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Approximately sixty communications to Harold Billings, a director of
the University of Texas Libraries, from poet Jonathan Williams, the founder and
publisher of the Jargon Society, make up this collection. The materials are
arranged chronologically in a single series, I. Correspondence, 1967-1981. |
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The correspondence began in the mid-1960s while Billings was
compiling an anthology of works by the fiction writer Edward Dahlberg from
materials in the Ransom Center’s Dahlberg Collection. Williams shared Billings’
interest in promoting Dahlberg’s writing and other experimental literature. The
collection is composed for the most part of letters, many of significant length
and substantive content regarding the Jargon Society’s publications, Williams’
activities in the literary world, the placement of the Jargon Society’s papers,
and the work and reception of Dahlberg. Most of the correspondence is some
combination of letters and enclosures. The enclosures range widely, from travel
schedules, photocopied letters to/from third parties, and publication
announcements, to broadsides, serials, and a manuscript. The manuscript is a
four page handwritten "Acrostic for ED to sit in at 70," a draft of a Williams
composition for a festschrift honoring Edward Dahlberg’s seventieth birthday.
Also included are an issue of the serial publication
Vort inscribed to Billings from Barry
Alpert and a small anthology of poems about Lorine Niedecker published by the
Jargon Society,
Epitaphs for Lorine. |
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The Ransom Center also possesses a small collection of Jonathan
Williams manuscripts, diaries, and letters from the 1960s. Other Ransom Center
collections with Jonathan Williams correspondence include Russell Banks, Edward
Dahlberg, Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner, George MacBeth, Gerard Malanga,
Christopher Middleton, Kenneth Patchen, Ezra Pound, and Louis Zukofsky. The
Ransom Center’s book collections contain an almost complete run of Jargon
Society publications. |
