JL Williams Poetry

Click to listen:

Scottish Poetry Library Podcast 

featuring Laertes, Why Are You Crying?

and

JL Williams on Ten Tracks

JL Williams was born in New Jersey and studied at Wellesley College with the poet Frank Bidart.  Her poetry has been published in journals including laurahird.com, Aesthetica, The Red Wheelbarrow, Chanticleer, Cutting Teeth, The Wolf and The Howler, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales and coming up in Gutter, Brand, Fulcrum and Stand.

Since moving to Edinburgh in 2001 she has been active both as a poet and in the performing arts as a director and producer, most recently of the performance art cabaret Neue Liebe.  She was awarded a grant from the Scottish Arts Council for a poetry collaboration entitled chiaroscuro pentimenti with composer Martin Parker and artist Anna Chapman and the Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary 2009 from the Scottish Arts Trust.  She will travel in September 2009 to the Aeolian Isles to write a collection inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses.

JL Williams plays in the bands Laertes, Why Are You Crying? and Horsebreaker and is currently studying at the University of Glasgow on the Creative Writing MLitt programme.  She is on the editorial boards of VAIR Poetry Magazine and Brown Williams Journal and can also be found on the Live Literature funded list of Scottish Book Trust Authors.                                                                                                                                                             

Why Silence

Don't ask, it was and
of all you the most and
sunset behind the mountain.

Of all the words what left to describe
another language or painting or sculpture?
Maybe in death or maybe in dreams,
over the River Almond the smell of...

What is it on full moons that butterflies?
In tweed and brogues you the first and
your hand with no gun
strokes what is most definitely
my thigh bruised by butterflies.

How can I tell
out over the ocean
of the hundred leaping fishes?

(c) 2008 JL Williams