Arte y Naturaleza, Madrid, Spain

Emmett Williams Biography

_ United States, 1925_

Emmett Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966. He studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, took courses in anthropology at the University of Paris, and was an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Lugano, Switzerland. He collaborated with Daniel Spoerri and Claus Bremer in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry, dynamic theater, etc., from 1957 to 1959. In the early sixties he was European coordinator of Fluxus, and a founding member of the Domaine Poetique in Paris. His close friendship and collaboration with Robert Filliou resulted in many co-productions and co- inventions.

His publications include konkretionen, Krefeld 1958; ja, es war noch da, an opera, first printed in nota, Munich 1960; poesie et cetera americaine, an anthology of action poetry, Paris 1963; 13 variations on 6 words of gertrude stein, Galerie der Spiegel, Cologne 1965; rotapoems, variations on a poem from Diter Rot's lyrical collection Scheisse, Edition Hansjorg Mayer, Stuttgart 1966, and sweethearts, a long erotic concrete poem cycle, Stuttgart 1967. His theater essays have appeared in Das Neue Forum, Berner Blatter, Ulmer Theater and other European magazines. Williams translated and reanecdoted 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, New York.

His latest work, a boy and a bird, is a long "building" poem, constructed of shifting linguistic relationships.