Jonathan Williams’s poetry has been described as brilliant, sensuous, lyrical, quirky, suave, vital, joyful, sardonic, melodious, passionate, alive, pyrotechnic. This new, much enlarged edition of Blues and Roots displays all of the above. Williams has tramped the Appalachian Trail for decades, botanizing, jotting down specimens of authentic American speech, graffiti, superstitions, and nostrums—always curious, alert, and affectionately attentive. Blues and Roots focuses on the linguistic horizon of Appalachia in lyrics of wonder and light, of wit and comic incongruity, in found poems of the speech of his mountain neighbors. Publishers Weekly said of the earlier edition, “One of the most beautiful and evocative tributes to the Appalachians and its people yet published.” Blues and Roots is a fine celebration; Wiliams is a joyful ringmaster.
The poems of Blues and Roots / Rue and Bluets make up an unofficial oral history in verse of the Southern Appalachian folk often vilified and dismissed as hillbillies. Most of these poems are composed in a pungent dialect, as if Huck Finn had settled in the Blue Ridge or Smoky Mountains and continued to view the world's propensity for stupidity and meanness with the humorist's clear-eyed and trenchant truth-telling.
Jonathan Williams’ work of more than half a century is such that no one activity or identity takes primacy over any other—he was the seminal small press publisher of The Jargon Society; a poet of considerable stature; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary correspondent; literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early collector and proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist and Juvenalian critic; curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen and adroit raconteur and gourmand. Williams’ refined decorum and speech, and his sartorial style, contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly, with his delight in the bawdy, with his incisive humor and social criticism, and his confidently experimental, masterful poems and prose. His interests raised “the common to grace,” while paying “close attention to the earthy.” At the forefront of the Modernist avant-garde—yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional—Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved those things he described as, “more and more away from the High Art of the city,” settling “for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass.” Subject to much indifference—despite being celebrated as publisher and poet—he nurtured the nascent careers of hundreds of emerging or neglected poets, writers, artists, and photographers. Recognizing this, Buckminster Fuller once called him “our Johnny Appleseed”, Guy Davenport described him as a “kind of polytechnic institute,” while Hugh Kenner hailed Jargon as “the Custodian of Snowflakes” and Williams as “the truffle-hound of American poetry.” Lesser known for his extraordinary letters and essays, and his photography and art collecting, he is never only a poet or photographer, an essayist or publisher. This book of essays, images, and shouts aims to bring new eyes and contexts to his influence and talent as poet and publisher, but also heighten appreciation for the other facets of his life and art. One might call Williams’ life a poetics of gathering, and this book a first harvest.
This impressive volume provides over 1,700 biographical entries on poets writing in English from 1910 to the present day, including T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Carol Ann Duffy. Authoritative and accessible, it is a must-have for students of English and creative writing, as well as for anyone with an interest in poetry.
Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings, and these traces define a collective voice in modern poetry independent of the more specific influences and backgrounds of the poets themselves. In This Compost Rasula surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview. Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s--Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan--and their successors. But This Compost extends to include earlier poets like Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other contemporary poets. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson also make appearances. Rasula draws this diverse group of poets together, uncovering how the past is a "compost" fertilizing the present. He looks at the heritage of ancient lore and the legacy of modern history and colonial violence as factors contributing to ecological imperatives in modern poetry. This Compost restores the dialogue between poetic language and the geophysical, biological realm of nature that so much postmodern discourse has sought to silence. It is a fully developed, carefully argued book that deals with an underrepresented element in modern American culture, where the natural world and those who write about it have been greatly neglected in contemporary literary history and theory.
Located in the area where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee meet, Pond Mountain rises to over 4,000 feet. In its valley it holds the Pond Mountain community, a small area in Ashe County, North Carolina. Most of the families that live in the valley have been there for generations, farming the land. Here 31 Pond Mountain residents reflect on their childhoods, families, neighbors, customs and traditions, and the changes that have come to their mountain communities. What emerges is a unique look at a way of life that is rapidly being lost to history.
Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work. Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical examination, Olson emerges as a stunning theorist and poet, whose erratic and often unfinished writings obscured his provocative intellect and the coherence of his perspective on the arts. Soon after World War II, Olson emerged as one of America's leading poets with his revolutionary document on poetics, "Projective Verse," and his now-classic poem, "The Kingfishers," both of which declared a new set of techniques for verse composition. Throughout the 1950s Olson wrote many polemical essays on literature, history, aesthetics, and philosophy that outlined a new stance to experience he called objectism. A firm advocate of spontaneous self-expression in the arts, Olson regarded the poet's return to an intense declaration of individuality as a force to combat the decade's insistence on conformity. Throughout his life Olson fought against the depersonalization of the artist in the modern age; his resources, raw verve and unedited tumultuous lyricism, were weapons he used against generalized life and identity. This volume begins with an overview of Olson's life from his early years as a student at Harvard through his short-lived political career, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, and his retirement to Gloucester to finish writing the Maximus poems. Christensen provides a systematic review of Olson's prose works, including a close examination of his brilliant monograph on Melville, Call Me Ishmael. Considerable attention is devoted to Olson's theory of projectivism, the themes and techniques of his short poems, and the strategies and content of his major work, the Maximus series. In addition, there is a critical survey of the works of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and other poets who show Olson's influence in their own innovative, self-exploratory poetry.
This guidebook is the first of three regional volumes that invite residents and out-of-state visitors to explore North Carolina while reading literature from our state's finest writers. Organized geographically through a series of eighteen half-day and day-long tours in the western part of the state, the book directs curious travelers to the historic sites where Tar Heel authors have lived and worked. Along the way, travelers can read outstanding excerpts from the writers, evoking the places, customs, colloquialisms, and characters that figure prominently in their poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and plays. More than 170 writers from the past and present are featured in this volume, including Sequoyah, Elizabeth Spencer, Fred Chappell, Charles Frazier, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Robert Morgan, William Bartram, Gail Godwin, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Lillian Jackson Braun, Nina Simone, and Romulus Linney. Each tour provides information about the libraries, museums, colleges, bookstores, and other venues open to the public where writers regularly present their work or are represented in exhibits, events, performances, and festivals.
