“Jonathan Williams: Lord of the Orchards”

Wish I could be at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro NC, for editor Jeffery Beams, and contributors Alex Albright, Thorns Craven, Neal Hutcheson, & Tom Patterson’ presentation of their excellent book Jonathan Williams: Lord of the Orchards on Thursday, March 15, 7pm. JW is one of the great neglectorino poets of the 2nd part of the 20C. One of the best ears & finest eye I know of. If you can’t be there get the book. Here’s how Jefferey Beams announces the reading:

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.

Jeffery Beam’s over 20 works include The Broken Flower (Skysill, 2012), The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969-2012 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012), Gospel Earth (Skysill, 2010), the CD What We Have Lost (Green Finch, 2001), the Carnegie Hall premiered song cycle Life of the Bee with Lee Hoiby (Albany Records New Growth, 2001), An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse & Buggy, 1999), and Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon 113, 1995).Composers Holt McCarley and Steven Serpa are working on other songs and song cycles.  Other JW works include the memorial quote book A Hornet’s Nest, the NC Literary Review essay “A Snowflake Orchard and What I Found There: An Informal History of the Jargon Society”, and the Rain Taxi interview Tales of a Jargonaut. Forthcoming is Spectral Pegasus/Dark Movements, a collaboration with Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins (January 2019), and an online chapbook Don’t Forget Love, a poem sequence of desire, grief, loss, and spiritual transformation in the tradition of Indian Bhakti, Anna Akhmatova, and Edna St. Vincent Millay (soon). He is poetry editor emeritus of Oyster Boy Review, a retired UNC-Chapel Hill botanical librarian, and resides in Hillsborough, NC.

Jonathan Williams: Lord of Orchards (Paperback)
By Jeffery Beam (Editor), Richard Owens (Editor)
$30.00
ISBN: 9781632260871
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Prospecta Press – September 26th, 2017

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