Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization
by R. Buckminster Fuller
Category: Architecture

Jonathan Williams and Fuller became friends at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1930s. Williams was delighted when in 1962 Fuller offered him a grant to help bring out this long poem in the Jargon Press series. Williams knew nothing about the concurrent Simon and Schuster edition until some years later when he came across a copy in a bookstore. Given Fuller’s casual approach to the publishing process this kind of funny coincidence was not unusual. Russell Davenport was an editor at Fortune magazine during the period from 1938 to 1940 when Fuller was a consultant. (Davenport was later national campaign manager for Wendell Willkie in the Republican campaign of 1940.) Almost buried on the back of the folded inside flap copy of the Jargon edition is Fuller’s statement that he and Davenport closely collaborated on the Industrialization piece: “About 10 percent of the wording was Davenport’s” and “... neither of us ever hoped it would find a publisher.” In the introduction Davenport describes Fuller as “not a poet in words” but “a poet in science,” and he had once described Fuller in Fortune as “the first poet of industrialization.” Hugh Kenner has characterized this anthem to American industry as “our only readable didactic poem.” Description by Ed Applewhite, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller