Poet,
publisher, and photographer Jonathan Chamberlain Williams, founder of The
Jargon Society press, one of the most renowned small presses of the last half
of the twentieth century, and champion and publisher of some of the most
important mid and late century poets in the United States and England, died on
March 16, 2008 in Highlands, North Carolina. Williams, 79, began his avant-garde press while a student at
the Chicago Institute of Design, naming it "Jargon" not only for its
meaning of personal idiom, but after the French spring pear,
"jargonelle" and the French "jargon," meaning the
twittering of birds.
The only
child of the late Thomas Benjamin and Georgette (Chamberlain) Williams,
Williams was born on March 8, 1929 in Asheville, North Carolina, grew up in the
District of Columbia and spent summers at the family’s North Carolina mountain
home. His father, who designed
office systems for government contracts in Washington, grew up in
Hendersonville, North Carolina; his mother, a gifted decorator, was the
daughter of a successful banker in Atlanta, growing up there and on the
ancestral farm near Cartersville, Georgia.
Williams'
interests and talents, revealed him as a Renaissance man – publisher;
poet and satirist; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary
correspondent; literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early
collector and proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist;
curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen and adroit raconteur and
gourmand. Williams' refined
decorum and speech, and sartorial style, contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly,
with his delight in the bawdy, his incisive humor, and his confidently experimental
and inventive poems and prose. His
interests, in his own words, raised, "the common to grace," while
paying "close attention to the earthy." At the forefront of the
avant-garde, and yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional,
Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved, as he described it, "more and more away from the High Art
of the city" settling "for what I could unearth and respect in the
tall grass."
Despite numerous awards and honorary degrees including a Guggenheim,
numerous National Endowment Fellowships, and a Longview Foundation Grant,
Williams was never sufficiently acknowledged for his achievements as a poet or
prose stylist by the writing establishment, nor for his press's generosity
toward artists from all walks of life. His southern Appalachian origins created in him a deep sympathy for the
underdog, for society's throwaways, and for the unbridled creativity of the
outsider. He unapologetically celebrated his gay identity long before it
was fashionable. By the Reagan years he began to object even
more vigorously to the failure of American democracy and education. Williams' concerns about threats to the
natural world; the loss of a humane and well-mannered society; and his distaste
for hypocrisy in government, religion and the arts; made for vivid poetry,
prose, and conversation, and informed his choices as a publisher. Known for his irascibility and
opinions, he once stated (quoting Henry Miller paraphrasing Celine), "one
of the things Jargon is devoted to is an attack on urban culture. We piss on it
all from a considerable height."
Nevertheless,
acclaim came despite the poetry world's general indifference. Buckminster Fuller once called Williams
"our Johnny Appleseed," Guy Davenport described him as a "kind
of polytechnic institute," while Hugh Kenner hailed Jargon as "the
Custodian of Snowflakes" and Williams as "the truffle-hound of
American poetry." Williams
held a number of poet-in-residencies early in his career. The Maryland Institute College of the
Arts honored him in 1969 with a Doctor of Humane Letters, and in 1974 he
received the "Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels" for services to
the arts in Kentucky. Publishers Weekly awarded the press its
Carey-Thomas Citation for creative small-press publishing in 1977; in the same
year Williams received the North Carolina Award in Fine Arts. Williams joined a handful of other
poets to read at the Carter Administration's White House Poetry Day event in
1980. In 1998 Williams was
inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Distinguished Houghton Mifflin Editor
Peter Davison stated in 1990, "a sensible society would set up a permanent
outsize subsidy for...Williams and let him go to whatever his hand fell upon...Jargon
is still searching out astonishments; it is one of the irreplaceable American
small-press institutions."
Williams
began his education at Washington's Cathedral School at St. Albans, entering
Princeton in 1947 where he soon found the academic track stifling. He wrote in
a 1984 self-interview, "I clearly did not want to become a Byzantinist in the basement of The Morgan Library; or an
art critic for The New Yorker; nor
did I want to live in the world of competitive business." Escape, much to
his parents' dismay, was inevitable and leaving Princeton in his sophomore year
he studied painting at the Washington's Phillips Gallery with Karl Knaths, later joining Bill Hayter's Atelier 17 in Greenwich Village to study etching, engraving, and printmaking.
Williams'
interest in photography and bookmaking led him eventually to the Chicago
Institute of Design. Here, again, Jonathan found the commercial focus too
confining, and his interest in photography deepened. Photographer Harry
Callahan, a professor at the school, unable to allow a lower-classman into his
seminars, suggested that Williams go to Black Mountain College in the summer of
1951 to study with him and Aaron Siskind. Before
leaving for Black Mountain, Williams set off for California to meet with
Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, and Kenneth Patchen,
all with whom he had been corresponding. Their enthusiasms for the enhancement
of words through visual dimensions, and Black Mountain's principles of learning
by doing and the tactile importance of art, were to play an important role in
the development of Williams' aesthetic principles as a poet, photographer,
publisher, collector, and critic.
Jargon and
Williams came to life at Black Mountain where Williams, under the tutelage of
rector poet Charles Olson, began writing more of his own poetry. Olson hired
his talented student to be the college publisher. Ultimately Jargon, along with New Directions, Grove, and
City Lights became one of the four most famous small presses of a burgeoning
1960s movement that continues not only on the printed page, but today, even on
the Internet. Jargon's books, in
particular, became collectibles, setting the standard for the small press, and
were widely praised for their meticulous beauty and refined craft, and for
Williams' ability to discover new and important talent. In the late 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s
Williams was known for filling his Volkswagen Beetle with books and traversing
the country, selling books out of the back seat, giving readings, and spreading
the word about the many writers and artists he had come to know.
Writers
and artists, nurtured by Jargon, number in the hundreds. Many of their careers began or
blossomed under Williams' and Jargon's patronship,
including American authors James Broughton, Robert Creeley,
Guy Davenport, Robert Duncan, Russell Edson, Buckminster
Fuller, Ronald Johnson, Denise Levertov, Mina Loy,
Paul Metcalf, Lorine Niedecker,
Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, and Louis Zukofsky;
photographers Lyle Bongé, Elizabeth Matheson, John Menapace, Mark Steinmetz, and Doris Ullman;
British poets Basil Bunting, Thomas A. Clark, Simon Cutts,
and Ian Hamilton Finlay; and bookmakers Jonathan Greene, Doyle Moore, and Keith
Smith. Some of the artists and photographers who contributed visually to Jargon
designs include Harry Callahan, John Furnival, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, James McGarrell, Ralph Eugene Meatyard,
Guy Mendes, Robert Rauschenberg, and Art Sinsabaugh. Thornton Dial, St. EOM, Georgia
Blizzard, Howard Finster, Annie Hooper, and James
Harold Jennings, are just a few of the visionary folk artists whom Williams
began to champion in the 1980s, and whose work is represented in his
outstanding personal collection of outsider art, in his essays about visionary
art, and his yet unpublished monograph Walks
to the Paradise Garden. One Jargon title, Ernie Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking, took America by
storm appearing on the New York Times bestseller list, with major interviews and reviews in the national media,
standing alone as the book which temporarily made
Jargon a household name.
The Jargon
Society archives, containing personal papers as well as press materials, rest
at the Poetry/Rare Books Collection - SUNY at Buffalo. Williams' correspondents were
legion. In his letters, no less
than in his poetry and essays, Williams - who was known to write under various noms de plume such as Lord Stodge,
Big Enis, Colonel Williams, and Lord Nose - held
court, preaching the art gospel with his usual flair. He was fond of quoting
Robert Duncan, "Responsibility is to keep the ability to respond."
Yale University recently purchased Williams' personal photographic archive,
including his uncommon portraits of poets, painters, writers, and artists -
major works documenting Black Mountain College and Williams' peripatetic
wanderings across America and Europe. His letters, negatives, and photographic prints alone will provide
bountiful insight into 20th century culture, history, sensibility, and
community.
Celebrated as a Black Mountain Poet,
Williams' work argues the primary importance of imagination as a foil to
ignorance, and pinpoints ignorance (whether in the arts, civic or personal
realms) as the source of cultural blight. As a poet he has been described as a
cross between Martial, Socrates, Basho, Tu Fu, and
Richard Pryor. Experimental and open in form, the symbiotic relationship
between music and poetic composition and the possibilities of beauty found in
the high and low, the ribald and the erudite, the metaphysical and the
concrete, set his writing apart as audaciously original. Oftentimes expressed through word-play,
found poems, paeans to pastoral significance, and rails against contemporary
despoliation, the poems and essays draw on a wide range of subjects and themes
including politics; jokes; local speech and customs; classical music and jazz;
and visionary, photographic, and abstract art. In them Mahler, Bruckner, Delius, Ives, Satie, Samuel
Palmer, and William Blake commune with Mae West, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonius Monk, Frederick Sommer,
and Richard Diebenkorn. Articulated through an
unconventional synesthetic panache, commanding
musical economy, and vinegary wit, they demand attention to, rather than
carelessness toward, ecological guardianship of the arts, nature, and local
traditions. His works of local speech equally capture the unpretentious nuances
of country vernacular and the refinement of the “aristocracy,” as well as the sometimes dumb misapprehensions of each.
Williams'
over one hundred works, published by many of the most important small presses
in this country and Britain, exemplified his playful blend of polish and
earthiness, and revealed his massive and impressive circle of friends. Williams seems to have known
practically everyone of consequence in early and mid-twentieth century American
alternative arts. An Ear In Bartram's Tree (1969, University of North Carolina) and Blues
& Roots/Rue & Bluets (1971, Grossman;
1985, Duke University) demonstrate his sensitivity to the nuances of language
and the simple charms of Appalachian and White Trash culture. Quote, Unquote (1989, Ten Speed Press)
was one of many editions of Williams' astonishing accumulations of revelatory
quotations discovered in his wide reading. A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and
Solitude (2002, David Godine) offers a select
view of Williams' photographs of unique people and places accompanied by pithy,
revealing mini-essays. The Magpie’s Bagpipe (1982, North Point)
and Blackbird Dust (2000, Turtle
Point) collect spicy essays on artists and culture. Jubilant Thicket: New
and Selected Poems (2005, Copper Canyon) contains a selection of over 1000 of Williams' poems.
Williams
and his partner of forty years, Poet Thomas Meyer, lived since the early 1970s
in a seventeenth century shepherd's cottage in the English Cumbrian hills in
the summer and at the Scaly Mountain home near Highlands in the winter. For the past decade they have resided
mostly at Skywinding Farm, in Scaly. Williams is survived
by Meyer, their beloved ginger-cat H-B, and numerous devoted friends and
supporters. In the
Appalachian poem "Epitaphs for Two Neighbors in Macon County No Poet Could
Forget" Williams captures Uncle Iv Owens. It seems a fitting epitaph, too, for
this remarkable man of American letters, Jonathan Williams:
he done
what he could
when he got round
to it
Selected Books by Jonathan Williams: Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems – Copper Canyon Press, 2005 | A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude - David Godine, 2002 | Blues and Roots/Rue and Bluets: A Garland for the Southern Appalachians - Duke Press, 1985 | The Magpie’s Bagpipe: Selected Essays – North Point Press, 1982
