In Memoriam, Heathcote Williams (1941–2017)

We're sad to hear that the British poet, playwright, and painter Heathcote Williams has died at the age of 76. According to the New York Times obituary, the cause of death was lung disease. At NYT, William Grimes describes Williams as "a relentless scourge of the British establishment for half a century." He railed against television, monarchy, and helped to found the anarchist nation, Frestonia. Grimes: "In the 1960s, Mr. Williams wrote for the radical vegetarian publication The Seed and the animal-rights magazine The Beast. In 1969, he joined with the feminist Germaine Greer and his girlfriend at the time, the model Jean Shrimpton, to found the alternative sex magazine Suck." Let's read on from there:

He became a leader of the squatter movement in the 1970s, directing homeless Londoners to available space through his agency Ruff Tuff Cream Puff. He also helped create the Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia, an anarchist country within a country, named after a nearby street, Freston Road. Located in the Notting Hill neighborhood, it issued its own passports and stamps and applied to the United Nations for full membership. Geoffrey Howe, then the shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, named Mr. Williams Frestonia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

In the 1980s, Mr. Williams began writing what he called “investigative poetry,” book-length screeds on environmental themes. With footnoted sources, poems like “Whale Nation” (1988), “Sacred Elephant” (1989) and “Falling for a Dolphin” (1989) emitted a sustained cry of anguish at humanity’s assault on the animal world. “Autogeddon” (1991) was a jeremiad directed at global car culture, which he called “a humdrum holocaust, the third world war nobody bothered to declare.”

To celebrate the queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012, he came up with a special poem of appreciation, “Royal Babylon: The Criminal Record of the British Monarchy.” In a trans-Atlantic gesture, he later took note of recent developments in the United States with “American Porn,” a collection of poems published on the day of President Trump’s inauguration.

“Donald Trump is really Donald Drumpf/To give him his ancestral, and risible name,” a stanza in the poem “President Donald J. Trump, World Emperor” began. “It suggests dumbness, even the passing of wind/As well as the merciful transience of fame.”

Read more at the New York Times.