An Ear in Bartram's Tree: Selected Poems 1957-1967

... Williams finds his poetic grist in the stars as well as ourselves, to twist a Shakespearean line, and he's not one to shy away from other masters to whom he's listened with care. Ezra Pound is Williams's "familiar compound ghost," and appears to Charles Olson ("let the song lie in the thing," from "Some Southpaw Pitching"). There is an echo in that from another, William Carlos Williams -- no relation -- who insisted "no ideas but in things." ... Jonathan Williams, poet, is a Southerner by birth but by no means a parochial one, and a wanderer too. What Williams finds in England, Wales, and Scotland (as well as Spillville, Iowa: "between Eldorado and Jericho / west of / US 52") is not a second heritage but one in which he was raised from the beginning. He's aware of this heritage because he is consciously adding to it, a tangled American idiom largely untraced in and out of officially-sanctioned literature and art. His long zig-zag trips can easily be explained by noting he is a publisher of books unwelcome to commercial publishers, and by the fact that to know artists and poets of a certain stripe, one has to travel to the smallest of American towns. He persists, because that's where the poetry is. The next time you read a slack, obscure convoluted poem, reflect that it was written in an age when printing has replaced recitation. Remember too that the best poetry still resounds in the inner ear as much as it appeals to the scanning eye. Thousands of people have heard poetry for every five readers who know it on the printed page. A poetry collection, like "An Ear in Bartram's Tree," is an offering to that charming fiction known as the reading public, best to be read out loud. For more about "An Ear in Bartram's Tree," visit BellemeadeBooks at Blogger.com