C. K. Williams in The New Yorker

The poet C. K. Williams, who died on Sunday, at the age of seventy-eight, published his first poem in* *{: .apple-converted-space}The New Yorker* *{: .apple-converted-space}nearly fifty years ago. It ran in the April 2, 1966, issue, and was titled, “The World’s Greatest Tricycle Rider.” It begins:

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.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Williams studied at Bucknell and then at the University of Pennsylvania, and he got started with poetry when a girlfriend asked him to write a poem. Right away, he said, “I knew that that was what I was going to do.”

While Williams wrote many intimate, personal poems, like “The World’s Greatest Tricycle Rider,” he also wrote about war and politics and the environment. “Keep It,” from the July 31, 1971, issue of the magazine, opens with the lines: “the lonely people are marching / on the capitol everyone’s yelling no t/ to give them anything but just / buying dinner together was fun / wasn’t it?”

He became known for the long, expansive lines of his poems, as seen, for instance, in “My Mother’s Lips,” from 1983: “I found myself leaning from the window, incanting in a tearing whisper what I thought were poems,” he writes there. He won every major award, more or less: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and lots of others.

In his 2009 poem “The Foundation,” Williams listed many of the poets and other writers who had inspired him.

Watch me again now, because I’m not alone in my dancing,

my being air, I’m with my poets, my Rilke, my Yeats,

we’re leaping together through the debris, a jumble of wrack,

but my Keats floats across it, my Herbert and Donne,

my Kinnell, my Bishop and Blake are soaring across it,

my Frost, Baudelaire, my Dickinson, Lowell and Larkin,

and my giants, my Whitman, my Shakespeare, my Dante

and Homer; they were the steel, though scouring as I was

the savants and sages half the time I hardly knew it …

In the past few years, Williams published several poems in the magazine that touched, in one way or another, on the subjects of death and getting older, among them “Haste,” “Salt,” and 2008’s “The Coffin Store.” (“Death, what a ridiculous load you can be, / like the world atremble on Atlas’s shoulders.”) Last year, Williams wrote* *{: .apple-converted-space}a tribute to his friend* *{: .apple-converted-space}and fellow-poet Galway Kinnell, shortly after Kinnell’s death, that October. Kinnell is the only contemporary that Williams mentions in “The Foundation.” The piece began: “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.”