Background
Williams, Jonathan Chamberlain was born on March 8, 1929 in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. Son of Thomas Benjamin and Georgette (Chamberlain) Williams.
(As a country, America has never been a slouch at producin...)
As a country, America has never been a slouch at producing "originals," a term applied loosely and glibly to everyone from rock stars to CEOs. But if any place of the past century really did spawn originals like a breeding box, it was Black Mountain College, and among its many illustrious graduates is Jonathan Williams: poet, publisher, raconteur, and eclectic collector of like spirits. In this wonderfully quirky book, Williams has made the rounds and produced his inventory of poets, painters, writers, and artists whose only commonality is their unequivocal distinction. And what a world it is, populated by his friends, some alive and some quite dead, people he knew, and people he wished he had known; famous people (Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Paul Strand, Buckminster Fuller, William Carlos Williams), people who should be famous but aren't (Basil Bunting, Frederick Sommer, Aaron Siskind, Wendell Berry, Charles Olson, James Laughlin), and the gravestones of some who were once famous, are now interred, and whose memories he'd have us honor (H.P. Lovecraft, Wallace Stevens, Erik Satie, James Thurber). Musicians, writers, composers, and especially the white and black geniuses of Outsider Art (Howard Finster, Elijah Pierce, Keith Smith) are all here, alive and kicking, in Williams's heaven of honorary prodigies. This self-contained galaxy, this "home-made world" of extraordinary personalities captured on film and then decoded in extended captions, presents people of genuine accomplishment who are never going to be feted in the pages of People or interviewed on Oprah. As Davenport writes, "He is not a journalist looking for feature stories, nor a critic with an agenda, nor a lion hunter collecting names to drop. A cultural anthropologist? I see parallels with Ruskin finding forgotten painters of the Trecento." Here is the flip side of America, where fame seldom intersects or coexists with true talent, and where the truly gifted often inhabit their own domains, hermetic, unseen, unheralded, but always present in the creative flux of our cultural landscape.
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( Jonathan Williams founded The Jargon Society—a publishe...)
Jonathan Williams founded The Jargon Society—a publisher dedicated to poetry, experimental fiction, photography and visionary folk art—and has championed the underdog, maverick and outsider in the arts for 50 years. He has also published over 100 of his own books, pamphlets and broadsides of poetry, essays and photography. Jubilant Thicket collects the best of his poetry and teems with the eccentric, strange and boundlessly authentic—neoclassical poems, social satire, musical suites and lyrics. There is spleen, salt and a delicious -sarcasm, as Williams finds inspiration in Mahler and Mojo Nixon, Blake and whimmydiddles. There is nobody quite like Jonathan Williams: “He is one of the few poets about whom it could be said, he has never bored a reader.”—Contemporary Poets “Of all the Black Mountain poets (teachers and disciples alike), Jonathan Williams is the wittiest, the least constrained, the most joyous.”—The New York Times “Jonathan Williams is himself a kind of polytechnic -institute, trained to write poems as spare, functional and alive as a blade of grass.”—Guy Davenport, from The Geography of the Imagination “Indispensable! . . . We need him more than we know.”—R. Buckminster Fuller Of the thousands of essays and reviews published about his work, Williams writes, “The best thing yet said about me came from an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. His letter ended: ‘Thanks for writing all those kick-ass books.’” Jonathan Williams’s most recent book is A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (Godine). He founded The Jargon Society in 1951, a publisher that, according to The New York Times, “has come to occupy a special place in the cultural life as patron of the American imagination.” He lives on Skywinding Farm in rural North Carolina.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556592027/?tag=2022091-20
Williams, Jonathan Chamberlain was born on March 8, 1929 in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. Son of Thomas Benjamin and Georgette (Chamberlain) Williams.
Williams attended Saint Albans School in Washington, District of Columbia, and then Princeton University, before dropping out to attend the Chicago Institute of Design and Black Mountain College, where he studied painting and graphic arts with Stanley William Hayter.
Along with David Ruff, Williams founded The Jargon Society in 1951, with the goal of publishing obscure writers. Based in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, as well as the Yorkshire Dales in England, Jargon was long associated with the Black Mountain Poets. The press has published work by Charles Olson, Paul Metcalf, Lorine Niedecker, Lou Harrison, Mina Loy, Joel Oppenheimer, Ronald Johnson, James Broughton, Alfred Starr Hamilton and many other works by the American and British avant-garde.
Once described as "a busy gadfly who happened somehow to pitch on a slope in western North Carolina," Williams was a living link between the experimental poets of Modernism"s "second wave" and the unknown vernacular artists of Appalachia.
Guy Davenport likened Williams" use of "found language" to the use of "found footage" by avant-garde filmmakers, as well as describing Williams as a species of cultural anthropologist. Williams for his part explained the fascination of such material in plainer terms: The literary critic Hugh Kenner described Williams as the "truffle hound of American poetry." A longtime contributing editor of the photography journal Aperture, Williams divided his time between England and Scaly Mountain, North Carolina.
He died March 16, 2008 in Highlands, North Carolina from pneumonia.
( Jonathan Williams founded The Jargon Society—a publishe...)
(As a country, America has never been a slouch at producin...)
( Jonathan Williams is a poet, publisher, photographer, p...)
(Book by Blaskower, Pat, Williams, Joanne)
Member Bruckner Society of America, Gadfly: The Mencken/Fields Trust, The Cast-Iron Lawn-Deer Owners of America (vice president 1960), The Campaign for Real Ale, The Delius Society, Mervyn Peake Society, Frivolist Movement (founding member).
Life partner Thomas Meyer.