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Articles by C. K. Williams
More Even Than Itself
On Restlessness I was doing yoga, restless, as always, in final relaxation pose, when a thought came to me: C. K. Williams’s poems never relax, even in their stillest moments—and that’s one reason I like them so much.
Butchers by C. K. Williams
Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things, from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need. Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block, and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected, where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood.
Light by C. K. Williams
Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour, unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples— I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante, “a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…” then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave, a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures, their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant...
A Poem by C. K. Williams: "Brain" Original
Photo illustration by Miki Lowe C. K. Williams stumbled into his poetry career by accident. When a college girlfriend asked him to pen a poem for her, his path became clear. But he felt frustrated by the cryptic ways in which poets got to their point. “It’s like a code,” he explained in 2000. “You say very little and send it out to people who know how to decode it.” So he started experimenting with form, switching from short, compact poems to meandering, conversational lines.
Flowers for the Dead
Review by Diane H, Reviewer Last updated on 30 Mar 2020 My Recommendation At seventeen, Linn is viciously raped within her own isolated home. Nineteen years later, Linn is finally seeking her rapist by moving back to that, now vacant, house. Initially, her attacker was thought to be a stranger. However, Linn’s memory of that night is slowly returning. Thanks to a special doorbell ring, she knows her rapist must have been a close friend or neighbor. So begins the new thriller, Flowers for the Dead.
The Gaffe - Poetry Archive
1. If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then, shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?
Tar by C. K. Williams
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours. All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building, and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
Learn Something New Every Day with Online Video Lessons
Isn't it a little late for this? Scientists believe they have discovered a new—and possibly the largest—organ in the human body. Say whaaaa? Last week, New York-based researchers published an article in the journal Scientific Reports describing the interstitium, a network of interconnected fluid-filled channels believed to exist in every tissue in the human body. This would account for one-fifth of the body's fluids by volume! So how have researchers missed the interstitium all these years?
Learn Something New Every Day with Online Video Lessons
Now here's some research you can actually consume! A new study published yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine claims that drinking coffee can significantly extend your lifespan. Researchers recently concluded a longitudinal study involving half a million British adults aged 40 to 69. Participants not only filled out questionnaires about their daily coffee consumption and exercise habits, but also received physical exams and blood tests. Almost all were coffee drinkers.
The Gaffe by C. K. Williams
If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then, shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?
On the Metro by C. K. Williams
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
Tar
Charles Kenneth Williams was born on November 4, 1936, in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. After attending high school in Maplewood, New Jersey, Williams enrolled in Bucknell College but later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied philosophy and English. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1959.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Review article: ‘Switch’ catalysis: from monomer mixtures to sequence-controlled block copolymers T. Stößer, T. T. D. Chen, Y. Zhu, C. K. Williams Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 2018 376 20170066; DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2017.0066. Published 24 November 2017
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who even knows now what about, what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws like fishbones, the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, to bed, and through the night, feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touch- ing, back to back, the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep us lifting, turning, through the angry...
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings, I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression, sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact, and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have once called lassitude, indifference, now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions to...
Fragment
was recording what was before it or more likely he didn't care, opening up with his pistol, not saying a word, on the clerk you see blurredly falling and you hear--I keep hearing-- crying, "God, God," in that voice I was always afraid existed within us, the voice that knows beyond illusion the irrevocability of death, beyond any dream of being not mortally injured-- "You're just falling asleep, someone will save you, you'll wake again, loved ones beside you.
Predicting recovery in patients with acute low back pain: A Clinical Prediction Model
There is substantial variability in the prognosis of acute low back pain (LBP). The ability to identify the probability of individual patients recovering by key time points would be valuable in making informed decisions about the amount and type of treatment to provide. Predicting recovery based on presentation 1-week after initially seeking care is clinically important and may be more accurate than predictions made at initial presentation.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
All night, snow, then, near dawn, freezing rain, so that by morn- ing the whole city glistens in a glaze of high-pitched, meticulously polished brilliance, every, thing rounded off, the cars submerged nearly to their windows in the unbroken drifts lining the narrow alleys, the buildings rising from the trunklike integuments the wind has against them.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew anything at all about the music, what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of the orchestra each represented: there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thinnings, the winding cries of change that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of you and then apart from you.
The New York Times
C. K. Williams (1936-2015) wrote the poems in “Falling Ill” after a terminal diagnosis of multiple myeloma. This poem, which appears toward the end of the book, is a glimpse into the mysterious insights of a person on the threshold of death. Poem selected by Matthew Zapruder.
Perceptions and Practices of Mass Bat Exposure Events in the Setting of Rabies Among U.S. Public Health Agencies
Current guidelines in the setting of exposures to potentially rabid bats established by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) address post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) administration in situations where a person may not be aware that a bite or direct contact has occurred and the bat is not available for diagnostic testing.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much frank need and want, so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity and unity they make— her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter at his laughter, he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of being craved so, she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow, every glance moving...
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed, offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me— I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things— she’d decided that I was after all all right … twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant, which, when...
The World's Greatest Tricycle Rider
The world’s greatest tricycle rider is in my heart, riding like a wildman, no hands, almost upside down, along the walls and over the high curbs and stoops, his bell rapid-firing, the sun spinning in his spokes like a flame. But he is growing older. His feet overshoot the pedals. His teeth set too hard against the jolts, and I am afraid that what I’ve kept from him is what tightens his fingers on the rubber grips and drives him again and again on the same block.
The Foundation - The New Yorker
1. Watch me, I’m running, watch me, I’m dancing, I’m air; the building I used to live in has been razed and I’m skipping, hopping, two-footedly leaping across the blocks, bricks, slabs of concrete, plaster, and other unnameable junk . . . Or nameable, really, if you look at the wreckage closely . . . Here, for instance, this shattered I-beam is the Bible, and this chunk of mortar? Plato, the mortar of mind, also in pieces, in pieces in me, anyway, in my mind . . .
Salt - The New Yorker
Abashingly eerie that just because I’m here on the long low-tide beach of age with briny timelicking insidious eddies over my toes there’d rise in me those mad weeks a lifetime agowhen I had two lovers, one who soaked herself so in Chanel that before I went to the otherI’d scrub with fistfuls of salt and not only would the stink be vanquished but I’d feel shame-shriven, pure,which thinking about is a joke: how not acknowledge—obsolete notion or no—that I was a cad. Luckily though, I’ve hung...
The Gaffe by C. K. Williams : Poetry Magazine
If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then, shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?
2015-02-23 - The New Yorker
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Discover more stories from nine decades of The New Yorker, from classic Profiles to short fiction—with new favorites highlighted every week. Explore issues from February 21, 1925, to this week.
By Cora Frazier, James Wood Verified, James Surowiecki Verified, Alex Ross, Jon Anderson, Tad Friend Verified, Richard Brody Verified, Roz Chast, Haruki Murakami, David Remnick Verified, Ian Parker Verified, Elizabeth Kolbert Verified, Hilton Als Verified, Adam Gopnik Verified, Anthony Lane Verified, Mary Norris, Hendrik Hertzberg, George Packer Verified, Emily Nussbaum, Zadie Smith, Ian Frazier, Deborah Treisman Verified, Michael Schulman Verified, Rebecca Mead, Russell Platt, Lizzie Widdicombe Verified, Sarah Larson Verified, Hannah Goldfield Verified, Alec Wilkinson, Christopher Reid Verified, Sarah Holland-Batt, C. K. Williams
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Postscript: Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS FELVER/GETTY About the death of any friend one feels sadness; with some, though, that sadness is tempered by gratitude, by a feeling of privilege to have been able to live in the world at the same time as the one who’s gone. I knew Galway Kinnell for almost half a century, we were friends for a good part of that time, and that feeling of being fortunate to know him, to be able to be with him, never diminished.
The Gaffe
1 If that someone who's me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn't he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then, shouldn't he have warned me he'd even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?
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