Emmett Williams

Emmett Williams (b. 1925 Greenville, South Carolina – 2007, Berlin, Germany) was an American poet associated with the international concrete poetry movement and a founding artist of Fluxus.  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 and dynamic theater 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 publications include konkretionen (Krefeld 1958); ja, es war noch da, an opera (Munich 1960); poesie et cetera americaine, an anthology of action poetry (Paris 1963); 13 variations on 6 words of gertrude stein (Cologne 1965); rotapoems (Stuttgart 1966), and sweethearts, a long erotic concrete poem cycle (Stuttgart 1967). 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 (1967), all published by the Something Else Press, New York. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and was an artist in residence at Harvard and the University of Kentucky.