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

Afterimage, March-April, 1996 by Tom Patterson

Alien is a preachy and tiresome writer, and the only line of his that ever rang the gong for me was the one that said 'America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel: But he is an amiable and friendly, genuinely nice man. He is often a very effective public figure, with a consistently imaginative approach to politics. He likes being famous and says it makes it easier to get laid.

What kept Jargon going during most of the decade after Black Mountain College closed "was simply interest on the part of collectors and friends who were willing to part with a subscriber's fee - anywhere from five dollars to a hundred dollars." Jargon's subscribers, according to Williams, "have been just friends, people I have known. Sometimes they're artists who have given me photographs or small artworks that I could sell, if I chose to, to put the money into paying the printers. In those days there weren't any foundations around that would support it." In the late 1950s and early '60s Williams managed to find enough private support to produce about two dozen Jargon titles. Along with new work by Black Mountain veterans such as Olson, Oppenheimer, Creeley, Duncan, Dawson and composer/poet Lou Harrison, during those years the press published work by several writers of an older generation whom Williams felt were unjustly ignored by the literary establishment. Among them were Henry Miller, Mina Loy, Sherwood Anderson, Walter Lowenfels and Fuller, whose Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization appeared under the Jargon imprint in 1962. Another landmark publication from Jargon during this phase was a 1964 reissue of Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry, first published by the Objectivist Press in 1948 in a relatively small edition that by the '60s was long out of print. During that time Jargon also helped introduce the work of younger writers who weren't part of the Black Mountain group, including Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, Gilbert Sorrentino and Paul Blackburn - one of the poets featured in a 1958 portfolio titled 14 Poets, 1 Artist. Another of those poets, incidentally, was Ginsberg, who made his only Jargon appearance in this volume. During this same period Williams also began incorporating photography into the design of Jargon books. Several publications from the late '50s and early '60s feature images by photographers who have since become widely known, notably Frederick Sommer, Wynn Bullock and two of Williams's former teachers, Callahan and Siskind.

While many of the writers and artists Jargon published during these years went on to develop international reputations, the press itself served as a model for hundreds of small, independent publishing houses that emerged from many corners of the U.S. during the 1960s and '70s. But these presses and the distribution network that has evolved to disseminate their publications didn't exist in the years immediately after Williams lost his base of operations at Black Mountain. By this time he published larger editions than in the early years of Jargon's history - often 1000 or 2000 copies of a new book. A small number of these were mailed out to the authors, the artists and the subscribers who had largely underwritten these publications, and there were occasional orders from libraries and book collectors. Otherwise Williams had to hustle them himself, which meant making frequent trips along the East Coast, to California or various cities in between, with a carload of Jargon books to sell at readings he gave at bookstores, art galleries, colleges and universities where there happened to be a Jargon-friendly professor or two. To this day, Williams has continued to follow much the same pattern, even though there now exist more convenient methods of distribution. This habit of roaming the countryside and sowing cultural seeds gained Williams the admiration of Fuller, who called him "Indispensable!," adding, "Jonathan Williams is our Johnny Appleseed. We need him more than we know." Williams himself compares his cross-country reading and book selling tours to the work of "Parson Weems, the early American clergyman who traveled throughout Virginia by horse and wagon, dispensing books and peddling culture to the American people."(11)