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

Afterimage, March-April, 1996 by Tom Patterson

Williams didn't have to travel far to attend the exhibition's opening reception and the BMC reunion, because he continues to live in western North Carolina, in a house his parents had built on a small mountainside farm they bought during the early 1940s outside the resort town of Highlands. His father named the place Skywinding Farm, since he was fond of this mountain slang term that Williams says means "all scattered out under the sky." Williams spent most of his childhood and early youth in Washington, D.C., where his father worked as a designer of filing systems, but Skywinding Farm has been his primary home since the Black Mountain days. He and fellow poet Thomas Meyer - his companion and Jargon Society assistant since the late 1960s - spend at least half of every year here. They travel frequently, and often pass the summers in northern England at a restored seventeenth-century sheep farmer's cottage. Most of Jargon's editorial affairs, however, are handled from their respective offices in the upstairs and downstairs sections of the North Carolina house.

Much of Jargon's most culturally significant work has been carried out in what might be delineated as the second phase of its history - the years since it became the Jargon Society Inc. and Meyer joined Williams in coordinating its various projects. It was during this period, for example, that the press published important collections of poems by Lorine Niedecker and Alfred Starr Hamilton, two older poets whose work had long been undeservedly neglected by the U.S. literary establishment. More recent years have also witnessed Jargon's publication of poetry by James Broughton, Finlay, Richard Emil Braun, Ross Feld, Ronald Johnson, Peyton Houston, Thomas A. Clark and Simon Cutts, as well as several new books of historically-based experimental prose by Metcalf. Also during this phase the Society published more work by Williams's Black Mountain cohort, Oppenheimer - most significantly his selected earlier poems, Names and Local Habitations (1988) - and the collected poems of the overlooked modernist poet Loy (The Last Lunar Baedeker, 1982). Another poet of an earlier generation, Britain's Basil Bunting, was honored by the press with a 1977 festschrift titled Madeira & Toasts for Basil Bunting's 75th Birthday, featuring contributions from many of the poets and other artists who have been moved by his work. Also in the 1970s Jargon issued several new photography books, including The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann (1971) and two particularly outrageous volumes - Ralph Eugene Meatyard's The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (1974) and Lyle Bonge's The Sleep of Reason (1974), a down-and-dirty look at New Orleans Mardi Gras revelry, with a text by Black Mountain alumnus and Midnight Cowboy author James Leo Herlihy. In the early 1980s the Society published a larger collection of Bonge's images and a book of John Menapace's stark photographs, letter in a Klein bottle (1984). The most recent Jargon photography books published are David Spear's The Neugents (1993), a documentary portrait of a poor tobacco-farming family in North Carolina, and Elizabeth Matheson's Blithe Air: Photographs from England, Wales and Ireland (1995). Among other visual art titles issued by Jargon in more recent years are two books of William Anthony's hilariously inept-looking drawings - Bible Stories (1978) and Bill Anthony's Greatest Hits (1988). Williams had hoped Bible Stories - Anthony's skewed nutshell summary of the Old and New Testament in words and pictures - might appeal to a broad enough audience that it would actually earn the Society some money, but as with previous Jargon books, that didn't happen. Jargon's paltry sales figures have prompted Williams to declare that "more Americans carve portrait busts of Ronald Reagan out of petrified bat guano than pay attention to the Jargon Society."(25) But there has been one major exception to the general failure of Jargon books in the marketplace - Ernest Matthew Mickler's runaway bestseller, White Trash Cooking, originally published by the Jargon Society in 1985. After selling more copies of the book than all previous Jargon books combined, the Society sold the rights to this unique collection of make-do recipes and color photos of Southern, "white-trash" territory to Ten Speed Press. It has since sold more than half a million copies.