Emmett WilliamsI’m a little slow on the uptake here, but Fluxus poet, performer, and artist Emmett Williams passed away on February 14. He was an important innovator in the areas of concrete poetry, visual poetry, text-sound, permutational poetry, text art, etc. He collaborated with people like Claes Oldenburg, Robert Filliou, Deiter Roth, La Monte Young, and others. Interesting that he died on Valentine’s day, considering two of his more important works are A Valentine for Noël and Sweethearts, an erotic concrete poem cycle which is a “full-scale, permutational masterwork of the concrete movement” (according to the editors of Poems for the Millennium). Most of his books are out of print and fairly rare, but as usual, UBUWEB comes to the rescue.

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