Smells Like The Real Deal

For obsessives of the Mimeo Revolution, Dan Saxon is something of a god.  Maybe it is just me, but Poems Collected at Les Deux Megot and Poets at Le Metro are some of the coolest publications of the entire era.  This is in large part because Saxon used a rexograph and, really, who the fuck did that beside your fifth grade teacher.  Saxon used a spirit duplicator not a stencil duplicator.  What that basically means is that Saxon's publications had a distinct smell.  In short they are completely authentic.  If you remember mimeo from your youth based on smell, what you remember is not mimeo (stencil duplicators) but spirit duplicators.  In short, the publications of Dan Saxon are all about memory and nostalgia.  They completely capture a certain time and space, which Daniel Kane breaks down in the essential All Poets Welcome. 

Except for the fact that Kane does not mention that Saxon published a chapbook series on top of his legendary magazines.  Clay and Phillips do not mention these publications either.  I am fascinated by mimeos mags which make the leap to mimeo presses and I always assumed Saxon was  a pure magazine editor.  This ties in with the myth of authencity.  Pure magazine publications seem to me to be purely in the moment.  They are all about immediate communication and speed.  That is why Floating Bear never expanded into a full blown press.  Le Metro seems purely in the moment.  There did not seem to be the impulse to preserve a larger statement or scene.  Well, I was wrong.  Besides his magazines, Saxon printed a Poets of Le Metro Series of which Nancy Ellison's Come Late was the first issued.

The purple ink is a give away that this is rexograph (thanks for the confirmation Daniel Lauffer), and for mimeo fetishists this is like blue cocaine a la Spalding Gray.  Nobody but nobody used a rexograph but sci-fi fanzines and church ladies announcing a baked bean supper.  This is beyond cool.  Not to mention my fascination with Nancy Ellison (along with Carol Berge).  I have a soft spot for all the women who drank at Stanley's Bar and published in Fuck You.  It is all black tights and turtle necks.  Talk about a fetish.

JB