Natures: Jonathan's obituary

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Jonathan's obituary

Ron Silliman today posts a link to an interview with Jonathan Williams that Jeffrey Beam published in Rain Taxi's Spring 2003 edition. It contains this wonderful exchange:

JB: This is a morbid question, but I hope a revealing one. Someday—a long time hence, since you are as mean as a cottonmouth and you're going to live a long time—what would you like your epitaph to be?

JW: It's the one I wrote for Uncle Iv Owens: "He did what he could, when he got round to it." (laughs)

Ron, as usual, has got a great compendium of links to other appreciations of Jonathan and his work, so give the link a click.

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Updates: Pierre Joris also has a warm appreciation of Jonathan and his work over at Nomadics.

My previous memorial post on Jonathan is here. The memorial show for Jonathan will stream this Sunday, March 23rd, at 2:00 PM EDT from the WPVM web site. It will be available as an on-demand stream and podcast Monday, the 24th, from the station archive page. Shows are listed alphabetically, so just scroll down to find Wordplay.

Another update, April 5, 2008: Jonathan's reading at City Lights is now archived at PennSound, here.

Labels: Black Mountain poets, Jeffery Beam, Jonathan Williams

Praise for NatureS

"Way back when, a literary gent by the name of E.L. Pound, from Hailey, Idaho, announced to the world: 'I divide poetry into what I can read and what I cannot read.' I am new to Jeff Davis's work but hit'll read!!! It reminds me that writers named Robert Creeley and Charles Olson once taught at Black Mountain College in Buncombe County NC - and made a difference."

~Jonathan Williams

"These poems are succinct in language and insights - no waste of words here - lovely and moving jewels of the Eleusinian luminous darkness, a magnificent shining in the dark. Poems (all of them) that are gifts, with a sassy bit of awareness to ground them all. At their best, they show an excellent eye and ear for the images and rhythms of nature - fresh, clear, as any sparkling mountain stream - and sing with that limpidity Olson was always trying to drum into my head at Black Mountain. Jeff Davis is a poet who knows what most males thirst to know - and die, not knowing. 'I am written,' Rimbaud said, and he is just that in these poems."

~Michael Rumaker

"Being human and part of nature, what we have in common with the natural world is something we gain then lose, gain then lose, over and over. The continual process of holding and letting go makes up the world we smell, we taste, we see, we feel, we hear, we share. As the custodian of this experience we have none better than Jeff Davis. He has been tireless in his practice of recording these dark and luminous encounters: the flicker of love, or the shadow of leaves in the wind."

~Thomas Meyer