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.
'TRACTOSAUR' by Amelia Dale
A central premise of Amelia Dale’s work is that it is entirely unconcerned with the valence of the work itself. She makes a poem that is a thing before it is a poem, a thing that never wants to be a ‘poem,’ that nevertheless is or gains something when we call it a poem. Here I want to spend some time with Amelia Dale’s 2015 poem TRACTOSAUR, published by Troll Thread in 2015. A Word doc, for example (the origin of her PDF poems), a file type with a fairly rudimentary and utilitarian purpose, becomes for Dale a playful space in which the poem can extend itself beyond its limits.
A central premise of Amelia Dale’s work is that it is entirely unconcerned with the valence of the work itself. She makes a poem that is a thing before it is a poem, a thing that never wants to be a ‘poem,’ that nevertheless is or gains something when we call it a poem. Here I want to spend some time with Amelia Dale’s 2015 poem TRACTOSAUR, published by Troll Thread in 2015.
A Word doc, for example (the origin of her PDF poems), a file type with a fairly rudimentary and utilitarian purpose, becomes for Dale a playful space in which the poem can extend itself beyond its limits. The format — an electronic file of white rectangular frames/pages with a basic sans serif font and a wonderfully gnarly-looking illustration rendered in MS Paint or similar — gives us a thing that wants to decimate our concept of the poem, of even the illustrated poem.