Jonathan Williams is a poet, publisher, photographer, polemicist,champion correspondent and cross-country promenader.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Offbeat poet and publisher Williams, who turns 71 this year, has been a presence on the American and British lit scenes since the 1950s, when he visited the fabled Black Mountain College to study photography. In the tradition of wayward and self-published amateur writers, his prose can have the cranky charm of the self-taught, while his verse is well-nigh unendurable. The best item in this highly uneven collection is a conversation with the poet and acolyte of Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting. James Dickey haters will find Williams's excoriation of him a lot of fun. But these sympathetic elements are almost lost in the chaff of prefaces, ghastly attempts at the light verse form, the clerihew, japes and strenuously bad writing. Obituary articles for the London newspaper the Independent are unsatisfactory mementos of writers like Robert Duncan and Joel Oppenheimer. An effort at a preface to a collection by the American poet James Broughton was sensibly rejected by the publisher: "COCKADOODLEDOO, crowed the cockerel! COCK'LL DO COCK'LL DO JUST FINE, cried the poet!" A city-hating (as he states often here) gentleman of rural North Carolina, Williams has for years run the Jargon Society press, an early reclaimer of Mina Loy. Unfortunately, this book does not prove a similar find, and won't get beyond a small circle of friends and admirers.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
For nigh on 50 years, Williams has run the Jargon Society, which publishes limited editions of poetry, essays, and photographs in books and other formats that are themselves works of art. Williams is otherwise eccentric, too. He is an avid hiker, omnivorous music lover, multicultural gourmet, and connoisseur of fine photography; an archaeologist of modern poetry, who finds, publishes, and crusades for the likes of Alfred Starr Hamilton, the destitute bard of Montclair, New Jersey; and a lover of all things rich and strange. His own writings and photos are whimsical, erudite, emphatic, profoundly respectful of artistic talent wherever he finds it, disrespectful of any and all establishments, and, if wordplay amuses you, extremely funny. Williams is the Buster Keaton of aesthetes, and his poems and wee essays modulate from fustian to foolery, from compassion to outrage, so virtuosically that all you can do is bark, like you do when a house wall falls on Buster, who stands precisely where the paneless window lands. Williams also knows where to stand, and what for. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Southern-fried Bourgeoisophobe,
By BB "Bill Bamberger" (Whitmore Lake, MI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Blackbird Dust (Paperback)
The poet, of course, says it best: in his introduction, Jonathan Williams calls himself a "Southern-fried bourgeoisophobe." Williams has been an important part of 20th century Cultural Gaia, creating new ways around the standardization and de-poeticization of our cultural life. He keeps a quote from the Shakers on his dresser: "No vice is with us the less ridiculous for being in fashion." A poet and publisher for fifty years hand-runnin', Williams also occasionally takes to the ramparts of out and out prose to express his disdain and delight with matters of appetite of all kinds: for food, bottled spirits, sexual matters, literature, photographs, "outsider art," and more. Blackbird Dust collects nearly four dozen of these "knot gardens," as he calls them, as well as a few of his own photographs. Williams thinks of himself as a curmudgeon, because his opnions are personal, thorny and at times sarcastic. Some of his subjects may seem a bit too personal---the beauty of Welsh in poetic motion, for instance---but Williams' saving grace, his interest snare is just his thorny (at times even towards he admires), personal approach, and the proletariat intellectual oratory it produces. He writes that photographer Clarence John Laughlin, "Baudelaire of the Bayous, had all the credentials to become a triumphant American weird. . . . Eye that meat, Cousin Clarence!" The cover here is by the man I consider our greatest living artist, and I had planned to keep my reading of the contents genteel enough to keep the cover image pristine . . . fat chance! I've bent and flattened, carted and towed this book with me everywhere for a couple weeks now. Williams is a classic American Weird, and we should all be glad for that.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Three cheers for Jonathan Williams...,
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This review is from: Blackbird Dust (Paperback)
...who finds his own path through the arcane, the obscure, and the unique. In these 40 essays, some published for the first time, Williams champions the reader as well as the writer, the artist and the tinkerer, the big idea and the passing fancy. What brings them all together is JW's unflagging faith in the individual; his enthusiasm for the regional writers and artists he celebrates (many published for the first time through the Jargon Society) is a joy to read. Sadly, the number of memorials included here (Joel Oppenheimer, James Loughlin, Robert Duncan, among many others) indicates a wealth of talent that is quickly passing; and, as Williams himself notes, the number of "85 genuine poetry readers sounds much too high to me." Still he persists, and continues to promote and publish. The wellspring of American creativity is a self-renewing resource, even as JW echoes Walter Lowenfels: "One reader is a miracle; two, a mass movement." This book is a welcome and needed collection of Williams's wry commentary.
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