Tuesday, November 03, 2009

i want to be c.k. williams

from The Writer's Almanac today:

It's the birthday
of the poet Charles Kenneth Williams, C.K. Williams, born in Newark, New Jersey (1936). After graduating from college, he sat down and tried to read everything he'd ever heard of. He read Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Shelley, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Miller, Frazer, Jung, Plath, and Ginsberg. He said: "I'd fall asleep every night over a book, dreaming in other people's voices. In the morning I'd wake up and try, mostly fruitlessly, to write acceptable poems."

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