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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. |
