On the sermons of Tyrone Williams
A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022.
Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.
Poetics List (1993-2014)
I started the Poetics List in late 1993, just after I came to Buffalo and co-founded the Poetics Program and a little while before the founding of the Electronic Poetry Center. When the list began, a email-based discussion group was a radically new format. There was no web interface and no way to filter messages. Emails were read and written via on-line ascii systems. During the first six years of the list, a deep and wide ranging discussion developed among the few hundred of us actively participating. I asked that the list address not be publicized so that we could keep the discussion to those with shared interests and that the list not become a general interest poetry forum. Much of the spirit of the early list was captured by Joel Kuszai, who edited Poetics@, for which I wrote the introduction. This ROOF book is available free in as epub, mobi, or pdf; or via Amazon.