More than any other poet, Jonathan Williams has used the Objectivist principle, the idea that a poem is first of all a linguistic, phonetic, graphic object. He takes the language eroding right now in our mouths and cultivates it, shapes it, and speaks it to life. For Williams more than anyone I know, poetry is an active art, the language being spoken.
Jonathan Williams (1929–2008) was a poet, publisher and photographer from Scaly Mountain, North Carolina. As founder of the long-running poetry and arts journal, The Jargon Society, Williams published work from Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer and many other prominent poets of the avant-garde. Williams’s own poetry was highly unique, employing “found language” from Appalachia.
An Ear in Bartram’s Tree, a selection made by Jonathan Williams himself, includes 158 poems written over the ten-year period 1957-67; it was first published in hard cover by the University of North Carolina Press in 1969. Amusing, satirical and witty, Williams has yet been called “the most lyrical of young poets”––evidence of the great range of mood and style at which he excels. Also varying, from the academic all the way to the ironic, are the elaborate notes appended to the poems in this volume. The title of the collection celebrates the early American naturalist William Bartram’s discovery of that rarest of native trees, Franklinia Alatamaha, which has not been seen in the wild since 1803.
More than any other poet, Jonathan Williams has used the Objectivist principle, the idea that a poem is first of all a linguistic, phonetic, graphic object. He takes the language eroding right now in our mouths and cultivates it, shapes it, and speaks it to life. For Williams more than anyone I know, poetry is an active art, the language being spoken.
