Jonathan Williams, 1929-2008

I'd love to be

his jockey shorts

on Friday night

"Some people . . . find the poems vulgar," he wrote. "I no more write for 'nice' people than I do for 'common' ones. I make poems for the people who want them."

Jonathan collected things the way he collected words. Hugh Kenner called him "the truffle hound of poetry." He collected poets and artists, living and dead, capturing portraits and gravestones with Rolleiflex and Polaroid (some gathered in A Palpable Elysium). Other quests included outsider artists long before "outsider art" was a term; hikes in beautiful landscapes such as the Yorkshire Dales, where he spent half of each year in a 17th-century stone cottage; recorded music from Mahler to Mojo Nixon; and gourmet food (often thanks to Tom Meyer, his partner of 40 years, whose own poems -- collected in At Dusk Iridescent-- twine through the Jargon oeuvre with balletic grace).

He wanted to share all this bounty. When you visited, he would present you with stacks of books or sit you down for single-malt scotch and a recording of Messiaen's "Turangalila" Symphony. And he felt keenly that not enough people wanted what he had to offer. But he was allergic to anything that smacked of the establishment. Jargon's one commercial success (ultimately sold to another publisher who could handle the demand) was the cookbook White Trash Cooking, by Ernest Matthew Mickler, and it was quintessential Jonathan: seen as being in poor taste by many people, focusing on a marginalized population, and including some seriously good food.

Many of Williams's poems (collected in 2004 in Jubilant Thicket) and essays (sampled in the exuberant Blackbird Dust) are memorials, valedictories, obituaries: a last chance to let people know about somebody they should have heard of, long past (painter Samuel Palmer) or recent (photographer Raymond Moore). For Basil Bunting, who led him to the Dales, Jonathan erected a postcard memorial that, like many of his poems, sneaks around so-called literary standards to lodge in the consciousness like a found beach pebble, smooth and solid and reassuring in one's palm. It stands, now, for him as well:

At Briggflatts Burial Ground

Dear Basil,

Eighteen months after you left us,

poetry (that abused & discredited substance;

that refuge of untalented snobs, yobs,

and bores)

sinks nearer the bottom of the whirling world.

For the rest, you there in the earth

hear the crunch of small bones

as owl and mouse, priest and weasel,

stone and cardoon, oceans and gentlemen

get on with it . . .

-- Anne Midgette is a music critic for The Washington Post and knew Williams for many years.