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An Arts-and-Letters Icon Poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, who died in March, captured, reflected the best of an unusually vibrant creative era
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Published: March 30, 2008
Poet and publisher Jonathan Williams lived a creatively accomplished, culturally distinguished life that carried him into his 80th year, if just barely. He turned 79 on March 8 and -- sadly for those of us who knew and admired him -- he died on March 16 of pneumonia, after a monthlong hospital stay in Highlands, near his longtime home.
In addition to his other talents, Williams was an essayist and photographer of note. In literary circles he was known as one of the last surviving Black Mountain poets who were informally named that in honor of Western North Carolina's former Black Mountain College. Williams and his writing contemporaries, who studied and taught there in the 1950s, were loosely associated with such beat poets as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.
Born in Asheville, Williams grew up in Washington and Macon County, where his parents bought a small mountainside farm in the early 1940s, which also became his primary home in later years. He studied at Princeton and Chicago's Institute of Design before enrolling at Black Mountain in 1951. That same year he founded his Jargon Press, whose early publications featured the work of writers, photographers and other artists associated with Black Mountain, the loosely structured, arts-centered college, an avant-garde haven.
Informed by a do-it-yourself philosophy rooted in his experience at Black Mountain, Jargon became a prototype for the small-press movement of the 1960s and '70s. Thanks to Williams' perseverance, his press outlived Black Mountain College by 50 years, publishing more than 100 books. Among the writers and artists whose works Jargon published -- in most cases before they became widely known -- are Sherwood Anderson, Harry Callahan, Robert Creeley, Buckminster Fuller, R.B. Kitaj, Michael McClure, Henry Miller, Charles Olson, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Rauschenberg and Aaron Siskind.
For years Williams maintained Jargon Press through the force of his own personality. Over 6 feet tall and supremely confident, he had a deeply resonant, authoritative voice, and he dressed like a country gentleman. He spent much of his life crisscrossing the United States and England in various Volkswagens, his car of choice, loaded with Jargon publications, which he sold at his poetry readings at colleges, universities and specialty bookstores. In that respect, he was the literary equivalent of an old-fashioned traveling medicine show. An expert networker and tireless correspondent, he devoted much of his energy to connecting likeminded friends and acquaintances with each other.
Winston-Salem was a regular stop on Williams' circuit. He found enthusiastic audiences at Wake Forest University, Salem College and the N.C. School of the Arts, and a number of local arts patrons took an interest in his work. After his press became incorporated as the nonprofit Jargon Society in the late 1960s, several of his Winston-Salem supporters joined the board of directors. Its business office was here for a number of years.
By Williams' own estimation he started to find his literary voice with his 1958 poem "O For a Muse of Fire!" Written to commemorate baseball great Stan Musial's 3,000th hit, this terrifically titled poem intercuts hipster patois with rapid-fire commentary typical of a sports announcer. One of the most striking aspects of Williams' poetry is its singular way of appropriating and recasting common, everyday speech. Probably the best examples are the poems in his Blues &Roots/Rue & Bluets (Duke University Press, 1985), which consist of colorful sayings, observations and brief stories he heard from his neighbors and other people he knew in the Southern Appalachians.
Spare and sharply honed, many of Williams' poems stand as distinctly American variations on the Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions that also influenced other American poets of his generation. The strong current of humor that runs through much of his poetry led his fellow writer Gilbert Sorrentino to suggest that Williams "may well be the best comic poet writing in English." The most comprehensive collection of his poetry is Jubilant Thicket (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), still in print and highly recommended.
Much of Williams' work pays homage to his cultural contemporaries and aesthetic predecessors. As a photographer he specialized in informal portraits of other writers and artists whose work interested him. He also photographed artists' environments and the tombstones of writers, visual artists, composers and musicians who preceded him in death. Some of his best photographs are collected in his books Portrait Photographs (Gnomon Press, 1979) and A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (David Godine, 2002). Williams' essays are collected in two volumes, The Magpie's Bagpipe (North Point, 1982) and Blackbird Dust (Turtle Point Press, 2000).
I was a college student with aspirations to a writing career when I met Williams and became a fan of his work in the 1970s. I looked to him as a role model for my early professional endeavors. In 1984 he hired me to work with him under Jargon's auspices on a three-year project researching contemporary Southern folk art, a mutual interest. That job opportunity prompted me to leave a fledgling magazine career in Atlanta and move to Winston-Salem -- a move I've never regretted. Aside from being great fun, the gig led to my first curatorial project, my first book (published by the Jargon Society); and my second (from a larger publishing house in New York), not to mention many subsequent professional opportunities.
Many people on both sides of the Atlantic owe a great debt to JW. He will be missed.
An exhibition of more than 200 works from Jonathan Williams' art collection, titled "If you can kill a snake with it, It ain't art," is on view through June 7 at Appalachian State University's Turchin Center for Visual Art, at 423 W. King St. in Boone. Tom Patterson curated the exhibition. For more information, call 828-262-3017 or visit the Turchin Center's Web site, www.tcva.org.
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