p o s t_m o o t
 _______________________
Tyrone Williams
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Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. His book, c.c., was published by Krupskaya Books in 2002. AAB (Slack Buddha Press, 2004) and Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004), are recent book publications. His work has appeared in recent issues of Kiosk and Chicago Review as well as in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner Books, 2003) and Rainbow Darkness (Miami University Press, 2006).


A Note About The Work

I began writing poetry during my teen years in Detroit, Michigan, thanks in large part to the encouragement of a junior high school teacher, Miss Horn. I continued to write through my college years. Finally, in 1987, long after I’d graduated from college, I published a small chapbook, Convalescence, on a small Detroit-based press. It would be fifteen years before my first book, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), would be published. During those long and often discouraging years, I continued to write and refine my craft. I got a job teaching literature at a small liberal arts college in Ohio, and the stability of that position has allowed me to explore many dimensions of the vast world of poetry.

My work ranges from the experimental to the more conventional lyric; I am not programmatic about the kind of poetry I like or write. It very much comes down to individual cases, both for the work I love to read and for the work I labor to write.

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The work I have done recently has focused on “staging” dialogues between the temporal and spatial dimensions of language—in particular, poetry—and dialogues between a number of individual artists and thinkers whose work has been important in my development as a literary theorist and poet. A great number of the pieces I have “assembled” shuttle back and forth between narrative and collage “effects” (few are, strictly speaking, wholly one or the other; hence the temporal/spatial emphasis throughout) and some of them operate on several narrative levels at once. Thematically speaking, the work is suffused with cultural, political and philosophical positions, controversies, issues, etc., treated primarily from an avant-gardist/leftist orientation. The poems included here are part of a larger manuscript tentatively entitled pseudoeshuneutics.

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I intend to complete the manuscript pseudoeshuneutics and do substantial work on another manuscript, tentatively entitled HOWELL (MICHIGAN), which has been commissioned by the avant-garde press Atelos, based in California. I only have a few more poems to complete for the first book. I’ve only completed about a fifth of the second book ; consequently, I anticipate spending the bulk of my time on that project.


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