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.—Robert Morgan, The Nation
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.
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.—Robert Morgan, The Nation
