Princeton poet procures prestigious prize

C.K. Williams wins Lily Prize worth $100,000.

By: David Campbell
   Princeton University poet C.K. Williams, the author of nine collections of poetry and recipient of multiple awards, has been awarded the 2005 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, The Poetry Foundation announced this week.
   Established in 1986, the prize is one of the most prestigious given to American poets. And at $100,000, it is one of the largest literary honors for work in the English language, the foundation said.
   The foundation is the publisher of "Poetry" magazine. Professor Williams’ first published poem, "Sleeping Over," appeared in the magazine in 1964. The prize will be presented at an evening ceremony on May 24 at The Arts Club in Chicago, the foundation said.
   "C.K. Williams is a master at dramatizing complicated psychological states, but he is also always equally concerned with the self’s relation to the larger world," said Christian Wiman, the magazine’s editor and chair of the selection committee. "He has created a signature style, which more and more seems a permanent part of our literature."
   Professor Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936 and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches in The Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University and lives half of the year in Normandy, France.
   "The recognition is great, the money is sort of astonishing," the poet said Wednesday. "It comes as a shock — a pleasant shock."
   Professor Williams was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989, a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award in 1992 and the PEN/Voelker Career Achievement in Poetry Award in 1998.
   In addition, he was awarded the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 1998, the Harriet Monroe Prize from the University of Chicago in 1993 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1999. He has also received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the foundation said.
   Professor Williams’ most recent volume of poetry, "The Singing," published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was the winner of the 2003 National Book Award.
   Previous collections include "Repair," winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; "The Vigil;" "A Dream of Mind;" "Flesh and Blood," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 1987; "Tar;" "With Ignorance;" "I Am the Bitter Name;" and "Lies" in 1969.
   Professor Williams is also the author of five works in translation, including "Selected Poems of Francis Ponge" in 1994 and "The Bacchae of Euripides" in 1990.
   "A C.K. Williams poem works like a joint venture between place, often a place as distinctly unromantic as an auto graveyard, and the state of mind observing the place," said John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation.
   "Invariably, the collaboration brings us to a more nuanced understanding of what it is to be human," Mr. Barr continued.
   The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honors a living American poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. Established in 1986 by Ruth Lilly, the annual prize is sponsored and administered by The Poetry Foundation. Over the past 20 years, the Lilly prize has awarded more than $1 million.