Is Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets (1964) the greatest mimeo publication of all time? I am hard pressed to think of anything more deserving. I thought about the mimeo edition of Howl, but that is merely a bibliographic curiosity. The edition that matters is the City Lights edition. But with The Sonnets, it is the C Press edition with the Brainard cover published in conjuction with Ellen and Lorenz Gude, not the Grove edition of 1967 or the United Artist edition of 1982, that is the defining one and serves as Berrigan's major achievement. It is not only a canonical publication of the Mimeo Revolution, but also of 20th Century poetry. It could be argued that, like Howl for the poets born in the 1920s, The Sonnets, is the highwater mark of the generations of poets publishing after Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology. Can any other true mimeo publication carry such weight?
JB
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