Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by C. K. Williams

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet C. K. Williams.

Last updated on December 25, 2024.

Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.

American - Poet | November 4, 1936 - September 20, 2015

Source: Wikipedia

A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.

C. K. Williams

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

C. K. Williams

I don't think of reflection on dark things as necessarily dark.

C. K. Williams

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

C. K. Williams

I don't like denial. I don't like repression.

C. K. Williams

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

C. K. Williams

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

C. K. Williams

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.

C. K. Williams

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

C. K. Williams

If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, you're wasting it.

C. K. Williams

One becomes a grandfather and one sees the world a little differently. Certainly the world becomes a more vulnerable place when one has a grandchild, or now I have two. And I think that possibly there's some tenderness that came out of just time and age and being a parent and grandparent.

C. K. Williams

The more I write, the more the silence seems to be eating away at me.

C. K. Williams

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

C. K. Williams

If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, youre wasting it.

C. K. Williams