Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers

Jonathan Williams

Jonathan Williams Jonathan Williams is part poet and graphic artist, part printer and publisher. He is also part yarn-spinner , a respecter ofthe "homemade," and among small publishers , a genuine American exotic. His press, the Jargon Society, has been an important presence on the margins of American letters for thirty-five years. In his own words, "those are the people I go for . .. the guys on the edges." Among Jargon's noteworthy achievements, none is more significant than the publication ofCharles Olson's The Maximus Poems. But Jargon's list also includes Kenneth Patchen, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, Russell Edson, Guy Davenport, revivals ofthe work ofMina Loy and Lorine Niedecker, and photography by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lyle Bonge, and Doris Ulmann. Mr. Williams' career began when he dropped out of Princeton to study etching at Atelier 17 with Stanley 188 AGAINST THE GRAIN William Hayter and graphics at the Institute ofDesign in Chicago. Jargon Press was born in 1951 in San Francisco and was associated for a time with Black Mountain College. After a year offugitive correspondence in preparation for this interview, I finally met Jonathan Williams in 1984 on a fine, mountain spring day at the family house in Highlands, North Carolina. It was to be an afternoon memorable for its candor and good humor. DANA: Well, let's go back to the very beginning for a moment -Buncombe County, North Carolina. You once said you suffered from "Buncombe County afflatus." Did you grow up there? WILLIAMS: I didn't, actually. Most of my connection with Buncombe County, after getting born there, was coming back to go to Black Mountain College. I didn't actually grow up in Asheville, where I was born. My parents lived over in Hendersonville , twenty miles away, where my father had a stationery store that went bust during the Depression. There wasn't much else to do. Ben Williams was a man interested in filing systems, visible-index systems, and he designed these things. So he went up to Washington, D.C., and got lucky. The war was very good for him. All of his equipment was used by the army and the navy and the government . So he did well. He was the class poet at Fruitland Academy in Henderson County. I have a tradition going. DANA: So there was a kind of literary tradition in your family to begin with? WILLIAMS: Of a very simple order. Ben Williams liked dialect poetry, and he was a friend of DuBose Heyward, who used to summer up in Hendersonville. My father was a great reader of things like Uncle Remus and Porgy. There was a dialect poet in North Carolina back early in the century named John Charles McNeill. He's the best-selling poet that's ever been in North Carolina. Lyricsfrom Cottonland was one of his titles. He was an alcoholic reporter for the Charlotte paper and wrote black dialect poems, which were tremen- Jonathan Williams 189 dously successful. Chapel Hill has sold more of that than any other book of poetry, hundreds of thousands of copies. My father was very good at this dialect, so I was brought up on it. Not bad. And Joel Chandler Harris-my mother's family lived about three or four blocks from Joel Chandler Harris's Wren's Nest in Atlanta. Thus, on both sides of the family there were these funny, Southern, . . . DANA: Funny, but powerful. WILLIAMS: Yes. Well, I'm glad I got to listen to all that stuff when I was a boy. It must have had its effect, because, in my own way, I finally turned back and became very acutely interested in what southern mountain speech was all about. DANA: You call yourself "a seeker of the homemade." Are we talking here about the roots of that interest in the homemade? WILLIAMS: I think having heard and been exposed to those Southern genre and imitation-black writers must have had its effect. I would never have admitted this until I got to be about forty, I'm sure. Suddenly I realized, well, hell, it's where it came from, really. DANA: What do you think are the virtues ofthe homemade? WILLIAMS: It's the only kind of virtue I know about. DANA: How would you describe it? WILLIAMS: I mean, I'm only interested in homemade people and homemade writers. Out ofthe main stream. Nonacademic. Nonurban. Really, when you...