'Craft Is Perfected Attention'

The campiness can get a little thick when the poet/publisher/photographer Jonathan Williams (1929-2008) is in the neighborhood, but he’s always festive, the sort of fellow you could hire to turn around tedious parties or staff meetings. A reader says she is enjoying Williams’ The Magpie’s Bagpipe: Selected Essays (North Point Press, 1982) based on something I wrote a long time ago. So, I browsed around in Williams again and found an interview he gave to Rain Taxi in 2003. This most cosmopolitan of artists was born in Asheville, N.C. (as his friend Guy Davenport was born two years earlier in Anderson, S.C., about ninety miles to the south) and never condescended to rural Southerners, black or white. Williams told the interviewer: 

“Uncle Remus says: ‘Hit run’d cross my min’ des lak a rat along a rafter.’ I have a mind like that. It darts and shimmies all the time. It thinks of six things (besides sex) all at once. So the trick is to slow down, focus, concentrate. Someone said that craft is perfected attention. I like making well-crafted books, and poems, and images, because it pleases me so to do. And it’s nice to please some of one’s friends now and then.”

 

That seems like a recipe for artistic happiness – for creator and consumer, writer and reader. Williams is not a writer I want to oversell. I don’t much care for his poetry, which often seems half-baked and gimmicky but I enjoy his prose and especially his photographs. Two of the people whose pictures he took – Davenport and Paul Metcalf -- I met and corresponded with, and Williams captures something of their natures. Reading him again and looking at his pictures always reminds me of Dr. Johnson’s assessment of Dryden:

 

“Next to argument, his delight was in wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and excentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense.”