The Letters of Ronald Johnson and Jonathan Williams: Edited, with a biographical and critical introduction by Devin King

This thesis examines the mentor/mentee relationship in letters between two post-war American poets, Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson. Attached to the thesis is an appendix: the first major edition of 217 of the letters, prepared with footnotes and a gloss. Through analysis of the letters, I argue that Williams and Johnson’s collaborative attention to Black Mountain poetry and their experience as out gay men during an era of societal transformation broaden the possibilities of the lyric self in American poetry. My Introduction argues that the work of these poets cuts across two eras—modernism and postmodernism. In Chapter One I show how poetic knowledge and tradition is passed on through reading lists and coterie traditions shared in the letters. In Chapter Two I explore how the men’s poetry brings autobiography into contact with the poetics of Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams. This allows me, in Chapter Three, to attend to the men’s display of homosexuality within their poetry, with reference to Jeanne Heuving’s work about queer desire in Robert Duncan’s poetry and Daniel Katz’s analysis of Jack Spicer’s poetics of “co-respondence.” I argue for Williams and Johnson’s version of collaboration: not sharing authorship but allowing the poem to develop through contact with desire, a desire that also admits the natural world—one of the men’s shared loves—into the men’s poetry. In Chapter Four I engage with other of their shared languages: the camp techniques and folk vernaculars which Williams and Johnson utilize in their poetry. Chapter Five analyses the men’s breakup and how this loss creates the possibility for Johnson’s mature work. This thesis presents an edition of the letters important for queer and literary historians and argues for an expansive vision of the lyric self built through poetic community and queer desire.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Author dc:creator

• King, Devin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Meyer, Thomas
• O'Leary, Peter
• White, Eric
• Munro, Niall

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/r8h8-xc04

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:c45b632f-799a-4ec1-9ebb-a23f355be45b:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1