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Smith, William Jay, 1918-2015

 Person

Found in 5 Collections and/or Records:

Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy edited by Deborah Rothschild / Murphy, Gerald ; Murphy, Sara ; Smith WJ ; Tomkins C ; Rothschild D., 2007

 Item
Identifier: CC-46937-49675
Scope and Contents

Deborah Rothschild, editor and curator, contributes an introductory essay for the catalogue and an acknowledgement in which she writes that "William Jay Smith knew the Murphys firsthand, and they also singledout his talent, prophesizing a distinguished career in arts and letters." Smith writes an essay titled "Gerald Murphy - cubist Painter, Concrete Poet" in which he describes his typewriter poems and how Gerald Murphy purchased copies of "Typewriter Birds" in excahnge for a Mark Cross attache case. In this essay, Smith also describes the genre of typewriter poetry and how he started to create them and how he felt that he "had instinctively reached back and cut through to something primitive and unspoiled. The fact that my triumph had begun as a humorous gesture made it no less serious. I had touched something, I felt, at the depth of the psyche, at that still center where creation makes its mysterious way." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 2007