Jonathan Williams Feature

Vic Brand

Burr, Salvage, Yoke

A starry vocabulary, adjectives and epithets, orbit around Jonathan Williams: with ‘toughness, affability, stamina, a sense of mission and a touch of madness’, he is an ‘imaginative gadfly’, ‘a one man band of exacerbated “injuns”’, and ‘the best comic poet writing in English’. [1] He has made a great motion in the world, in his goings and comings, on foot and by car across America. He seems to have known – or tracked down – everyone, and they in turn have rendered the tribute of description, repaying his generosity of spirit with words of effusive praise. The rarity of Williams’ trajectory through the culture seems to demand elaboration. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s not because he hasn’t been trying to get the word out about Jargon Society. Buckminster Fuller called him ‘our Johnny Appleseed’. [2]

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s Williams toured the country — ‘to move among a dormant public to seek out the many thousands of alert readers whose tastes are not served’ , [3] crisscrossing America in a series of old gas-guzzling family Pontiac station wagons crammed with books published by his Jargon Press as well as seven or eight other small presses. The press began in 1951, ahead of a boom in small presses that arrived in the 1960s. Jargon sought to promulgate American poetic voices that weren’t otherwise heard. [4] Jargon, later incarnated and institutionalized as The Jargon Society, soon came to supply a tenuous and influential artistic diaspora with an outlet, as well as a thread of community. In the beginning Williams looked to James Laughlin’s New Directions as a model, and at times the two presses shared authors like Kenneth Patchen and Robert Duncan. As Robert Dana noted in his study of small presses, ‘each press reflects… the character of its founder, its presiding spirit’. Williams’ admiration for artists has been Jargon’s only compass and agenda. Even the Society’s own writers — sometimes those who appear in the same volume — will object to others who appear under the Jargon imprint (’I’ve discovered most of the people I publish despise each other’ . [5]). But Williams has persevered in publishing whomever he believes should be seen and heard.

Jargon’s output has dropped off since the 1970s, when it was publishing four or five books a year. Williams himself notes that ‘a press does have a kind of shelf life… I don’t think you’re right on top of things but maybe fifteen or twenty years, in terms of what other people are thinking’ . [6] But Jargon continues to print, its most recent volume being Mark Steinmetz’s Tuscan Trees (Jargon 104; 2001). Williams is Jargon, and its artistic direction mirrors his own vector through space. Today Jargon’s reputation ranks with other venerable independent publishers, such as New Directions, City Lights, and Black Sparrow.

The Jargon Society advocates the American extraordinary: the unknown, the unique, the dedicated and obscure. Consider its contributors: Charles Olson, Paul Metcalf, Harry Callahan, Art Sinsabaugh, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Guy Davenport, Louis Zukofsky, Raymond Moore, Clarence John Laughlin, Mina Loy, Buckminster Fuller, John Menapace, Robert Creeley, Doris Ulmann, Denise Levertov, Guy Mendes. Williams’ challenge was to find an audience for them. Wealthy benefactors, collectors, friends, and contributing artists bought a majority of Jargon’s wares, as well as audiences at the hundreds of readings Williams performed around the country. And yet he admits that he ‘distrusts public attention and the city’ [7] — Williams the cantankerous apostle. He has often compared Jargon’s audience to the Lamed-Vav Zaddikim ‘the thirty-six anonymous and mysterious pious men, to whose humility, just deeds, and virtues the world owes its continued existence’. [8]

While struggling against inertia in the populace, he has also struggled as a publisher with the idiosyncrasies of his artists: they have been temperamental, overprotective, sensitive, skittish, or ornery. Art Sinsabaugh nearly backed out of a project because of differences of opinion over book design; Clarence John Laughlin refused to participate in an exhibition of Southern photographers curated by Williams. Since publishing with Jargon does not mean great fame or wealth (which have never been the point), the only thing at stake is the art itself. Ultimately, though, his artists and writers recognize Williams as a kindred spirit and come to trust him with their passion.

Although Jargon publishes to address the mainstream neglect of new and original poets, it exists primarily because Williams wants to make beautiful objects. From the beginning, Jargon has united word with image. Jargon 1 (1951) consisted of a poem by Williams accompanied by an engraving by David Ruff; Jargon 2 (1952), a poem by Joel Oppenheimer and a Robert Rauschenberg drawing. Williams has always aimed to create books that evoke the wonder that he felt as a child while reading the ‘Oz’ books, Kipling’s Just-so Stories , The Hobbit, and The Wind in the Willows . He has cited ‘the book as a kind of childhood desire… I want them to be as entrancing as those. I don’t think I’d bother if I didn’t feel that way’. [9] The work of William Blake and the graphic poems of e. e. cummings and Kenneth Patchen are Williams’ more mature touchstones.

Following in the steps of these visual poets, Williams trained in part to be an artist. He quit Princeton in 1949 after three semesters and went to New York, where he spent the spring of 1950 studying at Surrealist printmaker Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 . When Hayter closed the atelier to return to Paris, Williams moved on to the Chicago Institute of Design, where he studied typography. In July of 1951, Williams followed photographer Harry Callahan from Chicago to Black Mountain College. At the time, photography ‘just seemed like one of the things to know about… the camera seemed a very plausible substitute for drawing, which I couldn’t do very well’. [10] At Black Mountain he befriended Callahan and Callahan’s friend Aaron Siskind; but Williams was pulled irretrievably into the gravity of Charles Olson, poet and rector of the College: Williams traded camera for pen. [11]

Black Mountain College in North Carolina played host in its later history to a community of the artistic avant-garde, including poet Robert Creeley, choreographer Merce Cunningham, painter Robert Motherwell, composer John Cage, and visionary architect Buckminster Fuller. The College began in 1933 as a progressive educational institution that emphasized community, democracy, experience, and the arts. Under Olson’s direction, until its closing in 1956, the name ‘Black Mountain’ became synonymous with a poetic movement that rebelled against a growing formalism in American poetry. Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, and Robert Duncan — with William Carlos Williams as their elder statesman and Olson’s essay ‘Projective Verse’ as their manifesto — all worked under Black Mountain’s influence. Olson declared to Williams: ‘The artist is his own instrument’ . [12] And with that challenge, Williams embraced a quintessentially American do-it-yourself aesthetic. With no one else willing to publish Olson and his circle, Williams willed into being the publishing venture known as Jargon, at first for the purpose of publishing Olson’s Maximus Poems . (The idea for Jargon only predated Black Mountain by two weeks: Jargon 1 was a single printed sheet that Williams issued in San Francisco, with art by engraver and fellow Atelier 17 student David Ruff, who later did printing for City Lights’ Pocket Poets series.)

Beginning in roughly 1958, Jargon began to attract work from well-established art-photographers. [13] California-based Wynn Bullock (whom Williams described as ‘a luminous man, with a windy, cloudy, lovely nature’ [14]), Henry Holmes Smith of Indiana University, Frederick Sommer in Arizona, and Callahan all began contributing photographs to be used as frontispieces for books like Henry Miller’s The Red Notebook , The Maximus Poems, and others (see bibliography). As word spread in the photography world, other artists began to seek out Williams to support Jargon’s work. Jerry Uelsmann, ‘70s master of the composite image; one-time Light Gallery director Charles Traub; the godfather of photography curators, Beaumont Newhall; novelist/photographer Wright Morris; Ansel Adams and Carl van Vechten, all were enthusiastic fans (one of Adams’s letters to Williams opens “Dear Genius… ’).

Jargon’s first, thorough integration of text with image came with On My Eyes (Jargon 36; 1960). Eight of Callahan’s abstract nature photographs — fallen leaves, spider-webs, reeds in water — were interleaved with poems by Larry Eigner, a Massachusetts poet of ‘sparse elegance’. [15] Callahan taught and photographed in Chicago with Art Sinsabaugh, Art Siegel, and Aaron Siskind, then moved to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he became Chair of the Department of Photography. While in transition from Chicago to Rhode Island (with an extended stop-over in Europe), he sent his selection of photos to Williams for On My Eyes . Callahan claimed that the eight shots were ‘not a choice at all’, being the only nature shots left in a ‘catch-all box’ after he had packed up.  [16] On My Eyes was a first for publisher and photographer both, being Callahan’s first appearance in print.

Like Callahan’s selection of prints, Jargon’s pairing of artists was serendipitous and inevitable: ‘I wonder why I chose to put some of those people together’, says Williams, ‘and then, I don’t wonder’. [17] A similar combination of text and photography was Six Mid-American Chants (Jargon 45; 1964). Williams was preparing to reprint a selection of prose-poems written in 1918 by Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), who had died in 1941. During a visit to Chicago Williams saw Art Sinsabaugh’s banquet-camera photography of Indiana landscapes, which convinced him that only an enormous 19 x 55 cm edition could put Anderson’s lyrics in the proper context. Sinsabaugh and Williams rekindled their association, which would later result in an invitation to Sinsabaugh to photograph England’s Yorkshire Dales, where Williams lived for parts of the year. Chants was one of only a few publications, other than exhibition catalogs, to feature Sinsabaugh’s work in his life-time. Charles Olson’s reaction to the gargantuan tome: ‘My God, it’s like a train, like getting a train for Christmas, even including the tracks… ’ [18]

Since the 1960s Williams had hoped to include artists’ monographs among Jargon’s publications, in the vein of Aperture magazine. But Jargon did not produce any completely photographic editions until The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann (Jargon 50) in 1971. The book began ‘“a quiet revival’ [19] of the Park Avenue socialite’s pictorialist studies of the Southern rural poor. It impressed no less than Museum of Modern Art photography director John Szarkowski as ‘beautiful, moving, and true’ [20] and the book was sold in the museum’s shop. The New York Times noted that ‘the recovery of Doris Ulmann’s portraiture is typical of Jargon’s cultural husbandry’. [21] Jargon is an ongoing salvage, like Williams’ photographs of tombstones, a monument to memory. Neglected Modernist poets Louis Zukofsky and Mina Loy also have him to thank for preserving their work from mainstream amnesia.

Two Kentuckians, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Guy Davenport, are among those whose reputations were established under Jargon’s flag. On one of Williams’ visits to Kentucky, he traveled with the photographer and the author to meet Thomas Merton, monk and poet, [22] after which Meatyard and Merton struck up an immediate friendship and collaboration that was eventually documented in the book Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton (Timken Publishers, 1991). Davenport and Williams had long been friends, having met in the early 1960s at a reading Williams gave at Haverford College. Davenport floated the idea of publishing a book-length poem, and through a frequent correspondence (collected in A Garden Carried in a Pocket [Green Shade, 2004]) of stylistic one-upmanship Davenport became Williams’ ‘principal colleague… (h)e already knew more about my poetry than I ever did’. [23] That long poem, Flowers & Leaves (Jargon 46; 1966), was Davenport’s first original, non-scholarly work in print, and frequent contributions to Jargon’s catalog followed, as well as introductions and prefaces to Williams’ own works.

Davenport also wrote prefaces for Meatyard and co-curated a major retrospective of the photographer’s work at the International Center of Photography (2005). An optician by day, Meatyard had studied with photography masters Van Deren Coke and Minor White; his work had been published in Aperture and Art in America , and shown in New York and at Tulane University. He had turned the front of his optometry store into a gallery where he held exhibitions of his and others’ works. Williams liked Meatyard — ‘he was terribly normal…  he fascinated me because I knew so little about him’ [24] — and he notes, ‘once in a while you want to print somebody you have doubts about or don’t really understand… I’m trusting my ears and my eyes’. [25] A Meatyard photograph appears on the cover of Flowers & Leaves , and he is responsible for the author photo of Davenport; [26] additionally several of his pictures were considered but finally not used for the cover of Walter Lowenfels’ Some Deaths (Jargon 32; 1964). But Meatyard’s magnum opus, ten years in the planning, was interrupted by his death from cancer in 1972. Williams had been in correspondence with the photographer up until the time of his death and subsequently worked with Meatyard’s widow to complete The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (Jargon 76; 1974), the seminal work of an artist of ‘extraordinarily ambitious ideas’. [27]

In the text of Lucybelle Crater, Williams cogitated: ‘You ask why it is so hard and perhaps so futile to write about photography, or to describe any medium in terms of another? Simply, that things are obvious or they aren’t there at all’. [28] In spite of the ‘futility’ of the effort, Williams has written persistently on the subject of photography, yoking words to images: in his unused preface to Emmet Gowin’s Photographs (1976); his essays on Callahan and the British photographer Raymond Moore; [29] and, since 1960, his commentaries and reviews in the photography magazine Aperture . His essay collections, The Magpie’s Bagpipe (North Point, 1982) and Blackbird Dust (Turtle Point Press, 2000), are littered with observations on camera-men like Sinsabaugh and Louisiana symbolist Clarence John Laughlin. When he speaks of photography, Williams is eloquent and enthusiastic. In 1961 Williams served as an Aperture guest editor, assembling a feature, ‘The Eye of Three Phantasts’, that surveyed the work of Laughlin, Wynn Bullock, and Frederick Sommer. Upon its publication, editor Minor White wrote to Williams that ‘Henry Holmes Smith is enthusiastic about your article; says it is the best piece of writing on photogs that Aperture has ever printed. And I tend to agree… ’ [30]

Of his own work, Williams has said, ‘“Jargon is a small effort. Yet I think it stands for something. That’s all that’s important… ’ [31] His are artists in the bud or in the dust, salvaged by a fellow outsider. He is an artist of the first order, all the more unique because his artistry lies in his ability to fashion a beautiful bibliographic object from the work of others. His tenacity in his mission is almost Greek in its tone: like Pheidippides, he has run innumerable miles to bring the city news of action on its borders; he persists like a Sophoclean hero, calling for the audience that his artists deserve, even while laboring under the knowledge that few will respond. Yet the risk has returned reward, and several major artists have him to thank for their first foothold in the culture: Olson, Callahan, Meatyard, Davenport, among others. While ‘The Mainstream’ runs muddy and full of fish, Williams and Jargon have stood in the mountains, tapping the root of a clear spring. Without them, we would probably not die of thirst, but it would be hard to recognize the taste of fresh water.

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Jargon Photographic Bibliography

(Listed by Jargon series number; edition information where available)

13a. Amen/Huzza/Selah . Poems and photographs by Jonathan Williams. ‘A Preface?’ by Louis Zukofsky. (1960; edition of 700; limited edition of 50 signed copies)

13b. Elegies and Celebrations . Poems by Jonathan Williams. Preface by Robert Duncan. Photographs by Aaron Siskind and Jonathan Williams. (1962; edition of 750)

17. The Suicide Room . Poems by Stuart Z. Perkoff. Drawing by Fielding Dawson. Photograph by Chester Kessler. (1956; edition of 200; 25 hardcover, signed & numbered)

22. The Red Notebook . Henry Miller (holograph manuscript with drawings). Photograph by Wynn Bullock. (1958; edition of 2,000)

24. The Maximus Poems . Charles Olson. Photograph by Frederick Sommer. (1960) [edition of 2,000; limited edition of 101 bound copies, of which 75 copies are numbered, and 26 copies are lettered and signed.]

27. Sonnet Variations . Poems by Peyton Houston. Photograph by Henry Holmes Smith. (1962; edition of 1,000)

28. A Laughter in the Mind . Poems by Irving Layton. Photograph (“Frog & Flower”) by Frederick Sommer. (1958)

29. 1450-1950 . Optical poems by Bob Brown. Photograph by Jonathan Williams. (c. 1959) [In association with Corinth Books; a facsimile reproduction, first published by The Black Sun Press in 1929; edition of 2,000]

32. Some Deaths . Poems by Walter Lowenfels. Introduction by Jonathan Williams. Photographs by Robert Schiller. (1964; edition of 1,500)

33. A Form of Women . Poems by Robert Creeley. Photograph by Robert Schiller. (c. 1959; edition of 2,000; in association with Corinth Books)

35. A Red Carpet for the Sun . Poems by Irving Layton. Photograph by Harry Callahan. (1959; edition of 1,000)

36. On My Eyes . Poems by Larry Eigner. Introduction by Denise Levertov. Photographs by Harry Callahan. (1960; edition of 500)

45. Six Mid-American Chants . Poems by Sherwood Anderson. Eleven photographs by Art Sinsabaugh. Preface by Edward Dahlberg. Postface by Frederick Eckman. (1964; edition of 1,550)

46. Flowers & Leaves . A poem by Guy Davenport. Photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. (1966)

49. The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton . Introduction by Geof Hewitt. Drawing by Philip Van Aver. Photograph by Simpson Kalisher. (1970)

50. The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann . Introduction by John Jacob Niles. Preface by Jonathan Williams. (1971)

55. A Long Undressing : Collected Poems 1949-1969 . Poems by James Broughton. Photograph by Imogen Cunningham. (1971; also in limited edition of 100, signed)

57. Just Friends/Friends & Lovers: poems, 1959-1962 . Poems by Joel Oppenheimer. Photograph by Bob Adelman. (1980)

64. St. EOM in the Land of Pasquan . ‘As told to and recorded by’ Tom Patterson. Foreword by John Russell. Photographs by Roger Manley, Guy Mendes, and Jonathan Williams. (c. 1987; edition of 4,000; also ‘patron’s edition’ of 100, leatherbound, numbered, and signed by authors and photographers)

70. Bad Land . Poem by Richard Emil Braun. Photograph by Frederick Sommer. (1971)

73. Spring of the Lamb . A ‘wild Welsh tale’ by Douglas Woolf. ‘Broken Field Runner: A Douglas Woolf Notebook’ by Paul Metcalf. Two photographs (covers) by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. (1972)

75. Some Particulars . Poems by Thomas A. Clark. Photographs by Bart Parker. (1971)

76. The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater . Photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Texts by Jonathan Greene, Ronald Johnson, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Guy Mendes, Thomas Meyer, and Jonathan Williams. (1974)

77. The Sleep of Reason . Mardi Gras photographs by Lyle Bongé. Texts by James Leo Herlihy and Jonathan Williams. (1974)

78. The Middle Passage (A Triptych of Commodities) . Text by Paul Metcalf. Photographs by Guy Mendes. Designed by Jonathan Williams. (1976)

82. Who is Little Enis ? Catullan ode by Jonathan Williams. Photograph by Guy Mendes. (1974; edition of 500 signed copies)

84. Eyes and Objects (Catalogue for an Exhibition: 1970-1972). Poems by Ronald Johnson. “A Gallery Goer’s Foreword,” by John Russell. Photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. (1976; edition of 1,000)

89. The Photographs of Lyle Bongé. Introduction by A.D. Coleman. Afterword by Jonathan Williams. Writings by Lyle Bongé. (1982)

91. Elite/Elate Poems . Selected poems 1971-1975 by Jonathan Williams. Introduction by Guy Davenport. A portfolio of photographs by Guy Mendes. (1979; 1st edition of 150, signed by JW and specially bound, with original Mendes print, “Home, Cow and Country!” laid in; 2nd edition of 850, bound in paper)

95. Heart’s Gate (Letters between Marsden Hartley & Horace Traubel 1906-1915) . Edited and introduced by William Innes Homer. Photograph by Aaron Siskind. (1982)

97. Letter in a Klein Bottle . Photographs by John Menapace. Introduction by Donald B. Kuspit. Afterword by Jonathan Williams. (1984)

104. Tuscan Trees . Photographs by Mark Steinmetz. Text by Janet Lembke. (2001)

107. Last Man In . Poems by Richard Emil Braun. Cover photograph by Ron Nameth.

111. The Neugents: Close to Home . Photographs and text by David M. Spear. Afterword by Jonathan Williams. (1993)

112. Blithe Air: Photographs from England, Wales, and Ireland . Photographs by Elizabeth Matheson. Illuminations and pyrotechnic display by Jonathan Williams. (1995; edition of 1500, of which 50 in deluxe edition, signed and slipcased, with original print laid in.)

[special thanks to Michael Basinski, Steven Watson, Thomas Meyer, and especially Jonathan Williams.]

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Sources

Bain, Robert and Joseph M. Flora, ed. Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South: a bio-bibliographical sourcebook . Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Contemporary Authors Online , Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center . Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC.

Dana, Robert. Against the Grain: interviews with Maverick American Publishers . Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1986.

Davenport, Guy. The Hunter Gracchus and other papers on literature and art . Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996.

“David Ruff,” Wikipedia . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ruff

Greene, Jonathan, ed. A Fiftieth Birthday Celebration for Jonathan Williams . Truck 21. Gnomon Press, 1979.

Harris, Mary Emma. The Arts at Black Mountain College . Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.

Henderson, Bill ed. The Art of Literary Publishing: editors on their craft . Yonkers, NY: Pushcart, c1980.

The Independent (UK) , January 12, 2005.

The Jargon Society Archive, The Poetry Collection, University of Buffalo Library.

Johnson, Ronald. “Jonathan Williams.” Dictionary of Literary Biography , vol. 5, edited by Donald J. Grenier. Gale: 1980.

The Library catalogs of Emory University and the University of Buffalo.

Meyer, Thomas, ed. A Garden Carried In A Pocket: Guy Davenport [and] Jonathan Williams; Letters 1964 –1968 . Haverford, PA: Green Shade [and] James S. Jaffe Rare Books, 2004.

New York Times , February 15, 1957; November 21, 1971; and January 12, 1975.

"Stanley William Hayter.” Contemporary Artists , 5th ed. St. James Press, 2001. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center . Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC.

Williams, Jonathan. Blackbird Dust: essays, poems, and photography . New York: Turtle Point Press, 2000.

———. The Magpie’s Bagpipe: selected essays of Jonathan Williams . Edited by Thomas Meyer. San Francisco: North Point, 1982.

———. Uncle Gus Flaubert Rates the Jargon Society in one hundred laconic présalé sage sentences . The Hanes Lecture. Chapel Hill: Hanes Foundation, Rare Book Collection/University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1989.

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Notes

[1] Herbert Leibowitz in the New York Times ; Ronald Johnson in The Dictionary of Literary Biography ; Robert Creeley and Gilbert Sorrentino in Greene, respectively.

[2] Quoted in Contemporary Authors.

[3] New York Times, Feb. 17, 1957.

[4] “We publish the best we know to please ourselves and our friends, and to confound our enemies.” Blackbird Dust , p. 118.

[5] Dana, p. 192.

[6] Dana, p. 221.

[7] Uncle Gus Flaubert… , p. 2.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Dana, p. 196.

[10] Dana, p. 202.

[11] Williams continued to make photographs, which appear alongside his poetry in Amen/Huzzah/Selah (Jargon 13a; 1960) and Elegies and Celebrations (Jargon 13b; 1962). Usually made with a Rolleiflex that he bought with Siskind’s help, his photographs are portraits of friends or influences – their faces or their headstones – and include eccentric architecture. Portrait Photographs (Gnomon Press, 1979) and A Palpable Elysium (David R. Godine, 2002) collect and comment on a number of these.

[12] Dana, p. 204.

[13] Nearly all of these photographers had connections to the pioneer of photographic education, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Chicago, through either his New Bauhaus or the Institute of Design. Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind would then have had close professional connections to all of them.

[14] Magpie’s Bagpipe , p. 89.

[15] Mark Perlberg, quoted in Contemporary Authors Online.

[16] Letter, Harry Callahan to Jonathan Williams.

[17] Interview with the author.

[18] JW, “Homage to Art Sinsabaugh.” Aperture 95. Reprinted in Blackbird Dust . Also good for a rowdier account of JW’s relationship with the photographer.

[19] New York Times , January 12, 1975.

[20] Letter, John Szarkowski to JW.

[21] New York Times , November 21, 1971.

[22] Davenport recalls this meeting vividly in his book The Hunter Gracchus (Counterpoint, 1996).

[23] The Independent (UK), Jan. 12. 2005.

[24] Interview with the author.

[25] Dana, p. 220-221.

[26] A contribution of which Davenport was unaware until the book was in proofs, offering further evidence that Jargon’s pairings were mysterious yet always somehow appropriate.

[27] New York Times, January 16, 1994.

[28] Draft of ‘Cogitations’ from The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater .

[29] In Harry Callahan (Aperture, 1999) and Moore’s Murmurs at Every Turn (1981).

[30] Letter, M. White to JW, November 28, 1961.

[31] Henderson, p. 126-127.

Victor Brand is a writer and expecting father in New York. He has been published in The Believer and Paper magazine, and writes about art, photography, and French writers. This essay was first published in 2006, in a limited edition rare book catalogue by Andrew Roth Inc, New York. Web site: http://www.andrewroth.com/