The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, Photographs by Jonathan WilliamsBrooke Horvath
Jonathan Williams. Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, Photographs. Turtle Point Press, 2000. 243 pp. Paper: $16.95.
Jonathan Williams hit the scene half a century ago when he arrived at Black Mountain College to study photography but left as a poet after falling under the spell of Charles Olson. It was also at Black Mountain in 1951 that Williams founded the Jargon Society Press, publishing in illustrated, fine-art editions, books by Olson and Fielding Dawson, Joel Oppenheimer and Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Robert Creeley, along with work by those belonging to what Williams affectionately labels “the Village-Idiot School.” What Blackbird Dust chronicles in forty-five brief and mostly occasional pieces are the enthusiasms of this self-described anglophile and “hillbilly oligarch”: interviews and forewords, reviews and eulogies in praise of “sternly isolated and sedulously ignored” outsiders such as poets Ronald Johnson, Basil Bunting, Kenneth Patchen; artists Ray Moore and James McGarrell; photographers Arthur Sinsabaugh and Harry Callahan. Filling out the collection are sixteen pages of photographs, a couple clutches of poems, essays on epitaphs and recommended books, student evaluations of a Williams poetry reading and a test given to Wake Forest students in 1973 (sample question: “What drunkard’s last half-dollar climbs, with how sad feet, the sky over town?”). Williams, who has little patience for academics “dozing in their carrels,” is not one to proffer conventional critical commentary; rather, Blackbird Dust does what Williams’s friend and mentor Louis Zukofsky said art should do: “to record and elate.” Whatever brings the reader to this idiosyncratic, occasionally self-indulgent book, he or she will stay for the pleasures of Williams’s stories, for the witty joie de vivre of a man who likes his prose “to jump about, and dance and sing” and who has for so many years kept “as busy as a jaybird’s ass in mulberry season.” [Brooke Horvath]