Jonathan Williams' work of more than half a century is such that no one
activity or identity takes primacy over any other--he was the seminal
small press publisher of The Jargon Society; a poet of considerable
stature; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary correspondent;
literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early collector and
proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist and
Juvenalian critic; curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen
and adroit raconteur and gourmand.
Williams' refined decorum and speech, and his sartorial style,
contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly, with his delight in the bawdy, with
his incisive humor and social criticism, and his confidently
experimental, masterful poems and prose.
His interests raised "the common to grace," while paying "close
attention to the earthy." At the forefront of the Modernist
avant-garde--yet possessing a deep appreciation of the
traditional--Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved those things he
described as, "more and more away from the High Art of the city,"
settling "for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass."
Subject to much indifference--despite being celebrated as publisher and
poet--he nurtured the nascent careers of hundreds of emerging or
neglected poets, writers, artists, and photographers.
Recognizing this, Buckminster Fuller once called him "our Johnny
Appleseed", Guy Davenport described him as a "kind of polytechnic
institute," while Hugh Kenner hailed Jargon as "the Custodian of
Snowflakes" and Williams as "the truffle-hound of American poetry."
Lesser known for his extraordinary letters and essays, and his
photography and art collecting, he is never only a poet or photographer,
an essayist or publisher.
This book of essays, images, and shouts aims to bring new eyes and
contexts to his influence and talent as poet and publisher, but also
heighten appreciation for the other facets of his life and art. One
might call Williams' life a poetics of gathering, and this book a first
harvest.
