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Title: Blackbird Dust by Jonathan Williams ISBN: 1-885983-49-2 Publisher: Turtle Point Pr Pub. Date: 15 September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Southern-fried Bourgeoisophobe
Comment: The poet, of course, says it best: in his introduction, Jonathan Williams calls himself a "Southern-fried bourgeoisophobe." Williams has been an important part of 20th century Cultural Gaia, creating new ways around the standardization and de-poeticization of our cultural life. He keeps a quote from the Shakers on his dresser: "No vice is with us the less ridiculous for being in fashion." A poet and publisher for fifty years hand-runnin', Williams also occasionally takes to the ramparts of out and out prose to express his disdain and delight with matters of appetite of all kinds: for food, bottled spirits, sexual matters, literature, photographs, "outsider art," and more. Blackbird Dust collects nearly four dozen of these "knot gardens," as he calls them, as well as a few of his own photographs. Williams thinks of himself as a curmudgeon, because his opnions are personal, thorny and at times sarcastic. Some of his subjects may seem a bit too personal---the beauty of Welsh in poetic motion, for instance---but Williams' saving grace, his interest snare is just his thorny (at times even towards he admires), personal approach, and the proletariat intellectual oratory it produces. He writes that photographer Clarence John Laughlin, "Baudelaire of the Bayous, had all the credentials to become a triumphant American weird. . . . Eye that meat, Cousin Clarence!" The cover here is by the man I consider our greatest living artist, and I had planned to keep my reading of the contents genteel enough to keep the cover image pristine . . . fat chance! I've bent and flattened, carted and towed this book with me everywhere for a couple weeks now. Williams is a classic American Weird, and we should all be glad for that.