Palpable Elysium Portraits of Genius and Solitude

As a country, America has never been a slouch at producing "originals," a term applied loosely & glibly to everyone from rock stars to CEOs. But if any place of the past century really did spawn originals like a breeding box, it was Black Mountain College, & among its many illustrious graduates is one Jonathan Williams, poet, publisher, raconteur, & eclectic collector of like spirits. In this wonderfully quirky book, Williams has made the rounds & produced his inventory of poets, painters, writers, & artists whose only commonality is their unequivocal distinction. And what a world it is, populated by his friends, some alive & some quite dead, people he knew, & people he wished he had known; famous people (Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Paul Strand, Buckminster Fuller, William Carlos Williams), people who should be famous but aren't (Basil Bunting, Frederick Sommer, Aaron Siskind, Wendell Berry, Charles Olson, James Laughlin), & the gravestones of some who were once famous, are now interred, & whose memories he'd have us honor (H.P. Lovecraft, Wallace Stevens, Erik Satie, James Thurber). Musicians, writers, composers, & especially the white & black geniuses of Outsider Art (Howard Finster, Elijah Pierce, Keith Smith) are all here, alive & kicking, in Williams's heaven of honorary prodigies. This self-contained galaxy, this "home-made world" of extraordinary personalities captured on film & then decoded in extended captions, presents people of genuine accomplishment who are never going to be feted in the pages of People or interviewed on Oprah. As Davenport writes, "He is not a journalist looking for feature stories, nor a critic with an agenda, nor a lion hunter collecting names to drop. A cultural anthropologist? I see parallels with Ruskin finding forgotten painters of the Trecento." Here is the flip side of America, where fame seldom intersects or coexists with true talent, & where the truly gifted often inhabit their own domains, hermetic, unseen, unheralded, but always present in the creative flux of our cultural landscape.Williams, Jonathan is the author of 'Palpable Elysium Portraits of Genius and Solitude', published 2002 under ISBN 9781567921496 and ISBN 1567921493.