More From The Great Frontier

One of the first rare books I ever bought was a Frontier Press title:  Ed Sanders' Peace Eye.  For years I thought it was a Fuck You Press title, given that it was by Sanders and it was a mimeo.  Wrong again.  No doubt, Charles Olson suggested to Harvey Brown to publish his protege Sanders.  The feel and look of this publication is much more Fuck You than Frontier.  One of the calling cards of Frontier Press was high production values and design.  Peace Eye is mimeo all the way.  I wonder if Sanders' printed it and then Brown issued it as a Frontier title. 

What caught my eye in the Antic Hay Booksellers catalog about the title above was that it was inscribed by Sanders to Philip Whalen:  "With tender squirts."  Love that inscription.  Whalen was spewing out great poetry in the mid-1960s almost all (if not all) published by mimeos and small press.  There are some visual similarities between Whalen's calligraphy poems and Sanders glyph poems of the period as both build off of Olson's composition by field concepts first forwarded in Projective Verse, which themselves go back to Pound's work with Chinese characters and open forms.

Brown took Olson and thus Pound as his foundation.  Brown printed Cantos CX and CXVI in the third and last issue of Niagara Frontier Review in 1966.  Sanders followed that up by publishing Cantos CX-CXVI in a bootleg on Fuck You Press in 1967.  More on Fuck You's Cantos at a later date.   

JB