IMMEDIATE SURROUNDING by LEWIS WARSH


11. IMMEDIATE SURROUNDING. South Lancaster, MA: Other Books, 1974. 6x9¼" 20 pages. (P)

Offset, saddle-stapled chapbook. Blue, black and white cover and frontispiece (based on a photo by Rudy Burckhardt) by George Schneeman. Printed by The Fleetwood Letter Service for Other Publications in an edition of 500 copies with a special edition of 26 copies lettered A–Z and signed by the author and artist. 

“I wrote this poem at 216 East 10th Street, all in one sitting, not long after Mushka Kochan and I moved to New York from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It seemed to capture the feeling of returning some place, and for a little while everything that had been so familiar seemed new again. I had been moving around a lot for the last three years so the objects that stayed with me during my travels became significant—like the coffee cup at the end of the poem which I’d bought in San Francisco. It was like my personal fetish object—one of many—that kept the past alive. Memory is like an ongoing tangent (or parenthesis) to everything—a parallel life alongside the present, and I had no interest in leaving anything behind. The book was published by Alan Davies, a young poet I had met a few years earlier when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” (LW)

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Challenge me, please.
one string, a tone, the note
work the problem, sound a music
never before heard, one string
along a instrument arm, pluck
dancing, moving figurines
follow easy, slow on the red
stage, elaborate costume of their
nature, in seconds the nature re-new.

Unknown said...

Could not find your offering so I filled the box with mine, I apologize being so bold a twit!

Unknown said...

The web design itself is quite attractive and easy on my fragile view.

Unknown said...

Is comfort a good thing? Diana Vreeland while editor in chief of Vogue advised everyone that at her desk in a romantic red office she sat every day in the smallest most uncomfortable chair she could find to advise the women of the world, all of it, how to dress their figures with total excitement for their their man. She loved to tease the richest men of the world you see!

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