Perhaps still to appear ... a celebration of Jonathan Williams

Like many another such institution, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center usually sends a newsletter to members and other interested parties once a year or thereabouts, just to let all know what it's been up to, what exhibits it's hosted, what significant presentations, readings, and performances it's brought to the community, and offer an occasional bit of Center news. Well, this year the winter came and went, and the Center's sole staff person, the almost-tireless Alice Sebrell, continued to find her time consumed by the many many day-to-day tasks involved in managing the exhibits and events on the Center's calendar (all part of an intensely-programmed year-long series featuring the women of Black Mountain College), and the newsletter languished. Perhaps it will someday appear. In the meantime, having just done another Wordplay show featuring Jonathan Williams, I thought it might be good moment to dig out the newsletter article about the celebration of his life and work that the Center held last summer. Parts of it were developed from earlier posts here, and so might sound a bit familiar if you've already gone through the Natures archive in search of words about Mr. Williams; I've revised it to correct temporal references that were current when it was written last fall.

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Jonathan Williams: Last Flight for the Loco Logodaedalist


What's the old maxim? Don't speak ill of the dead? There's a curious metamorphosis that takes place after death, besides the body's moldering. If we believe less these days in a reckoning before a juridical God (or Pluto, or Osiris), we know there's still a reckoning of a different sort, one that affects not our afterlife in the world beyond, but our afterlife within the community and culture of which we're each a part. For those who lead public lives, especially our artists and writers, the departure sometimes offers a moment of public reconnection, new recognition that what the artist has done has significance and resonance, beyond whatever claims the contending artist might have made for it. Or not. And sometimes ... well, Melville's death was little noted in 1891, eliciting but one obituary; re-appraisal, and the recognition of achievement it provided, had to wait for thirty years and the publication of Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography; his edition of Melville's last work, the short novel Billy Budd, in 1924; and texts like D. H. Lawrence's 1923 Studies in Classical American Literature.

The death last year of Jonathan Williams, late of Scaley Mountain, near Highlands, NC, seems happily to have spurred the world to give his work a more immediate second look. Ron Silliman, one of the leading conceptual poets of the generation that came of age in the 1970s, shortly after Donald Allen's 1962 anthology New American Poetry had reshaped the landscape of American verse, in his obituary for Jonathan included a fine appreciation of Jonathan's Blackbird Dust, and noted that he'd reviewed Jubilant Thicket, Jonathan's last collection, as "one of those absolute must-have books of poetry." And the Electronic Poetry Center, one of the primary Internet source sites for poets who appeared (as Jonathan did) in the Allen anthology, as well as their spiritual progeny, has now created a page for him with an array of links to the part of his work that's made it to the web, and to a slew of articles and appreciations that help provide context for the encounter with his work. Such notice, however belated, is always welcome.

A curious fact about Mr. Williams, of course, is that he didn't start out to be a poet at all. When he came to Black Mountain College in 1951, it was to study with photographer Harry Callahan, who was teaching in the summer session. Charles Olson, who headed the college and taught courses in writing, cosmology, and "the present", recognized Williams' great gift as a writer, though, and - shazam! - writing soon became for Williams the primary creative focus. He'd founded Jargon Press by the end of 1951, when he was just twenty-two; he'd go on to publish under the Jargon imprint close to a hundred titles by the brilliant wildcat pioneers and demotic outliers of American arts and letters over the five decades after the college as a formal institution ceased to exist.

Fortunately, he continued to use his camera, too; thanks to him, we have images of many of the denizens of Black Mountain College during their time together there - Charles Olson, for instance, sitting at his desk in his quarters at the college writing an early Maximus poem. And Robert Creeley, who used one of Jonathan's photos of him on the cover of 1969's The Charm, which collected poems from the Black Mountain era. Poet Thomas Meyer, Jonathan's longtime partner and co-conspirator in things Jargon, said recently that Jonathan had shot thousands of photos over the years, many with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera that used a medium format film - and so provided negatives with much higher resolution than those from 35mm cameras. He later favored the Polaroid SX-70, whose print format was of a similar size. When Jonathan and Thomas would join friends for dinner, Jonathan would often use the Polaroid to shoot everyone present and document the antics of the occasion. In the fall, he'd go through the stacks of shots from the previous year, and mount them in albums. He'd also assemble slide shows of whatever images had caught his eye - poets, landscapes, architecture, landscapes, art works. Williams, according to Meyer, continued taking photos through 2004. By 2006, when the transparencies were archived at Yale's Beinecke Library, he'd amassed "several thousand", including a "core collection" of about 2400. Two of his published titles, 1979's Portrait Photographs and A Palpable Elysium, published in 2000, drew on this vast photographic work.

Last summer Asheville's Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center helped us give Jonathan's work as a photographer the same sort of second look that his poetry has begun to receive. From June 13th thru September 20th the Center hosted a show of Williams photos, many of them fine black and white prints that beautifully register and find form in occasions during his years at Black Mountain. Others, some of them in the vibrant saturated colors with which he later loved to work, feature Black Mountain artists and writers, like M. C. Richards and Robert Duncan, who came into the orbit of his eye after their years at the college. Williams became, I think, a master of the post-modern portrait, situating his subjects in vivid color fields or apparent contexts that give the images depth and dimension.

Jonathan made it clear that he wanted no memorial services - but while the show was up, the Center also celebrated Williams' work as a writer, hosting a reading on July 19th by friends from far and near, some of whom had known Williams for decades, some who'd known him just a few years. Writer Tom Patterson, one of the former, organized the event, and set the order of reading for the night. The readers had been corresponding for several weeks before to declare their preferences for poems or prose selections that defined Jonathan in his particularity for them. I found that I was reminded of the old Buddhist teaching story about the blind men and the elephant; for some of us Jonathan was a winnowing basket, for others a plowshare, for others a column, for others a rope. It was fascinating to hear these various takes on Jonathan converge; I'm hoping we got close to providing a glimpse of the whole elephant before we were done.

Readers included Aperture editor-at-large Diana Stoll; art historian James Thompson; poet/teacher Jay Bonner of The Asheville School, and his daughter Hannah; photographer Reuben Cox; longtime Jargon Society Treasurer Thorns Craven; poet Jeffery Beam; Meyer; Patterson; and myself.

Jonathan was probably best known for his humorous work, and he did humor well - perhaps a rare talent in any age, but one that seems particularly scarce these days. In the course of his long career (I almost wrote "careen"; he moved right along), though, he explored many territories of poetry, from the visual (see the original edition of Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets), through the procedural (portions of 1964's Mahler were composed by using a "Hallucinatory Deck", "a personal alchemical deck of 55 white cards on which are written 110 words, - the private and most meaningful words of my poetic vocabulary"), to the poem of found or discovered language. One of my favorites, though, (and one of the poems I read) is one of his more conventional poems ("conventional" at least in the context of The New American Poetry), one that's grounded deeply in the world of nature, and celebrates that grounding:

The Deracination

definition: root

"a growing point,
an organ of absorption, an aerating organ,
a good reservoir, or
means of support"

veronica glauca, order Compositae,
"these tall perennials with
corymbose cymes of bright-purple heads of
tubular flowers
with conspicuous stigmas"

I do not know the Ironweed's root,
but I know it rules September

and where the flowers tower
in the wind there is a burr of
sound empyrean ... the mind
glows and the wind drifts...

epiphanies pull up
from roots

epiphytic, making it up

out of the air.

The evening was a fine celebration, I think, of the remarkable Loco Logodaedalist, the Sage of Scaly Mountain, Mr. Williams, and his work.

Jonathan, hale and farewell.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo: Jonathan Williams by Reuben Cox.

Easter on the airwaves

For Easter's Wordplay I went to the vault* and brought up a vintage reading by Jonathan Williams from 1981. It was the year he published Get Hot or Get Out in merry old England, and the reading features a sequence of poems from that book that's grounded in the work of composer Charles Ives. Like too much of Jonathan's work, it hasn't, I believe, appeared in another collection since its first book publication.

The show also features part of a 2003 interview of Jonathan by Hillsborough poet (and Wordplay vet) Jeffery Beam for RainTaxi Review of Books. The transcription of the interview is still available on the RainTaxi site.

Music for the show includes some Ives, of course, and some tracks from Monk, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and British entertainer Mike Harding (his "Manuel" is pretty hilarious) that Jonathan enjoyed .

It's another Jargony treat. Tune in!**

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*Actually, Thorns Craven's vault. Thorns was long-time treasurer of the Jargon Society, and graciously shared some of his tapes with me last fall. Thanks, Thorns.

** The link now works, so the file transferred properly to the archive server after today's rebroadcast.

Update 4/21/2009: Last spring's Wordplay show featuring Jonathan's 2005 reading from Jubilant Thicket is now up on the Wordplay ibiblio archive, here (.mp3 file).

Loco with the Logodaedalists

(Click for a legible version)


Saturday evening I'll be joining a host of other poets and friends of Jonathan Williams to read from his work and celebrate his life at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

The readers have been corresponding for several weeks now to declare their preferences for poems or prose selections that define Jonathan in his particularity for them. I find that I'm reminded of the old Buddhist teaching story about the blind men and the elephant; for some of us Jonathan was a winnowing basket, for others a plowshare, for others a column. It'll be interesting to hear these takes on Jonathan converge; I'm hoping we get close to providing a glimpse of the whole elephant before we're done.

Loco Loodaedalist
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
56 Broadway, Downtown Asheville
Saturday 19 July, 2008
Doors at 7:30, reading at 8:00

Jonathan Williams: Toward a Second Look

What's the old maxim? Don't speak ill of the dead? There's a curious metamorphosis that takes place after death, besides the body's moldering. If we believe less these days in a reckoning before a juridical God (or Pluto, or Osiris), we know there's still a reckoning of a different sort, one that affects not our afterlife in the world beyond, but our afterlife within the community and culture of which we're each a part. For those who lead public lives, especially our artists and writers, the departure sometimes offers a moment of public reconnection, new recognition that what the artist has done has significance and resonance, beyond whatever claims the contending artist might have made for it. Or not. And sometimes ... well, Melville's death was little noted in 1891, eliciting but one obituary; re-appraisal, and the recognition of achievement it provided, had to wait for thirty years and the publication of Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography; his edition of Melville's last work, the short novel Billy Budd, in 1924; and texts like D. H. Lawrence's 1923 Studies in Classical American Literature.

The recent death of Jonathan Williams, late of Scaly Mountain, near Highlands, seems happily to have spurred the world to give his work a more immediate second look. Ron Silliman, one of the leading conceptual poets of the generation that came of age just after Donald Allen's 1960 anthology New American Poetry had reshaped the landscape of American verse, recalled in a post after Williams' death that he'd heralded Jubilant Thicket, his last collection, as "one of those absolute must-have books of poetry." And the Electronic Poetry Center, one of the primary Internet source sites for poets who appeared (as Jonathan did) in that anthology, as well as their spiritual progeny, has now created a page for him with an array of links to the small part of his work that's made it to the web, and to a slew of articles, obituaries, and appreciations* that help provide context for the encounter with his work. Such notice, however belated, is always welcome to the kin, friends, and fans who survive.

A curious fact about Mr. Williams, of course, is that he didn't start out to be a poet at all. When he came to Black Mountain College in 1951, it was to study with photographer Harry Callahan, who was teaching in the summer session. Charles Olson, who headed the college and taught courses in writing, cosmology, and "the present", recognized Williams' great gift as a writer, though, and - shazam! - writing soon became for Williams the primary creative focus. He'd founded Jargon Press by the end of 1951, when he was just twenty-two; he'd go on to publish under the Jargon imprint roughly a hundred titles by the brilliant wildcat pioneers and outliers of American arts and letters in the decades after the college had ceased to exist.

Fortunately, he continued to use his camera, too; thanks to him, we have images of many of the denizens of Black Mountain College during their time together there - Charles Olson, for instance, sitting at his desk in his quarters at the college writing an early Maximus poem. And Robert Creeley, who used one of Jonathan's photos of him on the cover of 1969's The Charm, which collected poems from the Black Mountain era. Poet Thomas Meyer, Jonathan's longtime partner in Jargon, said recently that Jonathan had shot thousands of photos over the years, many with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera that used a medium format film - and so provided negatives with much higher resolution than those from 35mm cameras. He later favored the Polaroid SX-70, whose print format was of a similar size. When Jonathan and Thomas would join friends for dinner, Jonathan would often use the Polaroid to shoot everyone present and document the antics of the occasion. In the fall, he'd go through the stacks of shots from the previous year, and mount them in albums. He'd also assemble slide shows of whatever images had caught his eye - poets, landscapes, architecture, landscapes, art works. Williams, according to Meyer, continued taking photos through 2004. By 2006, when the transparencies were archived at Yale's Beinecke Library, he'd amassed "several thousand", including a "core collection" of about 2400. Two of his published titles, 1979's Portrait Photographs and A Palpable Elysium, published in 2000, drew on this vast photographic work.

This month Asheville's Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will help us give Jonathan's work as a photographer the same sort of second look that his poetry has recently begun to receive. On June 13th, the Center will open a show of Williams photos, many of them fine black and white prints that beautifully register and find form in occasions during his years at Black Mountain. Others, some of them in the vibrant saturated colors with which he later loved to work, feature Black Mountain artists and writers, like M. C. Richards and Robert Duncan, who came into the orbit of his eye after their years at the college. Williams became, I think, a master of the post-modern portrait, situating his subjects in vivid color fields or apparent contexts that give the images depth and dimension.

But take this opportunity to give the work a look for yourself.

The show will be up at the Center through September 20th.

Jonathan made it clear that he wanted no memorial services - but while the show is up, the Center will also celebrate Williams' work as a poet on July 19th. Plans for that event were developing at last Sunday's "life celebration" at Scaly Mountain. More about it in a future note.


If You Go:
What: Photographs by Jonathan Williams. Visions of Wonderment + Affection
Where: Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 56 Broadway, Downtown Asheville When: June 13th through September 20th , 2008, Opening with a reception on June 13th, 7:00pm
Admission: $3, free for members of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center; the reception is free.
More Info: (828) 384-5050 or online at www.blackmountaincollege.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The photo: Jonathan Williams, Beauty and the Beast: Joel Oppenheimer and Francine du Plessix Gray, BMC, 1951, gelatin silver print, 21.75 x 21.25 inches, BMCM+AC Collection, Gift of the artist.

*Including an earlier post here. Other posts on Jonathan are here and here.

This post appeared in slightly different form in the June, 2008 issue of Rapid River.

And speaking of JW ...

... Marsupial Inquirer Dale Smith has a consideration of Jonathan Williams and Jargon Press up over at BookSlut. It includes a few poems I haven't seen posted elsewhere, so it's well worth a visit.

In case there's another round ...

I've had occasion to read the book known in the west as the Tibetan Book of the Dead several times over the last few years as family, friends and mentors have died and gone back around the wheel (or, perhaps, off it). I've come to appreciate deeply its insights into the process of death - as it occurs for the dead, perhaps, but certainly as it transpires for the living, those who remain behind to say its prayers. It's about hearing in the worlds of both, the Bardo and the world of unfolding illusions we call home while our hearts beat.

If Padma Sambhava, said to be its ancient author, has indeed limned out the phases of the transition between incarnations, then poet Jonathan Williams will have by now either begun celebrating liberation from of his cycle of lives, or been reborn in some form, somewhere.

So, Colonel, in case we weren't able to dissuade you from the temptations of rebirth, let me welcome you back once more to this earthly vale.

This week on Wordplay ...

We'll be repeating last week's show with Jonathan Williams. We've repeated shows before, usually when something's gone haywire with the station's automatic archiving system, and the show hasn't uploaded properly to the server from which it streams and downloads. This week ... well, Sebastian's in Seattle, and I've been busy with Robert Bly's performance last night and workshop today, and at show time tomorrow, I'll be recording Kay Byer, North Carolina's Poet Laureate, at a reading at the Asheville Art Museum. So.

The show features Jonathan's May, 2005, reading from Jubilant Thicket at Sylva's City Lights Books, and it probably won't hurt anyone to hear it again. In fact, listen to those meta-fours again, and see if they aren't even better the second time around. The man could be subtle and very very dry, after all.

Production notes are just one post down.

The upside: we've got what looks to be a good recording of Bly's plugged-in performance with Free Planet Radio last night, and a half- hour interview from this very afternoon as well.

Back next week with a new show, promise.

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Update, 31 March: And here's the new direct link for the show featuring Jonathan's reading. You can also get it by going to the station website, hitting the link for the Archive page, and cruising down through the alphabet to "Wordplay", if you'd like to get a glimpse at what else is shakin' at the Progressive Voice of the Mountains.
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Update, 19 April, 2008: Jonathan's reading at City Lights is now archived at PennSound, here.

Jonathan Williams on the air

This week, Wordplay features a reading Jonathan gave at City Lights Books in Sylva, North Carolina, on May 27, 2005, shortly after Jubilant Thicket had come out. Almost any reading that followed the organization of the book, beginning, as it does, with the "meta-fours" that Jonathan wrote so many of in the last couple decades, would be fun, given their spirited play; it didn't disappoint.

A few production notes:

The room in which the reading was held was very warm, even in May, and there was an electric fan near the chair from which Jonathan read; one of my mics was close to the fan, and inevitably picked up its steady, annoying hum. I was able to filter out most of the noise, but at times Jonathan's voice sounds a bit as though it were echoing off cavern walls as a result.

Two of the four pieces of music I used for intro, breaks, and outro were pieces Jonathan had praised in conversation; one was by a musician he'd written a poem for, or about. I don't know how Jonathan felt about Miles Davis, but he was a favorite of Charles Olson's during the Black Mountain era, so I figured I was on pretty solid ground in selecting one of his classics.*

The tunes:
The intro was Miles Davis' "Bye Bye Blackbird" from 'Round About Midnight;
the first interlude was Charlie Mingus' band doing "Memories of You", from East Coasting;
the second interlude, Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on Greensleeves", as performed by the Academy of St. Martins in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner;
and the outro was the first three minutes or so of Williams' "The Lark Ascending", also performed by the Academy.

Enjoy.

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* Update, 28 March: Not to worry, Jonathan dug Miles. I've been reading so much Jonathan over the last few weeks that I can't for now nail down the source (was it somewhere in Blackbird Dust? No Jonathan book ever had an index, of course ... Or somewhere in Jeffrey Beam's dialogue with the Colonel over at Jargon? Or in the 1973 issue of Vort - more from that soon?), but Jonathan claimed early on to own as many Miles Davis records as he did of Bach - twenty-one each. That's a fan.


Of the photo, Alex Gildzen writes:

Doug Moore took this picture of Jonathan (which appears on the back cover of The Magpie's Bagpipe) in my livingroom on Morris in Kent.

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Update, 19 April, 2008: Jonathan's reading at City Lights is now archived at PennSound, here.

Update, 9 September 2008: The Wordplay show featuring Jonathan's reading is now archived at ibiblio, also, as part of Wordplay's permanent archive:

March 23, 2008, featuring Jonathan Williams reading at Sylva's City Lights Books in May of 2005.

Jonathan's obituary

Ron Silliman today posts a link to an interview with Jonathan Williams that Jeffrey Beam published in Rain Taxi's Spring 2003 edition. It contains this wonderful exchange:

JB: This is a morbid question, but I hope a revealing one. Someday—a long time hence, since you are as mean as a cottonmouth and you're going to live a long time—what would you like your epitaph to be?

JW: It's the one I wrote for Uncle Iv Owens: "He did what he could, when he got round to it." (laughs)

Ron, as usual, has got a great compendium of links to other appreciations of Jonathan and his work, so give the link a click.

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Updates: Pierre Joris also has a warm appreciation of Jonathan and his work over at Nomadics.

My previous memorial post on Jonathan is here. The memorial show for Jonathan will stream this Sunday, March 23rd, at 2:00 PM EDT from the WPVM web site. It will be available as an on-demand stream and podcast Monday, the 24th, from the station archive page. Shows are listed alphabetically, so just scroll down to find Wordplay.

Another update, April 5, 2008: Jonathan's reading at City Lights is now archived at PennSound, here.

Jonathan Williams 1929-2008

Jonathan Williams, one of this country's literary treasures, died last night in Highlands from complications of a systemic infection. He had been ill for some time, and had been receiving treatment for peripheral neuropathy for the last several years. As Ron Silliman notes today, Jonathan was the last survivor of the Black Mountain poets featured in Donald Allen's 1962 New American Poetry; fortunately, other Black Mountain writers not included in that anthology, notably Michael Rumaker, still flourish.

Jonathan was an extraordinary poet, of course, and perhaps equally remarkable as a publisher (his Jargon Press was one of the absolutely critical undertakings in American poetry of the last sixty years) and a photographer. He also was a long time collector of vernacular art, and a show from his collection, curated by Tom Patterson, is currently up at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, North Carolina. It runs until June, for those who'd like to get a glimpse of work that caught Colonel Williams' eye.

Jonathan was generous with his time and attention, and proved gracious and amiable host when I asked in 2005 if I might interview him about his career and work. The afternoon at Skywinding, Jonathan and Tom Meyer's home, was an illuminating feast of insight, history, and the various delights of imagination - and Tom made one of the best lasagne's I've ever had, to boot. Jonathan gave a few readings here in Western North Carolina after the publication of Jubilant Thicket, his selected poems (Silliman: "one of those absolute must-have books of poetry"), and I managed to record one of those, at City Lights Books in Sylva, as well. I'll be listening to those recordings this week, and putting together a memorial show for this coming Sunday's Wordplay.

Jonathan was probably best known for his humorous work, and he did humor well - a rare talent these days. In the course of his long career (I almost wrote "careen"; he moved right along), though, he explored many territories of poetry, from the visual (see the original edition of Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets), through the procedural (portions of 1964's Mahler were composed by using a "Hallucinatory Deck", "a personal alchemical deck of 55 white cards on which are written 110 words, - the private and most meaningful words of my poetic vocabulary"), to the poem of found or discovered language. One of my favorites, though, is one of his more conventional poems ("conventional" at least in the context of The New American Poetry):

The Deracination

definition: root

"a growing point,
an organ of absorption, an aerating organ,
a good reservoir, or
means of support"

veronica glauca, order Compositae,
"these tall perennials with
corymbose cymes of bright-purple heads of
tubular flowers
with conspicuous stigmas"

I do not know the Ironweed's root,
but I know it rules September

and where the flowers tower
in the wind there is a burr of
sound empyrean ... the mind
glows and the wind drifts...

epiphanies pull up
from roots

epiphytic, making it up

out of the air.

Jonathan, hale and farewell.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Updates, March 19th:

There's a bit more about The Colonel a couple of posts up.

The memorial show for Jonathan will stream this Sunday, March 23rd, at 2:00 PM EDT from the WPVM web site. It will be available as an on-demand stream and podcast Monday, the 24th, from the station archive page. Shows are listed alphabetically, so just scroll down to find Wordplay.

Another update, March 24:

The reading at City Lights is now available from the Archive page at WPVM; it'll be there through next Sunday, March 30th (at least), and will eventually find a home in the online Wordplay archives, wherever they may be hosted. I'll update again as that project get closer to realization. Production notes for the show are up here. Enjoy.

And more: Poked around over at the old Eden Hall, and found some earlier notes about readings by Jonathan and Thomas Meyer at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. They're here.

And yet more, 5 April, 2008: The reading by Jonathan has now found a permanent home in the wonderful PennSound audio archive, here.

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Photograph by Roger Manley, who collaborated with JW on St. Eom in the Land of Pasaquan: The Life & Times and Art of Eddie Owens Martin. It was originally posted at the Jargon site, though I can't locate it there now.

WordPlay this week ...

This week Sebastian and I rushed back from a fine reading at the Flood Gallery by our own sometime co-host Glenis Redmond, A. Van Jordan, and Juilian Vorus to talk with poet Steve Godwin. Fortunately, Steve had also been at the reading and could share his impressions of it, as well as some recent work. Sebastian read from Jordan's new Quantum Lyrics.

Two weeks ago I took some time off to visit my son in Chapel Hill - and, of course, book addict that I am, hit a couple of used book stores, including the great The Bookshop on Franklin Street. There I found some early books by the sage of Scaly Mountain, Jonathan Williams, including his Amen Huzzah Selah, which collected very early work - poems, in fact, from the period when he was a student of Charles Olson's at Black Mountain College. From it I read "The Anchorite", a poem that's held up well enough through the years to have been included in 2005's Jubilant Thicket, a selection of poems from his whole career to date.

We had a little time, so I also read a poem by the great Hilda Doolittle, or H.D., as she preferred to be known, her musical take on Sappho's "Fragment 113", neither honey nor bee for me ... I've been re-reading, or in some cases reading for the first time, work from her whole career as a way to participate at a distance in the H.D. Group that's developed on the Lucipo list. It's been a great pleasure, of course; how not stand in wonder before a woman who, even had she no claim of her own to make on the memory of history, was intimately involved with both Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence (ever read Lady Chatterley's Lover?)? And was psychoanalyzed by Freud himself?

And the lady does have a large claim to make on the basis of her own work. I wish I'd read more of it sooner. Back in the benighted epoch when I was going for my degree, though, she was barely mentioned, and seldom read extensively; she was thought a bit ... "unusual", in that era before sexuality and gender were discussed, you know, in polite company, much less the classroom. Much of her work, too, had yet to surface fully, as many volumes were first published (or re-published after obscure first publication) only after her death in 1961, just the year before I started the university in Chapel Hill.

My first encounter with her work came in my final year in Chapel Hill, I believe, when I was working in the old Bull's Head Bookstore, then in the basement of the library. There I often had time to browse, and even read, between tweedy customers. Her Helen in Egypt had appeared in the last year of her life, and the shop still had copies in its poetry section. I found that text a difficult place to jump in, but intriguing, nonetheless, and explored more of her work later, in Buffalo and after.

Here's a poem from her 1924 volume Heliodora:

Mysteries Remain

The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass,
I multiply,
renew and bless
Bacchus in the vine;
I hold the law,
I keep the mysteries true,
the first of these
to name the living, dead;
I am the wine and bread.

I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you,
and you.

There's a great deal more over on her Modern American Poetry page, where I borrowed the photo I've used here.

Enjoy. And, hey, it won't hurt you to read a poem this week.

(The initial version of this text cross-posted at WPVM).

This Week: Celebrating Black Mountain Poets

Sometimes when I'm at Black Mountain's Camp Rockmont, now home to The Lake Eden Arts Festival, and the former site of Black Mountain College, I wonder what it would have been like to hang out in the dining hall a half-century ago and listen in as the great Black Mountain poets read to one another and discussed each other's work. When Donald Allen placed the Black Mountain College poets first in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, the great anthology that introduced a generation of experimental poets to a national audience, he might have done so based not just on the quality of their intellectual and formal adventures, but on a solid hunch about the significance their work would assume for the rest of the twentieth century. While they didn't achieve the momentary mass audiences a few of the Beat poets found, it'd be difficult to find another contemporary group of poets who did as much to shape the subsequent course of American writing. The energy of their work has rippled through the imaginations of the several generations and many schools of poets who've come down the road since, and ripples still.

This Friday, November 17th, at 6:00 PM, the Asheville Art Museum celebrates the legacy of these artists with a special evening of poetry that features local poets reading works of these groundbreaking Black Mountain College writers.

Language poet Ron Silliman recently noted on his weblog that when he met Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley in the mid-sixties, he was already the "dean" of American poetry. Ron caught some flack for that; Creeley was only in his mid-thirties, and his mentor, the visionary Charles Olson, was still living, though he had to that point little audience. I think, given that "dean" can imply the lofty heights of academic seniority, that Ron might have chosen a better word. But having met Creeley just a few years after, I can testify that the man had real mojo, genuine moxie, some serious virtu, as Horace might have said, and that by the time he was in his early forties, he had already discovered passes through language that settlers are still trooping through.

"Form is never more than the extension of content," he famously noted. Later he came to acknowledge that the statement was also true if the roles of content and form were reversed. Form embodies content, is the extension of the feeling that's the poem's initial premise. His insight into the nature of poetry, its relations to speech and mind, his consummate feel for rhythm, and his awareness of the fields of meaning within which the language of the poem must dance, make his work one of the enduring testaments of twentieth century poetry.

Charles Olson, certainly one of the most influential poets of his generation, had once befriended Ezra Pound (until he lost patience with Pound's reflexive anti-Semitism), and so provided a bridge back to the great Modernist poets who offered him, and his generation, an initial stance. When he came to Black Mountain College, he'd published a handful of poems and a short critical work on Melville; by the time he closed the College in 1957, he'd published, via Jonathan Williams' Jargon Press, the first two sections of his Maximus Poems, and completed the work that appeared as The Distances in 1960, displaying in both the gift for radical insight into history and the project of consciousness that makes his work of such value.

It was Olson, with his vision of new possibilities for poetry, and for life, who decisively shaped the minds and imaginations of the writers who gathered at the college in its final years. He brought Creeley to the college to teach, and later recruited Robert Duncan. Edward Dorn, John Wieners, and Jonathan Williams, to note just a few of the other significant poets who came through the college's refining fires, had ventured there as students. Other writers, Denise Levertov and Paul Blackburn, for instance, never visited the college, but were published by Creeley in the Black Mountain Review. The Review presented Creeley's and Olson's vision of useful modes of writing to the world, introduced the poets of Black Mountain to a larger community of like-minded writers, and became a meeting place for some of the most creative spirits of the era.

Robert Duncan went on from Black Mountain to become a leading figure in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the nineteen sixties, producing a major body of work that included The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow, as well as the important late work published in the two collections of Ground Work, republished in one volume just last year. He also authored over a period of decades the amazing HD Book, not yet published in book form, but available at the moment on the web (it's a large .pdf file) in an unofficial electronic format that bears the imprint of the crucial, elusive Frontier Press. It began as a study of the work of Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (who published as HD), but became a major work on poetic imagination. It's similar, in many ways, I think, to Coleridge's rambling, monumental Biographia Literaria, still one of the indispensable texts of the English Romantic period.

Speaking of that scepter'd isle ... Denise Levertov was English, born in Ilford, Essex, in 1927; she married an American, Mitch Goodman, after World War II, though, and moved to the States in 1948. Her Here and Now, published in 1956, and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, published three years later, established her as a major voice in the new poetry. She published more than twenty volumes of verse during her lifetime. Though she and her husband were personal friends of Creeley, her closest relationship with another Black Mountain writer was probably with Robert Duncan, with whom she had a long and illuminating, if sometimes contentious, correspondence, published in 2004.

Ed Dorn is perhaps one of the least well known of the Black Mountain poets, though there's hope that his Collected Poems, due out next year, will bring his work the larger attention it deserves. He was the most contrary of the contrarians who stood at the college, and ever afterwards, against the generalizing mass culture that seemed, seems, to strip individuals of their particularity, of the ability to stand grounded as creative, active participants in the polis of the world. His next-to-last collection, High West Rendezvous, contained sections from "Languedoc Variorum", a major late work that remains mostly in manuscript, which reveal it to be a poem of astonishing technical achievement that also challenges the pious orthodoxies of the history of heresy. It's an amazing, polyvocalic montage that mocks, on one level, the structures of contemporary media news presentation. He had his chops till the end. Unfortunately, it'd probably be next to impossible to perform, so Thomas Rain Crowe, charged with presenting the work of Dorn, will, I hear, read from another, earlier, masterpiece, his Gunslinger.

The reading will feature the works of these Black Mountain poets, and works, as well, by the poets gathered for the occasion: Sebastian Matthews, who organized the event, Thomas Rain Crowe, Jaye Bartell, Glenis Redmond, Keith Flynn, and myself. The reading is a part of the Museum's year-long celebration of Black Mountain College and its legacy in the arts.

Olson died in 1970, Duncan in 1988 , Levertov in 1997, Dorn in 1999, Creeley just last year, but on the 17th of November, the voices of their poems will return to Western North Carolina once again, and ring out.

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I took the photo of the Dining Hall on Lake Eden in 2003.
This post was published in different form in the November, 2006, issue of Rapid River. Trying to write about the Black Mountain poets in a thousand words or so ... Ha! Well, we'll have more than that to offer on Friday.

Posts in the Permanent Collection

Two posts archived here deal head-on with Robert Creeley's work:
Something Quite Different: A Farewell for Robert Creeley (published 2006), and
Robert Creeley: Here and Now (first published in 1979); they're the best place to start if you're interested in Creeley (or at least my engagement with his work).

In addition, a search of NatureS on "Robert Creeley" will turn up many other mentions of him, often in the context of discussions of Buffalo in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, or considerations of other Black Mountain College poets.

Jonathan Williams was one of those Black Mountain College poets. He was born in Asheville, and lived much of his life about an hour and a half west of here, at Scaly Mountain. Posts on Jonathan include this appreciation of his work published just after his death in 2008; this post previews a showing of some of his photographic work; and another post provides production notes for the Wordplay show featuring Jonathan reading his work, live and in person, at Sylva's City Lights Books in 2005.

Articles on Thomas Meyer's 2006 translation of the daode jing can be found here, here, and here. Production notes for the Wordplay show that featured Tom reading his translation, as well as a selection of earlier work, will be found here, and the notes for the program featuring his reading of Kintsugi and other poems are here.

A Note on Jack Clarke discusses Charles Olson's Buffalo friend and fellow poet, who founded the Institute of Further Studies. There's look at some of Novalis' fragments here; the great German Romantic was among authors included in the Institute's unique Curriculum of the Soul.

I've discussed Bill Knott's poetry, as well as his aversion to music, several times - here and here and here, for instance.

Visual artist Joyce Blunk is featured in an article on her piece "Crown Conch"; there's also an interview with Joyce.

Guitarist Steve Kimock, a master of musical improvisation, is the subject of several posts, including this one and this one.

Wait, there's still more! Posts, for example, on Baby Beat Thomas Rain Crowe, and his group The Boatrockers, and poets Fred Chappell and Jim Applewhite.

Other possible attractions: a post on poetry and computers; another farewell, this one to west-coast surrealist poet Ken Wainio.

Over on Eden Hall, there are older posts about happenings at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, including one on Hazel Larsen Archer and the book about her work the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center published in 2006. There are several of her photos here.

Enjoy.

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Updated 2/19/2009 to include additional posts.