Jonathan Williams founded The Jargon Society—a publisher dedicated to poetry, experimental fiction, photography and visionary folk art—and has championed the underdog, maverick and outsider in the arts for 50 years. He has also published over 100 of his own books, pamphlets and broadsides of poetry, essays and photography.
Jubilant Thicket collects the best of his poetry and teems with the eccentric, strange and boundlessly authentic—neoclassical poems, social satire, musical suites and lyrics. There is spleen, salt and a delicious -sarcasm, as Williams finds inspiration in Mahler and Mojo Nixon, Blake and whimmydiddles. There is nobody quite like Jonathan Williams:
“He is one of the few poets about whom it could be said, he has never bored a reader.”—Contemporary Poets
“Of all the Black Mountain poets (teachers and disciples alike), Jonathan Williams is the wittiest, the least constrained, the most joyous.”—The New York Times
“Jonathan Williams is himself a kind of polytechnic -institute, trained to write poems as spare, functional and alive as a blade of grass.”—Guy Davenport, from The Geography of the Imagination
“Indispensable! . . . We need him more than we know.”—R. Buckminster Fuller
Of the thousands of essays and reviews published about his work, Williams writes, “The best thing yet said about me came from an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. His letter ended: ‘Thanks for writing all those kick-ass books.’”
Jonathan Williams’s most recent book is A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (Godine). He founded The Jargon Society in 1951, a publisher that, according to The New York Times, “has come to occupy a special place in the cultural life as patron of the American imagination.” He lives on Skywinding Farm in rural North Carolina.
