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.
Diogenes sitting in his tub by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860).
Schultz writes so that the general unhingement is revealed in personal perceptions, emotions, and relations; and personal unhingement points back toward the general. If we live in a world of madness and deceit, how can we remain sane and honest?
I emailed Susan Schultz about madness (May 28, 2024): “I really believe there is some general madness becoming more and more prevalent and pervasive in everything — from state policy to personal emotion. There seems no sense of rational-ethical bearing; a general unhingement.
“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The García Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?
“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.
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.
This brief essay, introducing Drafts, was published in its unrevised version in 2017 in a single issue of Thresholds, a prototype journal put out in 2017, that now several years later will publish regularly. I have altered this essay for Jacket2, making some cuts and updates. Here I included a brief consideration of the DuPlessis PennSound Archive in order to celebrate both the 2024 completion of my recording of all the Drafts and the imminent publication of Drafts in 2025 by Coffee House Press.
This brief essay, introducing Drafts, was published in its unrevised version in 2017 in a single issue of Thresholds, a prototype journal put out in 2017, that now several years later will publish regularly. I have altered this essay for Jacket2, making some cuts and updates.
