In
recounting his visit with collagist Wendy Kramer on the Philly Sound website, CA Conrad mentioned
of Jonathan Williams that
“so many writers my age and younger seem to be ignorant of the man and his
press.” This may well be true, but, if so, the loss belongs to these younger
writers. Williams has been, from the beginning, a one-of-a-kind renaissance
tucked down there in the western mountains of
Among other
things, Williams is not only a master punster, but the first of the Black
Mountain poets – and him you can legitimately call such, since he not only went
to that august but dishabille institution, but has lived nearby most if not all
of his life – to understand that Projectivism’s rigorous scoring of the line
for sound could be used with a much sharper sense of satire than, say, Pound’s
mere mocking of southern accents in The
Cantos. Williams ear, as well as his wit, turns out to be far sharper.
Here, almost at random from the earliest book of Williams I have, Amen / Huzzah / Selah, published as Jargon 13 in 1960, is “Hojoki”
If you can keep straight you will have no friends
but catgut and blossom in seasons.
— Basil
Bunting, from Chomei at
no loot, no
lust to string a catgut
in a banjo
to hoot
or holler into
Nawth Jawja
too effete to
chant “
in trochaic feet
all’s quiet at
It’s hard
to imagine a poem in English more organized around the regional possibilities
of h, u & t, not to mention ch, as this. That
last line echoes long after – indeed the whole poem has stuck in my head for at
least 35 years.** Conrad or someone is sure to point
out that the word “straight” in Bunting’s poem here is heard as a binary pair
to the unspoken “gay” by Williams’ own text & that this poem invokes the
particular problems of cruising in the rural south of the 1950s, a circumstance
I can’t even fathom in that era of institutionalized homophobia.
Within a
decade, Williams’ work would appear to be everywhere – a selected poems, of
sorts, from New Directions, An Ear in
Bartram’s Tree, a booklength long poem, Mahler,
from Cape Goliard/Grossman & a large, fabulously daffy collection, The Loco Logo-Daedalist in Situ, as from
Cape Goliard/Grossman** & then another, Blues
& Roots, Rue and Bluets: A Garland from the
Appalachians. But as Projectivism itself receded in the 1970s after the
death of Olson & divergences by Creeley, Dorn, Baraka, Levertov & then
Duncan’s long hiatus, the context in which Williams work had first been
received itself seemed to dissolve. Since then, Williams has been one of
poetry’s great secrets, central to almost anyone familiar with the work, but
apt to be bypassed by less careful students of the form’s heritage.
Fortunately,
he seems to keep writing and his press, Jargon, has proven critical over the
years – giving us Lorine Niedecker’s work, for example, at a time when it could
be found nowhere else. Williams is himself also a master photographer. I’ve had
the Gnomon edition of Portrait
Photographs since Jonathan Greene first published it in 1979 &
Williams’ photos of a young Robert Duncan & Louis Zukofsky, torn from a
Poetry Society of America publication, stare down at now as I type. Check out
this history of the
press and, while you’re at the site, marvel at the galleries of photographs.
Back in
1999, Sylvester Pollet published Amuse-Gueules for Bemused Ghouls in his Backwoods
Broadsides Chaplet series. It’s the most recent Williams I have on hand. As I
read “La Grande Cuisine Corniche,” I’m happy to
report that, as that one line poem aptly attests, Williams
unique combination of ear & wit is as vigorous as ever:
soggy ratty tatty oggy
* Indeed, it
was recognizing the Jonathan Williams’
influence that first made it possible for me to really get into Coolidge’s
work, realizing that it was not, as
** In my mind,
I inevitably pair it with Grenier’s famous ”Wintry,”
which ends
oh vell
I, oh well, I
well I don’t know
oh, vell,
I don’t know
Ah yah
ah, yah
ja
a sod hut
*** Check
out the options for Daedalist in
Microsoft Word’s spell check!
