina bifida, am addicted to tobacco, and am a homosexual.'?" This was 1982.

His own work speaks for itself. Flesh and Blood is his most accessible book, but there are others with their keen sense of the current scene and his outrage at all that is outrageous in American life that seemed to me when they came out, and still seem to me, searing, immediate, and often profound. I shall miss this voice, seeing his poems in The New Yorker, and hearing from him at Princeton from time to time. He introduced me to people whose work I published and whom I came to love.

Professor Williams is remembered in obituaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Poetry Foundation. Please see links at the right.