Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, and Photographs

Offbeat poet and publisher Williams, who turns 71 this year, has been a presence on the American and British lit scenes since the 1950s, when he visited the fabled Black Mountain College to study photography. In the tradition of wayward and self-published amateur writers, his prose can have the cranky charm of the self-taught, while his verse is well-nigh unendurable. The best item in this highly uneven collection is a conversation with the poet and acolyte of Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting. James Dickey haters will find Williams's excoriation of him a lot of fun. But these sympathetic elements are almost lost in the chaff of prefaces, ghastly attempts at the light verse form, the clerihew, japes and strenuously bad writing. Obituary articles for the London newspaper the Independent are unsatisfactory mementos of writers like Robert Duncan and Joel Oppenheimer. An effort at a preface to a collection by the American poet James Broughton was sensibly rejected by the publisher: ""COCKADOODLEDOO, crowed the cockerel! COCK'LL DO COCK'LL DO JUST FINE, cried the poet!"" A city-hating (as he states often here) gentleman of rural North Carolina, Williams has for years run the Jargon Society press, an early reclaimer of Mina Loy. Unfortunately, this book does not prove a similar find, and won't get beyond a small circle of friends and admirers. (Oct. 31)