Dirty Books - The Bibliography


Nobody enjoys a good bibliography more than Kyle. Patrick Kearney's The Paris Olympia Press is definitely a good one and just the thing for a trip to Paris. Published by University of Chicago in connection with Liverpool University Press, this is the real deal. I remember reference to an earlier verison years ago in a William Reese catalog, which featured a near complete collection of Olympia Press books. This 2008 editions goes far beyond that.


JB

Bon Voyage, Kyle




Kyle is in Paris for the Collaboration and the Artists Book Conference.




Needless to say I am jealous and I would like to be there. Well, every book is a voyage so let's dig into the archives and journey away to Paris Mimeo Mimeo-style.


How about a very Parisian little mag that isn't really Parisian at all. I always think of Locus Solus as from the City of Lights. It is sophisticated like that, and as Clay and Phillips mention it has a Gallimard feel to it.


But the copyright page lists Lans-en-Vercors, a skiing town near Grenoble, as the headquarters of Locus Solus. On a side note, I stayed in Grenoble for 3 hideously drunken days in 1992, at a friend of a friend's host family, generally making a nuisance of myself. Beautiful country as I recall. Surprised if I would be invited back.


It was edited by New York School poets and was actually printed for the most part in Geneva. Furthermore, the first volume was printed in Mallorca and, to be honest, it looks just like a Divers Press book.


So go figure. I guess we didn't exactly make it to Paris after all. We'll try again tomorrow.


JB

Granary Books: Artists' Books Collection Spring 2011

I cannot figure out how to cut and paste text into here but I just received notice of a Granary Books Artists' Books sale. Here is a transcription of the notice (Sorry for any errors of transcription): Artists' Book Collection Spring 2011 Granary Books is pleased to offer for sale a broadly representative collection of approximately 600 artists' publications spanning the years 1960-2010 assembled with an eye to an eclectic range of engagement with ideas and form. In "The Century of Artis' Books" Johanna Drucker describes multiple "zones of activity" within which artists explore and interact with the book. She devotes entire chapters to: The Artist's book as a Democratic Multiple The Codex and its Variations The Book as Visual Form The Book as Verbal Exploration The Book as Sequence: Narrative and Non-Narrative The Artist's Book as an Agent of Social Change The Book as Conceptual Space The Book as Document Key examples of each of these paradigmsn ae here present enhancing and defining the collection's value as an important site for scholarly and artistic research, teaching and exhibition. Among the dozens of artist included are: Ida Applebroog, Eleanor Antin, Arakawa, Alice Aycock, John Baldessari, Banco de Ideas, AA Bronson, Marcel Broodthaers, Bill Burke, Coracle Press (including more than 100 publications from this important British artists' press operated by Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn), Tennessee Rice Dixon, Henrik Drescher, Johanna Drucker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Philip Gallo, Ralph Gibson, Walter Hamady, David Horton, Shelley Hoyt, Susan Johanknecht, Robin Kahn, Shelagh Keeley, Ruth Laxson, Jean le Gac, Warren Lehrer, Sol Lewitt, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Richard Long, Little Cockroach Press, Ochiishi, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Purgatory Pie Press, Robert Smithson, Buzz Spector, Telfer Stokes, Michelle Stuart, Barbara Tetenbaum, Hans Waanders and Janet Zwieg. The works are not available as individual items, but as a collection only. For a complete catalog (in PDF) and price please contact Steve Clay sclay@granarybooks.com. JB

ROBERT CREELEY'S PLACES


A poet of place, this chapbook was published by Shuffaloff Press in the “Local Habitations: Writings from Buffalo” series. Other writers in the series include John Clarke, David Tirrell, Elizabeth Willis, Marten Clibbens, Lisa Jarnot, Randy Prus, Sheryl Robbins, Bruce Holsapple, and the Shuffaloff editor Mike Baughn. Many of the poems in this collection have some specific location or person in the title.

The Kinderspielplatz / Halensee Park

Empty but sun’s warm
and the leaves of the beech,
maple, slur in the slight wid.
The long orange side
ripples broadly down
to sand where Willy was
so young, so young!

            Berlin, June 7,  1987
—KS

Creeley on Creeley

Unlike with Kyle, the number of Creeley books in my possession is rather small. So it makes sense that I have Creeley's Autobiography, published by Hanuman Books as Number 40 in that seemingly endless series of miniature books. These "little gems" were edited by Raymond Foye and artist Francisco Clemente. I think there are 48 in the series and Bob Flanagan's Fuck Journal (#12) is the stopper, which is around $400 by itself.

You see these little fuckers tucked into odd spaces at book shows and bookstores. They're like Tribbles, endlessly reproducing themselves and generally becoming a nuisance. Some people think the Hanuman books are cute. Frankly, I don't. I am not a big fan of babies either. Let's face it not all babies are cute. They just aren't. While we are on the topic of teenie books, I could do without the City Lights Pocket Books too. People gush over their design. To me, they are just another ugly baby. I'll take the Eighth Street Bookshop's Cornith Press chapbooks over City Lights any time.

And if I am going to be grouchy (it is early and I just had my first sip of coffee and I haven't had a cigar yet), I hate big books too. No elephant folios, thank you. Audubon's Birds is, like the dodo, big, thick and dumb. It deserves to be carved up (sliced for prints) or stuffed (locked up in libraries or institutions). I'll take my 10-page mimeos and chapbooks and sit over here in the corner by myself.

All this said, I have to admit that Creeley's Autobiography is an important book and, in fact, much of the Hanuman Series is great. They just look terrible and they are small and trying so hard to be cute. Creeley on Creeley is so interesting that it wins me over every time I dip into it and read a few pages. (Babies tend to do that, too, in their own way. They are so innocent and good that you develop a soft spot for even the particularly ugly ones. And the next thing you know you are holding them and cooing at them and your IQ drops 50 points and then your hands get wet.) The Autobiography has been reprinted in Tom Clark's Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place (New Directions 1993).

Please don't get me started on Tom Clark and his biographies. Which brings us to Ekbert Faas' Robert Creeley: A Biography. Hanuman Autobiography might be only 102 pages, and I would guess it is 5000 to 6000 words, even so it is more insightful and informative than Faas's monstrosity, which inexplicably stops at around 1967, a pivotal period in Creeley's development as a personality and a poet. Not that Faas would shed any light that anyway. In any case, I'll take Creeley Words, if I want to know about what was going on with Creeley in 1967. And that goes for Creeley on Creeley in terms of biography as well. And don't tell me that Faas's book is a companion to The Young Robert Duncan. If it is then call it The Young Robert Creeley, goddamn it. Creeley was over 40 in 1967, and that is not young, it is middle aged. I should know. By the way, my arm hurts; I must have slept on it wrong.

Did I mention I got off on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

JB

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ROBERT CREELEY

Another Collected by Creeley that is very manageable, practical and delight. Published by the University of California Press in 1989, this book is a comprehensive collection of essays in the broadest sense of the word. Divided into five sections, I) Heroes/Elders II) The Company III) The Writing Life IV) Artists V) Autobiography and Poetics, the 'essays' range from casual notes to forewords to autobiographical sketches to longer pieces. But the majority of the 150 essays in this near 600 page book are short, averaging 4 pages each. It once occurred to me that Creeley rarely wrote essays about people he didn't know personally, and looking over the table of contents, that seems to be so.

—KS

ROBERT CREELEY'S LIFE AND WORK

A who's who of criticism, this is something of a festschrift covering the 50s, 60s and 70s.

CREELEY'S MEMORY GARDENS

CREELEY'S MEMORIES

New d.a. levy Concrete Poetry Publication

We interrupt Creeleyfest 2011 to bring you the details about an important new d.a. levy publication reprinted by Jon Beacham in Brooklyn:

This is a group of concrete poems done by levy while in Madison, Wisconsin in the fall of 1968. They were originally issued amongst a group of poems he wrote, and collages he made while being the poet in residence at the Free University which was associated with the University at Madison. These works were published after his his death in November, and not much is known about the context and publishing effort done by Quixote Press. The publication consists of 19 individual poems printed on card stock, and laid into a small folder that houses the work. Images and purchase information are available on Jon's website:
www.thebrotherinelysium.com

ROBERT CREELEY'S COLLECTED PROSE



This is one of the ‘collected’ books I read and reread for pleasure. Generally, I prefer individual volumes for reading and use the ‘collected’s for spine-cracking-transcribing-heavy-duty-research. Not too cumbersome, the binding nice and flexible, I read The Island every summer for years. Love the Kitaj drawing on the cover.
—KS

ROBERT CREELEY'S A CALENDAR


A Calendar, published in 1984, includes twelve poems by Robert Creeley, each titled (The Door; Hearts; March Moon; ‘Whan That Aprille...’; Whatt’s May; Summer Nights; ‘By the Rude Bridge...’; Vacation’s End; Helen’s House; Old Days; The Tally; Memory) and arranged to correspond to one month of the year. This oblong book is printed on the recto only. Handset in Spectrum and printed on Simpson’s Gainsborough Text, this is copy number two in an edition of six hundred signed by the poet. The image on the title page is by Ann Mikolowski of the Alternative Press. I’m not certain what the Morning Coffee Chapbook series was all about (this is number five in the series), but it appears to be in imprint of the Coffee House Press, which was formerly Toothpaste. I also have Ron Padgett's and Trevor Winkfield's How To Be Modern Art, which was number seven in the series. Certainly designed by Allan Kornblum and printed in West Branch, Iowa, my guess is that this series connects Kornblum’s two imprints. He said in an interview:

Partly under [Harry] Duncan’s influence and partly of my own interest and volition, I began to learn the history of the craft of books and printing, bought a press and a house in West Branch, Iowa, and under the imprint of Toothpaste Press, began publishing exclusively letterpress books and pamphlets of poetry on a full-time basis in 1973. We published our last Toothpaste title, Anne Waldman’s Make-Up on Empty Space, in December 1983, and re-opened as Coffee House Press in 1984.

I have a memory of seeing another calendar by Creeley in the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo years ago, one that could literally hang on the wall. Was it spiral-bound? And if I recall correctly, their copy was actually used, with appointments and such written in pencil, which had been partially erased. Practical art.

This copy of A Calendar came from the Spoonbill and Sugartown warehouse in Williamsburg. I had traded in several boxes of books and had a store credit. I found a lot of interesting poetry listed on their website that wasn’t in their store, so I asked the owner if the items had already sold. He explained that many of their rare books, some cataloged, others in-waiting, were a few blocks away. We spent a few hours there sorting through the stacks and there were a lot of interesting discoveries. I was happy to explain the significance and relationships between some of the poets in the inscriptions of various title pages, etc. Certainly one of Brooklyn’s finest bookstores.
—KS

ROBERT CREELEY'S MIRRORS

Oh Max

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT CREELEY


The Collected Poems was as good a place as any to begin, I guess. This is the first book of Bob’s I bought, one of the first books of poetry I owned, and one of the few of those first books I still read regularly. Bob signed it in the parking lot of the Vermont Studio Center after a long ride home after his reading at Goddard College.  
—KS

SAGETRIEB


I bought this special issue of Sagetrieb (Volume 1 Number 3; Winter, 1982) devoted to Robert Creeley at Troubadour Books in Hadley, Massachusetts on my way to a 4th of July celebration in Vermont in the summer of 2009.  A little water damage, but perfectly readable—perfect for sitting by Lake Champlain, actually. According to their website, Sagetrieb began in ’82 as “A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition.” In 2002, it changed its subtitle to “Poetry and Poetics After Modernism” to cast the net just a bit wider, I suppose. This issue says “A Journal Devoted to the Poets in the Pound-H.D.-Williams Tradition” which is even more specific than the Imagist/Objectivist tradition at large. At this time, George Oppen and Basil Bunting were senior editors, Carroll F. Terrell editor, and Burton Hatlen executive editor. Contributors include: Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Michael McLure, Cid Corman, Anselm Hollo, Burton Hatlen, Albert Cook, Robert Sheppard, Harald Mesch, Charles Bernstein, Jerry McGuire, George F. Butterick, Cynthis Dubin Edelberg, Jed Rasula, Michael Heller, Linda W. Wagner, and Timothy Murray.
—KS

ROBERT CREELEY’S ECHOES


Another handsome chapbook from The Toothpaste Press, designed and printed by Allan Kornblum in an edition of 2,000 paperbacks plus 200 hardcover copies bound by Constance Sayre at the Black Oak Bindery. Here’s a terrific poem:

Bresson’s Movies

A movie of Robert
Bresson's showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched

by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,

knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film

of Bresson's has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.

—KS

Act Two - Work Song





For many people, if you were to play the soundtrack to the life and work of Detroit's John Sinclair, you would pop in a little MC5. That held true for me as well, until I got a hold of the mimeos of the Detroit Artists Workshop. Here is a complete run of the first incarnation of Work (apparently a sixth issue was published decades later). Reading through this mag, is sweet, sweet music. Jazz to be specific. Trumpter Charles Moore, a co-founder of the Artists Workshop, is on the first three covers. Work featured jazz reviews as well, but became more of a literay mag upon the publication of Change, a mimeo dedicated to avant garde jazz. Sinclair's mimeos are DIY at their best and their look and feel must have influenced punk and grunge zines, directly or indirectly.

For your listening pleasure, here are some sounds while you Work:
JB






A Brief Intermission

As we continue through Robert Creeley's greatest hits and onward through his little known masterpieces, here for your enjoyment is a collection of short pieces by Louis Zukofsky. Some Time was published by Jonathan Williams's Jargon Society from Stuttgart in 1956 as Jargon 15. Bound in the Japanese style in a trade edition of 300 copies, there were a further 50 copies issued in a slipcase and signed by the author. By all accounts, this book is one of the highpoints of Jargon Society and shows Williams's fine sense of book design.

Pennsound has a reading by Zukofsky from 1954 and another from 1958 demonstrating Zukofsky in performance at the period in which Some Time was issued.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Zukofsky.php

Enjoy!!.

JB

ROBERT CREELEY: WAS THAT A REAL POEM & OTHER ESSAYS


Was That a Real Poem & Other Essays (Four Seasons Foundation, 1979) picks up, in a sense, where A Quick Graph (Four Seasons Foundation, 1970) leaves off. Edited by Donald Allen, the essays in this collection include: A Sense of Measure; Black Mountain Review; The Creative; Inside Out; Introduction to Penguin Selected Whitman; On the Road: Notes on Artists and Poets 1950-1965; Last Night; Here; For Michael; Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself?; Introduction to The Manner “Music” by Charles Reznikoff; Ecce Homo; and Three Films. The book also includes a Chronology by Mary Novik.
—KS

ROBERT CREELEY'S POETRY: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION


Cynthia Dubin Edelberg's Robert Creeley's Poetry: A Critical Introduction is the first book-length study of Creeley's major works, which were, in 1978, For Love, Pieces and A Day Book. I haven't read this for years, and honestly don't remember much about it.
—KS




ROBERT CREELEY'S LATER


Later was written at 400 Fargo Street in Buffalo, NY September 3-13, 1977. Taking a glace at Google Maps to refresh my memory, it appears that the house is abandoned. This is the home, then above a grocery store, where the interview with Spanos I mentioned a few days ago took place.

Later was published by Allan Kornblum’s Toothpaste Press in West Branch, Iowa in the spring of 1978. Printed in three colors (black, brown and orange) the typeface is Perpetua, on handmade Iyo Glazed paper. The edition is eight-hundred in Strathmore wrappers (pictured above) and one-hundred numbered and signed by Creeley and bound in Japanese wrappers.

There’s an excellent interview with Allan Kornblum, who is perhaps better known today for his second press, Coffee House, here.

If you’re reading this post on the iPad2, drop us a line and we’ll send the first respondent a free printers’ apron from Cuneiform Press featuring a handsome purple portrait of Karl Marx. If you're here in Austin for SxSW, you can pick up iPad2 at the secret pop-up location downtown.
—KS

ROBERT CREELEY'S HELLO: A JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 29-MAY 3, 1976


Time and place are constants in Creeley's poetics, but perhaps nowhere are they more apparent than in Hello, a journal of the poet's travels through Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea in 1976. 

Kuala Lumper, Malaysia
OLD SAYING
There is no
more.


Start again
from the beginning then.

                        4/14 
—KS

ROBERT CREELEY: A GATHERING



What could be cooler than being on the cover of Boundary 2? LIFE? Maybe... probably not. The whopping 570-page Spring/Fall issue of 1978 was edited by William Spanos out of the English Department of SUNY Binghamton. Those were the days.

Postmodern to the bone, this issue is set entirely in a medley of sans serif typefaces, which grow tiresome after a while, but at least the whole issue isn’t set with ragged left and ragged right margins pockmarked with random spacing, as is the opening interview with Creeley conducted by Spanos! Although cordial, the conversation seems to be a struggle between poet and critic who keep circling, never quite landing on common ground. The questions and terms Spanos uses to describe Creeley’s work are very much those of a critic looking at poetry from the outside-in, while Creeley, characteristically inspired, delimits Spanos’ rhetoric. His responses speak very much from the inside-out, often steering the conversation elsewhere.

Other poets and critics featured in this issue include: a selection of Creeley’s own poems; George Butterick’s “Creeley and Olson: The Beginning”; Michael Rumaker, “Robert Creeley at Black Mountain”; Paul Mariani’s “’Fire of a Very Real Order’: Creeley and Williams’”; William Sylvester’s “Robert Creeley’s Poetics: I Know that I hear you”; Robert Kern’s “Composition as Recognition: Robert Creeley and Postmodern Poetics”; Robert Duncan’s “After For Love”; Kenneth Cox’s “Address and Posture in the Early Poetry of Robert Creeley”; Samuel Moon’s “The Springs of Action: A Psychological Portrait of Robert Creeley (Part 1: The Whip)”; Cynthia Dubin Edelberg’s “Robert Creeley’s Words: The Comedy of the Intellect”; Robert Duncan’s “A Reading of Thirty Things”; Linda W. Wagner’s “Creeley’s Late Poems: Contexts”; John Vernon’s “The Cry of Its Occasion: Rober Creeley”; Peter Quartermain’s “Robert Creeley: What Counts”; Paul Diehl’s “The Literal Activity fo Robert Creeley”; William Navero’s “Robert Creeley: Close. In the Mind. Some Times. Some What.”; Albert Cook’s “Reflections on Robert Creeley”; Robert von Hallberg’s “Robert Creeley and the Pleasures of the System”; Sherman Paul’s “Rereading Creeley”; Robert Grenier’s “A Packet for Robert Creeley”; Allen Ginsberg’s “On Robert Creeley’s Ear Mind (and a Poem)”; Edward Dorn’s “Of Robert Creeley”; Three poem by Denise Levertov; Tom Clark’s “’Desperate Perhaps, and Even Foolish,/ But God Knows Useful’ – Creeley and the Experience of Space’”; Duncan McNaughton’s “Bullshitting About Creeley”; Samuel Moon’s “A Lake of Clear Water”; Warren Tallman’s “Haw: A Dream for Robert Creeley”; Nathaniel Mackey’s “The Gold Diggers: Projective Prose”; Marjorie Perloff’s “Four Times Five: Robert Creeley’s The Island”; Charlie Altieri’s “Placing Robert Creeley’s Recent Work: A Poetics of Conjecture”; Michael Davidson’s “The Presence of the Present: Morality and the Problem of Value in Robert Creeley’s Recent Prose.”

This issue also contains contributions from artists John Altoon, John Chamberlain, Jim Dine, Elsa Dorfman, Philip Guston, Robert Indiana, RB Kitaj, Franz Kline, Marisol, Dan Rice and Frank Stella. Seriously.
—KS

THANKS

 

Thanks to Michael Cross for finding Thanks at Serendipity for me. It’s an unusual volume; a hardcover book containing just two short poems (“Theresa’s Friends” and “Thanks") written for Theresa Turner, Creeley’s “’mentally retarded’” red-headed Irish housekeeper from childhood. The book contains two illustrations by Timothy Engelland, and was published simultaneously by The Deerfield Press in Massachusetts and The Gallery Press of Ireland in December, 1977. All were signed by Creeley.

Thanks

Here’s to Eddie—
not unsteady
when drunk,
just thoughtful.

Here’s to his mind
can remember
in the blur
his own forgotten line.

Or, too, lest
forgot, him in the traffic
at Cambridge, outside,
lurching, confident.

He told me later,
“I’m Catholic,
I’m queer,
I’m a poet.”

God bless him,
God love him,
I say,
praise him

who saves you time,
saves you money,
takes on the burden
of your own confessions.

And my thanks again
for the cigarettes
he gave me
someone else had left.

I won’t escape
his conversation
but will listen
as I’ve learned to,

and drink
and think again
with this dear man
of the true, the good, the dead.

—KS

PRESENCES: A TEXT FOR MARISOL


Of Presences, poet-critic John Yau wrote: “Published by a commercial press, Presences: A Text for Marisol (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1976), is a major, innovative accomplishment in the history of collaboration, as well as a book no other post-war American poet has come close to equaling. The tantamount contribution of the two collaborators is announced from the outset, both on the cover and on the spine:
In accordance with this equal billing, both Marisol and William Katz, the book’s designer, as well as friend of both sculptor and poet, have done much to establish an open-ended yet corresponding dialogue between the sixty-one back-and-white photographs and the thirty single-spaced pages. Because there is no index, and the book isn't paginated, the reader/viewer is not only invited to begin anywhere, but also there is the insistent sense that one can’t return to exactly where one was, because that would imply the sequence is a fixed narrative, which it isn’t.
—KS

HELLO


Robert Creeley’s Hello (Hawk Press, 1976) was designed and printed by Alan Loney in Taylors Mistake on an Arab treadle platen. The typefaces are Perpetua and Centaur; edition of 750 copies with 50 numbered and signed by Creeley. From the introduction:


Coming to New Zealand in our spring (your fall) of 1976 (momently to be my fiftieth year)—I knew, intuitively, a time in myself had come for change. I don’t mean simply clothes, or houses, or even cities or countries or habits. I mean, all of it—what it ever is or can be. No doubt one’s a poor tourist, so preoccupied—but one needs specific places for specific acts, and if the demand be that one step our into space, that life as we say we presume to live, then best it be a giant step, as far from what’s known as one can manage.

Thank God you speak English, however—no American is quite that daring. My invitation to come was, in fact, from a dear fellow-poet, Alistair Paterson, and it was our common concern for what could be done with English language in New Zealand or American poems, that resulted in the divers lectures and readings I gave, either alone or in generous company, the length and breadth of your pleasant land.

But you know that, as I do—and what seems far more to the point is to cite, here, such senses of New Zealand as stay put for me. For example, the clouds of your country—especially Wellington—are so active and so lovely. I know the wind blows too, often harshly, but those clouds are such a cosmos of possibility. Then there’s New Zealand light—intense, clear, particularizing, ruthless, unlike any I’ve ever previously known. In my own concerns, it brought all things factually to stand in the light, and that’s where finally one wants to see them.
KS

IN LONDON


Creeley’s chapbook In London was printed by Andrew Hoyem and Robert Graborn in San Francisco in 1970. Edwin and Robert Grabhorn’s allusive typography (after Bruce Rogers) became a sensation in the Bay Area and beyond. When the elder brother retired from printing, the younger went into business with Hoyem, and for a few years produced books under the Grabhorn-Hoyem imprint. Creeley’s book was published by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair Books, which I usually associate with the mimeograph rather than the fancy deluxe editions that Hoyem went on to produce at his own Arion Press after he absorbed much of the Grabhorn Brothers' type, so to my mind, In London represents a fascinating moment where three generations (Grabhorn 70; Creeley 44; Hoyem 30; and Warsh & Waldman only in their mid-20s) of printers/publishers with very distinct values and approaches to publishing and design.


The format is large; nice big type with generous margins that accommodate the snapshot observations and thoughts of the poet:


“EAT ME”
The favorite delicious dates.


Girls
Girls
Girls
Girls

2x2


Some guy here inside wandering around with ladder and bucket. Meanwhile the scaffolding being built goes on and on, more secure.


Like German’s poem I once translated, something about “when I kissed you, a beam came through the room. When I picked you flowers, they took the whole house away.” Sort of an ultimate hard-luck story.


Lovely roofs outside.
Some of the best roofs in London.


Surrounded
by bad art.



In London later appeared in A Day Book, a temporal experiment in various journalistic forms. Thanks to Jed for generously sending a copy my way.
This would be a good time to mention that issue number 5 of Mimeo Mimeo will be out this summer and issue number 6, focusing exclusively on the life and work of Lewis Warsh, will appear in the winter. Copies of number 4 are running thin.
KS

ROBERT CREELEY: AWAY

ROBERT CREELEY: THE CREATIVE


Although one could argue that Sparrow was essentially advertising for Black Sparrow Press, the format and concept were spectacular. Thin pamphlets, this one printed by Noel Young, appeared monthly, presenting poetry, fiction, essays criticism, etc. by a single-author. This copy sold for 50 cents, March, 1973. I never write in books, and find other people's marginalia an endless distraction, but I've held on to this copy, at least until I stumble on a replacement. The previous owner highlighted this in red ink:


"It is the need to enter what we loosely call the vision, to be one with the Imago Mundi, that image of the world that we each of us carry within us as possibility itself. What can we say otherwise? Peace, brother. It's going to be alright. It's soon over and it won't hurt."


In addition to "The Creative," the pamphlet contains the poem, "For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley." You can listen to Bob read the poem and the story behind it at PennSound as I heard it for the first time at a reading I organized for him in Vermont in 1998.
KS