WILLIAMS, Emmett

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Nationality: American. Born: Greenville, South Carolina, 4 April 1925. Education: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, B.A. 1949; University of Paris. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1943–46. Family: Married 1) Laura Powell MacCarteney in 1949, two daughters and one son; 2) Ann Nöel Stevenson in 1970, one son. Career: Lived in Europe, 1949–66: on the staff of European Stars & Stripes, in Darmstadt; assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin, in Lugano; associated with the Darmstadt group of concrete poets; founding member of the Domaine Poetique, Paris, and the international Fluxus group since 1962. Editor-in-chief, Something Else Press, New York, 1966–70; artist-in-residence, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey, 1968, and University of Kentucky, Lexington, 1969; professor of art, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, 1970–72; guest professor, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, 1972–74; artist-in-residence, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1975–77; artist-in-residence, research fellow, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977–80; artist-in-residence Berliner Kunstler Programm, 1980. Artist-in-residence and guest professor, Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin, and Hochschule für bildender Künste, Hamburg, 1981–85. Co-founder and director, International Symposium of the Arts, Warsaw, 1987–88. Artist-in-residence, Machida-shi Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo, 1987, and Malindi Artists' Proof, Malindi, Kenya, 1990 and 1992. Since 1990 president, The Artists' Museum, Lodz, Poland. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1979. Address: Koblenzerstr 17, 10715 Berlin, Germany.

Publications

Poetry

Konkretionen. Darmstadt, Gemmany, Material, 1958.

13 Variations on 6 Words by Gertrude Stein (1958). Cologne, Galerie der Spiegel, 1965.

Rotapoems. Stuttgart, Hansjörg Mayer, 1966.

The Last French-Fried Potato and Other Poems. New York, Something Else Press, 1967.

Sweethearts. Stuttgart, Hansjörg Mayer, 1967; New York, Something Else Press, 1968.

The Book of Thorn and Eth. Stuttgart, Hansjörg Mayer, 1968.

The Boy and the Bird. Stuttgart, Hansjörg Mayer, and New York, Wittenborn, 1968; new edition, illustrated by the author, Stuttgart and London, Hansjörg Mayer, 1979.

A Valentine for Nöel. Stuttgart, Hansjörg Mayer, 1973.

Selected Shorter Poems 1950–1970. Stuttgart, Hansjörg Mayer, 1974; New York, New Directions, 1975.

The Voyage. Stuttgart, Hanjorg Mayer, 1975.

Faustzeichnungen, illustrated by the author. Berlin, Rainer, 1983.

A Little Night Book, illustrated by Keith Godard. New York, Works, 1983.

Deutsche Gedichte und Lichtskulpturen, illustrated by the author. Berlin, Rainer Verlag, 1988.

La Dernière Pomme Frite et Autres Poemes des Fifties et Sixties. Geneva, Centre de Gravure Contemporaine, 1989.

Aleph, Alpha, and Alfalfa. Berlin, Haus am Lutzowplatz, 1993.

Plays

Ja, Es war noch da (produced Darmstadt, Germany, 1960). Published in Nota 4 (Munich), 1960; as Yes It Was Still There (produced New York, 1965).

A Cellar Song for 5 Voices (produced New York, 1961).

4-Directional Song of Doubt for 5 Voices (produced Wiesbaden, Germany, 1962).

The Ultimate Poem (produced Arras, France, 1964).

Other

Six Variations upon a Spoerri Landscape: A Suite of Lithographs. Halifax, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Lithography Workshop, 1973.

Zodiac (lithographs). Tokyo, Gallery Birthday Star, 1974.

Schemes and Variations (autobiographical essays and illustrations). Berlin, Nationalgalerie, and Stuttgart and London, Hansjörg Mayer, 1981.

Holdup (photodrama), with Keith Godard. New York, Works, 1981.

Chicken Feet, Duck Limbs, and Dada Handshakes. Vancouver, Western Front, 1984.

schutzengel/l'ange gardien/guardian angel/angelo custode. Cologne, Edition Hundertmark, 1985.

My Life in Flux—and Vice Versa. London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Editor, Poésie et cetera américaine. Paris, Biennale, 1963.

Editor, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. New York, Something Else Press, 1967.

Editor, Store Days, by Claes Oldenburg. New York, Something Else Press, 1967.

Editor, "Language Happenings," in Open Poetry: Four Anthologies of Expanded Poems. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1973.

Editor, with Ann Nöel, Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas 1931–1978. London, Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Translator, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance…, by Daniel Spoerri. New York, Something Else Press, 1966.

Translator, The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir John Mandeville by Daniel Spoerri. New York, Something Else Press, 1970.

Translator, Mythology and Meatballs: A Greek Island Diary-Cook-book, by Daniel Spoerri. Berkeley, California, Aris, 1982.

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Bibliography: In Schemes and Variations, 1981; An Annotated Bibliography by P. Frank Brattleboro, Vermont, Something Else Press, 1983.

Manuscript Collections: Sohm Archive, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Sackner Archive, Miami Beach, Florida.

Critical Studies: Concrete Poetry: A World View by M.E. Solt, Bloomington, University of Indiana, 1968; "A Blurb for Emmett" by R. Hamilton, in Collected Words (London), 1982; "All Han Zon Dek!" by S. MacDonald, in Afterimage (Rochester, New York), 12(6), 1985; "Fluxus Today and Yesterday" by J. Pijnappel, in Art & Design (London), 28, 1992; "Poetry As Life and Life As Fiesta" by A. Arias-Misson, in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), April-May 1992.

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Emmett Williams's name is better known than his poetry, and one reason for this is that he edited An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, which has outsold its competitors (including an anthology of mine). At the same time most of his poetry remains unpublished, particularly in his native country. Unlike other American writers of his generation, Williams became closely involved in the 1950s with the European intermedia avant-garde, epitomized by the so-called Darmstadt Circle, in which he figured prominently. By the 1960s he was an initiator of Fluxus, an international post-Dada, mixed-means movement that won considerable attention at the time but that has escaped most historians of contemporary art and literature. Thus, to an unusual degree his writing reflects the experimental tradition in the nonliterary arts. For instance, he echoed not Dylan Thomas but rather Kurt Schwitters in his early performance poems, to use the term that refers to poems whose most appropriate form is not the printed page but rather live performance.

It was Williams's good fortune to learn that English-language poetry could be composed in radically alternative ways, different not only from the academic poetry of the time but also from the declamatory expressionism of, say, Allen Ginsberg. Instead, Williams pioneered the art of concrete poetry, in which the poet eschews conventional syntax and related devices to organize language in other ways. Rather than using free form, Williams favored such severe constraints as repetition, permutation, and linguistic minimalism. His masterpiece, the book-length Sweethearts, consists of one word (the title) whose eleven letters are visually distributed over 150 or so sequentially expressive pages, the work as a whole relating the evolution of a relationship between a man and a woman. Like Williams's other work, Sweethearts is extremely witty, and like much else in experimental writing, it must be seen and read for its magic to be believed.

—Richard Kostelanetz