Jonathan Williams founded The Jargon Society-a publisher dedicated to poetry, experimental fiction, photography and visionary folk art-and has championed the underdog, maverick and outsider in the arts for 50 years. He has also published over 100 of his own books, pamphlets and broadsides of poetry, essays and photography.

Jubilant Thicketcollects the best of his poetry and teems with the eccentric, strange and boundlessly authentic-neoclassical poems, social satire, musical suites and lyrics. There is spleen, salt and a delicious -sarcasm, as Williams finds inspiration in Mahler and Mojo Nixon, Blake and whimmydiddles. There is nobody quite like Jonathan Williams:

"He is one of the few poets about whom it could be said, he has never bored a reader."-Contemporary Poets

"Of all the Black Mountain poets (teachers and disciples alike), Jonathan Williams is the wittiest, the least constrained, the most joyous."-The New York Times

"Jonathan Williams is himself a kind of polytechnic -institute, trained to write poems as spare, functional and alive as a blade of grass."-Guy Davenport, from The Geography of the Imagination

"Indispensable! . . . We need him more than we know."-R. Buckminster Fuller

Of the thousands of essays and reviews published about his work, Williams writes, "The best thing yet said about me came from an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. His letter ended: Thanks for writing all those kick-ass books.'"

Jonathan Williams's most recent book is A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude(Godine). He founded The Jargon Society in 1951, a publisher that, according to The New York Times, "has come to occupy a special place in the cultural life as patron of the American imagination."He lives on Skywinding Farm in rural North Carolina.

"Those unfamiliar with the actual verse of septuagenarian Jargon Society founder Williams will be surprised at how consistently funny it is, but not at its sophistication. Williams's press, based in his native North Carolina, has long been associated with the Black Mountain school of Olson-Creeley-Levertov, but Williams was also the first to bring out a collected edition of major modernist Mina Loy. Pared down from 1,450 works over 55 years, this selection features jaunty dances through naughty woods ('David Hockney/ met a most ravissant Cockney// with, mirabile dictu,/ no cock to hang onto!'), jokes to and about Ezra Pound, selected listings from the Western Carolina Telephone Company phone book, limericks, 'meta-fours' (poems in which each line has four words), a poem for each Mahler symphony and acrostics using the names of friends like Guy Davenport, with some pauses to take dictation in the form of found poems: 'LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WILL NOT/ AND OTHERS MUST NOT/ PULL THE FLOWERS IN THIS GARDEN.' By the end of the book, it becomes clear that Williams can make a verse out of whatever's at hand; the result is a kind of commonplace book for a life lived, with wry but inextinguishable enthusiasm, in the company of artists and arts." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Fifty years of eccentric, irrepressible poetry from the founder of The Jargon Society.

Poet, photographer, and publisher Jonathan Williams has been justly called a "polytechnic institute."Throughout his storied career, Williams has always prowled the outskirts and defended the underdog, maverick, and outsider. He is the founder and publisher of The Jargon Society, a literary publisher that, according to The New York Times, "has come to occupy a special place in the cultural life as patron of the American imagination."