Brain

Photo illustration by Miki Lowe

C. K. Williams stumbled into his poetry career by accident. When a college girlfriend asked him to write a , 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. “By writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt,” he said. “I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose.”