![Heathcote Williams [photo: JH]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/heathcote-williams-photo-280-200x200.jpg)
Heathcote was always prescient. But it is still astonishing to realize how relevant — and resonant — his dissident voice remains more than a dozen years after he recorded “The United States of Porn.”
Search Results for: heathcote williams
More Resonant Than Ever
Heathcote Williams
Uncensored, ‘Advertisement’ for a Supermarket
![Heathcote Williams [Photo: JH, 2013]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/heathcote-williams-photo-copy-200x200.png)
‘The people who run Tesco must be Buddhists / You go in there and things are exactly as they should be / There is nothing that you could possibly want / Bits of telepathic animals neatly shrouded in heat-raised polystyrene / With Magic-Maker gravestones. / Dyed tomato mulch slobbering to itself in lead-lined tubular coffins, / Zilched by monosodium glutomate.’ — Heathcote Williams
Heathcote Williams’s Credo
‘If Poetry Isn’t Revolutionary, It’s Nothing’
This is a collectors alert. Open Head Press is about to release “Juggling Ghosts”, a series of pamphlets of previously published poems and essays by Heathcote Williams in a slipcased, numbered edition of 500 copies about his encounters — live and otherwise — with William Burroughs, Harold Pinter, Dylan Thomas, Sinclair Beiles, Christopher Marlowe, Lord Buckley, Christopher Smart, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Michael Lesser, Alan Turing, Diogenes of Synope, William Blake and the Tigers of Wrath.
Will Oprah Pick Up Where He Left Off?
Heathcote Williams on the British Monarchy
“‘God save the queen,’ they sang, ‘it’s a fascist regime.’ / And the song’s hook-line became a new anthem — / Disturbing to clutches of flag-wavers lining the streets. / And horrifying to Middle England and the Daily Mail.” — from ROYAL BABYLON
PS: In all the press coverage I have seen of the interview, it has been treated as a tale of personal tragedy, a terrible racist family squabble, for the British royals but not one mention of the larger tragedy at the heart of “Royal Babylon,” namely the immense damage caused by the monarchy’s greedy, rapacious treatment of peoples and nations the world over.
Heathcote Williams: ‘Cobalt Blues’
I was reminded of ‘Cobalt Blues’ this morning by Louise Erdrich’s op-ed “Not Just Another Pipeline” about “a tar sands climate bomb” in Minnesota now under construction and racing “to lock in pipeline infrastructure” before it can be stopped.
Remembering Heathcote Williams . . .
Nimble as you were in your ‘hey’day, / Your ‘wow’zone resplendent, / whenever your / Writing and way claimed a mind. / Those still on the planet salute you in love, / Winking our wish through the cosmos, / Broadcasting life’s message that yours / Is the path still to find. It used to lead / To Oxford, but now, it stretches on . . . —David Erdos
‘After the Revolution’: Heathcote Williams as Playwright
Jay Jeff Jones writes in London’s Theatre Record: Like [Jeff] Nuttall, Williams was multi-talented and constant in his espousal of utopian anarchy. He was as uncompromising as he was compassionate; an intellectual force that alternated poetry and playwriting with direct action for causes that included the homeless, battered women and the environment. His first major […]
‘Dying’s Annoying,’ a poem by Heathcote Williams
Ever since the death of two close friends, my staff of thousands has had trouble sleeping. Recently a suffocating moment of enlightenment troubled it further. The staff was contemplating an obvious but astonishing fact: When a body expires the person attached to it vanishes. The person has dematerialized. It’s hard to wrap your head around […]
‘America: How It Works’ by Heathcote Williams
The fierce dissidence of Williams’s polemical poetry is as radical as Shelley’s. “America: How It Works” bears witness to the monster within “the most dangerous country in world history.” Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. The business of America is business, And it’s number one business is war. It uses Hollywood […]
‘Burroughs in London’ by Heathcote Williams
Now that the Burroughs centenary has moved into high gear, it suddenly dawned on Heathcote Williams that he’d known the man on and off for more than half a century.
A Poem by Heathcote Williams: ‘It’s a Barbie World, or …’
Walter Benjamin said, ‘There is no cultural document / That’s not at the same time a record of barbarism…’
‘The Red Dagger’ by Heathcote Williams
London’s symbol for the hub of global finance in the City (Shown on the city’s flag to convey heraldic grandeur) Comes from a blood-soaked dagger that killed the rebel, Wat Tyler, For Tyler had challenged London on behalf of the poor. The dagger survives and is on display at Fishmonger’s Hall In the City’s secretive […]
Heathcote Williams: ‘My Dad and My Uncle’
![Royal Artillery gun crews and Howitzers WWI at Lydd [Bill Hyde collection].](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/My-Dad-and-My-Uncle-howitzer-1-.jpg)
Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. Written upon learning that WWI centenary Remembrance plans are to be given £50 million by the UK government.— BBC News, 11 October 2012 My Dad and my Uncle were in World War One. At least they were in it, but not in it: Conscripted but […]
Ernest Hemingway, Heathcote Williams, and So Forth
And then I sent a photo of the Ernest Hemingway plaque in the series … Which drew this reply … Serving as further testament to what has been lost, or as the poet noted with his reply, “Pace Hemingway.”
Who Is Heathcote Williams? Not for Sale, That’s Who
“He is one of a few of genius who did not sell out and who peaks in (relative) old age. That’s quite something nowadays.” — Gerard Bellaart +++ “Fame is the first disgrace because God knows who you are.” — Heathcote Williams, “The Local Stigmatic” +++ The videos comprise Parts 1 and 2 of a […]
Heathcote Williams on the Real American President
Narration and montage by Alan Cox. Musical accents by Louis Armstrong.
‘American Porn’ for the Orange Man’s Inauguration Day
!['American Porn' by Heathcote Williams [Thin Man Press, 2017]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/American-Porn-by-Heathcote-Williams-Thin-Man-Press-2017400-200x200.jpg)
Here we go again. To mark the resumption of our long nightmare, my staff of thousands thought it apt to repost this from 2017:
On the day he is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of “investigative poems about American history, culture and politics” by Heathcote Williams.