Bibliographical On-Sendings and Dentdale Waterfalls 

The following is guest post from Andy Martrich, author of Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot: A Peripheral History of the Jargon Society as Told through Its Missing Books, which is now available wherever books are sold.

Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot: A Peripheral History of the Jargon Society as Told through its Missing Books is a book about the legendary writer’s press—the Jargon Society—and its founder, the poet Jonathan Williams. That said, as one may glean from the title, it’s also about coming up short; and by that, I nod to an underlying incompleteness that haunts bibliographies and archives, something Craig Dworkin speaks to in The Perverse Library where he writes that “libraries are defined not by what they have on their shelves, but by what they exclude from them.” Over the course of a nearly 60-year publishing career, Jonathan Williams put out a colossal amount of work, so much in fact, that James S. Jaffe—considered by many to be Jargon’s bibliographer—alleges it would be impossible to assemble a comprehensive list of everything he published. Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot takes this idea to an admittedly absurd level by adding to that list the books that Williams wanted to publish but wasn’t able to, in effort to show that what a small press publisher ends up excluding may reveal defining features as well.

The difficulty of working on a book like this is deciding (not knowing) when to stop. Bibliography, in general, is a dynamic medium; there’s always another detail, however minute, to be discovered and penciled in. While chapter 5 features an annotated checklist of Jargon’s published and slated books, it also includes titles that didn’t make it very far in the planning stages, and even incorporates authors and projects Williams merely mentioned wanting to publish, possibly as an afterthought or joke, alongside some probable figments. Consequently, the list is peppered with “unknown” works, e.g., from Catullus, Blaise Cendrars, Stevie Smith, even Homer. 

Of course, one can’t possibly know everything Williams simply thought about publishing, and to cope with the obvious abridgement this causes, I take a page from the artist Richard C.—who features prominently in Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot—and his on-sending projects, i.e., delivering “a message to a party through an intermediary” with the expectation that the intermediary make changes/additions to the “message” before sending it off again. On-sending is typically associated with Ray Johnson (who invented the technique circa 1955) and his New York Correspondence School, of which Richard C. was a principal member. An exemplary book form of on-sending is Poems by Richard C., And/or another notepad for all those endless lists (Nexus Press, 1987), essentially a half-finished catalog of clichés presented as found poems, to which Richard C. invites readers to complete the book by filling in the blank pages. Similarly, I encourage others to add to the list of Williams’ prospective and imaginary books, and some already have, such as Dr. Patrick Eyres, co-founder and director of New Arcadian Press in Leeds. 

In the 1970s, the British artist Ian Gardner (1944-2019) was a member of the Jargon Society’s sprawling network and a contributor to some of its most beautiful publications of the decade. He came to know Williams and his partner Thomas Meyer by way of his involvement with Tarasque Press, its founder Stuart Mills, and the poet Simon Cutts. At the time, the trio (i.e., Mills, Cutts, and Gardner) served as linchpins of the poetic avant-garde in and around Nottingham, reflecting the influence of one of Williams’ principal mentors, the Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. 

At the tail end of the ’60s, Williams and Meyer had partly relocated to the Cumbrian countryside and a seventeenth-century sheep farmer’s cottage deemed Corn Close, which served as something of a haunt for Gardner and co. Naturally, this led to a variety of projects published on their respective imprints, including the Jargon Society. In 1975, Gardner and Williams collaborated on the stunning Pairidaeza: A Celebration in Lithography & Poetry For the Garden at Levens Hall, Westmorland (Jargon 80), which features thirteen of Gardner’s lithographs. That was followed by an accolade, which appears in Cutts’ Quelques Pianos (Jargon 81), and then by his Six Variations on a Chrysanthemum of William Morris which was published alongside Thomas A. Clark’s A Still Life as Jargon 86 in 1977. 

That same year, Eyres accompanied Gardner to Corn Close for the first time, and witnessed the nascent stages of one of the “unknown” titles I include in my list of Jargon’s missing books. As Eyres relates: “The first [visit to Corn Close] was culinarily and bibulously convivial and prompted by Jonathan’s proposal that Ian should produce watercolours for a book of his poems about Dentdale waterfalls. We scoured Deepdale for appropriate falls, both in the river Dee and in tributaries cascading down moorside gullies, and on occasion walked beside these up to their moorland springs.” After the trip, Gardner set to work, basing his watercolours on photos he’d taken; but it was only a few months later that Gardner nonchalantly announced to Eyres that the project was off, and he began selling the paintings he had composed for the book.

As one learns in Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot, nearly all of Jargon’s projects were plagued by strained finances, and this was a primary cause for some of them to turn out “missing” over the years. That said, this obviously wasn’t the case with the Dentdale waterfall book. Although Williams provided no excuse for dropping out of the project, Gardner was apparently known as a bit of a troublemaker, to an extent where he holds the rare acclaim of being the only person to get banned from Corn Close, and one may speculate this as playing a part in the project’s demise. It’s easy to imagine Williams, who was himself quite temperamental, getting fed up with Gardner if he was deliberately trying to get under his skin. Regardless of the reason, they began seeing less and less of each other. The dawning of the ’80s and the launch of New Arcadian Press—which Gardner founded with Eyres and Grahame Jones—saw Williams and Gardner entirely on the outs. As Eyres explains: “Ian was convinced that Jonathan had engineered a negative review of [New Arcadian’s] inaugural exhibition, Mr Aislabie’s Gardens. This perception, combined with other allegations, led to New Arcadian Broadsheet no. 5, Homage and Lament (1982), which was a rebuke to Jonathan. Somewhere, I have a photo of the impish Gardner gleefully appending the [New Arcadian letterhead] to the garden gate at Corn Close,” an act meant to wind-up Williams after he had received the broadsheet by post. All this despite Eyres doubting Williams’ involvement in the review.

Jargon’s missing books and the stories behind them offer unique insight into the press and Williams’ international network of poets, artists, photographers, book designers, printers, booksellers, collectors, archivists, and librarians. And the best thing about working on Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot was getting a chance to meet some of these people, many who graciously aided in my research and generously contributed to the book. I’m grateful to Dr. Patrick Eyres for keeping the conversation going. If you, or someone you know, has insight into Jargon’s missing and lost projects, please drop me a line.

Andy Martrich is a poet, publisher, and archivist.