Jonathan Williams

Navigating distance in locality

An interview with Tom Patterson, featuring photographs by Jonathan Williams

Photo of Tom Patterson taken by Jonathan Williams in 1980 at the Ocmulgee National Monument. Courtesy of Tom Patterson.

I initially reached out to Tom Patterson in June 2019 with a research inquiry related to poets practicing in the American South during the late 1970s and ’80s. Although he’s now known primarily as a writer on contemporary art and an independent curator, Tom has served in multiple roles with small poetry presses over the years, perhaps most notably as the executive director of the Jargon Society from 1984–87, where he led Jargon’s Southern Visionary Folk Art Preservation Project.

Note: I initially reached out to Tom Patterson in June 2019 with a research inquiry related to poets practicing in the American South during the late 1970s and ’80s. Although he’s now known primarily as a writer on contemporary art and an independent curator, Tom has served in multiple roles with small poetry presses over the years, perhaps most notably as the executive director of the Jargon Society from 1984–87, where he led Jargon’s Southern Visionary Folk Art Preservation Project.

June 17, 2020

Jonathan Williams: The lord of orchards

A giant feature in Jacket 38

John Tranter

INTRODUCTION:
[»»] Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens: The Lord of Orchards: Jonathan Williams at 80: (Excerpt:) Throughout his life in poetry and the arts Williams preferred active involvement with artists and the world at large over cloistered study or administrative labor: “I clearly did not want to become a Byzantinist in the basement of The Morgan Library; or an art critic for The New Yorker; nor did I want to live in the world of competitive business.” His work in the arts thus demanded direct and persistent engagement with the world — a form of engagement that gave rise to both enduring friendships and irreconcilable conflicts.

REMEMBERING:
[»»] Jonathan Williams: A Life in Pictures
[»»] Basil Bunting: Comment on Jonathan Williams
[»»] Dear JW: Erica Van Horn
[»»] James McGarrell: Mountainside Reader; for JW
[»»] Ann McGarrell: À mon cher Stodge
[»»] Anne Midgette: On With It
[»»] Bob Arnold: Swept in with the Rain
[»»] Charles Lambert: Acts of Kindness
[»»] Diana C. Stoll: Jonathan Williams: More Mouth on that Man
[»»] Gary Carden: The Bard of Scaly Mountain
[»»] Harry Gilonis: from Pliny: Naturalis Historia XXVII. xvi 58
[»»] John Mitzel: Jonathan Williams: An Appreciation
[»»] Michael Rumaker’s Last Letter to Jonathan Williams
[»»] Robert Kelly: Colonel Generosity — Saying Thank You to Jonathan Williams
[»»] Ronald Johnson: A Microscopic/ Telescopic Collage of «The Empire Finals at Verona»

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza