Customer Reviews

A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude

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I have had a soft spot for Jonathan Williams' photographs for many years, since I first saw one of his wonderful photos of poets' graves in a long forgotten magazine. I was one of the lucky ones who got to "know" Williams in his later years, though only by correspondence, when I was researching a biography of one of the poets Williams had befriended and sponsored, and one day when I was least expecting it the mailman brought me a heavily stiffened package that I just knew had something grand in it! I used a scissors to hack away at the duct tape surrounding all edges of the reinforced cardboard square, and soon my little studio was littered with bits of rubber, plastic, tape and brown paper, and I was in hog heaven when the debris flew away and revealed a gorgeous print Williams had made for me of the man I was writing about. It was his way, he said, of encouraging me. I see this portrait reproduced in A PALPABLE ELYSIUM on page 149, the poet Jack Spicer, casual and nearly unrecognizable in jeans and what looks like an Eisenhower jacket with padded shoulders, one flung back, his hands held awkwardly at different angles, one nearly hidden behind his butt. He's balancing on a huge hunk of felled timber, one of many massive trunks in the photo, a swatch of white sky like a flag poking through the timber at the top center of Williams' composition. The photo is from 1953 and had that eerie fifties quality peeking through it, I suppose a question of the color film stock JW used (and perhaps the particularly romantic gaze of the Rolleiflex with which it was taken).

Not all the photos in the book have this resonance for me, but many are remarkable in any light, and some have that archival quality of wow! Lorine Niedecker, Mina Loy, who else but Williams has given these writers both the high quality exposure their work deserved, or sat them down to give these uncompromising images for posterity. Actually there aren't many women in the book, and the "genius and solitude" subtitle might have been an indication that this was going to be a highly specialized, masculinist vision, but I couldn't help myself, I embraced this book as a memory of the late Jonathan Williams, for who could resist, in the captions that accompany each photograph, a man who tells us that in his youth Michael McClure was so beautiful that JW called him Allure McClure, and once took advantage of an overnight trip to pilfer, for erotic purposes, a pair of Michael's boxer shorts.... God bless him.

This book is exquisitely seductive--a rich and evocative interplay of color portraits of writers and artists accompanied by Williams' idiosyncratic vignettes and recollections. From the imperious Kenneth Rexroth (backdropped by a soda-pop billboard) to little-known outsider artists from the American South, this homage to creative genius and genuine relationship is an absolute blessing. Williams, who founded and ran the publishing house Jargon Society, had an amazing ear for literary talent; he also had an amazing eye with a camera. His subjects are completely at ease in his presence. This book would be a welcome addition to every library, public and private, in the country.

I usually wait a day or two after I read a book to let my thoughts gel before I write a review. However, just moments ago, I finished the last page of this marvelous photo-album/memoir/biography/travelogue and had to write about it immediately.

Williams has written dozens of (mostly) one-page essays combining photographs and the observations made in his journal three or four decades ago with whatever it strikes him to say about them in the light of a couple of (quite full) decades of additional living. The subjects are (almost exclusively) creative people Williams has spent a little time with, plus a few that he wishes he had. Included in these pages are writers, poets, photographers, sculptors, painters, thinkers - a lot of folks I've never heard of, a few that I have, and a few that everyone has, and Williams makes me wish that I could sit down and visit with every one of them. The only thing I can see that they all have in common is that there couldn't be but one of each in the world. In the midst of reading these gems, I was struck with the growing sense that my own cloud of family/friends/aquaintances was rapidly expanding - broader and deeper.

A Palpable Elysium is the best argument I've seen yet for making the people in your life the most important thing in your life. It's certainly an odd book, and Williams has made no attempt (hooray) for it to 'fit' into a category. It's odd; sometimes startling; and frequently surprising. I already know it's one of the best things in my library.

Buy this book and keep it by your reading chair/sofa/bed/tree. Read a couple of entries and study the photos every time you sit down.