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2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W COURTESY OF JEFFERY BEAM
A FIRST HARVEST FROM NORTH CAROLINA’S JOHNNY APPLESEED a review by Savannah Paige Murray Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens, Editors. Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards. Westport, CT: Prospecta Press, 2018.
SAVANNAH PAIGE MURRAY is a native of Asheville, NC. She is currently in a PhD program in Rhetoric & Writing at Virginia Tech, where her research focuses on environmental and Appalachian cultural rhetorics. She recently served as assistant editor and contributor to the 2018 Black Mountain College special edition of Appalachian Journal. JEFFERY BEAM is poetry editor emeritus of Oyster Boy Review and a retired UNC Chapel Hill botanical librarian. His books include Midwinter Fires (French Broad Press, 1990), The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969–2012 (Triton Books, 2012), and The Broken Flower: Poems (Skysill Press, 2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). RICHARD OWENS is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Embankments (Interbirth, 2009), No Class (Barque, 2012), and Ballads (Habenicht, 2012; Eth Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Cambridge Literary Review, Hi Zero, Poetry Wales, Shearsman and elsewhere; his critical comments and essays have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Open Letter, Paideuma, and Poetry Project Newsletter. He currently resides in southern Maine.
In Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards, Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens offer an edited collection on the life and work of Jonathan Williams, the Ashevilleborn publisher, poet, and photographer who founded the Jargon Society Press while a student at Black Mountain College in Western North Carolina. This text, the first to try and focus new attention on Williams’s expansive literary and creative legacy, offers four distinct sections. In “Remembering,” contributors “remember” Jonathan Williams with “intimacy and affection” (xxi). In the second section, “Responding,” authors bring “into focus both new statements” on Williams’s work as well as re-published texts of “presently out-of-print introductions” about Williams’s work (xxii). The third section, “Reviewing,” focuses on Williams’s photographic work. Lastly, the fourth section, “Recollecting,” “is two-fold, addressing not only Williams as a collector committed to selecting his fruit from the Firmament but also the work involved in collecting Williams” (xxii). Overall, The Lord of Orchards offers readers a comprehensive introduction to the diverse publications and productive arts of Williams, an artist who is every bit as varied as the numerous epithets associated with him – lively language ranging from “The Truffle-Hound of American Poetry,” to “our Johnny Appleseed,” to “magpie,” to “America’s largest open-air museum” (ix). In the Introduction, Jeffery Beam credits Richard Owens with “first field[ing] the idea of some sort of memorial festschrift for Jonathan after his death” (ix). Beam and Owens, co-editors of Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards, first started an online version of this “memorial festschrift,” but as Beam suggests, given Williams’s fondness for print books, Beam
promised himself that “one day The Lord of Orchards would be an expanded print book and more hybrid festschrift and a first reflective look at Jonathan’s Legacy” (x). Furthermore, Beam suggests that the “Lord of Orchards is not only printed proof” of the devotion and gratitude he feels for Williams, but also “proof of fidelity and loyalty” to Williams’s life’s work “and its unique and inestimable value” (xiii). Beam states that Williams is “[l]esser known for his extraordinary letters and essays, and his photography and art collecting,” but he is “never only a poet or photographer, an essayist or publisher” (xiv). In order to capture Williams’s diverse legacy, then, The Lord of Orchards as an edited collection of “essays, images, and shouts aims to bring new eyes and contexts to his influence and talent as poet and publisher, but also heighten appreciation for the other facets of his life and art” (xiv). According to Beam, “One might call Jonathan’s life a poetics of gathering,” and The Lord of Orchards is “a first harvest” (xiv). And I would argue, this harvest is a bountiful one. Jonathan Williams’s productive publishing, photography, and poetry ventures are certainly interrelated to his experiences as a student of Black Mountain College, the acclaimed, eclectic school that operated in Western North Carolina from 1934 to 1957. Richard Deming suggests, “Given the range of Williams’s abilities and creative intellect – that he would find traditional university study too confining, too overdetermined and overdetermining – is not at all surprising” (267). Instead, Williams was able to plant the seeds of his own creativity at Black Mountain College, which in the 1950s, “offered a central site of community for figures from Merce Cunningham