Jonathan Williams: Beyond Black Mountain

This chapter examines Jonathan Williams’s activities as the editor of the seminal Jargon Society press and as a poet. In both respects, this chapter argues, Williams’s reputation has been distorted as a result of his early association with Black Mountain College and the school of poetry that emerged from it in the late 1950s. Although chapter three examines Williams’s links with the college and the formative influence that its rector Charles Olson had on his poetry and his publishing, it also makes a makes a strong claim for disassociating Williams’s reputation from the exclusive, binding labels of ‘Black Mountain poet’ and ‘Black Mountain publisher.’ Williams, it is argued, expressed considerable aversion to not only being labeled a ‘Black Mountain’ poet but to being associated with any poetry school or movement. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Williams has resisted and complicated the Black Mountain label, both in his poetry and in his publishing, by paying particular attention to his use of vernacular speech in his poetry and through an abiding fascination with what was initially an imagined England that would become more tangible as a result of his semi-annual residency in England from the late 1960s onwards.

Coracle’s Unpainted Landscapes

Chapter 6 examines the ways in which the English publisher Coracle has utilized the ‘alternative space’ of the book and other printed platforms to critically rethink representations of place and space. Coracle’s approach to the question of landscape is shown to have anticipated recent developments in the field of cultural geography regarding ‘non-representational theory’ and its emphasis on the ‘small stories’ of landscape. Chapter 6 examines how a number of poets and artists associated with Coracle (Erica Van Horn, Simon Cutts, Stephen Duncalf, Colin Sackett, Richard Long) have significantly paralleled many of these non-representational approaches to landscape and revised the grand, heroic values traditionally attributed landscape representations by engaging the modest means of small press publications. It is argued that the space of the allotment is of particular significance for Coracle as an ‘unofficial’ landscape analogous to Coracle’s own emphasis on co-operative work, community, and creative singularity. The chapter concludes by discussing Richard Long’s installation Stone Field in the semi-refurbished space of Renshaw Hall in Liverpool. Despite its immense size, chapter 6 demonstrates how Long’s installation reiterates the qualities associated with the ‘alternative spaces’ of small press publishing and its broader possibilities on and off the page.

Opening the Folds: A Pastoral Vanguard

Chapter 5 considers the ubiquitous presence of pastoral literature and art in the late modernist milieu of The Jargon Society by examining its role and function in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Thomas A. Clark, and Simon Cutts. Far from perpetuating the common perception of pastoral as an idealistic, nostalgic, or escapist aesthetic mode, Finlay, Clark, and Cutts’s use of pastoral, it is argued, demonstrate a more knowing understanding, and innovative appropriation, of its complex tradition. In particular, it is suggested that pastoral provides these poets the means for reflecting on the materiality of the poem and for articulating the poetics of the printed format that it takes. Furthermore, due to its close links with Epicureanism and its dense weave of intertextual allusion, chapter 5 shows how pastoral presents an insightful analogy for the social dynamics and collaborative vanguard spirit of the remote small press networks that Finlay, Clark, and Cutts have participated in.

Introduction

In this extended introduction, the book’s underlying theme of small press poetry networks is introduced via the example of Lorine Niedecker and her poetry’s transatlantic reception. Discussing examples from Niedecker’s poetry, her friendship with the poet Jonathan Williams, and her legacy for a younger generation of British poets, publishers, and artists, the introduction argues that within the transatlantic small press poetry milieu, ‘remoteness’ is as much a strategic position as it is an imposed circumstance. The introduction also discusses the various ways in which the term ‘folk’ is understood and applied in Avant-Folk. Emphasis is placed on the role of botanical folklore, the use of vernacular speech, and the significance of a ‘cottage-industry’ approach to publishing. In the context of modern small press publishing, the emphasis on craft and artisanship, it is argued, reasserts the domestic sphere as an incisive site for the poetry and publishing practices examined in the following chapters.

Small is Quite Beautiful: Tarasque Press

The 1960s saw an explosion of mimeographed poetry magazines and books on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter four provides a broad overview of this ‘mimeo revolution,’ tracing its origins back to the do-it-yourself ethos of Black Mountain and the burgeoning of the ‘New American Poetry.’ As chapter 4 discusses, with this explosion of small-scale publishing, however, came more problematic issues of quality, both with regard to the production standards of the publications and the poetry they published. Chapter 4 examines how the British little magazine Tarasque and the eponymous small press established by Stuart Mills and Simon Cutts responded to this side of the mimeo revolution with a potent mix of trenchant irony and a championing of the small poem—as practiced by Finlay and Williams—that emphasized impersonal, constructed formal objectivity in answer to the expressive solipsism of the time.

Ian Hamilton Finlay: Scottish Futurist

Chapter 2 examines the formative period in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s career when he encountered the work of like-minded poets in the United States, including Niedecker. Chapter 2 argues that Finlay’s use of folk forms in his poetry during the late 1950s articulates a critical response to the orthodoxies of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ at that time. Finlay counters what he perceived as the Renaissance’s cultural myopia and literary pretensions by developing a faux-naif folk poetry that consciously evoked the doggerel of the Scottish poet William McGonagall, as well as with an early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde. In doing so, this chapter argues, Finlay strategically situates his work in an international tradition of avant-garde innovation that subverts Renaissance nationalism.

Coda: Certain Trees

‘Certain Trees’ concludes Avant-Folk by reflecting on the socio-creative implications of distribution within the small press networks examined in the previous chapters. Returning to Lorine Niedecker, the book’s Coda discusses an exhibition organised by Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn, Certain Trees, that tacitly reaffirms the extended legacy of Niedecker and Jargon Society within the broader small press milieu covered in Avant-Folk. ‘Certain Trees’ also finds an apposite analogy for the ‘happy distribution’ of small press publications in John Bevis’s artists’ books on bird song and answers the questions initially raised in the introduction regarding the possibility of a remote, ‘elsewhere community’ of poets that remain united through amity, collaboration, and the complex infrastructures of small press networks.

The Avant-Folkways of Lorine Niedecker

This chapter examines the ‘avant-folkways’ of Lorine Niedecker and her poetry and demonstrates how Niedecker’s poetry of the 1940s and 1950s draws on various aspects of folk, including folk speech, nursery rhymes and ballads, local history, and artisanal and domestic craft practices. Niedecker’s folk sensibility, chapter 1 argues, was enhanced considerably by her work on the Federal Writers’ Project, from 1938 to 1941. Niedecker’s poetry, it is argued, undermines the dichotomies that underpin the pervasive ideological construction of American folk in the twentieth century—notions of the regional versus the cosmopolitan, the modern versus the traditional—as well as popular distinctions regarding ‘formal’ versus ‘folk’ poetry, art, and aesthetics. Chapter 1 also examines the social implications of Niedecker’s folkways and their defining role in her own ‘renaissance’ across the Atlantic, in England and Scotland, via the channels of small press networks in the 1960s that her own handmade gift books, it is argued, significantly prefigures.