Charles Kenneth Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was educated at Bucknell University and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took the B.A. in 1959. Since 1972 he has been a contributing editor for American Poetry Review. In 1974 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which resulted in the publication of his latest book, With Ignorance (1977).

Williams's long poem, A Day for Anne Frank, was first published in a limited edition in 1968 before it was included in Lies (1969), a collection of lyrical invectives against the bitterness and lying that, in the poet's view, are at the root of much of the world's daily activity. The world is not a place for sensitive and articulate beings; Anne Frank, for instance, is "a clot/ in the snow, / blackened, a chunk of phlegm / or puke." The epigram from A Day for Anne Frank reads: "God Hates You!" and, indeed, the...