Jonathan Williams, RIP

Brian Berger, whose funny, erudite, and freewheeling blog Who Walk in Brookyln I read faithfully, has posted a very nice obituary for the poet, publisher, and graphic designer Jonathan Williams, who died on March 16. The critic Hugh Kenner called Williams the "truffle-hound of American poetry," because he championed the work of some of the most important poets in mid 20th-century America, including Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, and discovered dozens of lesser-known talents, too.

Berger also posts an obituary that Williams wrote for himself in 1994. Here it is:

Jonathan Williams, born Asheville, North Carolina, 1929 was one of Charles Olson's students at Black Mountain College, commencing in 1951. For 43 years, he has been the publisher of the Jargon Society, an internationally unknown, rusticated, distinguished writer's press. Mr. Williams is a poet, essayist, photographer, occasional walker of long distances across the Basque Pirineos, around Mont Blanc, through the Schwarzwald, connoisseur of single-malt whiskies, and curmudgeon of the jocular persuasion. Recent publications: Anathema Maranatha! (Richard Minsky, New York); No-No Nse-Nse (Walter Hamady's perishable press); Letters to Mencken From the Land of Pink Lichen (Dim Gray Bar Press, New York). Seeking publication are a book of essays, Blackbird Dust; a book on Outsiders in the South (with photographers Roger Manley, Walks to the Paradise Garden; and Jonathan Williams' Quote Book. Mr. Williams is happy to be covered by Medicare in such troubled times. He adheres to the songs and dances of Federico Mompou, the basketball of the Carolina Tar Heels, and the barbeflorida-- like delius-- is the south (sometimes)cue Mrs. Grace Proffitt of Bluff City, Tennessee. Jonathan Williams and his poet/astrologer companion, Thomas Meyer, divide their year between a farm near Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, and a 17th-century stone cottage in Dentdale, Cumbria, England. He agrees with Herr Wittgenstein, "Never take know for an answer."

Mr. Williams was 79. The New York Times also ran an obit; click here to read it.