J o n at h a n W i l l i a m s 2
“You can’t be too careful.” Typhoid Mar y “Literature, the way we ripen ourselves by conversation.” Edward Dahlberg
W
riting becomes a cottage industry—one of the last —, approximately like what the women in the Hebrides do: weave sheep’s wool into Harris tweed that is dyed with a mordant of male urine and lichens collected locally. It has to do with privacy and the quiet of the hearth. The desk and the hearth are sacred places to the devoted writer and reader. Note the multitude of warming particles in the word hearth: hear, heart, ear, earth, art. They are what it is all about. On the following sheets I have put together a résumé of JW and of JW books. The student has every right to know who this is who is ‘professing’ to them. The observant student should be interested in the fact that from 1951 until 1962 my own writer’s press, Jargon Books, had the responsibility of getting my own work out to friends, to the (if you prefer) avant-garde — which is always a community of mutual concern. This is the pebble hitting the water, from which ripples may (or may not) go on out to what is called ‘the reading
4
public’ or ‘the audience’. Charles Olson (1910-71), my mentor at Black Mountain College, stressed that each of us must not feel abject before events, must not feel confined or depressed by lack of ways & means of getting the work out. “the artist is his own instrument!” So, at Black Mountain, we learned to set type, run a hand press, design and produce small broadsides and handmade publications for the community there. I still think that this is what I am doing, even though now I have some books published ‘commercially’ by the official book industrial in New York and London. It becomes a pleasure to hear from someone you have never read poems to personally on a campus or never met, that they picked up the paperback version of an ear in bartram’s tree in the San Francisco airport. A new ripple— and very nice when it happens to one’s aging, tattered, mildly misanthropic vanity. It took a few of us about nine years’ publishing Robert Creeley in small ‘private’ editions to get it into the heads of Scribner’s in NYC that the work meant enough to enough people to make them ‘waste’ their money on a poet. Mr. Creeley thus became ‘established’. (This does not make him necessarily better, or major, or any of the silly magnitude terms we rely on in a mercantile culture.) However, his work is around and that is as it should be, competing for attention in the Land of Horrid Plenty. America is gluttonous and consumes three times the calories, rubbish, distraction, and even poems that it should. Simplify! said that funny man sitting by Waldon Pond. Easier then than now, then the writer had no automobiles, radios, televisions, stereos, and Media/Blitz to hustle the gentle readers. Ergo, “think small!” as Wendell Berry suggests... Confucius taught friends and disciples from his bathtub, on which it said in refined calligraphy: “make it new, honey, make it new. All things must be made anew.”
Plato taught in the gymnasium. At Black Mountain I realized you could learn a lot about a man — and about his art —from playing poker with him, or Monopoly to the death, or seeing him perform during the Sunday afternoon softball game. So, I would really enjoy playing a lot of volley-ball with students; taking some weekend hikes up around Stone Mountain or through Winston to sharpen up the eyes and ears; playing some ping-pong; sitting in a sauna bath where the mind doesn’t seem to wander as much as it does at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Poets are, after all, the “Boys of Summer”. (And the Girls of Summer too. Black Mountain’s major disservice to many persons was a machismo thing that revolves around Olson’s stance: that men were shakers and makers, and women cooked the cornbread and made children and kept quiet.) I mean: poets are persons who continue to play the language games of childhood. Gustav Mahler remarked that he never drew upon his experience (his ‘head’ as they say these days) beyond the time when he was 10. There is a child in every man who wants to play —that’s approximately the way that the marvelous German poet, Christian Morgenstern, put it. So, poets are operating as ‘players’ and this is one of the reasons that people who have to work for other people from 9 to 5, in jobs they usually despise, often resent artists of all sorts. Artists don’t seem to do any ‘work’, despite any amount of production of poems, or pots, or pictures, or pieces, or plays. Aging tire salesmen love to see George Blanda playing pro ball against youngsters and scoring, but they think that adults should really be ‘serious’, like selling tires at Sears and contributing daily to the gross Gross National Product. Never let your family or community throw you this particular spitball. (As Herr Freud so kindly pointed out for our benefit: the reason that jobs done for money are almost
5
6
inevitably so boring is that money is not a childhood desire.) A thought, while I think it, about the Generation Gap: namely, don’t be stupid and swallow such ridiculous bait. Compare the situation with automobiles, since so much in America is couched in blithering, Mo-Town metaphor. I could be compared to a Volkswagen with 43,000 miles on it. The machine may not be, physically, quite up to what students are with 18,000 or 20,000 miles on the dial. I.e., a little slow on the up-take. So what? It’s the same machine. The world has been around awhile (they just found a bone in Sarlat in the Dordogne region of France that is engraved with ‘art’ by a burin tool in a human hand—Marshack flew over from Harvard to confirm this). Perceptions have changed very little since then, and our ability to murder other people more effectively is one of the few technical improvements. “The truth was known already long ago” Geothe noted. Remember Confucius: make it new! Sappho is just as interesting now as she was to the poets on her isle of Lesbos in the bc Greece of her day. It’s because she got the words right. Every generation with eyes and ears has been re-translating her fragments into the language and light of the day. Sappho is more interesting than any man or woman now living, probably, even though she is older than your 1970 Dodge Polara and never got fast food from the Colonel or Burger-Chef. All I can do for you, as students, is demonstrate by example— show you the daily concerns of a Man of Letters, the way I, for one, organize a life to get certain work (i.e. play) done. With me this involves writing, reading, and publishing other poets. “We do not live for ourselves alone” —Cicero, I think. I do not believe the sloppy, liberal sentiment that we are all equally competent as artists. The fact that I have devoted 25 years to the craft has to mean something...
I am ‘southern’ enough to believe in manners and the decorum of things. A gentleman is a man who treats every body the same. I shall treat you all as students—and take pleasure in friendships when they happen naturally. Students must realize that it is not ‘servile’ to allow me the dominance of my position. I expect to learn something from you or I’ll leave town. I know enough about the craft of poetry to realize the astonishing depths of my ignorance. Act on that, but without arrogance. We are not playing at power, but at learning from each other about the words in our poems, and about books that are of value to read. You go to the VW place to get your car diagnosed; and to the hygienist to get your teeth cleaned. Poems are not different—you go to someone who works on them all the time. You will not find me putting anybody down because he or she is young, but, in art it is the life and the body of work that ultimately matters, and children are not superior to adults in the field. Please note what the painter Delacroix said: “To be 20 and to be a poet is to be 20... to be 40 and to be a poet is to be a poet.” Sinclair Lewis once arrived, very drunk, before an audience of lusty undergraduates who wanted to know (within an hour) how to become ‘writers’. He looked around and said: “If you’re writers, why the hell aren’t you home at your goddamn typewriters?” Mr. Lewis then collected his check (which buys groceries and sour-mash fuel for addled older writers) and left the auditorium for the hinterlands to the west. Develop a little Sitzfleisch, if I remember my German’ i.e., get calluses on your hunkers and stay home now and then and be quiet and don’t allow interruptions and write and read and loaf and invite the soul.
7