Gestorben

C. K. Williams, whose morally impassioned poems addressing war, poverty and climate change, as well as the imponderable mysteries of the psyche, won him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, died on Sunday at his home in Hopewell. N.J. He was 78. (…)

“For a long time I had been writing poetry that leaves everything out,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It’s like a code. You say very little and send it out to people who know how to decode it. But I then realized that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt. I wanted to enter areas given over to prose writers, I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose.”

Mr. Williams, in this new phase, tackled themes of social injustice, the complexities of lust and love, and the intricate workings of the mind as it perceives and processes — “how we take the world to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself,” as he put it in “The World.” / Marlise Simons and Daniel E. Slotnik, New York Times