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

Afterimage, March-April, 1996 by Tom Patterson

Before his arrival at Black Mountain, Williams had made a few tentative forays into writing poetry inspired by his interest in William Blake's work and his admiration for the poems of Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, E. E. Cummings and Robinson Jeffers. During a visit to San Francisco a month before he arrived at Black Mountain, he had printed 150 copies of an early poetic effort, Garbage Litters the Iron Face of the Sun's Child (1951), on a small letterpress operated by artist David Ruff, who embellished the poem with an original copper-plate engraving. This became the first publication of the Jargon Press. Williams was barely out of his teens at the time, and says about the experience, "when you're that age, there's no such thing as an outside audience. So it's your own responsibility to make this audience for yourself - to find out if there is an audience. That was very much Olson's idea." A do-it-yourself publishing operation seemed an appropriate vehicle for building an audience, not only for Williams's own work, but also for that of other writers and artists he knew and admired at Black Mountain and elsewhere. Within two months of his arrival at BMC, he teamed up with fellow student Oppenheimer, who had taught himself to operate the small press that the college owned, and together they produced the second Jargon publication - 150 copies of Oppenheimer's poem, The Dancer (1951), along with a Robert Rauschenberg drawing. The following year they produced two small publications under the Jargon imprint - The Double-Backed Beast, featuring the work of fellow students Victor Kalos and Dan Rice, who provided text and drawings respectively; and Williams's Red/Gray, with drawings by Paul Ellsworth, a student at the Institute of Design during Williams's brief stint there. It was Ellsworth's frequent use of the word "jargon" that inspired the name for Williams's press. Upon researching the word's etymology, Williams discovered that the French word "jargon" refers to a "twittering of birds." He says, "That appealed to me, because I was sharp enough to know already that these rare birds I was fooling with would twitter a lot." He adds that he also liked the irony of using "Jargon" as an imprint for books he knew many people might consider "inexplicable and slightly dubious."

Williams's approach to writing poetry underwent a major transformation under Olson's influence. He quickly discovered that the work of his early literary influences - Blake, Patchen, Rexroth, Cummings and Jeffers - was "antithetical" to Olson's interests. Olson, Williams says, "was determined to rid me of these interests. He considered all that sort of thing whimsical and pseudo-religious." In one recent interview he recalled that Olson "would write these amazing comments out in the margins of my poems: 'Aw, c'mon.' 'Where's my hanky?' 'Boo hoo!'" and he concluded, "He was tough. He was hard to get through to. There was the size of the man. . . . The power of the work. You could not help but be daunted by him. It took me years to get beyond his sound to write my own poems.'"(8)