'Hemi-demi-semi Barbaric Yawps': Jonathan Williams and Black Mountain

The achievements of the former Black Mountain College student Jonathan Williams (1929-2008) are, Kenneth Irby notes, “diverse and remarkable,” encompassing his work as a poet, a photographer, a publisher, an essayist, and, as Guy Davenport suggests, a peripatetic disseminator of culture: “He publishes poets, introduces poets to poets, poets to readers, professors to poets, poets (perilous business) to professors, and he photographs poets” (307; 180). Williams is perhaps best known as the founder of the small press The Jargon Society, which he began in 1951 during a brief period in San Francisco shortly before enrolling at Black Mountain College.