Selected and otherwise

By WILLIAM CORBETT | May 13, 2008

JONATHAN WILLIAMS — poet, essayist, photographer, and for more than 50 years the publisher of Jargon Books — died this past March at 79. He excelled at everything he did, and if you were interested in what he did and got in touch with him, he met your passion with passion. He published beautifully designed books by Charles Olson (under whom he studied at Black Mountain College), Mina Loy, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Lorine Niedecker, and Thomas Meyer. His own poems are quick and droll and show a great appetite for the odd and out of the way. In 2002, David R. Godine published his book of photographs A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude, with subjects ranging from Kenneth Rexroth and Buckminster Fuller to the graves of Jelly Roll Morton, Erik Satie, and Vincent van Gogh, accompanied by Williams’s commentary. After you Google Williams and Jargon Books, that volume is a good place to begin.

WILLIAM CORBETT’s latest book of poems, Opening Day, has just been published by Hanging Loose Press.

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ARTICLES BY WILLIAM CORBETT

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN’S HIGHS AND LOWS | July 10, 2012
Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) came of age as a writer in Beat Generation San Francisco, but he was no beatnik.

JOE BRAINARD’S COLLECTED WORKS | April 25, 2012
The sui generis artist and writer Joe Brainard invented a literary form.

POEMS, PROSE, AND THE NEW YORKER | February 02, 2011
After John Ashbery described Elizabeth Bishop as "the writer’s writer’s writer," reviewers repeated the witticism as if it were true. Actually, beginning with her first book, Bishop got awards and grants — that master poet politician Robert Lowell was in her corner — that gave her much more public recognition than Merrill's phrase suggests was the case.

REVIEW: PHILIP GUSTON: COLLECTED WRITINGS, LECTURES, AND CONVERSATIONS | January 07, 2011
If you are interested in the great painter Philip Guston (1913–1980), you will want this book. If you are interested in American painting from 1945 on, and into the future, you will want this book. If you enjoy a great talker in top form, you will want this book.

REVIEW: DAVID YOUNG KNOWS WHERE HE'S GOING | October 27, 2010
David Young's Selected and New Poems is a good book by a good poet. You'll have to take my word for that, because I am not going to quote from his poems.