O for a muse of fire: the iconoclasm of Jonathan Williams and the Jargon Society

Afterimage, March-April, 1996 by Tom Patterson

Why?

A review of Williams's multifaceted career and record of feisty public pronouncements reveals several possible answers to that question, which in turn raise serious, larger questions about the support and dissemination of culture in these troubled and tricky times. One of the more likely reasons he hasn't been more widely acknowledged and rewarded for his many contributions to post-war American culture is the very fact that his career has been so diverse. We live in a society that rewards and encourages specialization, in the arts as in all other fields. Individuals like Williams, who manage to do not just one but many things well, tend to get dismissed as dilettantes in such a cultural climate, regardless of the nature of their accomplishments.

Another factor that may contribute to the weak response to Williams's work is his unrelenting iconoclasm. He has no use for most of the institutions that dominate our culture, and has never been timid about saying so. His stance has always been defiantly anti-urban, anti-academic and anti-commercial, as he is fond of declaring in colorfully audacious language befitting a self-described "maverick poet." A few years ago, when discussing the Jargon Society press with a writer for The Advocate, he commented, "one of the things Jargon is devoted to is an attack on urban culture. We piss on it all from a considerable height."(2) As for academia, he has referred to universities as "pecuniary brain factories."(3) In a recent lecture he backhandedly boasted:

Institutions of higher learning know instinctively to leave my poetry alone. It might cause offense. Absolutely. I put a label on every book: 'Offense is always provided for those who will take some.' . . . To cause offense to the moribund and unfeeling is a necessary thing. Aesthetic is the opposite of anesthetic.(4)

And in a 15-year-old interview, he provided this assessment of the national arts-support structure, which in retrospect seems more prophetic than outrageous: "The handmaidens of the arts now are supposed to be Government and Business. Neither has an attention span of more than 15 seconds, so very soon both will tire of the whole mess."(5)

It was this kind of talk that led Williams's British contemporary, poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell, to describe him as "one of the loosest cannons on the good ship Literature"(6) As these comments suggest, Williams's outsider status vis-a-vis the American cultural mainstream is to some extent self-chosen. Ever since 1949, when he dropped out of Princeton University ("an Ivy-League chain gang," in his words), he has steered clear of the more well-traveled paths to literary and artistic success, choosing instead to follow an independent course in the various pursuits in which he excels. These tendencies were encouraged by several teachers he studied with or otherwise became acquainted with soon after his escape from behind the ivy-covered walls. He spent two years trying his hand at various modes of visual expression - painting, printmaking and book design - at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D.C. and Chicago's Institute of Design. In the summer of 1951, he turned to photography, signing up for special courses taught by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Black Mountain College, a small, experimental school in North Carolina that became famous as a breeding ground for the post-war American avant-garde.

Coincidentally located only a few miles from Williams's birthplace of Asheville, Black Mountain was the ultimate "outsider" educational institution - perhaps the most anti-institutional institution in the history of American education - and the associations he formed there played a big part in determining his future. Other developing artists and writers who were his fellow students there included Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain, Joel Oppenheimer, Francine du Plessix, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, Michael Rumaker and Suzi Gablik. In addition to Callahan and Siskind (who were part-time, non-resident teachers), Black Mountain's faculty in the early 1950s included Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley - whose poetry and friendship later became very important to Williams - as well as Paul Goodman, Stefan Wolpe, Franz Kline, M. C. Richards, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Of all the people he encountered at the school, the one he credits with having the most profound impact on him was poet Charles Olson, who taught literature and writing and was the school's rector during the five-year period when Williams was an on-and-off student there. Although a scholar of history and mythology, Olson was a proponent of non-traditional "open-form" poetry, whose literary mentors were Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. He was by all accounts a formidable individual (all six feet 10 inches of him) and a forceful presence in the classroom; his teaching evidently provided reinforcement for the 22-year-old Williams's strong sense of individualism. Describing Olson as "a vast, energetic spectacle," Williams has noted that one of the most valuable lessons he taught was that: "'The artist is his own instrument.' In other words, you have to make it up for yourself. You have to do it yourself."(7)