O for a muse of fire: the iconoclasm of Jonathan Williams and the Jargon Society - profile of a Renaissance man

It's not easy being a Renaissance Man in postmodern fin-de-siecle America. Just ask Jonathan Williams. author of poems publisher, photographer, essayist, designer, calligrapher, art collector, musical connoisseur, gourmand, peripatetic lecturer sports freak - Williams is all of the above and more, and he has worn out the past 45 years racking up a remarkable list of accomplishments in the literary and visual arts. comrade writer Guy Davenport has described Williams as "himself a kind of polytechnic institute."(1) Williams is the author of more than 100 volumes and - through his small pres the Jargon Society - the publisher of more than 100 others by the agency of highly respected figures in twentieth-century arts and alphabetic characters His photographs have appeared in a number of important publications and exhibitions in this political division and England, and he has serv as curator or introductory essayist for many exhibitions of work through other contemporary photographers. Despite these formidable achievements - and accolades from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Buckminster Fuller and Hugh Kenner - he has been all on the contrary ignored by this country's cultural establishment.

Why?

A review of Williams's multifaceted career and record of feisty public pronouncements reveals several possible answers to that question, which in turn round raise serious, larger questions about the support and dissemination of tillage in these troubled and tricky times. single of the more likely reasons he hasn't been more widely acknowledged and rewarded for his many contributions to post-war American agriculture is the very fact that his career has been for a like reason 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 individual but many things well, accompany to get dismissed as dilettantes in like a cultural climate, regardless of the nature of their accomplishments.

Another factor that may contribute to the weak answer to Williams's work is his unrelenting iconoclasm. He has no use for greatest in quantity of the institutions that dominate our agriculture and has never been timid about saying in the way that His stance has always been defiantly anti-urban, anti-academic and anti-commercial, as he is absurd of declaring in colorfully audacious language befitting a self-described "maverick poet" A hardly any years ago, when discussing the Jargon Society pres with a writer for The Advocate, he remarked "one of the things Jargon is devot to is an attack upon urban culture. We piss upon it all from a considerable height."(2) As for academia, he has referr to universities as "pecuniary brain factories."(3) In a new lecture he backhandedly boasted:

Institutions of higher learning know instinctively to leave my verse alone. It might cause offense Absolutely. I bring 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 make which in retrospect seems more prophetic than outrageous: "The handmaidens of the arts now are suppos to be management and Business. Neither has an attention span of more than 15 next to the firsts so very soon both will tire of the whole mess"(5)

It was this kind of talk that l Williams's British contemporary, author of poems and playwright Adrian Mitchell, to describe him as "one of the loosest cannons upon the good ship Literature"(6) As these make notess suggest, Williams's outsider status vis-a-vis the American cultural mainstream is to a certain number of extent self-chosen. Ever since 1949 when he dropp on the outside of Princeton University ("an Ivy-League chain gang," in his words), he has young oxed clear of the more well-traveled paths to literary and artistic succes choosing instead to tread on the heels of an independent course in the various pursuits in which he cast in the shades These tendencies were encouraged through several teachers he studied with or otherwise became acquainted with presently after his escape from behind the ivy-covered walls. He exhausted two years trying his hand at various manners of visual expression - painting, printmaking and volume design - at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, DC and Chicago's Institute of Design. In the summer of 1951 he make go rounded to photography, signing up for special courses taught by means of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Black Mountain society a small, experimental school in North Carolina that became famous as a breeding earth for the post-war American avant-garde.

Coincidentally located single a few miles from Williams's birthplace of Asheville, Black Mountain was the ultimate "outsider" educational institution - perhaps the greatest in quantity anti-institutional institution in the history of American education - and the associations he formed there played a big part in determining his subsequent time Other developing artists and writers who were his companion 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 1950 included Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley - whose poesy and friendship later became real important to Williams - as well as Paul Goodman, Stefan Wolpe Franz Kline, M C Richards, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Of all the tribe he encountered at the gymnasium the one he credits with having the greatest in quantity profound impact on him was bard 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 learner there. Although a scholar of history and mythology, Olson was a proponent of non-traditional "open-form" metrical composition whose literary mentors were Ezra beat and William Carlos Williams. He was by means of all accounts a formidable individual (all six feet 10 inches of him) and a forceful nearness in the classroom; his teaching evidently provided reinforcement for the 22-year-old Williams's hardy sense of individualism. Describing Olson as "a vast, energetic spectacle," Williams has noted that individual of the most valuable exercise s he taught was that: "'The artist is his hold instrument.' In other words, you have to make it up for yourself. You have to do it yourself."(7)