Williams, Emmett 1925-2007

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 4, 1925, in Greenville, SC; died February 14, 2007, in Berlin, Germany. Artist, editor, educator, and author. Williams was a leading proponent of the 1960s art movement known as Fluxus and was also known as a pioneer of concrete poetry. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and then earned a B.A. from Kenyon College in 1949. In Paris for his honeymoon, he decided to remain in Europe, living in France, Switzerland, and finally Germany. In 1962, he began corresponding with Fluxus founder, George Maciunas, and thus became involved in the movement that some consider the forerunner of performance, video, and conceptual art forms. Four years later, he became managing editor of the Fluxus-related publishing house, The Something Else Press, where he made an impact as editor of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967). Williams wrote his own concrete poetry, too, a style that abandoned ordinary syntax to reorganize language in inventive ways. His best-known collection of such verse is the poem cycle Sweethearts (1967). Other collections include Rotapoems (1966), The Book of Thorn and Eth (1968), The Voyage (1975), and A Little Night Book (1983). After leaving The Something Else Press in 1970, Williams was a professor of art at the California Institute of Arts for two years and a visiting professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design until 1974. Winning a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service in 1980, he returned to Germany and settled in Berlin. He was a guest professor at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and the Hochschule für Bildender Künste in Hamburg in the early 1980s, also teaching for short periods in Japan and Kenya. In addition to his poetry and edited works, he penned several plays, translated works by Daniel Spoerri, and wrote such nonfiction titles as Chicken Feet, Duck Limbs, and Dada Handshakes (1984) and My Life in Flux—and Vice Versa (1992).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Poets, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Williams, Emmett, My Life in Flux—and Vice Versa, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1992.

PERIODICALS

New York Times, March 1, 2007, p. C14.