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.

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

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.

Wordplay welcomes Thomas Meyer ...

Not actually, mind you; he didn't drive all the way over from Scaly Mountain to sit down in the studio this past Sunday. But he didn't have to, since I'd recorded several of his readings in recent years, and had sat down with him in another studio back in 2006 to talk about (among other things) his translation of the classic Chinese text daode jing.

Tom's a terrific poet, of course, so it was great fun to revisit the occasions I'd recorded. Those readings included one from September 30, 2005 at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, in which he gave, I thought, a really good overview of his work, from the poems collected in At Dusk Iridescent, to the long poem Coromandel (on line at the link), to his translation of the dao, which was then unpublished. He came back to the Center in March, 2006, though, after the dao's publication by Flood Editions, to present the text in full, so I used that recording for the show, as well as a snip from that interview we'd done the same day, rather than the excerpts from the previous fall.

When Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam visited Asheville in July, he brought along several tapes featuring readings by, or interviews with, Jonathan Williams. One of those tapes, from a midsummer, 1994, reading at The Literary Institute, Muker, Swansdale, Yorkshire, Great Britain, also included a brief reading by Tom; I opened the show with it, since Tom hadn't featured its material in the 2005 foray back into his earlier work. Thanks, Jeffery.

Since we were beginning the show in Yorkshire, I used Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on Greensleeves" for the show's opening theme, and honored the multivoiced Coromadel from 2005 with "Taboehgan" by the Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan (recorded in 1941, and available on Music for the Gods from the Library of Congress). Tom had said he loved Bollywood soundtracks, but I didn't have any handy, so I closed with Ali Akbar Khan's "Blessings of the Heart, Part 2", from 1993's Garden of Dreams. Khan has composed for film scores throughout his long career, after all, and I bet a few were Bollywood productions.

Oh, you might notice that the show that's now available from the WPVM archive is several minutes longer than Worplay's hour, so I should confess that it's not the show that aired. If you happened to be listening live, you had an experience that the station's rickety archiving system failed to record. When I came back to the station Sunday evening to re-produce the show, I included a little more of the music than I could squeeze into our live slot.

Give it a listen.

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

15 September update: The show's now up on the ibiblio archive, here.
And here's a catalog of other Wordplay programs.



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

Photo of Tom by Reuben Cox

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

Another birthday: Thomas Meyer ...

... who turns sixty-one today.

You certainly brought me good Fortune
But that is just what I regret, my success. The worst thing is once to have been happy.
A mouth and some yarrow stalks. Two witches dance for rain. Future foretelling.
A dish covered but full. Everything that was predicted comes about.
What you want will be done. Your heart's desire is the plan from now on.

(A few lines from the very fine "The Magician's Assistant", which appeared recently in Damn the Caesars, Volume III.)

Many more, Mr. Meyer.


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


Here's a previous post on Meyer's translation of the daode jing , and a link to other posts on his work. Though things have been quiet there lately, the Musings page over at the Jargon Society remains worth delving into.

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

The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

Gads! Tom Meyer now 60

To help him celebrate, why not scoot over to Jargon's site to read some of his work - the wonderful essay "On Being Neglected," for example, which I've returned to many times.

[A] good friend once confessed how wonderful it felt to edit an anthology, and not include work of his own. Though not a lesson our society proffers, there is good sense in making one's work a refuge, rather than a display, the self evident as opposed to the self-proclaimed, to dare not to be first, even in disappointment. Consider this: Hiding one's light under a bushel is actually a strength, not a weakness — the authority of accomplishment. That's nearly unthinkable here and now in these United States, despite all our spiritual aspirations.

In taking the measure of his own path, he casts light into byways anyone committed to the work of writing will find it more than useful to explore. If you're a poet, you'd do well to read it, print it, and keep it close at hand to read again.

And there's more to be found there through the Musings page - including files you can stream or download of Tom reading Coromandel, his recent long poem, the text of his translation of the Katha Upanishad, and his memoir of artist Sandra Fisher.

And there are articles on Tom's translation of the daode jing at NatureS here, here, and here.

Happy birthday, Tom. Like they say, many more.

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

The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

Tom Meyer on the Airwaves

When Tom Meyer came to Asheville in March to read his new translation of the daode jing at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, I managed to record an interview with him across the street at WCQS. Today part of it aired on WPVM; it'll be broadcast again Tuesday at 6:00 PM and Wednesday at 7:00 AM, and is available as an internet stream from the station website.

It's also available as a download this week; just use the "Archive" link and scroll down to "WordPlay."

Enjoy.

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

The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

More Translations by Tom Meyer

Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam writes to note that Tom Meyer's translation of the Katha Upanishad is available on the Jargon Society website, and to pass along a reminder from John Martone that the I Ching is there also. I've just seen the Upanishad, but have enjoyed the translation of the I Ching for several years. Do check them out.

While you're there, there's also a good account of the Jargon project through the years by Jeffery. Elsewhere on the site (sorry, I can't locate it at the moment), there is (or perhaps was?) a wide-ranging interview with Jonathan Williams, Jargon's proprietor and author of the fine Jubilant Thicket and, of course, many other titles. Jeffery's got a new collection of poems, Gospel Earth, up at Longhouse Press.

Update: Jeffery's interview with Jonathan is here. Thanks, Tom.
********************************

The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.
Original content © 2006.

Exploring The Dao With Thomas Meyer

Eugene O’Neill might never have written Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or any of his other dramas, except that tuberculosis forced him to bed, to a long reflective physical inactivity, and required of him a different life. Poet William Carlos Williams, felled by a stoke in 1951, had to learn to write all over again, but went on to produce The Desert Music, Journey To Love, and Pictures From Brueghel, three of his most moving testaments to the powers of relationship and of the imagination, in his final decade. For both of these men, experience of severe physical disability brought discovery or rediscovery of the vocation of writing; it drew them into deep creative work.

But, of course, Thomas Meyer didn’t think of these predecessors when he found himself flat on his back, unable to sit or stand, in 1989. He simply wondered what on earth he would now do.

Thomas had begun writing when still a teenager in Seattle, Washington, and submitted his first poem to a magazine when he was all of sixteen. He was already at that age a veteran of the arts, having been a child actor, beginning at age nine, in TV ads and summer stock theater. His determination to write persisted, even though, at that historical moment in Seattle

the shadow of Theodore Roethke loomed large. Classmates of mine had older siblings who'd been in his writing workshop where — we had heard stories — much emphasis was put on the name to write under, what magazine to send which poem to, and how to make your regional images appeal to a national audience. All of this, even then, struck me as another screwiness of America post World War Two. Writing, it seemed, wasn't about writing, it was about getting into print. Were we talking about poems or corn flakes? (from Tom’s article “On Being Neglected”)

It wasn’t uncommon, Tom amplifies, for Roethke, as he went through the roll of his students, to remark “Don’t worry, I’ll come up with a name for you.”

That local focus factored into his choice, when the time came, to go east for college. He wound up at Bard College, which had one of the premier programs in American literature in the 1960s and 70s, and was just up the Hudson from New York City. Bard faculty member Robert Kelly, himself a widely published poet and editor, helped him find his footing in the New York literary world, and by 1968, at age twenty-one, Tom was publishing poems in Clayton Eshleman’s great magazine Caterpillar; that’s where I first read him.

In the couple of decades following, Tom found audience and extensive publication for his poetry. His work with partner Jonathan Williams on Jargon Books brought him interaction with some of the most visionary writers and artists of the era, and extended his contacts. Gradually, though, publication came to mean less to him; it had never been a primary focus, and slowly became even less important. As he writes:

There were so many poets who wanted to get into print that by my late forties I felt I should step aside; in effect become neglected. I'd had more than a fair share of not wide but close attention; and at least three 'ideal readers.' So too, I'd been lucky, always having the time to write when I needed or wanted it. Perhaps that's why I think about being neglected the way I do. But who's to say that my luck isn't the result of always writing when I needed or wanted to? (again from “On Being Neglected”)

(Luckily for us, many of the poems from those lucky decades are collected in At Dusk Iridescent, published by the Jargon Society in 1999. There are some selections from it up at the Nantahala Review site.)

In the enforced immobility of the first days after his back injury (Tom writes from his home near Highlands: “It was one of those mysterious things. I had an exercise routine and somehow bent this way and not that, and wrenched the lower back, which was sort of painful the same day. But the next morning, at the bathroom sink, shaving, I bent to look in the mirror and WHAM! I was on the floor. Muscle spasm. And had to crawl back to bed, couldn’t stand upright for about five days.”), in those days of pondering, Tom found a project that spoke of the wisdom of inner stillness and provided new ways to assess his position in life, that provided new perspectives on the question of what, in fact, constitutes “success”? While he’d worked a bit with the I Ching, the great Chinese divinatory classic, one of the world’s oldest books, as a young man, he’d never found it particularly hospitable. Now, though, he did find it welcoming. “After a month or two, I had the amazing feeling of being embraced by something, of being held”. He’d been accepted, perhaps, into the fold of the ancient lineage of human imagination that the I Ching, that “crazy compendium of poetry, songs, legends, recipes, and sayings,” as Tom describes it, embodies. He’d not been interested initially in the I Ching’s divinatory aspect (its principle use, for millennia, has been divination), but he came to appreciate that, too, as “one of its many dimensions. Divinatory practice,” he says, “is a way to calm you down, to get you to stop thinking so things can work out.”

He also explored the other great classic of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching – or, as Tom, following contemporary conventions for transliteration, terms it, the Daode Jing. And he found it a text that spoke to him as well. “The Dao,” Tom says, “is of as profound an order as the I Ching, but it offers silence and the idea of a positive emptiness as a space in which something can happen.” For the next decade, as he slowly healed, unable for most of that time to sit for any extended period – he had to work standing at a high desk (“like a scribe”, he says) – he developed his understanding of these texts. He read the Dao every spring, all of it, character by character, one chapter a day, in Chinese. He gradually worked at translations, first of the I Ching, building a concordance of its many characters, some of them rare in contemporary Chinese, one found only in its ideograms, and then of the Dao. As he notes in the afterward to his version (now to see the broader light of day),“Though I tried [to translate it], I didn’t press too hard, heeding the [book’s] advice to look for and follow that inherent, natural course of things themselves.” The texts and his dictionaries became his constant companions, something he carried with him everywhere, like, he says, “a bag of needlework.”

As Tom’s translation emerged, he gradually found the voice of the text. As he notes in the Afterward,

The tone was conversational, not canonical. Honesty and simplicity foremost, rather than piety or complication. There were no themes, ideas per se. Following one upon another, things circled, darted away, appeared again, or vanished altogether, with the natural ease and bonhomie of good talk.

“Of course,” he adds. And that voice seemed to him consonant with the traditional story of the origins of the Dao, which, unlike the I Ching, is reputed to have had a single author, laozi – or, in the older, traditional transliteration, Lao-Tzu – though the name itself simply refers to an “old man”. Here’s Tom’s account of the story:

Many years ago an old man lived in the capital of a place called China. He was the emperor’s librarian and renown for having read everything there was to read. When the philosopher Confucius paid him his respects, he came away saying:

Birds fly. Fish swim. Animals run.
They can be caught, shot, or trapped.
But this old man is like an air-borne dragon.
He can’t be snared.

Then as now, things could not get worse, but did. Big troubles were afoot. Those with power abused it. Those without grew cunning and two-faced. The old man finally could stomach no more greed, dishonesty, or corruption. The time had come, he told himself, to get out of China.

He climbed upon an ox, and leaving behind what little he owned, headed west, toward the high mountains of another country. When he reached a gate that led up a steep pass, the border guard stopped him, and said:

I recognize you and cannot let you go until you tell me everything you know. Otherwise we will see all that is worthwhile swallowed up by all that is not.

The old man welcomed a rest. The sun almost down, a bottle of wine opened, the two sat in the little station hut. The guard listened as the old man told him what he knew, which he said was not much. In fact, the moon was still in the middle of the sky when he got up to leave.

He was never heard of, or seen again. The five thousand words spoken that night are all that is left of him. And that, in the mind of their speaker, was five thousand too many.

Tom’s now ready to emerge from his remote hermitage and share one of the results of his long undertaking, his translation of the great Daode Jing. On March twenty-second, at 7:00 PM, Tom will read from his newly published version at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center (another of the Center’s extraordinary programs), and introduce it to the world.

For more information, visit the Center’s website or call 828-350-8484.

For more on Tom’s translation of the Dao, read on; the next post is a “test of translation” that looks at Tom’s version and compares it to previous translations – and provides some background on the text of the Dao as well.

********************************
This post originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Rapid River Art Magazine Vol. 9 No. 7, March, 2006. Original content © 2006.

The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.