I wonder if a collection of contemporary reviews of mimeo
mags would be worth gathering. I suspect
it would. Looking through old rare book
catalogs, like the Ed Sanders/Peace Eye Books ones from the 1960s, it is
interesting that Floating Bear, Fuck You and C were all collectible the minute
they left the mimeo machine. In some respects
it seems to me that they were more collectible in their time than in the
mid-1990s, say. For example, Floating
Bears could command $15 to $20 in the 1960s and those prices held tight until
maybe even 2000. I remember buying up
Floating Bears for $15 for years. Same
with C and Fuck You, the prices held rather steady for decades and
then popped skywards about three years ago. I
wonder if these magazines were considered classics in their own time. Is there a John Galsworthy of little mags, a
mag that was idolized in its time and then fell from grace? Contemporary reviews would shed some light all on
this.
It would be an interesting project and Kulchur would be a
good place to start since in the 1960s it was THE critical journal of the mimeo
revolution. It was conceived by LeRoi
Jones and Marc Schleifer to be just that.
What follows below is poet Allan Kaplan’s review of the first eight
issues of C: A Journal of Poetry. Today, it is hard to find a mimeo mag as
revered as C. In form and content it is
considered a standout in 60s mimeo.
Kaplan’s review far from canonizes the magazine. No doubt it is a positive review but there
are some definite reservations and questions concerning the quality of the
contents. Not surprising since
unevenness is the mimeo way.
I found the most interesting section of Kaplan’s review the
last section. I was shocked that there
was mention of Joe Brainard’s covers but not a peep about the Warhol cover in
Issue 4, particularly in that the review mentions Tom Veitch’s Literary Days in
terms of Pop Art. It also made me chuckle
to have Kaplan piss all over Charles Olson.
I have written on Kulchur several times and I always come back to the fact
that Kulchur as a magazine consistently denies its origins throughout the Lita
Hornick years. Read her memoir on
Kulchur in The Little Magazine in America and it is not hard to understand
why: she hates and disrespects Marc
Schleifer. There seems to be a concerted
effort to scrub him and his editorship from the record.
The bad-mouthing of Olson by Kaplan is yet another example
of this procedure. Kulchur began as the
critical arm of Yugen and LeRoi Jones idolized Olson and basically agreed to
publish anything Olson produced. Kulchur
to some extent was created to give Olson a place to publish his unique brand of
criticism. Olson was a contributing
editor to Kulchur from the start.
Olson oversaw the direction of the magazine and as I have argued on
RealityStudio the eyes on the cover of Kulchur #1 are a reference to those of
Olson as well as the idea of “the polis is eyes,” among other things like the
critical eye and a jest that the mag will hear, speak and see no evil. The first issue of Kulchur ends with an Olson
punchline as masthead. He is the
mouthpiece of the magazine and breathes its purpose into being with this brief statement: “(this is from Olson) ‘reviews of the intellectual odor of our
time.” Funny then that Kaplan pooh-poohs
all magazines that reek of the Big Man.
Kaplan’s review of C definitely erases Kulchur’s past. It also looks into C’s future as a pivotal
magazine for the next generation of poets, namely the Language Poets. Kaplan’s review with all its talk of creating
a new language could have come from a number of Bay Area mags from the 1970s. There are any number of places a review like
the one below can take you. Like the
magazines they analyze, such reviews are time machines: They can take you back or thrust you forward.
After finishing reading Kaplan’s piece,
where will you end up?
C, A Journal of
Poetry: No. 1-8, published
monthly: editors Ted Berrigan and
others.
C
is different from other avant-garde poetry magazines because its editors
couldn’t care less about the development of the line as a poet’s natural
breath, as the inviolable unit of his natural speech – in short, the popular
legacy of Williams, Creeley, Olson, et. al.
to a new generation of poets.
The following lines by a young poet
who appears often in these 8 issues should give us a glimpse of what C is all about:
O scarcely
verge
o strings Where is a new
beg
of morning matin?
“yes”
of the hand?
delve
sky against Nude
mandarin
d’étoile
A
tour of slept Sleptl: the pacific
the vine of orange of
sommeil
made
of dawn! Rape of you you. . . .
o
the autumn sand
We can call the voice of Joseph
Cerevolo that of a lyric poet even though there is no identifiable emotion as
the subject of this poem, there is no believed (or despised) party to whom the
poet addresses himself; nor is there a recognizable personality as
narrator. Stripped, as much as possible,
of usual meanings, words evoke lyric feelings and suggest new meanings by
appearing in original juxtapositions and contexts. These few lines reflect some of the ideals
for which many poems in C strive: surprise, abstraction, purity, lyric joy, and
complete uniqueness of expression.
In a magazine with the bent of a robust distrust of
logical thought to convey poetic truth is natural, a distrust which, of course,
opens the mind to surrealism. Here again
the magazine rejects popular surrealist influences, Neruda, and Lorca. What we find in C is a more elegant, post-Breton French variety. (I am using the term surreal more as a loose description than as a rigid
classification.) Generally, familiar
distinctions reminiscent of quiet prose or casual, civilized conversation are
used to surprise the reader, often humorously, and to communicate a feeling
which I can only describe simply as “oddly mysterious” because it covers so many poets. The following illustrations are by Tony Towle
and Ron Padgett, respectively:
Exactly one, at a
time of morning
In which the edge of the hill
Is
going down, and I was close
To
loving you for it.
This
is a tale then. Good.
The
forest is important,
The
Boar hunt, and the close
Of
the legend.
When
by turns the leaves would arrive
With
the next nice October,
And
the king was away from our throats.
*
* *
From point A a wind is blowing to point B
Which
is here, where the pebble is only a mountain.
If
truly heaven and earth are out there
Why
is that man waving his arms around,
Gesturing
to the word “lightening” written on the clouds
That
surround and disguise his feet?
If
you say the right word in New York City
Nothing
will happen in New York City:
But
out in the fabulous dry horror of the west
A
beautiful girl name Sibyl will burst
In
by the open window breathless
And
settle for an imaginary glass of something.
But
now her name is no longer Sibyl – it’s Herman,
Yearning
for point B.
Dispatch
this note to our hero at once.
The cliché, and other forms of
commonplace speech, also is used to couch the poet’s “odd mysteriousness” and
to satirize the American scene. Used
without restraint these commonplaces can become metaphorized into a fey poetic
diction. For example, the novel Literary Days, long sections of which
have been anthologized in C, is
written in a compendium of all the familiar styles of bad prose, from the
comics to the ubiquitous imitators of Hemingway. Tom Veitch has written a novel that might be
categorized as Pop Art.
This magazine eschews the profound poem, and it is
important that we understand why. As an
example of profound, one might point to a Levertov poem profoundly lyricizing
man-woman love or, say, sections of an Olson poem profoundly advising a young
poet how to manage his affairs. The C sensibility would consider it truthful for
Shelley to distinguish the profound from the lighter aspects of his life; but,
considering man’s present comic relationship to society that grows absurder by
the hour, is it real nowadays to separate the profound from the campy? Are they separable? To the editors of C many profound poems written today seem pretentious or
derivative. For C a more honest way to be profound in the 20th century
is the poet’s expression of his “odd mysteriousness,” which is the tapping of his own
consciousness.
Many poems in C
succeed in what they attempt.
Certain voices will strike the reader as intriguing and worthy of
attention. However, many poems left me
with a feeling of emptiness, seeming more like language calisthenics than poems
or irritatingly arbitrary when they communicated no strangeness or
surprise. Their campiness, sometimes,
just isn’t funny. But this lack of
consistency, inevitable, I suppose, when contributors sharing similar aesthetic
ideas have varied talents or are of different stages of development, poses no
real threat to the magazine’s goal of valuable originality, provided, of
course, it continues to publish enough good material. However, a threat lies elsewhere.
I imagine much of the non-academic poetry which has
sprung up as a reaction to the dull imitations of Eliot and Auden strikes the
editors of C as being in turn either second-class Pound,
Williams, or Ginsberg. But is it
possible that some of C’s Young Turks
will in turn be trapped in the same way as some of the poets who realized that
Williams was one of America’s great poets?
C is unique in that it is the only young-poet,
non-academic journal inspired by the ideas and work of John Ashbery, Kenneth
Koch, and Frank O’Hara, the leaders of the New York School, as Don Allen has
grouped them. (Incidentially, there are
a number of excellent contributions by these poets in C.) While reading C, it was my feeling that a number of
poems slip past the line of being inspired by the original and, to varying
degrees, are close to being adaptations of, say, Ashbery’s style. Granted that these poems may be interesting
in themselves and that the talent of the poet may be such that it is sometimes
impossible to distinguish between master and disciple, nevertheless, this path
in the long run leads to the shadow of Ashbery and not his substance.
A happy impression one gets in reading through any
issue is that it is fairly successful as a fountain of youth. There is a willingness to play with words to
discover what they might do – i.e. represent simultaneous thoughts, to make
absolutely wacky, unproducable plays, etc.
Even the occasional appearances of poets such as LeRoi Jones and Ed
Sanders, who write in a different manner, is accounted for, I think, by what
the editors consider original in their use of language. In fact C
is a laboratory of language experiments that can be a source of ideas not only
for the contributors but for the readers (assuming that many of them are other
poets). Even while in the process one
becomes involved with a particular problem of what language can or can not
do. One might say that here language is
“the thing itself” – rather than stance, line, natural objects, nature, one’s
spouse, muses, the Bomb, America.
Indeed, the search for a new language becomes the search for one’s
individuality.
Mimeographed on 8 ½ X 14 paper, C has a tenement spun appearance and is too big to be put alongside
your other “littles.” If this dissuades
you from bringing it home, let me add that C
has two features (other than those I mentioned in this review) that will
make it unique than most of the avant-garde poetry journals in your
library. They are:
1) covers
by artist Joe Brainard that are funny, sublime and beautiful. (The covers merit a review by itself)
2) no
love letters to Charles Olson.
Allan Kaplan
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
MIMEO MIMEO #7: THE LEWIS WARSH ISSUE is the first magazine ever devoted in its entirety to poet, novelist, publisher, teacher, and collage artist Lewis Warsh. Warsh was born in 1944 in the Bronx, co-founded Angel Hair Magazine and Books with Anne Waldman in 1966, and went on to co-found United Artists Magazine and Books with Bernadette Mayer in 1977. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, the Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, and as you’ll soon discover, so much more. Includes an introduction by Daniel Kane, an interview conducted by Steve Clay, 10 new stories, 5 new poems, dozens of photographs and collages, and an anecdotal bibliography.
Please visit Granary Books to see a selection of striking collages and collage books created by Lewis Warsh.
MIMEO MIMEO #6: THE POETRY ISSUE is devoted to new work by eight poets who have consistently composed quality writing that has influenced and inspired generations since the golden era of the mimeo revolution. Contributors include Bill Berkson, John Godfrey, Ted Greenwald, Joanne Kyger, Kit Robinson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lewis Warsh, and Geoffrey Young. Cover art by George Schneeman.
The few copies that remain can be purchased via SPD.
MIMEO MIMEO #5: includes a lost and found essay by Paul Blackburn on the mimeo revolution, Steve Clay on Robert Creeley’s copy of Presences, Michael Klausman on the art of poetry LPs, interviews with Lyn Hejinian and Larry Fagin, Stephanie Anderson on Alice Notley’s CHICAGO, Abel Debritto on Charles Bukowski’s rise to fame, and more. Cover art by Buzz Spector.
MIMEO MIMEO #4: focuses on the poets, artists, printers, and publications of the British Poetry Revival, a particularly rich period of activity that ran roughly parallel to the New American Poetry of the post-WWII era. On both sides of the Atlantic, the dominant modes of poetics, publishing, and media were being thought anew. Featuring: wide-ranging interviews with Tom Raworth, David Meltzer, and Trevor Winkfield; insightful essays by Richard Price, Ken Edwards, and Alan Halsey; a selection of letters from Eric Mottram to Jeff Nuttall providing a British perspective on the Lower East Side Scene; and a long out-of-print statement by Asa Benveniste, poet and publisher of London’s legendary Trigram Press. The few copies that remain can be purchased via SPD.
MIMEO MIMEO #3: THE DANNY SNELSON ISSUE examines the relationship between structuralism and the poetries of the mimeo era by presenting a detailed analysis of Form (a Cambridge-UK magazine published in 1966) and Alcheringa (a journal published by Boston University in 1975), two exemplary gatherings that illuminate the historical, material and social circumstances under which theory informed art (and vice versa) in the early works of some of today's most celebrated experimental writers. Also includes a special insert, The Infernal Method, written, designed and printed by Aaron Cohick (NewLights Press). OOP.
MIMEO MIMEO #2: features Emily McVarish on her artist's book Flicker; James Maynard on poet Robert Duncan's early experiences as an editor and typesetter; Derek Beaulieu on the relationship between the influential Canadian poetry journal Tish and Black Mountain College; and an extensive interview with Australian poet and typographer Alan Loney conducted by Kyle Schlesinger. Cover is by Emily McVarish.
The few copies that remain can be purchased via SPD.
MIMEO MIMEO #1: features Christopher Harter on Midwest mimeo; Jed Birmingham on British poet and critic Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag; an extensive interview with acclaimed printer, bibliographer and critic Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press, and poems by Stephen Vincent inspired by Jack Spicer. Cover is by Alastair Johnston.
The few copies that remain can be purchased via 
