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…

— C. K. Williams

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

— 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

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

— 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…

— C. K. Williams

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

— C. K. Williams

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

— 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

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

— 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…

— 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…

— C. K. Williams

A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.

— 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…

— C. K. Williams