Vocation : Writers : Poet

Emmett_Williams

Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Noël.
Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966. Williams studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, anthropology at the University of Paris, and worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Switzerland.
As an artist and poet, Emmett Williams collaborated with Daniel Spoerri and German poet Claus Bremer in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry from 1957 to 1959. One of his notable pieces from this period is "Four-Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices" (1957), in which five performers are each assigned one word of the phrase "You just never quite know", and say their word according to a grid on a card, keeping together with the beat of a metronome: when a black circle appears on the grid, the performer speaks the word, and when no circle appears they say nothing. In the resulting performance, the core phrase "you never quite know" is overshadowed by other combinations of words, such as "you know" and "quite just".In the 1960s, Williams was the European coordinator of Fluxus and worked closely with French artist Robert Filliou, and a founding member of the Domaine Poetique in Paris, France. His work appeared in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. Williams was friends with Václav Havel during his dissident years' he translated some of Havel's work into English. Williams was a guest artist in residence teaching at Mount Holyoke College from September 1975 to June 1976.
Williams' theater essays appeared in Das Neue Forum, Berner Blatter, Ulmer Theater, and other European magazines. He translated Daniel Spoerri's Topographie Anecdotee du Hasard (An Anecdoted Topography of Chance), collaborated with Claes Oldenburg on Store Days, and edited An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, all published by the Something Else Press, which was owned and managed by fellow Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s Williams was Editor in Chief of the Something Else Press.
In 1991, Williams published an autobiography, My Life in Fluxus - And Vice Versa, published by Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Stuttgart, and reprinted the next year by Thames and Hudson.
In 1996, he was honored for his life work with the Hannah-Höch-Preis. He died in Berlin in 2007.
In 2014, Edition Zédélé published a reprint of SOLDIER (Reprint Collection, curated by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Clive Phillpot), first published in A Valentine for Noel (1973) by Something Else Press and Hansjörg Mayer.

Robert_W._Watson

Robert W. Watson (December 26, 1925 - February 27, 2012) was born in Passaic, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Johns Hopkins University, where he received a doctoral degree in 1955. From 1953 to his retirement in 1987, he served as a member of the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was the main architect of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at UNCG. The program is considered one of the best in the nation. In 1966, Watson and graduate writing student Lawrence Judson Reynolds began the Greensboro Review, a respected literary journal that has since earned a national reputation.Some of Watson’s awards and honors include: the American Scholar Poetry Prize (1959), a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship (1974-1975), and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1977).
In 1980, he authored an article, published as "Media Martyrdom" in Harper's Magazine and excerpted as "The Other Side of the Greensboro Shootout" in the Washington Post, in which he defended the Ku Klux Klan for their actions in the Greensboro massacre.

Anne_Waldman

Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet.
Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.

Diane_Wakoski

Diane Wakoski (born August 3, 1937) is an American poet. Wakoski is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. She received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism.

William_Pitt_Root

William Pitt Root (born 1941 Austin, Minnesota) is an American poet.He was raised in Fort Myers, Florida.He studied at the University of Washington, and University of North Carolina at Greensboro.He was Tucson Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2002, and taught at Hunter College.
He was a US/UK Exchange Artist, Rockefeller Foundation fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and an NEA fellow.His work appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harpers, The Nation, Commonweal, The American Poetry Review, Tri@uarterly, and Poetry. He is poetry editor of Cutthroat Magazine.He is married to poet Pamela Uschuk; they live near Durango, Colorado and Tucson Arizona