Emmett Williams

Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Nöel.

Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966. Williams studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, anthropology at the University of Paris, and worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Switzerland.

As an artist and poet, Emmett Williams collaborated with Daniel Spoerri and German poet Claus Bremer in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry from 1957 to 1959. One of his notable pieces from this period is "Four-Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices" (1957), in which five performers are each assigned one word of the phrase "You just never quite know", and say their word according to a grid on a card, keeping together with the beat of a metronome: when a black circle appears on the grid, the performer the word, and when no circle appears they say nothing. In the resulting performance, the core phrase "you never quite know" is overshadowed by other combinations of words, such as "you know" and "quite just".