MIMEO MIMEO

Diva

2012-01-27T23:48:00.002-05:00

This project with Robert Duncan was on again and off again. This publication is from when it was a go. There could be a documentary about the trials and tribulations about publishing Duncan.

Auerhahn X 4

2012-01-27T23:14:00.007-05:00

It's round midnight and I have had a few Pabst Blue Ribbons but I do not see Auerhahn Auerhahn Auerhahn Auerhahn in the Johnston bibliography. It is probably in there. Sue me. I still have my wits about me enough to realize that this is quite the item. A piece like this is why ephemera is where it is at. And flipping through the bibliography there is a ton of ephemera in the Auerhahn catalog. It is in these small details that the history of Auerhahn is to be written.

The Business of the Alternative Press

2012-01-26T21:55:00.006-05:00

When it comes to the Mimeo Revolution, I am naive and romantic. This is art for art's sake, creation of a community, life as art, and all that crap, but alternative publishing was also a commercial enterprise. The intertwining of capitalism, entrepeneurial spirit, and the counterculture is so in-your-face in something like the Ed Sanders/Peace Eye catalogs that it cannot be ignored.

That is why it is important to study the alternative press as a business model. How does the alternative press market itself, how does it distribute its product, how does it advertise, how does it interact with customers? I have become interested in this in part because of my experiences with putting out and distributing Mimeo Mimeo and because of my relationships with small presses as a collector. Publishing Mimeo Mimeo, I have been forced to realize what I always knew but suppressed. The design and contents of the little magazines that I see as pure in some artistic or creative way are often dictated by a brutally mundane monetary bottom lines. Let's face it people used the mimeograph because it was cheap not out of some higher calling.

For whatever reason, Auerhahn Press provides an opportunity to collect great examples of the everyday activities of a working press. Business cards, invoices, letterhead, prospectuses, annoucements, catalogs. Sooner or later all this material will come under scholarly attention in order to get a fuller picture of how the alternative press worked on a day by day basis and how the works they produced came to the light of day.

That said, take a look at the Dave Haselwood business card. It is all business, but that essence of Auerhahn design shows through. This business card symbolizes the interplay of creativity and economic bottom line that dictated not only the output and aesthetic of Auerhahn Press, but all the presses of the Mimeo Revolution.

The Auerhahn Menu

2012-01-26T19:12:00.013-05:00

The Auerhahn when cooked tastes like turpentine. Dave Haselwood never published the cooked, only the raw. Here is the menu to the Auerhahn Press buffet from 1962. These selections are three-star Michelin ("exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey") all the way.

The Hidden Card

2012-01-25T22:41:00.015-05:00

After turning up Venus and the Moon, I found another little known Open Space item. Janet Thormann's The Tarot Suite was printed in 1964 by White Rabbit and included as a supplement to Open Space 5. I am so happy to get a copy that I will show you my hand. Above is the complete Tarot Suite.

Silence To Say Goodbye

2012-01-24T14:35:00.004-05:00

Carl Weissner has passed away. For those not familiar with Carl, above is a cut-up autobiography written for the 1969 Intermedia Festival in Heidelberg.

Much more on and by Weissner can be found here:

http://realitystudio.org/publications/death-in-paris/

Venus and the Moon Glimmering on the Horizon

2012-01-21T16:24:00.004-05:00

Completeness is the horizon constantly before the eyes of the collector but a place, a state never to be attained. I thought I was approaching the unapproachable in regards to Open Space. From what I could tell I had all the magazines as well as the standalone chapbook publications. In fact, they can all be found on the Mimeo Mimeo blog.

And then Harold Dull's Venus and the Moon come into my orbit. The bookseller's catalog description stated it was associated with Open Space #4. This would be the White Hope Issue not the Taurus Issue. Yes, there were two Number 4s. Open Space is quirky like that.

The publication advertised came from Harold Dull's personal collection so it could be like an offprint for his own personal distribution. Yet Alastair Johnston, author of the White Rabbit bibliography, which features a valuable checklist on Open Space magazine, suggests that there were possibly overrun sheets of the Dull poem and the extras were used to make the above publication, which was printed, like Open Space, "sans serif typewriter litho on cheap bond."

Back in 2006, when Ron Silliman wrote on Dull, he describes this same publication as one of the four Dull items in his possession. As Silliman notes, Venus and the Moon became the opening poem in Dull's 1967 collection The Star Year, "a record of discovery of stars in life and sky, celebrat[ing] the beginning of [Dull's] new life at Drew House with Ila Hinton" (Poet Be Like God). I have no idea how many copies of Venus and the Moon were made or the motive behind it. There is another copy currently available on Abebooks.

All I know is that I had to buy it. Immediately. In order to get one step closer to that ever-receding horizon.

JB

Benjamin's Suitcase

2012-01-20T07:55:00.004-05:00

Ever since reading Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" years ago, Benjamin and his various archives and projects have been my model as a collector. Benjamin serves as a guardian angel watching over Mimeo Mimeo. I highly recommend Verso's Walter Benjamin's Archive. Fascinating insights into a collection and the passion and mind that drove and organized it.

Benjamin makes me feel good as a collector unlike Jean Baudrillard and his essay "The System of Collecting." Who wants to be that guy? It is a fine line between collector (order, sanity) and horder (chaos, madness).

Looking over Benjamin's archive it is easy to see his loving gathering of Russian peasant figurines as a countermeasure to the Nazis ruthless roundup of human beings. One collection preserves and keeps alive and one exterminates. The collecting impulse is both merciful and murderous.

In 1989, I walked through Auschwitz., an experience which I will never forget. When confronted with Benjamin and his archive, I always flash to Auschwitz and a room filled floor to ceiling with suitcases. The fate of an archive is ultimately depressing, leading to an inevitable death and dispersal. I am reminded of the fate of some other suitcases: Benjamin's lost at the Spanish border; Duchamp's institutionalized in the museum.

Il n'ya pas de hors-galerie d'art

2012-01-19T06:19:00.003-05:00

I just finished reading Alternative Art New York 1965-1985 edited by Julie Ault, in order to follow up on Gwen Allen's Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Both books are fascinating for documenting how various artists banged their heads against the white cube in an effort to find a way out. Reading the books it remains debatable to me whether these alternative spaces were in fact outside of the art market and whether there is any artistic space or production that cannot be absorbed into today's global economy of information.

Rimbaud, Walser, Roussel, Kafka seem to provide models for an alternative but as David Markson's Reader's Block demonstrates the idea that states of silence, exile, and madness or the act of suicide are the only possibilities for creative freedom in a post-avant garde landscape is pretty bleak indeed.

What is the collector to do with the flotsam and jetsam of the alternative space? It seems to me that it would be worthwhile to gather the postcards, announcements, handbills, stationery, notations, blueprints, diagrams, posters, and other bits of artistic confetti leftover from the party. (Among the other books I have been reading, I just finished a book on Walter Benjamin's Archive.) But this party looks to be already crashed. A signed and unnumbered altered announcement card for "A Work Marjorie Strider / 112 Greene Street / To Nov. 7" sent October 1970 is $750 dollars. The historical account of 112 Greene Street published in 1981 by New York University is around $250. Alternative art spaces in San Francisco and Los Angeles like Ferus Gallery, the Batman Gallery, the Six Gallery and Womanhouse I am sure are getting similar treatment.

To get some fresh air, one will have to head out for the territory. I am out of my element here given that my nose was attracted to the cheese in the San Francisco and New York City mousetrap, but the Detroit Artist Workshop comes to mind. I am sure there were alternative art spaces in Austin, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Cleveland. What were the alternative spaces in the South during the 1960s? I would suspect there is a lot of work to be done in collecting and documenting these scenes.

But maybe to find a true alternative space, if such flora and fauna can still grow in the current climate, we have to go even further out to Main Street. I am thinking of Blair Murphy's Grand Midway Hotel in Windber Pennsylvania, the home of Alan Freed and Johnny Weissmuller. Freed and Weissmuller definitely had their roles in the art of the sellout, but in Windber there seems to be a blurring of art and life (with Beat, silent film, motorcycle, vampire, paranormal and zombie festivals combined with living and art space) without regard to the market. John Fetterman is mayor in nearby Braddock. Jon Beacham's bookstore gallery in Beacon NY comes to mind. Possibly alternative space can take root in the small town. But maybe I am being naive about the true nature of these ventures and betraying a fetish for the pastoral.

In any case, if such an alternative space did exist and flourish, I am sure that a collector like me would quickly take it by the roots, pull it into context, and press it between printed pages.

JB

The Machinations Of: Mimeo Mimeo

2012-01-16T21:58:00.000-05:00

An interview with the editors of Mimeo Mimeo at Flying Object.

Cornish Pasty Pate with a Side of Haggis

2012-01-16T16:13:00.005-05:00

In honor of the Roussel post today, I decided to cook some French onion soup for my wife's birthday. So here I am stirring up some soup, when the Clash's London Calling comes on my Pandora. Culture clash, what to do??

As a previous post proves, when I think food I think of Lee Harwood the editor. So I ran to my bookshelf and pulled down Night Scene Dada from London 1963, edited by Harwood and dedicated to Tristan Tzara. I turn to the first page and read Harwood translation of Tzara's "The Almost Perfect Man - An Extract," which opens "Who will free us from the encumbrance of possessions and flesh." Then I read the second poem "Way" and with Harwood translating Tzara I can hope that at least one "road that separates us," the cultural divide inspired by the Clash, has been bridged, but here I am being so fleshy, stuffing my gullet with bread and cheese.

Then I see on the title page that I happen to have the copy of legendary Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and things get a little more concrete but still with the flavor of haggis.

The Tropological Space of Locus Solus

2012-01-16T07:48:00.011-05:00

The five issues of Locus Solus, edited by Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, are yet another example of the magazine as alternative space. If Robin Blaser viewed Pacific Nation in terms of mapping and nations, in terms of open space, I see Locus Solus as a form of Kunstkammer (a Cabinet of Wonder), a closed in hermetic space akin to Cornell's and Duchamp's boxes. A closed space, yet one that opens into an endless labyrinth of choices, options, and possibilities.

Locus Solus was named after Raymond Roussel's 1914 novel. Central to scientist and inventor Martial Canterel's Solitary Place and the novel itself was a large glass box in which eight resuscitated individuals repeated the central moment of their lives. As Foucault makes clear in Death and the Labyrinth that moment is the threshold of life moving into death. This door perpetually open and closed. Later in the book Foucault writes of a similar door,

"In order to put one's hand on the skull with the sonnets, which leads straight to the well hiding millions - a first glimmer of particles of the sun - one must push two doors, one as open as the other (so afraid was old Guillaume that his treasure would not be found), one as closed as the other (so frightened was he that it would be lost from such easy access). Once these thresholds are crossed, the path is the same; two rival groups progress along identical stages. Perhaps also leading to the treasure of the work - to this well, at the same time a mine and a forge, whose glow was shown from the beginning by the poem L'Ame - there are two roads which are the same, two thresholds for the same road, two doors which can be opened with one motion, the first being secret (unveiled, thus becoming nonsecret) and the second being the nonsecret (because it does no need to be uncovered, remaining in the shadow and under the seal of a paradoxical secret)."

In the interview at the end of my edition of Death and the Labyrinth, interviewer Charles Ruas states, "Marcel Duchamp and other artists discuss Roussel only incidentally, there is no attempt to come to grips with his work." With Duchamp, this strikes me a debatable. For if Duchamp's Door 11 Rue Larrey (1927) only addresses Roussel incidentally, the work happens (by chance??) to capture the essence of the Rousselian threshold.

Death and the Labyrinth is Foucault's only full-length book of literary criticism. It was published in France in 1963, thus roughly contemporary with Locus Solus, which ran from 1961 to 1962. John Ashbery wrote an introduction to Raymond Roussel in 1961. It cannot be overestimated just how off the beaten path Roussel was to Americans in the early 1960s. Each issue of the magazine featured a quote from Roussel on the title page: l'ecriteau bref qui s'offre a l'oeil apitoye (roughly translated as "The short notice offered to the compassionate eye"). Ashbery and other editors of Locus Solus were pioneers in their interest in Roussel and the publication of a section of Roussel's Locus Solus in Issue Five (translated by Harry Mathews) probably introduced Roussel to a number of American poets and writers.

In the early 1960s, Roussel was being infused with the vitalium and resurrectine of literary and artistic attention and consideration. The New York School poets, Foucault and French structuralists, the Nouveau Roman writers (like Alain Robbe-Grillet), and the Oulipo writers (like Italo Calvino and Georges Perec) all lavished attention on Roussel such as he had not experienced since the surrealists rallied to his defense when Roussel's plays were being met with hoots and catcalls in the 1920s.

Roussel's work also exerted an influence on art and music. John Cage, Fluxus, LaMonte Young, Jean Tinguely, Allan Kaprow and the Happening scene. Canterel's teeth-arranging art machine surely inspired Tinguely machines, such as Homage to New York, which destroyed itself in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. That sculpture garden is yet another Locus Solus with Tinguely as a return of Canterel.

Foucault writes of Roussel's play within tropological space, i.e. that instant when the signifier detaches from the signified and becomes abstract, that space between, that space of silence. Is the door at 11 Rue Larrey the threshold into that labyrinthine space? Or maybe it represents the Rousselian process of simultaneously entering/exiting that door? The writing collected in Locus Solus magazine also explores that space and that process and thus the magazine serves as a cabinet of the curiosities to be found there.

JB

Oh The Places You Will Go

2012-01-15T12:55:00.003-05:00

"I wish to put together an imaginary nation. It is my belief that no other nation is possible, or rather, I believe that authors who count take responsibility for a map which is addressed to travellers of the earth, the world, and the spirit. Each issue is composed as a map of this land and this glory, images of our cities and of our politics must join our poetry. I want a nation in which discourse is active and scholarship is understood as it should be, the mode of our understanding and the ground of our derivations."

Robin Blaser (June 3, 1967)

The little magazine as space, as map, as nation, as place. As Gwen Allen's book on the magazine as alternative space, this idea is being aggressively chewed over by the academic community. Despite all the attention lavished in Allen's book on this concept and the host of follow-ups no doubt already in progress, a magazine like Pacific Nation will probably fall through the cracks. The primary reason for this is location, location, location. Vancouver, and Canada in general, are just not desirable academic real estate. They are not New York, in fact they are in many respect an anti-Big Apple. For Blaser, Vancouver is an outpost, a land of exile from San Francisco, yet also a place of potential intellectual freedoms. You see this conflicted attitude of Vancouver as alternative space in TISH as well.

Like Allen's book, Secret Location possesses zip code bias as well. At least, Secret Location addresses the West Coast while still sadly neglecting the fly over zone. I was happy to see Pacific Nation featured in its pages, because it is a great magazine that deserves some attention. As does Blaser. If Dick Gallup is the forgotten figure of the Tulsa school, Blaser is the odd man out in the Berkeley Renaissance. Duncan, Rexroth, Spicer (and by association Olson) get all the press. I am not going to misrepresent myself. I am by no means immersed in Blaser, but have read his Open Space publications. I always make a promise to dig deeper, to get the collected, to read The Fire. The acquistion of Pacific Nation is one step to make good on that promise.

In my opinion, Blaser as editor is worth encountering as the quote above makes clear. Let's face it, it is going to be tough to experience Spicer as an editor. The first five issues of J Magazine just are not available and if they are they are several hundred dollars an issue. (In my opinion they are worth the effort and the expense.) Yet the neglected Pacific Nation is far cheaper at around $25 for issue two. Issue One is much more rare and is collectible as a pivotal Brautigan item (this issue published Trout Fishing in America for the first time), but a copy is currently available for $30 (albeit in less than collectible condition). So for around $50 you can get the complete run of a very interesting map of the mind of Robin Blaser. Issue One includes work by Blaser (The Image, The Fire), Spicer (A Poem to the Reader of the Poem), Charles Olson (A Comprehension), Antonin Artaud (On Nerval), Michael McClure (The Moon is Number 18), Harold Dull (Dream), George Stanley (You, On Strangers), Stan Persky (California Sociology), along with youngsters Karen Tallman, Colin Stuart, Rick Bryne and Gerry Gilbert. Not bad, and oh, the places you will go!

Rite of Passage

2012-01-13T11:19:00.002-05:00

I have always wondered what made Ted Berrigan starting printing again in 1978 after a considerable gap. Must be a special occasion, right?

I know precious little about Elio Schneeman, but Wikipedia lists his birthday as October 16, 1961. If you look closely above, you can see that his father dated the sketch above as October 16, 1978. In some fashion, the personal details of which I do not know, In February I Think is a birthday present, a rite of passage into manhood, and an initiation into the community of poets and artists.

Personally, I read this publication as a physical gift from father to son. I also take In February I Think, so ephemeral, along with Elio's early death, as reminders that this stubborn and sturdy bond which threatens to become a routine pantomine of constant interaction and even, in troubled times, a burden is actually very fragile and, in some ways, temporary. Yet my age-toned copy of In February I Think with its staples loosening, like a memory, a recollection, and a reflection, persists.

Print and the printed object will never die.

WEST HOUSE

2012-01-12T13:20:00.001-05:00

I love getting mail, especially mail from overseas. The carrier came to the gate yesterday with a package from Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk's remarkable bookstore/press West House Books in Sheffield England. Here's what was inside:

Tom Raworth's chapbook Emptily published by The Figures in 1994 with drawings are by Suzanne McClelland.

Even if only out of, a new collection of Halsey's poems written between 2008-2010, just out from Veer Books. I couldn't agree more with Mark Scroggins when he admits that Halsey is "one of the 5 or 6 poets whose work I'll buy immediately on sight, no questions asked, without bothering to open the book or read the blurbs." Okay, maybe a few more than five or six for me, but not much. Halsey constantly delivers in ways you wouldn't expect.

Although not particularly rare, Haiku is a late addition to my collection of books from Trigram Press. Unlike Jed, I'm not a serious collector, but it would make me very happy to have the opportunity to look and learn from a complete Trigram collection someday. Here are haiku from John Esam, Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth with each author's words printed on a different color paper.

Strange Faeces is a magazine that I would like to learn more about. This is the cover of number three, devoted to the work of Ron Padgett. Edited by Opal Nations, according to Secret Location, there are a total of twenty issues published between 1966 and 1988. Not a bad run! The only other copy I've see is the Larry Fagin issue, which was published in a similar side-stapled A4 mimeo format.

As much as I do relish in packages from afar, it's unfortunate that the cost of postage has soared in the last decade. To ship a copy of Mimeo Mimeo to England costs as much as the magazine itself. In an effort to keep prices low for mimeo lovers throughout Europe, West House will carry Mimeo Mimeo as well as Cuneiform Books. Check it out, and while you're there, do observe their carefully selected, very reasonably priced, used book section along with books published under their own imprint. Did I mention that there's also a gallery? You can't do much better than than West House Books.

--KS

ARTISTS’ BOOK NOT ARTISTS’ BOOK

2012-01-11T12:38:00.000-05:00

An exhibition featuring books that are, and/or, are not, artists’ books. Co-curated by Johan Kugelberg and Jeremy Sanders. Open 12-6pm, seven days a week, January 18 to February 12, at Boo-Hooray Gallery, 265 Canal Street, 6^th floor (between Broadway and Lafayette). Details here.

In February I Think

2012-01-10T21:40:00.003-05:00

Here is a copy of Elio Schneeman's In February I Think published by Ted Berrigan under the C Press imprint in 1978 with assistance by Ron Padgett at the Poetry Project and Bob Rosenthal. Elio's father, George, did the front and back covers. Only 250 copies.

There is a sense of beginnings and youth with In February I Think as C Press began with a group of teenagers. Elio was around 17 or 18 when his C Press book came out which is about the age of Brainard, Gallup and Padgett in The White Dove Review days, which lead to Censored Review and then C A Journal of Poetry and C Press.

Yet Elio's book will always be associated with death and endings for me. In Secret Location, C Press is listed as running from 1963 to 1980, but I am blanking on just what Berrigan published with C Press after 1978. Steve Carey's The Lily of St. Mark's came out in 1978 as did Elio's thin, fragile book of poems. For me, In February I Think is the end of the road for C Press. Elio, so young here, would be dead before he reached 40; Berrigan held out a little bit longer than that. Elio's book and his life were like February much too short, but "filled with emotion" as Vincent Katz noted.

Polis Is This

2012-01-06T09:32:00.002-05:00

The above image is of Olson at 28 Fort Square in March 1966. He was recorded for the documentary USA: Poetry. Now I have not listened to every Olson reading but I have heard my share. I have been to PennSound; I placed the Folkways album on my turntable. I have to admit that Olson the reader oftimes hits a dull note with me. Maybe he is like an old locomotive. It takes him awhile to get started; he does struggle with openings. Maybe like Carl Lewis singing the National Anthem Olson will bring it home, but listening to Olson reading I wonder of the power of Olson the talker. That one on one surrounded by cigarette smoke; his hot breath in your face and his gestures dangerously close to cuffing you on the chin. Where is that guy?

Well, the crew at USA: Poetry caught that guy on film. Maybe because they caught Olson in his natural habitat. Maybe because Olson reading here was like Olson talking around midnight on a cool night at Black Mountain. Loose, informal.

Olson absolutely kills it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYxpSjkyAg reading Maxiums to Gloucester, Letter 27 [Withheld]. This is Olson at his best and hearing this, watching this I find myself caught up in Olson the mythic figure. Hearing this I become an Olson groupie, an hanger-on, hanging on every word.

Here is Tom Clark on that day in March 1966:

"Olson proved only slightly easier to keep up with when his sanctuary was invaded in March 1966 by an production crew from the NET documentary series USA: Poetry. He allowed himself to be filmed amid a cloud of smoke in his unventilated kitchen, reading "The Librarian" and then talking extempore, with great good cheer and characteristic poetic disconnectedness, of Catholicism and fishing, the history of Gloucester and Tim Leary's drug bust, the writing of Maximus and a recent bizarre neighborhood episode in which he'd hoisted a boy who'd flung dirt at him onto the roof of the beach wagon and, in lieu of administering a spanking, taken a bite out of him. Afterwards he dragged producer Dick Moore and cameraman Phil Green out on the town, proudly showing off landmarks of his poems like Lufkin's Diner, and conducting and informative but potentially hazardous tour of the harbor while "stumbling around in his big coat talking about a million things at once" with such evident abandon that Green feared he'd misstep and plunge through the rotting boards of the ramshackle old wharf. (When the show appeared five months later, with his several hours of monologue squeezed in a fifteen-minute segment, the TV-star-for-a-day sent out notices instructing old friends as disparate as Frances and James Laughlin to tune in.)"

JB

Naked Type

2012-01-03T19:14:00.003-05:00

I find that typewriter in the background of the still from Vilgot Sjoman's I Am Curious (Yellow), well, curious. Its presence highlights the fact that in the post-WWII era until (arguably) the age of video, pornography was intimately involved with the literary, and by that I mean high culture. But think the Venus of Dusseldorf, Manet, and Man Ray. Pornography always aspired to Art. Not surprisingly pornography is an intimate, essential component of the Mimeo Revolution. Look no further than da levy and Ed Sanders. William Burroughs' Roosevelt After Inauguration is another example that hits close to my heart. In could be argued that the financial success of Grove Press (and it historical importance as a publishing house) derives from its relationship with pornography.

Pornography is no longer contained in the cages of the art gallery or the peep show. Pornography is mainstream and has infused every aspect of popular culture. In some sense, I Am Curious (Yellow) is from a more innocent time. A Garden of Eden, when pornography could still shock, inspire, and titilate. A time when pornography encouraged one to hit the pause button or slow-mo rather than the fast forward button. But was I Am Curious (Yellow) the bite of the apple of carnal knowledge? Along with Andy Warhol's Blue Movie or, more certainly, Deep Throat or Behind the Green Door, did this Swedish classic signal the moment when porn moved towards the mainstream? Clearly, the small press in the form of Grove Press put that moment into print and helped disseminate porn to the masses.

The memory of a time when porn was shocking and fresh like Venus in her shell is quickly slipping away, like the memory of a time when letters were composed on a typewriter, or even more intimately, more nakedly, written by hand.

DAMP PAPER

2011-12-31T09:59:00.000-05:00

An excellent series of posts on dampening paper for printing on Alan Loney's blog: http://electioeditions.blogspot.com/

FOUR BOOKS

2011-12-19T09:04:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Michael Cross for sending these books my way:

4 Poems by Charles Bernstein. Not quite a chapbook, but certainly an alternative book structure from Chax Press published in 1988 on the occasion of the author's reading in Tucson. Printed letterpress, the type is Garamond and the drawing (not pictured) is by Cynthia Miller. 36/125

Here's a book that's been missing from my Gregg Biglieri collection, until now. Profession is number seven in the Idiom chapbook series. He's been one of my favorite writers since we met ten years ago, and his new book, Little Richard the Second, will not disappoint.

Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee's collaboration, The Occurrence of Tune, is in the Poems & Pictures exhibit I curated for Columbia College (February 9-April 12, 2012). Details are on the exhibition are here. You can download the whole book from Eclipse and learn more about Bee and Bernstein's collaborations here.

Tan Tien by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge was first published as a broadside for Woodland Pattern Book Center in 1984 in a 'bare handful of copies.' This attractive variation on a chapbook was published by Chax Press in conjunction with the author's reading at the 1988 Tucson Poetry Festival.

--KS

Lieb House

2011-12-11T21:40:00.005-05:00

I just finished Learning from Las Vegas. The trip from Clip Stamp Fold to Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles to Learning from Las Vegas has been an amazing journey and a real education. Reading Brown and Venturi's book I was surprised to learn about the Lieb House, a summer vacation home they designed and built on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. I spent quite a bit of time there in the summers during college and later on a few New Year's Eves at the vacation home of one of my friend's parents. I never knew the Lieb House was there. I would have been quite a treat to see it.

To late now as the house is no longer there. In 2009 it was threatened with destruction and eventually moved on a boat up to New York State. I talked to my friend tonight and asked him about the house. He did not know about it, but looking at a picture of it he commented, "It sure is ugly." Exactly!! And a real triumph.

I absolutely love the huge "9" which seem to me just perfect. Venturi has commented that such touches were just not done on important architecture and were a radical gesture. I immediately thought of the art of, not Ed Ruscha as one might expect, but instead that of Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana. It is touches like this that make Brown and Venturi's "ugly and ordinary" sheds pop before one's eyes and so monumental.

John Thomas Menesini

2011-12-09T19:35:00.003-05:00

I first got to know John Thomas Menesini at an early Kerouac Fest in Windber Pennsylvania. After a frantic night of poetry and performance and heavy Yuengling consumption, I suggested to a group of early risers a trip to a diner up the street for breakfast. John and I bonded over some hash (corned beef), salty not smoked.

He was the first poet I got to know on a personal level. We talked about his poems, about poetry, he sent me chapbooks and pamphlets. I had been reading and collecting little magazines and small press publications for years but I remained distanced from that world myself. Meeting John would initiate a change in all that. In a short time I would start writing for RealityStudio and later start Mimeo Mimeo.

I would like to think that John got something out of our friendship as well. My interests were always more academic than John's; my take on his poetry more of the head than of the balls, but in one of our conversations I suggested he take a stab at the long poem. I was not thinking epic like Pound or Olson but instead Ginsberg. The Ginsberg of Witchita Vortex Sutra rather than Howl or Kaddish. A poem of the radio, the road, the billboard. A poem of movement and dictation. Loose and free.

Well, John took me up on it as his latest collection, Endo, published by Six Gallery Press, opens with "It was too much and it was nothing," his longest and, arguably, most ambitious poem to date. John's bread and butter as a poet is making myth out of the day to day grind of urban, suburban, and rural wastelands of Western Pennsylvania. In this poem, John takes on his childhood and his origins as a seer of visions and hearer of voices. Madness, sickness, alienation leads into the pursuit of poetry.

John writes, "I had a fever when I was two the day Elvis died/105 degrees/was rushed to the hospital/and dunked in ice water/force fed ice water/and icy grape juice/which was good too/sweet and so cold." It is passages like this in John's poetry that I love to over analyze. It is in this fever that John is baptisized into a world of visions and voices, a world of poetry. Elvis as white trash bard. Grape juice as sacrament, and a foreshadowing of John's love/hate relationship with drink and the drinking life. I read the grape juice as grape drink, that nectar of the trailer park as well as a connection to the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests of rundown flophouses and abandon lots that John would chronicle in his poems. Finally forgive me if I see in "sweet and so cold" a bit of William Carlos Williams, not the Williams of Paterson, but the Williams of the American Idiom and no ideas but in things.

John will always been in some ways my first poet and will be forever associated with self-discovery and nostalgia. This is appropriate as these are driving forces in Endo and his work as a whole.

JB

The Dismal Science of the Mimeo Revolution

2011-12-06T19:48:00.003-05:00

Digging through used bookstores, I always keep a look out for books that covered aspects of the Mimeo Revolution when it was a current event. Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture is a good one of course. There are many more books on the Underground Newspaper as opposed to the little magazines and Roger Lewis' Outlaws of America and Robert Glessing's The Underground Press in America are two examples.

What I like about these books in contrast with a more recent take, like Smoking Typewriters, is that they are not afraid to provide tons of information about the logistics and economics of printing and distributions. Glessing (more than Lewis) provides some great details on what it actually cost to put out an underground paper in terms of supplies, manpower, and printing as well as the money to be made (or not) on distribution. For example, leasing of IBM Selectric typesetting equipment was about $150 per month whereas a new Linotype or Intertype machine for letterpress was $20,000 installed. Or Glessing explaining that a four-unit web-fed offset press was $20,000 a unit or about $100,000 to get up and running. The sunk costs made it necessary for small printers to actively search out jobs to fill downtime and these printers were willing in some cases, like Ed Sanders, to print anything. It is interesting to know that the Los Angeles Free Press was started with $15 in capital and quickly grew from four pages to 48 with weekly subscriptions of 95,000 and expenditures of $15,000. Or how about that East Village Other paid full time staffers $45 a week, but the Helix in Seattle provided food and lodging? Classified sex ads, which were indispensible for underground papers, brought in $6 per inch, and the Dwarfe, an underground paper in Phoenix, charged $100 for a full page ad for a circulation of $10,000.

Contemporary accounts, be they books or news articles, are full of this type of information and incredibly important for understanding the nuts and bolts and day to day activities of countercultural publishing. Like I said such information is more common for the Underground Press as opposed to the Mimeo Revolution, but that said spending some time digging around in contemporary sources definitely will paid some dividends in understanding the economics of counterculture printing.

Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles

2011-12-05T20:43:00.005-05:00

From the MIT Press website for Alexandra Schwartz's Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles: "Despite Ruscha's fame, this is the first comprehensive critical consideration of his art, and the first to consider it in the context of L.A.'s tumultuous 1960s and 1970s."

I have to say this statement blew me away. I assumed Ruscha's work had been well picked over by now, but then I got to thinking of the number of book length studies of Pop artists outside of Warhol. Not coffee table type books of full of images or popular studies for a mass audience, but converted dissertation type stuff. I am no expert but I am not aware of many. Plus Ruscha is from the West Coast, not New York, which makes it even less surprising that his corpus still has considerable meat on it.

I had high expectations for this book and I think it is a wonderful way to approach Ruscha's work, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed. There was never a really a-ha moment where Schwartz placed Ruscha and his work in a totally new perspective. That is not to say that there was not a tremendous amount of new information for me to chew on. Ruscha is not an artist that I am overly familiar; that said I have read a good amount on LA Pop, the Semina Circle and Ferus Gallery. I remember getting those moments reading Cecile Whiting's Pop LA: Art and the City in the 1960s. Schwartz has interesting historical details but not detailed analysis. Whiting's book had both.

But Whiting's book was on LA Pop generally and Schwartz does a service by focusing on LA and Ruscha. Chapters on Ruscha and Hollywood, Ruscha's artist's books and the then current theories of urbanism, and the Ferus Stud persona left me wanting more. From the concluding paragraph of the Hollywood chapter, "The dynamic between Ruscha and Hopper exemplifies the exchange between [the avant garde art and Hollywood filmmaking] communities; while Ruscha and his artistic cohorts often drew inspiration from Hollywood movies and culture, Hopper and his New Hollywood colleagues owed a profound debt to that era's avant-garde art. Ruscha's Los Angeles did not merely coexist with the Hollywood film industry, but was intimately intertwined with it." This is not earth shattering stuff.

From the concluding paragraph of the Ferus Stud chapter: "[Ruscha's] flamboyant public self-fashioning of this period illustrates this dynamic, for it calls attention to the sophisticated economy of denial by which his work simultaneously addresses highly provocative issues and obscures them, thwarting attempts to determine what his "true" authorial stance may be. The pleasure, but also the frustration, of Ruscha's highly nuanced work is that always keeps us guessing." Schwartz does a great job filling us in on what those guesses have been historically by detailing the various responses, reviews and reactions of others to Ruscha's work but the strong thrust of Schwartz's own guesses fall to shine through.

For readers of Mimeo Mimeo and those who may delve into the architecture magazines of Clip Stamp Fold, the chapter "Learning from Ed Ruscha" with its reading of the democratic multiples through Venturi, Brown, and Baynam is very interesting. Like with Clip Stamp Fold, I would have liked to see more treatment of Ruscha's books not as dealing with postmodern architectures, like swimming pools, gas stations and parking lots, but as forms, objects, structures and architectures that in themselves express the theories of Verturi, Brown, and Byanam. Schwartz captures this idea with the discussion of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, but that is the most obvious example of book as architecture. For example, a discussion of the act of reading Ruscha's multiples as cruising or surfing and how this act relates to the infrastructure of LA would have been interesting.

I am probably being hard on a book that I really enjoyed and got alot out of. Schwartz's book may be a first, but it should be far from the last and falls a bit short of the definitive.

When Evergreen Review Jumped the Shark

2011-12-03T17:02:00.011-05:00

Somewhere between March and April 1964, Evergreen Review jumped the shark. I am being generous as many would argue that Evergreen Review was never the same after Donald Allen relinquished his duties as editor but I will give ER the benefit of the doubt until Issue 32.

It is not just the format change to a larger glossier format, it is the shift from conservative, but culturally relevant covers to a Playboyesque cover design as well as the accompanying vaseline smeared softcore porn that dooms the magazine. That along with content that is increasingly not experimental or avant in form and style but instead exploitative of subject matter and questionable in taste.

Most obviously the cover design signals the change. The first 31 issues have a smaller format that I love as opposed to the oversized later issues but it is the difference, for example, in the images of race in featured in Issue 30 vs. Issue 68 than announce the decline of Evergreen Review most emphatically.

JB

Instructions for Guerilla Cock Alert

2011-11-27T19:02:00.002-05:00

I hear Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Yoko Ono, and Russell Simmons support Occupy Wall Street. Why the fuck not? Yoko is, as always, a class act and knows a freak scene to be exploited. She is the master. Here is our man Ed Sanders freakbeaming into the front lines circa 1965 in Bulletin From Nothing #1. Seems timely.

JB

Twenty-Four Sonnets (1971)

2011-11-27T16:49:00.003-05:00

Mimeo'd in an edition of 250 copies with offset covers by Philip Whalen, Twenty-Four Sonnets is Alice Notley's first book of poems. Like with Notley's Chicago to Ted Berrigan's C: A Journal of Poetry, there are parallels here with Berrigan's first book of poems The Sonnets, which was self-published by C Press in 1964. To get a sense of what these cross-currents are, get a copy of Mimeo Mimeo #5 and read Stephanie Anderson's essay on Alice Notley's Chicago.

Hinges (1965)

2011-11-27T16:36:00.002-05:00

I am sure somebody has made this observation before, but Dick Gallup is the Zeppo of the Tulsa School. Zeppo only appeared in the first five Marx Brothers movies and then he dropped out of the picture. Gallup similarly left the poetry scene for about two decades before coming back to various selecteds and collecteds. Everybody knows and has read Ted, Ron and Joe, but Dick slips through the cracks. I am pretty sure Hinges, published by C Press in 1965 as Gallup was finishing college, is Gallup's first book of poems.

JB

Clip Stamp Fold

2011-11-26T15:26:00.003-05:00

My first thought upon getting my hands on Clip Stamp Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X was "Who the hell put up the money to print this thing?" Turns out it was an architecture publisher out of Barcelona: Actar. They must be well-funded because this book that accompanied a travelling exhibition is an amazing production. It is in essence an exhibition in book form with tons of interviews, transcripts of symposia, facsimiles of magazines and tons of images. The book captures a moment in publishing history when architecture magazines were infused with the spirit of littleness, counterculture, and theortical fervor, and the book itself is a form of radical architecture.

I was hoping that the exhibition made much hay with the idea of the little magazine as architecture. It does to a certain extent, particularly with a publications like On-Site and Form, which was featured in Mimeo Mimeo 3, but the connection of the magazine as a structure, a construction in itself did not dominate this exhibit.

I touched on this approach with my post on Mimeo as Junkspace and I would have loved to hear how a mimeographed architecture magazine reflected the architectural theories of the time beyond mere expediency. Clipping, stamping, folding, stapling, copying, mimeoing, silk-screening, mailing, etc are central to the little mag of the post-WWII era but also crucial means of construction in the field of architecture, as Rem Koolhaus has made clear.

Such a connection seems to be one of the major considerations in analyzing magazines right now. In Numbers and Artists Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art are spearheading this approach. The idea of the little magazine as more than just a representation of the gallery, the museum, the library, the archive, but as an actual structural object, as a radical architecture is in its foundational stage. If you need proof of the immaturity of the study of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution, revisit the Secret Location on the Lower East Side after reading Clip Stamp Fold. The research and archival work that remains to be done on the topic is staggering and very exciting.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS

2011-11-22T21:52:00.000-05:00

It isn't every day that I read a catalog cover to cover, but today was one of them. And it was a pleasure. James Jaffe's Many Happy Returns: Arts & Letters of the Tulsa School focuses on the work of Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup, and Ron Padgett, four poets (and friends) who moved from Tulsa to New York City at the same (approximate) time and became a vital part of what was later known as the second generation of the New York School. The catalog opens with a very special run of The White Dove Review, a now legendary literary magazine in the mimeo revolution edited by Padgett and Gallup with art editors Michael Marsh and Brainard. The bulk of the catalog is divided into four sections, one devoted to each author (Berrigan, followed by Brainard, Gallup, and Padgett). It also includes relevant letters, manuscripts, original art, magazines, and collaborations. Generously illustrated throughout in black and white, plus a dozen color reproductions (mostly by Brainard) toward the end.

Aside from the wonderful descriptions by Jaffe and impeccable design by none other than Jerry Kelly, what impresses me most about the materials here is the highly personal nature of many of items: the inscriptions in the books; the correspondence; the collaborative language and visual arts; and the sense, above all else, that beyond any material thing, that these poets knew how to work and play with one another like no other generation.

Explore this, and other catalogs by Jaffe here.

--KS

NO PRESS LIKE GOOD PRESS

2011-11-22T16:07:00.001-05:00

A rave review of the latest issue of Mimeo Mimeo by Michael Cross @ Disinhibitor

A Werewolf in London

2011-11-15T09:08:00.004-05:00

"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand/Walkin' thru the streets of Soho in the rain."

Talking with Brian Cassidy about little mags, he made the comment that British mags are much like British food: bland. I had to agree. The food I enjoyed most in London was that with a little spice, a little international influence: Chinese and Indian.

It has always struck me as strange that a little magazine tradition that began with a day-glo blast screaming across the sky would prove to be so much like an overcast English Sunday morning going forward. I understand the style and appeal of Wimbledon whites but what people always talk about during the fortnight are those who inject a little color into centercourt.

So let's beat a Poor. Old. Tired. Horse here for a minute. The visual nature of My Own Mag is one more reason it is one of the major little mags in the British tradition. No other mag looked like it before it came out and it out punks the punk mags of the next decade in my opinion.

Further proof that British little mags lack spice and flavor is the attention lavished on Lee Harwood's Soho in Price and Miller. They seem to think Nick Tidnam's cover is the bomb: "an arresting white-on-black lino-cut of a cow skeleton." It is also one of the few magazines which merits an image reproduction. Where's the beef??

That said Price and Miller do the right thing in singling out Lee Harwood for attention in their essay on the 1960-1975 period. "From around 1963 to 1969, Harwood edited or co-edited several important little magazines, including Night Scene (1963?), Night Train (1964), Horde (1964), Soho (1964), and Tzarad (1965-1969).

Harwood is one of those poets who used the little magazine as a major part of his creative process. It will become clear in Mimeo Mimeo #7 that Lewis Warsh is another such poet. Bukowski was obviously another such poet. William Burroughs is that rare novelist who used the little magazine as a means to experiment with and distribute his work.

What makes Soho worthy of all the hype is a little bit of French cooking that makes its way into the land of Cornish pasties. Soho opens with Tzara's The Death of Guillame Apollinaire translated by Harwood. The magazine closes with a large section of contemporary French poetry in some cases translated and in others in the original French. According to Price and Miller, British little mags had no time for the Continent despite such affinities in the early Modernist mags.

Jean Fanchette is included in the French section which makes sense to me. Fanchette edited Two Cities in Paris in the early 1960s, which allowed British, American and French writers to meet and mingle within its pages. Fanchette and Two Cities published Minutes to Go (by Burroughs, Gysin, Beiles and Corso) with an assist by Gait Froge of the English Bookshop. Harwood draws on a similar concept to Two Cities in Soho.

Soho is not quite an exquisite filet of sole, but it is not just plain fish and chips either. A bit of haute cuisine presented in the fish and chip wrapping of mimeo, it suits my taste just fine, but if I want a true Naked Lunch I'll pull out my copies of My Own Mag, which with the Odour-ful edition, the cut-up edition and a host of other quirky details, are truly a feast for the senses.

Talking a Blue Streak

2011-11-14T23:08:00.008-05:00

I know enough about the Cleveland mimeo scene to be dangerous or, more likely, to look stupid. But in light of publications like In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 and Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, it is clear to even the most clueless that you have to go to Cleveland if you are looking for support for the idea that mimeograph publications are art or artist mags.

Thanks to Jeff Maser for encouraging me to get a copy of Dialogue In Pale Blue by rjs and tl kryss, "printed" by Broken Mimeo Press in 1969 in an edition of 200 unique copies. The story goes that rjs and tl kryss were in possession of all the supplies needed for a mimeo collaboration but the mimeograph broke down, leaving them with a mess of paper and no way to get it messy with print, so they decided to correspond with each other through alternate cutting and pastings of blue paper onto blue paper.

When I showed a copy to my wife, she chuckled and made a comment about the emperor's new clothes, and as I first flipped through it I was struck by the silly desperation of it. Here were rjs and kryss all dressed-up with supplies but nowhere to go as far as printing. The book is mimeo without the mimeograph: the pale blue paper refering to the blue of mimeo stencils, paper and ink.

Yet as I looked at the book and thought about it some more, things seemed a bit more serious, full of references to high art, and not just a stoned joke. The first thing I thought of was origami. Then quickly thereafter concrete poetry. Cleveland is THE location for the intersection of mimeography and the concrete. da levy and the mimeograph revolution makes this argument so well that I will not repeat it in detail here.

As a Burroughs collector, Dialogue in Pale Blue struck me as a cut-up collaboration of sorts like Burroughs' work with Gysin in The Third Mind or his interplay with editor Jeff Nuttall in My Own Mag. Burroughs was very much interested in chance and coincidence as it relates to collaboration and conversation, which gets one thinking of the collage work of Hans Arp, particularly his chance collages that rhyme with the cover of Dialogue in Pale Blue. See Arp's Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance above.

rjs and tl kryss are surely talking blue or maybe just talking a blue streak because there is something obscene and obscure in the nakedness of this book. Not surprising given that the poets and printers of Cleveland were masters of generating a lot of layers from publications that on the surface seem rather stripped down. Dialogue in Pale Blue maybe the most striking example of this phenomenon.

OBJECT POEMS

2011-11-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

http://www.23sandy.com/objectpoems/catalog.html

Mining for Gold

2011-11-06T17:24:00.002-05:00

According to Philip Smith Bookseller, this issue of Floating Bear No. 20 came from the collection of Sir Joseph Gold. Who is Sir Joseph Gold and why is he getting Floating Bear? Cue up Google. Turns out Gold was the legal counsel and Director of the Legal Department of the International Monetary Fund from 1960-1979. He was also quite a book collector, particularly of the work of Samuel Beckett. His Beckett collection of over 3000 items is at the University of Delaware. In addition to Beckett, Gold collected first editions of authors like Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Ezra Pound and Harold Pinter. Think International Monetary Fund. Gold collected blue chippers but as his receipt of Floating Bear proves he was always on the lookout for a good penny stock that might jump in value. He must have seen Floating Bear as a way to keep abreast of the next big thing. A wise move as Floating Bear is now several hundred dollars an issue and the authors featured in its pages have become blue chip writers as well. Not a bad investment for a newsletter that was distributed free.

It should also be noted that Gold was a world renowned legal scholar on international monetary law. In this issue LeRoi Jones and Diane DiPrima announce their victory in their legal battles stemming from charges of obscenity in Issue #9, which featured controversial work by Jones and William Burroughs. So Floating Bear #20 must have really tickled Gold on both a literary and a legal level.

The Odd Couple

2011-11-06T16:44:00.003-05:00

Let try this again.

Here is a copy of Floating Bear 26 that was sent to poet Bill Deemer. I know almost nothing about Deemer except that Auerhahn published a particularly beautiful limited edition of his Poems in 1964 in a hard bound edition of 25 copies, when Deemer was only 19 years old. Ron Silliman wrote a blog about Deemer years ago that categorized Deemer as a Zen Cowboy poet associated with Coyote Journal and Press.

As the mailing label shows, Deemer lived in Oregon and his poetry is associated with the West and a life of rural contemplation. What is remarkable is that this issue of Floating Bear was guest edited by Billy Linich aka Billy Name of Warhol's Factory and it is very inside on what was going on in the New York art scene in the Fall of 1963. Warhol is quoted, as are Leo Castelli and Larry Rivers, Fluxus is featured as is the avant garde music scene of LaMonte Young, Angus MacLise, Tony Conrad, and Marian Zazeela. Such material seems far away from the poetry and locale of Deemer. Then again Bill Thomas's Toad Press out of Eugene would publish Deemer in an issue of Intransit guest edited by James Koller. Thomas also published the Andy Warhol/Gerard Malanga Intransit Monster Issue. Coincidence?? Is there a relationship between Deemer, Oregon, and the Warhol scene?

I wish I was more familiar with Deemer's poetry and his book of poems published by Auerhahn just months after he received this issue of Floating Bear. Maybe his Zen came by way of John Cage, a pivotal influence on Fluxus and avant garde music or maybe Deemer wanted to keep his distance from such seductive influences from the Big Apple. I would like to learn more but a study of issues of Floating Bear suggests all sorts of literary paranoia: connections real and imaginary.

JB

Returned to Sender

2011-11-06T16:19:00.002-05:00

A few years ago I was all psyched about a project to track who got copies of Floating Bear. I created a spreadsheet and everything: http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/floating-bear-archive/. At that point I tracked all the copies I could find and I lost touch with it. Well, since Between the Covers' attempt to establish the market for Floating Bear at several hundred dollars a copy, lots of copies of Floating Bear have come to market. Unfortunately I have not tracked these new copies.

I should. It would make an interesting chapbook to write about who received Floating Bear and what these correspondences mean. I could see it taking the shape of 37 chapters with each chapter focusing on each issue of Floating Bear and homing in on one issue and one particular relationship.

For example, Chapter 10 would deal with Issue 10 (pictured above) which was sent to Chicago to Frederick Bock , the associate editor of Poetry. Issue 10 dealt exclusively with the poetry of John Wieners. What makes this issue great is that it was Returned to Sender. Maybe Bock's address changed or the address was wrong or whatever, but it would be fun to riff on the possibility that Bock refused to accept it, that he ducked it like an unwanted subpoena. In 1961, the poetry of Wieners and the rest of the poets of the New American Anthology (and Floating Bear) were not to be invited into the home of the editor of Poetry. Likewise, they were not ushered into the pages of the establishment magazines. Such rejections were the primary reason for mimeos like Floating Bear in the first place.

I should really do this.

JB

Limited Editions of the Mimeo Revolution

2011-11-06T15:38:00.005-05:00

Over at RealityStudio, I posted a piece on the "do they or don't nature" of the limited editions of Fuck You Press. See http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/fuck-you-press-cockatrices/. As in do they exist or not. Is there really a Boiling Sperm Edition of Fuck You, a magazine of the art Number 5, Volume 2 to say nothing of The Trembling Buttock Edition of Bugger? In over a decade of collecting Fuck You Press, I have not seen anything that would suggest a subset of signed limiteds designed for collectors or contributors. I have no reason to believe they do not exist. My gut tells me they should. Why wouldn't they? It seems right up Sanders' alley to do something like this.

In fact, such limiteds do exist for Ted Berrigan's C Press. Burroughs and Gysin's Time has a few different numbered and lettered limited editions as the image of Time above proves. See also http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/time/. In addition a de facto limited edition exists for C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 No. 4 and it is truly amazing. Brian Cassidy currently has a copy for sale: http://store.briancassidy.net/shop/cassidy/12568.html.

The Edwin Denby issue of C and its limited edition highlight the fact that the mimeo magazine can be considered an artist multiple as suggested by In Numbers. I would argue that the Boiling Sperm Edition of Fuck You and the boxed limited edition hard covers designed by underground comix artist Bill Beckman, provided they exist, would fall into this category. To say nothing of an artist's book like The Complete Sex Poems of Ed Sanders, a hard cover limited edition of 50 copies, to which "Sanders has designed & added his infinite sex drawings."

INFOLIO & INCOMPREHENSIBLE THINGS

2011-10-20T00:21:00.000-04:00

Tom Raworth has a new book out, printed POD DIY, and it's called Incomprehensible Things. Someone on the UK Poetics list asked, "What's Infolio?" Good question, and in case anyone is wondering, here's the link to Tom's very useful and extensive archive of one of the greatest experiments in publishing I know: Infolio.

For Your Reference Library

2011-10-16T17:08:00.002-04:00

Richard Price contributed to Mimeo Mimeo 4 with an article on scanning little magazines. It is embarrassing that it has taken me so long to pick up his indispensible reference, British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of Little Magazines, co-compiled with David Miller. While at the NY Book Fair at PS 1, I desperately needed a copy to find out if Lee Harwood's Horde, a one-shot little mag from the mid-1960s, was, in fact, a one-shot. Miller and Price told me it was, despite the announcement of a second issue in the closing pages of the first.

The back cover blurb reads, "Here is the work of T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, James Joyce, Laura Riding, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark, Harold Pinter, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Angela Carter, Irvine Welsh and many others." For me, the value of this book lies with the "many others," who were rebelling against many of the names listed above. Not a single British Poetry Revival writer is listed in the blurb above and it is names like Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall, Lee Harwood, Michael Horovitz and Eric Mottram that I search the index for and why I bought the book. It strikes me that the Revival writers took the mantle from the Modernist magazine masters and made great use out of the little magazine, not Seamus Heaney, Muriel Spark, and Ted Hughes. I cannont stress enough that Miller and Price know just how important the Revivial writers were to the British little mag as their chapter accompanying the magazines of 1960-1975 makes very clear. Yet in marketing to the general public and, more important, establishment institutions and libraries, Seamus Heaney, Angela Carter, and Ted Hughes still get all the respect and justify a cash-strapped library to find $95 in its cut-to-the-bone budget. So I should not be that surprised, the Revival Poets still get the short end of the stick. I had to crack a sad smile when Miller and Price's bibliography informs me that the British Library (co-publisher along with Oak Knoll Press) has a complete run of Connolly's Horizon but not of Nuttall's My Own Mag. In fact, the British Library only recently purchased the incredibly important Dutch Schultz issue of My Own Mag for its collection. It seems ironic (yet typical of the state of the academic landscape) that a bibliography on little magazines, that oasis and utopia for the underdog and underappreciated, should promote itself by listing darlings of the establishment.

These are quibbles and my personal axe to grind. The amount of time and effort that went into compiling this absolutely essential reference is staggering. Christopher Harter's mimeo index listed 125 mags, Miller and Price list over 2,000, along with a name index that features well over 5,000 authors and artists. Miller and Price is full of useful information on the Mimeo Revolution (Charles Olson was the anonymous editor of Before Your Very Eyes, published by Goliard) and a must for one's research library.

NOW AVAILABLE AT SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION

2011-10-12T11:25:00.000-04:00

SPD

Miller - Durrell on the Mimeograph

2011-10-08T00:29:00.004-04:00

I just received this email from my friend Charles Talkoff riffing on a reference to the mimeograph in the Miller-Durrell correspondence.

In the winter of 1936-37 Miller and Durrell were writing to each other with Miller in Paris and Durrell on Corfu. Miller writes to Durrell:

"...I have a little scheme of my own - another! - which I want to propose to you. Perhaps we can do both - adopt my plan and have Laughlin* take it also. I am thinking of investing in a machine, a sort of mimeograph machine which enables one to make innumerable copies from an original typewritten sheet in any colored ink one wants. I have been wondering if, instead of a magazine, with all the difficulties it entails, we could not do better by bringing out one thing at a time, after this process. We could put a thin paper cover around it with the title printed on it - by the same process - or else each one separately, in Chinese ink or something like that.We would send the thing to a select list of people who we think might be interested. Put no price on it, but suggest that they pay what they like towards the expense, if it appeals to them. I haven't solved all the technical problems yet, nor have I the dough..."

This entire piece strikes me as a meta-fiction of the best kind. We are so used to the images and tropes of Miller and Durrell that to look into the correspondence is to read the fiction upon which the reality rested and was filtered to reappear as their respective works of fiction. In other words Miller and Durrell as characters in the ur-narratives of Miller and Durrell who becomes totemic to us - thus the act of reading is a fetish and ritual bringing magic into our consciousness.

To put it still more succinctly of course Miller is in Paris and is hatching a scheme and of course Durrell is in Greece and specifically on an island. Prospero's island and Prospero's Paris identical yet different enough.

We then have the next layer in which (and about which you know more than I do) the mechanics of what one assumes are the first mimeo machines. And all of this prior to the great changes wrought by WWII.

Yet of course in Miller's scheme we see something timeless. The no dough broke-ass writer struggling to find some way to combine distribution and integrity of means and method. Versus of course mass production printing - the ink-drenched nightmare as it were in which the very essence of writing (a thing one does alone) is transmuted and diluted.

Miller's solution is the archetypal underground gesture.

It is the thinking of a monk.

It is the thinking of a romantic.

It is also the thinking of a reactionary and we should not be so afraid that we do not see that aspect in Miller and his monkish romanticism.

In Inside the Whale, Orwell recounts meeting Miller and telling him he was on his way to fight in Spain. Miller tells Orwell he is an idiot.

Orwell of course, the committed socialist; the writer as figure-of-action in the world is (to his credit) torn as he regards Miller as a significant writer commenting upon the slow-moving putrification of the 20th century, and yet...what does one make of Miller's point that the wheel turns endlessly and this war is essentially no different than the other war.

Orwell picks up on this of course and again strikes a somewhat ambivalent tone about the end of Tropic of Cancer where Miller watches the Seine flow as a symbol of eternity.

Quite right says Orwell but (echoing Voltaire?) he comes down on the side of needing to tend to the garden.

And so we have Miller writing to Durrell and both reside with in our imaginations and we carry them with us - some eternal Paris and some eternal Greek island and the romantic monkish gesture of printing endless reams in an endless ocean of multi-colored inks (and foregoing the gross hierarchical notion of debasing art by pricing it before the initiate can respond by telling you what it is worth to them (!)) all combine to tell us something we already knew and are happy to be reminded of.

*Founder of New Directions.

JB

Come and Get It

2011-10-06T22:01:00.002-04:00

After a slight delay in printing, we have Mimeo Mimeo 5 in our grubby little mitts. Get one in yours. If you have ordered through the website in the past month, your copy is in the mail. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

JB

ART=TEXT=ART

2011-10-05T15:32:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Raphael Rubenstein for the link to the Art=Text=Art exhibit in Richmond: http://www.artequalstext.com/

Shigmurao.org

2011-10-03T22:48:00.003-04:00

Shig Murao: The Enigmatic Soul of City Lights and the San Francisco Beat Scene is officially online: http://shigmurao.org/. As is well known, Shig, who worked at City Lights, sold the copy of Howl that lead to the obscenity trial, and went on trial with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was written out of the Howl movie. Such treatment reminds me of the 1957 photo of Jack Kerouac that copped Joyce Johnson out of the shot. Johnson took matters into her own hands and wrote the classic memoir Minor Characters. Shigmurao.org has the makings of a classic website that will serve as an archive to all things Shig.

For Mimeo Mimeo readers, the opportunity to view issues of Shig's Review should be a special treat. Unfortunately, Shig's Review has largely been written out of histories of the Mimeo Revolution. Until previewing Shigmurao.org, I had heard of Shig's Review but never actually seen a copy. I was unaware of the publishing history of the Review. I thought the Review ran for many more issues in the 1960s and was shocked to discover just how many issues there were in the 1980s. The site provides a sampler and an index. I know for a fact that this material fills a need for scholars and collectors alike.

JB

6 Decades Books

2011-10-03T20:39:00.002-04:00

I drove up to the NY Book Art Fair last weekend with Brian Cassidy. I was very impressed with 6 Decades Books. A great selection of material that is a bit more representative of the art market than the mags and mimeo that we post here, but the focus on artist's books and the book as an object is right on point. 6 Decades reprinted Germano Celant's Book as Artwork 1960-1972, which I was ashamed to be unaware of. Here is the description of the first edition from the 6 Decades website:

http://www.6decadesbooks.com/2010/10/book-as-artwork-19601972-by-germano.html

Jon Beacham was working the 6 Decades booth this weekend and he recommended the 6 Decades website highly. I spent a little time with it today and it is very good with informative and interesting catalog entries of items I am just not as familiar with as I would like. Hopefully some more time on the 6 Decades website will remedy that.

JB

PUSHING WATER by CHARLES ALEXANDER

2011-09-26T23:04:00.000-04:00

Charles Alexander's long-awaited epic serial poem, Pushing Water (Cuneiform Press, 2011), is on its way to the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia direct from the press. If all goes well, it will be available tomorrow night when Alexander takes the stage at 6:00. For details on the reading, click here.

This book will soon be available through our distributors SPD (in the States) and West House Books (in the UK) as well as on our own newly remodeled website (forthcoming).

Advance praise for Pushing Water:

This long serial poem weaves, dodges, shifts, dissolves, coalesces. Improvisation is the foundation for a practice of listening: directed meditation, evanescent rumination, sparkling allusion. “A life in words” through rhythms made new in the wandering flow of thought’s melodies.

— Charles Bernstein

“through the tunnel pushing water” : the first appearance of this image in Charles Alexander’s serial poem arises as if in a dream, and that sense of dream persists throughout this long and complex work (“the dream pushes up from under the water”). Yet, “pushing water” also becomes a metaphor of body, of breath, of heartbeat, blood and brain, of consciousness itself, time and history, rendered in diverse poetic forms. Alexander embraces language and the bodies of work that comprise the touchstones of English poetry from the “word hoard” of the Anglo-Saxons through Shakespeare and Greville, Dickinson, and Williams, Olson and Creeley. But overall, this is a love poem to and for the poet’s wife, the painter Cynthia Miller, and the poem is imbued with the color and forms of her work. The domestic scene is the setting, the love of family is one of the motives for the writing (their two daughters are often invoked) and there is a sense of shelter from the wider world. Without having done an actual word count, “love” and “syllable” (the beat or rhythm of the word) seem to me to be the most frequently used in this poem of love, language, and love of language.

— Beverly Dahlen

What’s the shape of a life, one among many, what’s the rhythm? What’s pushing water? If air were water (and it is) you’d feel the graceful displacements that make up a life here ripple out, and you’d register the rhythms of other lives as undulations coming back in, the day’s news. From right here all the way to water’s cosmic rim and back: the local the (only) universal, as in Williams’s grand and expansive pragmatism. Or Dickinson: “And he unrolled his feathers / And rowed him softer home— // Than Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam— / Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap, plashless as they swim.” That’s a fact—here made plain as any day, or daybook.

— Tenney Nathanson

Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash

2011-09-24T21:14:00.003-04:00

Gillian Whiteley emailed me asking for some Jeff Nuttall images and I am glad she did. She told me about her book Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash, which I bought immediately. Not surprisingly there is a chapter on California Junk and Funk but I was happy to see a chapter on the United Kingdom with some mention of Jeff Nuttall. The chapter on Australia was completely new to me. The theory surrounding trash is absolutely fascinating and it is clear that garbage is of major importance in 21st Century thought.

JB

The Big Bang

2011-09-21T20:10:00.005-04:00

Or should I say the Shot Heard Round the World? The point is that these publications out of Camp Angel in Waldport, Oregon are (if Clay and Phillips are to be believed) one of the starting points for the Mimeo Revolution. The Fine Arts at Waldport is an eight page mimeographed booklet/pamphlet from 1944 that was used as the prospectus to describe the Fine Art School at Camp Angel. X War Elegies was printed by The Untide Press in 1943. Individual War Elegies appeared in issues of the alternative Waldport paper, The Untide.

These publications are some of the incunabula of the Mimeo Revolution. Others being The Experimental Review, The Ark, Semina, Merlin, Folder, Suck Egg Mule, Contact, and Four Winds. Let define mimeo incunabula as those publications printed before 1957, when the Mimeo Revolution blew up into a supernova with the appearance of The San Francisco issues of The Evergreen Review, The Black Mountain Review and (slightly later in 1958) The Chicago Review.

Publications out of Waldport are the very definition of ephemeral. Fragile and rare to be sure. Thanks to Ted Dunn for providing the images.

MIMEO MIMEO 5

2011-09-09T23:17:00.002-04:00

100 pages of pure Mimeo bliss! Larry Fagin, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bukowski, Robert Creeley, Vamp & Tramp, The Gallery Upstairs, Alice Notely's CHICAGO and more with cover art by Buzz Spector. BUY a copy for just ten bucks, or be a pal and pick one up for a friend while you're at it. That's the mimeo way!

LARRY FAGIN IN THE NY TIMES

2011-09-08T11:24:00.000-04:00

I hate to brag, but I think the interview with Larry Fagin in Mimeo Mimeo 5 (buy a copy in the column on the right) is better than the feature in yesterday's New York Times.

--KS

Hooray for BlazeVox!

2011-09-05T20:33:00.003-04:00

last night I couldn't sleep after I read the shit that some guy named Brett was writing about BlazeVox books and its editor Geoffrey Gatza at a blog called Bark: http://thebarking.com/2011/09/the-half-hearted-acceptance-letter/

This kind of delusional, spoiled, ignorant MFA thinking makes me sick. So I wrote a short response. Much of the more productive thinking on the subject has transpired don Facebook in the last 24 hours with overwhelming support from poetrys greatest advocates. I hope that we can do a longer, more sustained article in Mimeo Mimeo in the future. KS

It is clear from reading this post that the author hasn’t done his research–research about this press in particular or the publishing industry at large. While I can appreciate the fragility of the ego that the mfa is paid, by the poet to produce, I can’t accept this as a valid intellectual or historical charge against BlazeVox. Dreams of prizes, publication, validation and celebration of your poems and ideas are what you, or your parents, paid your poetry professors to fill you with. The prizes and publications are, quite often, rigged, and prey on the poets’ deepest insecurities, insecurities that are part of the mfa pedagogy at the core, and at it’s most deceptive and profitable state. BlazeVox is transparent, and rises in stark contrast to the predatory mainstream, by making their selection process, finances, politics, etc., clear as can be. If you’ve read their books, followed their presence online, listened to interviews with the publisher, etc., readers of this blog would realize the BlazeVox is the mimeo revolution of the new media era. Gatza’s politics run parallel to Ed Sanders, Paul Blackburn, Amiri Baraka, and the other bold publishers of new American poetry that got the word out when commercial presses flinched (or simply didn’t care enough to notice). BlazeVox is what the independent press is all about, and if it needs money to float (as most presses do) there’s nothing wrong with asking author’s to pitch in. I pay for my six year old son to play on the soccer team, and the coach donates his time. My money helps cover the cost of oranges, balls, water, and other essentials. As Robert Creeley said, “poetry is a team sport.” Gatza has done a lot to change the game, more than most, and I’m extremely grateful for all he has given, especially to emerging writers.

LITTLE RICHARD THE SECOND

2011-08-22T13:50:00.000-04:00

A hot new title by Gregg Biglieri, beautifully produced by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Poetry | $12 ($10 direct from UDP)
Hand-bound. 24 pp, 4.25 x 7 in.
Interior: Letterpress on French folds.
Covers: Letterpress on Fabriano.
Binding: Japanese stab binding.
Publication Date: 2011
Filled with wry puns, clever turns of phrases, and tautologies that knock the reader over from a slant, Little Richard the Second adds a bit of tutti frutti to the regalia of the eternal bard.

http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=189

ALPINE

2011-08-16T21:25:00.000-04:00

George Oppen
Alpine
Perishable Press Limited (1969)

FOR JOEL

2011-08-16T21:21:00.002-04:00

Robert Creeley
For Joel [broadside]
Perishable Press Limited (1966)

THE REARDON POEMS

2011-08-16T21:20:00.000-04:00

Paul Blackburn
The Reardon Poems
Perishable Press Limited (1967)

SIRVENTIES ON A SAD OCCURRENCE

2011-08-16T21:18:00.000-04:00

Joel Oppenheimer
Sirventies on a Sad Occurrence
Perishable Press Limited (1967)

SONGS FROM THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

2011-08-16T21:14:00.000-04:00

Keith Waldrop
Songs from the Decline of the West
Perishable Press Limited (1970)

it might as well be spring

2011-08-16T21:09:00.000-04:00

Paul Blackburn
it might as well be spring [broadside]
Perishable Press Limited (1967)

THANKING MY MOTHER FOR THE PIANO LESSONS

2011-08-16T21:07:00.000-04:00

Diane Wakoski
Thanking My Mother for the Piano Lessons
Perishable Press Limited (1969)

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

2011-08-16T21:03:00.000-04:00

Armand Schwerner
Triumph of the Will
Images by Arthur Thrall and Walter Hamady
Perishable Press Limited, 1976

UNHIRED

2011-08-16T20:59:00.000-04:00

John Weiners
Unhired
Perishable Press Limited (1968)

images courtesy of the Poetry Collection, UB

SINCE MAN BEGAN TO EAT HIMSELF

2011-08-10T09:02:00.000-04:00

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Bernard, Allen Ginsberg, Toby Olson, Jerome Rothenberg, & Joel Oppenheimer
Since Man Began to Eat Himself, images by Warrington Colescott
Perishable Press Limited (1986)

DIVISIONS & OTHER EARLY POEMS

2011-08-10T08:56:00.000-04:00

Robert Creeley
Divisions & Other Early Poems
Perishable Press Limited (1968)

THE SELECTION OF HEAVEN

2011-08-10T08:54:00.000-04:00

Paul Blackburn
The Selection of Heaven, collage by Walter Hamady
Perishable Press Limited (1980)

SIX PROSE PIECES

2011-08-10T08:51:00.001-04:00

Robert Duncan
Six Prose Pieces, drawing by the author
Perishable Press Limited (1966)

GABBERJAB NUMBER 6

2011-08-10T08:40:00.001-04:00

Walter Hamady
Gabberjab Number 6
Perishable Press Limited (1988)

THESE CHAIRS

2011-08-10T08:34:00.001-04:00

Walter Hamady
These Chairs, drawing by Jack Beal
Perishable Press Limited (1971)

THE DOWNFALL OF AMERICAN PUBLISHING

2011-08-07T11:16:00.005-04:00

At the annual Printers' Ball in Chicago, I was choosy about what to take. Everything's free and most of it is in the right ballpark interest-wise. I had a subscription to Stop Smiling a few years ago and let it slip, so I was happy to stumble on a copy of #22, The Downfall of American Publishing, which must have come out in 2005 after Hunter S Thompson took his own life in Woody Creek, Colorado. I was in Berlin at the time, and it was only a month or so before Thompson's death that Susan Songtag had died. Both writers meant a lot to me in my teenage years and informed my sense as a young writer of the relationship between the word and the world, of the experience of writing and the experience of living and what happens to a life when one writes it down. I saw one of my favorite filmmakers, Frederic Wiseman, screening his work at Arsenal, and Wiseman has always been one of my heros for his life-long investigation of institutions, a pioneer of cinéma vérité (a term I've since learned he doesn't like). I wondered if his objective approach to documentary filmmaking was in any way related to a new approach to journalism that was forming in the late 60s? After all, Wiseman was working on his first big hit, Titticut Follies (1967), an investigation of a questionable mental institution in Massachusetts, while Thompson was writing his first major book, Hells Angels (1966) and Songtag was writing Against Interpretation (also 1966). Wiseman's response was fascinating: 'No, not at all actually. The biggest thing that happened during the sixties as far as my experience of documenting situations was the invention of film that could capture image and sound on one reel--before that it was always a struggle to get the sound and the image to correspond with one another.' Needless to say, the generous 35-page tribute to Thompson and his work reminded me of the importance of reading him for the first time, but the focus on publishing, more generally, is something that readers of this blog will definitely want because it has articles on: Lewis Lapham of Harper's, Barney Rosset of Grove Press, Philip Gourevitch of The Paris Review, David Rosenthal of Simon and Schuster, HW Ross of The New Yorker, and more. Back issues are available fromwww.stopsmilingonline.com

In Memoriam for the Blue Kid

2011-08-06T11:22:00.006-04:00

I have not read much Claude Pelieu but I love his work as an editor and publisher. Bulletin from Nothing (with Mary Beach) is one of the great mags from the 1960s. Pelieu was a writing machine, an Automatic Pilot. Here is a manuscript from that period, when Claude and Mary worked at City Lights

Openings Press

2011-08-06T10:44:00.002-04:00

Here is a prospectus for Openings Press, which was initiated by Dom Sylvester Houedard and John Furnival in 1964 for publishing concrete poetry. This pamphlet provides a short and sweet statement of their poetic vision and publishing dreams.

X-mas from dsh

2011-08-06T10:22:00.002-04:00

Here is a Christmas Card poem from Dom Sylvester Houedard from 1964. dsh was a Benedictine priest and a concrete poet, who corresponded with some of my Beat friends, like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Of course, he was also tight with British concretes Bob Cobbing and Ian Hamilton Finlay. My CD has some of his correspondence with Jeff Nuttall, which at times shades into mail art.

Anybody out there have any information on Roundwood Press?

JB

Jeff Nuttall Drawings

2011-08-06T10:13:00.008-04:00

These are taken out of context; I think they are all part of a longer piece of related text and drawings, but from how they are presented on the CD I can't figure it all out. All the same some nice examples of Nuttall's artwork from the early 1970s.

And Certain Men, Being Maddened By Those Rhymes

2011-08-06T09:44:00.002-04:00

Here is a postcard from Tom Pickard to Jeff Nuttall from around 1966. Pickard asks Nuttall to come up to Morden Tower and give a reading. A heady time for Pickard as Basil Bunting's Brigflatts was published the year before and things were cooking in Newcastle upon Tyre. Nuttall was wrapping up the last issues of My Own Mag and working on Bomb Culture, which would be published in 1968.

Pickard to Nuttall - this is the epitome of the British Poetry Revival.

JB

WOODLAND PATTERN

2011-08-06T09:21:00.001-04:00

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Woodland Pattern is everything a bookstore should be: independent, socially- and politically-conscious, community oriented, and most importantly, fun. I probably became aware of Woodland Pattern through Stacy Szymaszek who worked there before moving to New York to work at the Poetry Project. Anyways, it's been on my radar for years, and I've always heard good things about it, but the inventory totally exceeded my expectations. I spent a few hours browsing with friends from Columbia College who made a jaunt up the lake's shore from Chicago to Milwaukee, but I didn't stray too far from the poetry section, which consumed the largest wall in the store from floor to ceiling with a sturdy ladder to take you to the top shelf. There was also an elegant cabinet with drawers about twice the size of an old card catalog, each stuffed to the brim with sumptuous chapbooks. There was a lot of small press stuff no doubt produced by students of Walter Hamady. The stock was incredibly well organized, and there wasn't much they didn't have. I always feel pleasantly surprised to see my own books in stores, books that I’ve written, published, or edited. There were even some books that I helped friends print and bind a long time ago that I forgot about until I stumbled on them again at Woodland Pattern.

Although they don't sell used books, many of the 'new' books have been there for years, and many of those that are ten or twenty years old were being sold at their original prices, while some of the older books that have appreciated substantially in value over the years were kept behind the register. For exampled, I came very close to buying a copy of Larry Fagin's Rhymes of a Jerk with the brilliant Ruscha cover, but exercised some moderation (against my better judgment). There was also a thrilling stash of broadsides Charles Alexander printed for readings at the bookstore under the signs of Black Mesa Press (his imprint from the pre-Tucson days) and his current imprint, Chax Press. The signed Tom Raworth, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn broadsides were particularly alluring and marvelous to encounter, Dorn's larger than life autograph, Duncan's neat correction to a small typo in the poem written in his own hand on each copy, and the long, narrow format that seemed perfectly conducive for Raworth's agile writing.

I came away with a healthy bundle of books that I've been slowly reading since I've been back in Austin, including this collection of poems (above) by five San Francisco poets with a cover by Michael Myers of Zephyrus Image and typography by Clifford Burke. Other great finds include: Joanne Kyger's God Never Dies; Johanna Drucker's Simulant Portrait; Kit Robinson's Democracy Boulevard, Balance Sheet and 9:45; Ron Padgett's Blood Work and Oklahoma Tough; Michael Gizzi's Continental Harmony, No Both and My Terza Rima; Tom Raworth's Clean & Well Lit, 6 Poems and Windmills in Flames; Miles Champion's Compositional Bonbons Placate; and CJ Martin's impossible-to-find-anywhere chapbook City.

After paying for our books and dropping them off in the rental car we made our way over to Karl Saffran’s garden for a poetry reading. Chuck Stebelton had the grill going and Karl was manning the keg (he explained that they it is a common misnomer that there are kegs at every reading in Milwaukee). I met Roberto Harrison for the first time as well as many other poets and writers in the city on the lake, which somehow felt immediately familiar. I look forward to returning to the area, and next time I’ll be certain to give myself a few extra days to make a trip out to the Hamilton Woodtype Factory (now a museum) and to Lorine Niedecker’s abode.

— KS

"The Most Dangerous Man in America"

2011-08-05T21:31:00.005-04:00

I just finished reading The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. An entertaining, informal history that looks at Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil. The inclusion of Smith and Weil provides Lattin with his twist on an oft-told tale.

Going through some old CDs of images, I came across some Leary ephemera for the Castalia Foundation and for The Leary Defense Fund. The instruction that women bring slacks for the LSD workshops at Millbrook, the cover design by Allen Atwell, and the list of supporters are just the kind of little details that prove the scholarly and entertainment value of ephemera. I would have liked to see more of such details in Lattin's book.

DARKNESS AND LIGHT

2011-08-04T10:56:00.000-04:00

This attractive chapbook from Bill Berkson was on my desk when I returned from Chicago on Saturday. It was published by Verna Press in New Orleans, Dante on Mohawk with a reproduction of a portrait of Bill by Larry Rivers. There are only 150 copies, so scoop one up at: http://vernapress.com

--KS

WHERE YOU'RE AT: POETICS AND VISUAL ART

2011-08-03T11:57:00.001-04:00

The art of conversation may be a genre in decline, overshadowed by the twitchy blips and bugs of social networking, but Kevin Power brings it all back home with his marvelous collection of interviews with eight poets about visual art. Interviewees include Robert Duncan, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael McClure, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Bill Berkson, George & Mary Oppen, and David Meltzer. Substantial in nature, there is something of a casual intensity that keeps the conversation moving. Power's thoughtful questions evoke fresh information and perspectives from poets who have been interviewed extensively, and as I noted in an earlier post, Creeley's interview (originally published in Niagara Magazine) is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. Order direct from Poltroon Press.

--KS

The Black Mountain Issue of NCLR

2011-07-30T15:22:00.002-04:00

The North Carolina Literary Review put out a Black Mountain Issue in 1995. The Black Mountain Museum had copies on hand and I scooped one up. Around 150 pages of material on the College with interviews, poems, memoirs and articles. Looks promising, I'm not so hot on the rest of the issue but not everything can be pure gold like the Black Mountain Review, if you can dig one of those up. That said back issues of NCLR are still available for $15: http://www.nclr.ecu.edu/issues/back-issues.html.

JB

From BMC to NYC

2011-07-30T15:14:00.002-04:00

From BMC to NYC: The Tuelary Years of Ray Johnson is another publication of the Black Mountain Museum and College. Copies were still available on my visit but I would get them quick if Vincent Katz's Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, published by MIT Press is any indication. That book is out of print and was selling for as much as $200 online. The Strand seems to have a copy now for $90. If you are interested I would suggest you go out and grab it as it is an essential resource. Black Mountain related material seems to appreciate at a fantastic rate. From BMC to NYC is currently on Abebooks for over $300, which is Exhibit A for just how ridiculous Abebooks has become. I bought my copy at the Museum for $15.

Black Mountain Dossiers

2011-07-30T14:58:00.008-04:00

I thought I had all the necessary Black Mountain secondary material, Katz, Harris, Duberman, that is until I stopped at the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center in Asheville. The Museum is small, a single room, which during my visit featured a modest exhibition on Jack Tworkov. What was really exciting was being able to get my hands on all the great publications the Museum and Society has published since 1993. The Black Mountain Dossiers are a prime example. Each dossier provides a monograph on a single Black Mountain individual with tons of images. I picked up all eight currently published. The dossiers on Michael Rumaker and Ray Johnson are particularly meaty, but the others on lesser known figures, especially Black Mountain women like Susan Wiel or Gwendolyn Knight, were great finds as well.

I was happy to learn that there is now a Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, http://www.blackmountaincollegestudies.org/, which posted the first run of papers online. The Ray Johnson issue is password protected, but if the currently available material is any indictation it is probably worth becoming a member of the Society to get the password. The next issue of the Journal is due out in late summer.

Black Mountain College

2011-07-30T14:44:00.003-04:00

I just got back from a family vacation in Boone, North Carolina. While there I took the two hour drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway to the site of Black Mountain College. The site is now how to Camp Rockmont, a Christian summer camp for boys. Despite all my reading about the College and viewing hundreds of pictures of that time and place, I was unprepared for just how beautiful the campus is. I think this is because the period I am most interested in is the period of the school's decline: the rough and harrowing years of the early and mid 1950s. Eden gone malignant and insane. But seeing it on a sunshine filled day in late July really brought home to me why Black Mountain College could attract such creative talent despite its obvious financial and material shortcomings. The campus was truly God's Country even before Camp Rockmont took over. Before you reach the College there is a prison, which I am sure I read about but it never registered until I actually passed it. Prison/College/Religous Retreat. A dissertation could be written on the use and meaning of the space along Lake Eden Road.

JB

The Secret Location: Wish You Where Here

2011-07-10T16:40:00.003-04:00

Recently, Adam Davis of Division Leap (Have you gotten on their email list yet? I got an email just this morning telling me they had some issues of Maps; a complete run of Thee Flat Bike, which I had never heard of; Pan, which had a cover illustration by Robert Smithson, which was interesting to me as I just read Monuments of the Passaic; and Cleveland Anthology) sent me an email inquiring about the postcard above. Adam wanted to know if the plays Koch listed, The Return of Yellowmay, The Revolt of the Giant Animals, and The Building of Florence, did indeed appear in C in the order Koch desired and if so what issue. Well, they did appear in that order in Issue 9 on pages 55-60 in the summer of 1964.

Adam emailed me because he knows I have a run of C, but let me remind everybody out there of a great resource that is perfect for requests of this type: Christopher Harter's An Author Index to Little Magazines of the Mimeograph Revolution. Harter indexed 114 American little magazines published from 1958 to 1980, and C naturally made the cut. I find myself pulling Harter's index from the shelf maybe once a week or so, and it really cuts down on the wear and tear of pulling out the mags.

That said, I also pulled Issue 9 to double check for Adam whether there was the possibility of a variant. No small possibility in the world of mimeo. In fact I am looking forward to flipping through C again in the next couple of days for another research request, but do not sleep on getting a copy of An Author Index. No doubt it is expensive at almost $140 but I have saved a lot of time in using it to say nothing of having a good time doing it.

For ordering info to http://www.scarecrowpress.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0810861135

By the way, check out these John Ashbery Postcard Collages: http://www.sienese-shredder.com/1/john_ashbery-postcard_collages.html which were featured in an issue of The Sienese Shredder, another magazine I know nothing about but which looks really great.

JB

You're the Inspiration

2011-07-09T12:37:00.006-04:00

When Kyle floated the idea for Mimeo Mimeo, I drew on the Knights' Beat Journey and Beat Road, Dave Moore's The Kerouac Connection, and my relationship with Kevin Ring's Beat Scene as inspiration and for guidance. Publications like these do not get the respect they deserve in academic circles, but they were, and are, a valuable and important part of Beat Studies. Most people think of poetry in connection with the Mimeo Revolution, but there was a Mimeo Revolution in scholarship as well.

Shriek! Shriek! Ed Sanders/Glyphs

2011-07-09T12:11:00.003-04:00

It seems like years ago that I went to The Arm in Brooklyn for the Ed Sanders Glyph show. I got there very early and had the pleasure of spending some time with Jon Beacham, Dan Morris and Ed Sanders. Sadly, it seems even longer that I received a package from Jon enclosing a collection of unpublished Glyph poems from that show. I have been meaning to post some images but the summer blues have gotten the best of me.

I was clean up my bookshelf today and I spent some quality time with the Glyphs and, well, they cheered me up and inspired me. Thanks Jon. Only 250 copies were printed in this numbered edition and they were issued in May so I am not sure how many are left, but they are a real treat.

Looking around the Internet, it appears that Sanders is editing his book on the Fugs, Peace Eye and Fuck You Press. I am literally panting for this book to come out. In talking to Sanders at the Glyph show he revealed he still has the stencils for the completed but never published Fuck You, a magazine of the arts, Vol. 5 Issue 10. As Sanders was quick to say, his mimeograph machine is still operational. While I would love to see Jon, Dan and Ed combine forces and put out that long lost issue, revisiting the Glyph Poems today was just what I needed to get excited about the Mimeo Revolution, both past and present, again.

For more info go to: http://www.thebrotherinelysium.com/thebrotherinelysium.html or contact Jon at thebrotherinelysium@gmail.com.

JB

New Found Author

2011-06-25T07:44:00.002-04:00

I just got back from a trip to the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. My wife and I stayed in a small red house (not unlike the one pictured above) on the edge of the ocean in the small hamlet of Pouch (pronounced Pooch) Cove.

Jeff Maser of bookselling fame recommended that I read Alistair MacLeod's short story "The Boat" during my trip. Well, I found a copy of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, MacLeod's slim first collection of short stories published in 1976, which includes The Boat and six other stories.

MacLeod is a craftsman, each story like a wooden boat meticulously made by hand. Seaworthy to be sure and as uncompromising and devastating as the sea itself. Like The Odyssey, that first story of the sea, MacLeod's stories deal with home and homecomings, journeys away, father/sons and family.

I read The Boat at The Ship Pub, which is located in an alley between Water and Duckworth Streets in St. John's. This is one of the great literary pubs in St. John's, which might possibly have more bars per capita than any city in North America. I settled into a chair at the bar ordered a Black Horse pint and jumped into the story. The writing was a crisp, clear, and clean as the waters of around St. John's Harbour and it pulled me out in its riptides. About a half hour later my pint was gone and the story finished and my head was swimming a little, eyes a bit wet as I stepped out into the bracing grey mist and fog. Maser must have known that this story would give me a taste of Newfoundland, more full of salt and sea than a bite of fish and chips at Cres's just up the street. What he might not have know is that the story would also take my thoughts home to my own father who now rests mingled in the fresh waters of Maine overlooked by Blue Hill.

Thanks Jeff for a great recommendation and for introducing me to a writer I had never heard of and a reading experience I will not forget.

POKER BLUES

2011-06-11T16:06:00.000-04:00

Poker Blues is a video poem collaboration between poet Ted Greenwald and producer/director Les Levine (Mott Art, Inc. 1991). According to Greenwald, the performance was improvised and later transcribed by Levine for the book (above) along with several stills from the film.

--KS

Lorne Bair

2011-06-07T10:25:00.003-04:00

If you do a search on Abebooks for "mimeographed," you are going to, of course, come up with SF Zines and little mags, but as I have mentioned before, you are going to get lots and lots of military documentation. So if you have read your Kittler and your Virilio, you know the drill. The mimeograph follows the same trajectory of the cinema, the gramaphone, the typewriter, the computer, and the Internet: technologies developed for and by the military and part and parcel of the militarization of everyday life.

But as William Burroughs wrote in the Talking Asshole routine in Naked Lunch, there is always a space in between, an Interzone: "That's the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out globs of that un-DT to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image."

Exhibit A is Burroughs's abandoned little mag: Interpol.

http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/interpol/

Lorne Bair's latest catalog suggests some other exhibits: the publications of the American Left and Labor.

https://www.lornebair.com/images/upload/CAT12%20(SPRING-SUMMER%202011)-1.pdf

Such material is ground zero for the birth of the Mimeo Revolution/Underground Press, be it the publications of the Untide Press or, as suggested in Smoking Typewriters, the publications of SDS.

Lorne Bair always has great mimeo material, including literary items out of Secret Location, but his specialty is the ephemera of the American Left churned out in secret cells, radical churches, and union halls before and after WWII.

Check it out.

JB

Art Terrorism in Ohio

2011-06-05T15:17:00.003-04:00

My wife is from Toledo, Ohio and when I visit I like to go to Tony Packo's and have some hot dogs. Jamie Farr of M*A*S*H made the place famous and Col. Klinger remains one of the city's favorite sons. Ah, chuckles, good old Ohio.

Then I read Bryan Burroughs' Public Enemies, a wonderful account of the reign of terror of homegrown terrorists, like Dillinger, the Barkers, Alvin Karpis, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson, and the rise of the FBI. Turns out Toledo, and Ohio in general, was a safe havens for all manner of Robin Hoods and hoodlums, which smeared the lipstick on good ole Klinger, and made Ohio all the more gritty to me.

And then comes Kate and Adam Davis's newest Division Leap catalog: Art Terrorism in Ohio.

http://www.divisionleap.com/akd52/images/pdfs/catalog12.pdf

I had jokingly referred to them as the Bonnie and Clyde of the rare book scene, but this catalog is no joke. It is one of the most interesting collections of material on the Mimeo Revolution and its related offshoots in some time. This catalog is a history lesson and it supplements The Secret Location and re-locates off the Coasts and smack dab in Klinger's backyard: Cleveland, Akron, the Rust Belt.

Download this catalog immediately and save it. The item descriptions are incredibly well researched and the catalog is instantaneously an indispensible source of reference material.

But come to think of it Col. Klinger always was quite the revolutionary in his own right and it is only fitting that he is one of Ohio's favorite son's, er, daughters. He is part of the Ohio family, and just one of many black sheep produced by this seemingly flat state. Believe me the Division Leap catalog proves Ohio's history is twisted and deep.

TED GREENWALD

2011-06-01T15:22:00.001-04:00

Unlike Jed, I don't consider myself much of a collector, but there are a few authors and presses that I do collect because I feel that the work (not just the texts, but the work) needs to be read in its entirety. Ted Greenwald is one of them. Thanks to Miles Champion, publisher of Ted's collaboration with poet Michael Gottlieb for digging up a copy of More Than All, published as Tongue to Boot #4 in 1999.

Just in from Amsterdam, a nice copy of No Eating, with a beautiful cover by Alain Sadoc (click on the image for a closer look). Prose poem published as Blue Pig #10 in Paris and Massachusetts.

And a fine copy of You Go Through issued by Case Books in 1992.

Sorry for the short posts recently. We've been proofreading and designing Mimeo Mimeo #5 for your reading pleasure. Should be out late summer/early fall, with: Steve Clay on Robert Creeley's copy of Presences; Justin Katko on Holbrook Teter, Ed Dorn, Michael Myers' (and co.) Bean News; Stephanie Anderson on Alice Notley's Chicago; Michael Klausman on poetry LPs; Abel Debritto on Charles Bukowski and the small press in 1968; Lyn Hejinian on Tuumba and her collaborations with visual artists; a long-lost essay by Paul Blackburn on the mimeo scene; an interview with Larry Fagin on Adventures in Poetry (and more); James Sullivan on The Gallery Upstairs; Bill Stewart on Vamp &; Tramp; Alan Loney on the poet/typographer; cover by Buzz Spector.

-- KS

Koolhaas, Bourdain and Food Culture

2011-05-28T22:19:00.003-04:00

Rem Koolhaas: "Singapore seems a melting pot that produces blandness and sterility from the most promising ingredients."

Anthony Bourdain: Singapore: "This if you love food might be the best place on earth."

How do we reconcile these two different views of Singapore and the Generic City. I alway get quesy watching Bourdain or Zimmern stroll through a city like Singapore, which is "benevolently autocratic" and "free of crime" and a food haven. I cannot help but think of Kafka when Zimmern eats a cockroach in such places.

So how can Koolhaas see blandness and Bourdain taste bold flavors in the same landscape. The negative part of me can only see conspicious consumption. Why is Bourdain always reading Graham Greene? There has to be an element of the Ugly American at work here. Food, tourism, colonialism/imperialism and consumption are all at work.

It is strange. I am not innocent. The elements that Koolhaas finds so negative in architecture seem to me positives in mimeo and little mags and the same seems to hold true for food. This must be the collector in me: always acquiring something new, always buying the exotic, always searching for the authenitic and original. The Secret Location as territory to be charted and exploited.

JB

SOMEWHERE IN HO & SHORT SLEEVES

2011-05-23T13:44:00.001-04:00

Short Sleeves is Ted Greenwald's first book to follow his debut, Lapstrake (1962) from Aram Saroyan's Lines. Although printed letterpress, Short Sleeves has a the feeling of the mimeo tradition that I often associate with Tuumba (who published Greenwald's Smile in 1981), Burning Deck, Awede, and Ithaca House. Curiously, although the book wasn't published by Ithaca House, it was handset and printed in 12 point Goudy by Joan Simon in Ithaca in 1970. One favorite:

STRAIGHT ON BEARING LEFT

skies skid into Baghdad
out of my mind copied, pieced
together, studied and translated
they get their oil from a ‘well’
as likable as chinese writing systems
I grasp and share, like a popping beacon
the complete experience of the sky’s members
whose i.d. cards are clouds
(see conditions inside) adn how they bend
A lulls B into seeing D
R loves S but hates you
Z snores as Y marks the spot with X
ledge ages dawdle, and rush,
as I pull plug out, and rug E

Somewhere in Ho is a collaboration with Ed Baynard. The text of this play (starring Tree, House, and Patio) is handwritten, accompanied by terrific line drawings by the artist. Published in 1972 by The Buffalo Press.

--KS

CONTEMPORARY MIMEO PAR EXCELLENCE

2011-05-23T13:01:00.001-04:00

Ecolinguistics, edited by Jared Schickling in Farmington, Maine, has the jumpy (in a good way) feeling of a zine. Photocopied with boxy retro fonts, this issue includes work by Brenda Iijima, Joel Chace, Chuck Richardson, Micah Robbins (whose new book, Crass Songs of Sand and Brine, I read and enjoyed very much night before last), EJ McAdams, Steve Dalachinsky, Nicholas DeBoer, Caroline Knapp, Michael Basinski, Dot Devota, and many more. I don't think there's a website to take you to, but Michael Cross listed the email address ecolinguistics[at]hotmail{dot}com on his Disinhibitor Blog.

Another fine issue of Gerry Mulligan has arrived! Editors Ben Tripp and Roger van Voorhees have done a bangup job with this issue (#3.0). If you missed out in the past, issue #0-2 are available upon request. GM does't have a website either, so you'll have to write tripp dot benjamin at gmail dot com for a copy. Includes particularly fine work by the editors, nine beautiful poems by Steve Carey, Peter Inman, plus new work by Pierre Joris, Kit Robinson, Valerie Snobeck, Jeffrey Perkins, Simon Pettet, and Christopher Sorrentino.

-- KS

ANGUS MACLISE

2011-05-23T12:26:00.000-04:00

"The Completed Work of Angus MacLise" and "Straight Farthest Blood Towards"

TWO MORE CREELEYS

2011-05-22T11:29:00.000-04:00

I bought this chapbook, Bolinas et moi..., from the wonderful editors of Contrat Maint when I was in France last month, along with similarly formatted translations of David Antin, John Baldessari and Miles Champion.

The Company (1988) was printed by Rosmarie Waldrop at Burning Deck press in two colors.

World

The world so sweet its
saccarine outshot by
simple cold so colors
all against the so-called
starkness of the winter's
white and grey the
clouds the ice the
weather stables all in
flat particular light
each sunlit place so placed.

-- KS

CHARTINGS

2011-05-19T11:57:00.000-04:00

Lyn Hejinain and Ray DiPalma's Chartings was published by Chax Press in 2000. In an interview, Lyn explained:

LH: Chartings, with Ray DiPalma, was written without a publisher in mind, and I actually thought Joel Kuszai’s Meow Press would be a really great. KS: It would have been different!LH: It would have been a lot different! And Ray DiPalma, in one of his grumpy moods, rejected that idea. He said that he didn’t want to be published by a press that had so little self-respect that it called itself “Meow.” I had already been in touch with Joel and had to withdraw the manuscript. About that time Ray got in touch with Charles and they did this incredibly beautiful job and I’m completely happy, but I feel somewhere I owe Joel a manuscript.

In an separate interview with Charles Alexander, Director of Chax Press, he explained how the book was made:

CA: Every once in a while I look at my own bookshelf of works created by Chax Press and think what a strange jumble. [laughter] And yet when I look at the individual book, I usually still like what happens there. I don’t know if I have any answer other than that. People who know me best, people in my family, will tell you I’m not all that efficient to begin with. [laughter] I’m likely to make decisions that are sometimes not very efficient. One book that we did by Lyn Hejinian and Ray DiPalma was called Chartings. I had not printed a letterpress book in a couple of years because I was running the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, which was a big enough job. So when I got to it again, I thought I wanted to do something small and simple. And I thought I was going to do this project with Lyn and Ray that was oh, you know, maybe a six inch by eight and half inch book. Nicely printed, maybe on some oriental papers, comfortable binding that wouldn’t particularly call attention to it as an imaginative piece of book art. I printed most of the book that way and then decided that was not the right thing to do for those poems and trashed those pages and started all over again. [laughter]KS: Did you tear them up and use them in the book that we know as Chartings?CA: No, no, no. I, I literally started all over again, printing poems on mulberry paper and hand-tearing them out which is where I’m sure that you might have gotten that idea. Then pasting them into oversized pages that have large, random numbers and letters in the background and kind of envisioning something that seemed to be hinted at in the text of the poems. I think there’s a line in the poem, something about meaning carved in and out in space, or something like that, and I wanted to activate that space. While that was time consuming it wasn’t difficult. I mean it was a lot of fun. I had Jesse Seldess, who you probably know, doing an internship with me in the studio while that was going on, and he was helpful on that book. I regret spelling his name wrong in the colophon, but things like that happen once in a while. I often had student interns, and for a while there some particularly gifted people who came with a lot of ideas and interests. You know that to me, having Jesse in that studio was a highpoint. I think within a year of that I had Tim Peterson and Heather Ingamy in my studio and that was another high point.

Remarkably, there may still be a few copies of Chartings in print. More details are here.

INDIVIDUALS

2011-05-18T14:23:00.001-04:00

Individuals (Chax Press, 1988) is a book of 24 poems written 'individually' in the fall of 1986 by Kit Robinson and Lyn Hejinian. I asked Hejinian how this book came to be, and she responded:

"The Individuals started because I was stuck and wasn’t getting any writing done. I complained, whined, to Kit Robinson about it and he told me he was writing ten lines every morning. So I said, “if I did that, could I mail them to you?” So really I was just leaning on him for support. He had a job in the high-tech world that involved a long commute, and I think I was teaching at New College, which did not involve nearly as many out-of-home hours, so I wrote way more than he did ultimately. So mine became The Cell, and Kit’s was scattered through other works. More than anyone I can think of, Kit has used the workplace as completely acceptable material for composition. He established a non-separation, and there could have been a risk, but he never disguised his poetic identity at his workplace, and his colleagues like that. Charles Alexander came up with a design, and figured out a way for our lines to play off each other to create new configurations, mixing and matching."

Ciel ing

2011-05-17T19:36:00.002-04:00

Brilliant new mag out of Portland, OR. Issue Zero features new work by Joseph Bradshaw, Nico Vassilakis, Sarah Kelly, and Dan Thomas-glass. Cover image by Cecil Touchon. Edited by James Yeary.

Slightly Touched, A Work of Genius

2011-05-15T09:20:00.003-04:00

I love the publishing work of Jan Herman, particularly his Nova Broadcast Series. I have written on RealityStudio about this work at length. His uses of the fold in his chapbooks and broadside pamphlets are especially appealing. For me a brightspot is William Burroughs's The Dead Star (Nova Broadcast 5), which shines like a switchblade opened in broad daylight.

Yet Herman's perfect bound efforts are less than perfect. I am thinking mostly of Carl Weissner's The Braille Film. The text crawls into the gutter and dies there. Although Herman published this work in an act of friendship and love, to read it is is an act of rape. It is bound to tight and a complete reading would destroy the binding at the opening. Thus the appropriately named Braille Film remains a book I can only fondle but never read.