Jamison A. Oughton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jamison Ashley Oughton (born July 15, 1975, in Abington, Pennsylvania) was one of the founding members of the Dust Poets and the Plus Group in Raleigh, North Carolina. Although these radical literary organizations have been defunct for over a decade, Oughton continues to write poetry embodying their ideals of free-thinking, philosophical inquiry, and the socialization of poetry.

His first book of poems, Songs of the Cleophite, is to be followed up by a second volume, Vinum Daemonum, which is rumored to be a joint project with the controversial recluse, Jeffrey D. Woolley. If rumors prove true, this will be their first collaboration since the mid-1990s, when Oughton and Woolley flooded college campuses with pamphlets and poetry expressing their revolutionary views on English poetry, which, although widely dismissed by academic and publishing circles as atavistic and obsolete, was to garner the support of a small group of intellectuals who would later make the two poets' dreams of the Dust Poets and the Plus Group a reality -- if only a short-lived one.

In his poetry, Oughton explores complex themes of tradition, occultism, humor, and philosophy, but some of his most accomplished and pleasing work is his amorous verse in which he successfully blends traditional meters with timeless imagery:

Her eyes are like the Moon

At which the Shepherd gazes—

Her beauty is like the lightning,

It startles and amazes...

Oughton cites Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Aleister Crowley, H. P. Lovecraft, George Darley, Thomas Chatterton, and Thomas Overbury as the formative influences on his poetry.^{[citation needed]}