In Beautiful Enemies, Andrew Epstein challenges ‘the Romantic myth of the poet as solitary genius’ (10) and argues that ‘aesthetic and cultural forms cannot be fully understood through the study of individual authors in isolation’ (5). Epstein makes this claim in the context of the New American Poetry that rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, proposing that the lyric ‘should not be seen as an utterance issuing from an isolated subjectivity but as a social text, caught in a web of interpersonal and intertextual relations’ (15). For the first generation of New York poets, the main subject of Epstein's book, their interpersonal relations were supported by a social infrastructure comprised of numerous New York City coffeehouses, loft spaces, galleries and bars, all of which reified their sense of group identity. Such venues were, Epstein suggests, ‘densely interwoven cultural, intertextual, interpersonal spaces’ that ensured tangible, if often fractious, notions of poetic community (15). But where do geographically remote, isolated or solitary poets lacking the ‘highly social environments’ and urban enclaves fit in relation to these metropolitan networks (Kane, 1)? Do they simply reinforce the myth of ‘isolated subjectivity’ that Epstein is keen to dispel, or, as I argue, do they indicate that there are alternative means for establishing and sustaining ‘interpersonal relationships’ outside of the geographical conveniences and proximities of the city? These questions of remoteness, distance and the question of ‘interpersonal relationships’ are especially pertinent in the context of the ‘transatlantic drift’ of American and British poetry that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s (Blanton 134). As I intend to show via the examples of Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jonathan Williams and a younger generation of poet-publishers that include Stuart Mills, Simon Cutts, and Thomas A. Clark, this was an important time when many poets on both sides of the Atlantic ‘found parallel practices or significant models via transatlantic communication,’ particularly through the channels of small press publishing which, as we shall see, continues to flourish (Tuma 41).

As a vital taproot for the ‘transatlantic communication’ examined in the following chapters, Niedecker offers a compelling example of how a networked poetry community can operate not only outside of the familiar cosmopolitan centres of literary activity such as New York or San Francisco, but also transnationally.

Jonathan Williams was born in Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina, to Thomas Benjamin and Georgette Williams who, Ronald Johnson explains, ‘were straight from the gracious strictures of Southern Semi-aristocracy (yet stubborn mountain folk to the bone)’ (‘Jonathan Williams’ 406). Although he spent most of his youth in Washington D.C., Williams's Southern roots form a significant part of his poetry, particularly his interest in Appalachia's folk cultures and natural history. Williams's links with North Carolina also figure prominently in his associations with the liberal arts college Black Mountain College where he enrolled as a student in the autumn of 1951. Williams's experiences at Black Mountain, as this chapter argues, played a formative role in his development as a poet, photographer, and publisher.

Prior to Black Mountain College, Williams briefly ‘studied art history at Princeton, painting with Karl Knaths at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, etching and engraving with Stanley William Hayter [a British printmaker and artist, closely connected with Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism] at Atelier 17 in New York, and the whole range of arts at Chicago's Institute of Design,’ including photography and typography (Johnson, ‘Jonathan Williams’ 406). The Institute of Design, formerly The School of Design in Chicago, was established by the Hungarian constructivist and former Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy in 1944 and, according to Williams, ‘was one of those schools rather like Black Mountain’ where ‘the arts were the basis of the curriculum’ (Alpert 56).

The origins of Jargon are traceable to this period immediately predating his time at Black Mountain. ‘The first Jargon was done in San Francisco while I was there in June,’ Williams tells Barry Alpert: ‘Just a very small little folded sheet that with a copper engraving by a man who had worked with Hayter, David Ruff, and a poem of mine,’ printed in an edition of 50 copies (Alpert 59).

In his book Landscape and Western Art, Malcolm Andrews, argues that an abiding tradition of landscape painting has played a significant part in determining the ‘visual prejudices that may never find formal expression in works of art, but that are crucial shaping influences in terms of the way in which we privately respond to both our natural environment and the pictures of that environment’ (1). ‘A “landscape,”’ therefore, Andrews reasons, ‘cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art,’ because the ‘process of marking off one particular tract of land as aesthetically superior to, or more interesting than, its neighbours’ is a discriminatory and complex one comprised of ‘visual facts and imaginative construction’ (1, 3). Alluding to the title of Kenneth Clark's influential book Landscape into Art (1949), Andrews expands on this idea by proposing that the ‘mental conversion’ involved in creating such artifice is a twofold process: ‘land into landscape; landscape into art’ (3).

An early one-word poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay titled ‘Arcady’ makes a similar claim about the mental conversion of land into landscape, and landscape into art. Finlay's poem consists of the 26 letters of the alphabet italicized in capitals in Times New Roman font. In a 1966 version of this poem published by Tarasque, as one of their Private Tutor broadsides, Finlay devises a series of questions about the poem that also serve as a tacit commentary. One asks:

Here, Finlay, as Yves Abrioux suggests, brings to the fore ‘the suggestion of a mimetic relationship between the alphabet and an idyllic landscape’ (Abrioux 198). However, like the folding-poems (discussed in the previous chapter) that proceed ‘Arcady,’ Finlay's poem does not propose that the letters of the alphabet simply describe or represent a pastoral landscape, but instead implies the possibility that they might constitute an equivalent one.

A photograph of Jonathan Williams (Figure 5) taken in the late 1970s by the North Carolinian photographer Elizabeth Matheson gives a good indication of how far Jargon's utopic ‘elsewhere’ community had extended (geographically and temporally) by the late 1970s. The photo was taken in the locality of Dentdale where, with Thomas Meyer, Williams had been semi-residing since 1969 and where the two Americans played host to a broad spectrum of visitors to their cottage, Corn Close. It was also in this rural part of Cumbria where, as Williams tells David Annwn, he ‘learned a little about sheep from the hill farmers. They spare me palaver about art and seem happy enough to tolerate a couple of “odd” Americans’ (‘Interview’ 52). Matheson's photograph is, in this respect, very much a reflection of Williams's embrace of the region's long history of sheep farming and wool manufacture. In particular, the dry-stone walls clearly visible in the photograph, and the shepherd's crook that Williams holds, both reiterate the strong presence of sheep farming in the local landscape.

Further allusions to shepherding in Matheson's photograph evoke a pastoral tradition that extends well beyond the dry-stone walls of Dentdale. This is evident in the phallic road sign that Williams stands behind which was made by the American typographer and designer A. Doyle Moore who also runs the Finial Press in Champaign, Illinois. Moore's manipulated road sign suggests the rustic ithyphallic god Priapus who appears in the foundational pastoral text, Theocritus's Idylls, as well as the more familiar pastoral figure of Pan. Indeed, the road sign's warning triangle serves as a pertinent reminder that Pan (who is frequently depicted with an erect phallus in the ancient world) is traditionally associated with panic and terror. A further pastoral reference is apparent in the jumper that Williams wears, which reproduces Samuel Palmer's self-portrait, painted sometime between 1824 and 1825. The jumper, which was knitted by the British artist Astrid Furnival, makes a material pun on the very fabric of Palmer's celebrated pastorals, which Geoffrey Grigson describes as ‘visual poems on rural and strictly shepherd themes’ (Samuel Palmer 1).

Peter Middleton has suggested that Lorine Niedecker's ‘commitment to what she called the “folk,”’ and her ‘active interest in folklore,’ resulted in ‘a radically innovative form of poetry’ that distinguished her from contemporaries such as Zukofsky and George Oppen (‘Lorine Niedecker's “Folk Base”’ 170). Niedecker would later refer to the folk elements of her poetry as her ‘folk base,’ which, in a letter written to Jonathan Williams she believed ‘might actually be my only claim to any difference between most poets and meself’ (‘Letters’ 54 ‘“Most poets,”’ Middleton suggests ‘are presumably the poets she read in magazines like Origin’ (‘Lorine Niedecker's “Folk Base”’ 173). This is not, however, necessarily the case. Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose poetry appeared in the sixth issue of the second series of Origin in 1962, also shared Niedecker's interest in ‘folk.’ Furthermore, Niedecker also claims Williams's poetry as ‘folk too but [with] an intellect beyond it also’ (‘Letters’ 54). Indeed, as chapter three argues, Williams's ‘folk base’ owes a considerable debt to Niedecker's model.

Niedecker may have influenced Williams, but her affinities with Ian Hamilton Finlay were entirely fortuitous, as Finlay's letter to Gael Turnbull, written in the June of 1961, emphasizes:

Finlay's ‘timely affirmation of [Niedecker's] folk aesthetic’ was reciprocated by Niedecker who, after receiving a copy from Gael Turnbull, expressed similar enthusiasm for the folk poems in The Dancers Inherit the Party (Penberthy, ‘A Posse of Two’ 18).

Johanna Drucker has questioned the appealing myth of the artist's book as a ‘democratic multiple’ (Figuring 176). Books such as Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations, as she explains, were ‘meant to circulate freely outside the gallery system, beyond the elite limits of an in-crowd art going audience and patrons’:

Thus, as a ‘multiple,’ the artist's book ‘assumes a sophisticated artworld viewer initiated into a play with conventions and their subversion which characterized much of the work of the advanced guard’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Figuring 176).

The point that Drucker raises regarding a ‘sophisticated,’ ‘esoteric’ in-crowd recalls the similar questions of specialism and exclusivity that that name ‘Jargon’ has provoked. One might accuse the poets, publishers, and artists examined in Avant-Folk of fashioning a clique of initiation via the sustained use of certain references such as pastoral, as well as through a network of self-serving friends, publishers, and collaborators. To do so, however, would miss the broader significance of such small press networks. As Simon Cutts has remarked in reference to Coracle's printed ephemera of postcards, exhibition invites, announcements, and statements, the principal concern is circulation and dissemination: ‘Sent, given away, left on public transport, sold,’ Cutts suggests, ‘it's all the same thing, a form of distribution’ (SFA 113). Writing with Colin Sackett in the context of their exhibition Repetivity: Platforms and Approaches for Publishing (2000), which showcases the work of 16 small press publishers, Cutts similarly singles out a ‘determined concern with availability’ and ‘repetition, in both the production and the distribution of publications’ as a shared impetus for a diverse range of publishers that includes Wild Hawthorn Press, Writers Forum, and Folding Landscapes (Repetivity 3).