Mimeo Revolution and Small Press Poetry Network
A Subjective Historiographic Compilation
by Jim Leftwich
2013 - 2016
1. Yugen, ed, Leroi Jones, 1958 - 1962, NYC
2. Bulletin From Nothing (eds, Claude Pelieu & Mary Beach) 1965, San Francisco
3. My Own Mag (ed, Jeff Nuttall) 1963 - 1966, London
4. C: A Journal of the Arts (ed, Ted Berrigan) 1963 - 1967, NYC
5. Floating Bear (eds, Diane DiPrima & Leroi Jones) 1961-1971, NYC & San Francisco
6. Fuck You, A Magazine of The Arts (ed, Ed Sanders) 1962 - 1965, NYC
7. The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle, ed, d. a. levy, 1967 - 1969, Cleveland, OH
8. The Marrahwannah Quarterly , ed, d. a. levy, 1964 - 1968, Cleveland, OH
9. Trobar, eds, Robert Kelly, Joan Kelly, George Economou, 1960-1964, NYC
10. Poems From The Floating World, ed, Jerome Rothenberg, 1959 - 1963, NYC
11. Alcheringa, eds, Dennis Tedlock & Jerome Rothenberg, 1970 - 1980, Boston
12. New Wilderness Letter, ed, Jerome Rothenberg, 1977 - 1984, NYC
13. Infolio, ed, Tom Raworth, 1986 - 1991, Cambridge, UK
14. Chain, eds, Jena Osman & Juliana Spahr, 1994 - 2005, Buffalo, NY
15. Roof, 1976-1979
16. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, eds Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein, 1978 - 1981, NYC
17. The Experioddicist, ed, Jake Berry, 1995 - 1997, Florence, AL
18. Juxta/Electronic, ed, Jim Leftwich, 1995 - 1997, Charlottesville, VA
19. Lost and Found Times, ed. John M. Bennett, 1975 - 2005
20. Taproot, 1992 - 1995, ed, Luigi-Bob Drake, 1992 - 1995, Cleveland, OH
-- JUXTA--(#1, 1994), 977 Seminole Trail No. 33l, Charlottesville VA, 22901. $4.50. Editors: Ken Harris and Jim Leftwich
21. 0 TO 9, eds. Bernadette Mayer & Vito Acconci (1967 - 1969)
22. Aspen, the multimedia magazine in a box (1965 - 1971)
23. xtant, edited by Jim Leftwich, Tom Taylor, Tim Gaze, Andy Topel, Michael Peters, and Scott Macleod (2001 - 2007)
24. textimagepoem, a blogzine edited by jim leftwich (2005 - 2016...)
Yugen, ed, Leroi Jones, 1958 - 1962, NYC
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/yugen/
"Yugen is often described as a Beat outlet. Work by Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen definitely appears frequently, but I think the content is much broader than that. Yugen billed itself as a “new consciousness in arts and letters.” The poetry dovetailed with the groundbreaking and monumental New American Poetry anthology of Don Allen published in 1959/1960. Jones included the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch), Black Mountain (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson), and San Francisco Renaissance (Robin Blaser) poets alongside a healthy helping of the Beats. The Black Mountain poets made a very strong showing." (Jed Birmingham)
The first lines of the first poem in the first issue:
I can't live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me
(Philip Whalen, from "Further Notice")
(I remember John High quoting these lines to me, one night
at a campground near Natural Bridge, in 2008, 50 years after
they were published.)
Bulletin From Nothing (eds, Claude Pelieu & Mary Beach) 1965, San Francisco
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/bulletin-from-nothing/
While most people highlight the cut-up’s ties to Dada, I have recently been interested in linking Burroughs and the cut-up to Fluxus and related groupings. In the pages of Bulletin from Nothing, Norman O. Mustill, Claude Pélieu, J.J. Lebel, and Mary Beach were all on the fringes of Fluxus, if not fellow travelers.
Burroughs’ connections to Fluxus, if you dig around, are definitely there. Paris in the mid-1960s is a good place to look. Emmett Williams provided the liner notes for Burroughs’ first spoken word LP, Call Me Burroughs. The album was produced at and recorded in the English Bookshop run by Gaît Frogé. Williams, a concrete poet, was a major force in Fluxus. Call Me Burroughs is pretty straightforward spoken word, but the sound collages Burroughs was creating at that time (1965) and that are collected in Real English Tea Made Here and elsewhere are truly Fluxus in spirit.
Briefly in Paris, Burroughs was on the fringes of Fluxus. The link is clearly Brion Gysin. Gysin was a founding member of Domaine Poétique along with Williams, Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin. This group paralleled and overlapped with Fluxus. As Barry Miles make clear, both groups were interested in “concrete poetry, electronic music, poésie sonore, machine poetry, happenings and performance art.” George Maciunas, the leading voice of Fluxus, was familiar with Gysin’s work and attended Gysin’s performances. Gysin and Ian Sommerville put on Happenings of their own that included sound recordings, slide projections, and readings. For a period in the 1960s the readings of Burroughs were in fact Happenings. His St. Valentine’s Day Reading of 1965 with its mixture of props, spoken word, and tape recordings is a good example. Burroughs’ artistic concerns of the 1960s were the same as Domaine Poétique and Fluxus and on occasion he entered their circle. On May 18, 21, and 22 at the Centre Americain des Artistes at 261 Blvd Raspail, the largest Domaine Poétique event occurred. Gysin, Francois Dufrene, Robert Filliou, Emmitt Williams, Bernard Heidsieck and others participated. Burroughs’ work was included in the performance. In 1965, Burroughs performed in a multimedia experiment with Brion Gysin at the ICA. Domain Poétique, the Lettrists, Fluxus. In the 1960s Burroughs was actively engaged in exploring the same creative terrain as these groups and in some cases he actively participated with them.
About a year ago I was able to buy the two-volume set of Colloque de Tanger published by Christian Bourgois in 1976. These volumes collected the texts from the conference held in September 1975 in Geneva. Unfortunately they are published in French so I cannot read them. There is precious little information in English on the Colloque de Tanger. It is not mentioned in the index of the two Burroughs biographies. It is briefly mentioned in Ports of Entry, but by and large it has been overlooked. The conference was a celebration of the collaboration of Burroughs and Gysin, and to me, it is far more interesting and important than the Nova Convention of 1978. On one level, I bought the collection because one volume is inscribed by Burroughs to bookseller Burt Britton. Yet the other is inscribed by Bernard Heidsieck to Dick Higgins and has proven over time to be far more interesting to me. Heidsieck, like Burroughs, was a man with familial links to wealth and privilege. You have probably had a sip of Piper Heidsieck champagne. Heidsieck was intoxicated by experimental art and literature and became an important figure in the European avant-garde, particularly in the area of sound poetry. Higgins was a major Fluxus figure who operated Something Else Press. The output of Something Else is impressive and his press is one of the finest of the Mimeo Revolution period from 1945-1980. Something Else published Brion Gysin in 1973, which featured texts by Burroughs. Jan Herman edited the volume. He was SEP’s chief editor at the time, having succeeded Emmett Williams. The presence of Burroughs in the Something Else backlist demonstrates Burroughs’ overlapping interests with Fluxus.
The publishing career of Jan Herman performs a similar service. San Francisco Earthquake and the Nova Broadcasts join Burroughs’ work with Fluxus directly. Wolf Vostell (Miss Vietnam) and Dick Higgins (A Book about Love and War and Death) appear in the Nova Broadcast Series, which also featured Burroughs’ The Dead Star. The Nova Broadcast imprint also published Alison Knowles’ The Journal of the Identical Lunch and Ferdinand Kriwet’s Publit. Nowhere is the Fluxus spirit of Burroughs’ work more clear than in the scarce Fifth Volume of SF Earthquake: VDRSVP. Burroughs appears alongside Fluxus artists’ Alison Knowles and Wolf Vostell. Yet more importantly this issue of the magazine epitomizes Fluxus’ interest in experimenting with mass media forms and turning them to creatively and politically radical ends. VDRSVP is a magazine in a poster format and thus does away with the codex. Burroughs contributed “The Moving Times.” Burroughs’ Third Mind experiments and his more advanced cut-up scrapbooks and newspaper pieces similarly challenged and detourned mass media material. The Dead Star is a case in point.
The Colloque de Tanger celebrated these aspects of Burroughs’ creative career. Work that involved close collaboration with Gysin. Heidsieck signed my copy of Volume Two on page 161 in the middle of his recollection. On that page, Heidsieck circled a passage that mentions the Domaine Poétique events at the Centre Americain des Artistes at 261 Blvd Raspail from 1962. This is the very venue that Burroughs was a part of with Gysin. Higgins and Heidsieck shared an interest in sound poetry. Burroughs’ reading at this venue fits in here as well. The CD Real English Tea Made Here (recorded in the 1965-1966 timeframe) and Burroughs’ readings / Happenings highlight his interest in sound poetry and sound experiments. So even though I cannot read the volume or the inscription, both highlight for me Burroughs’ personal and creative relationship to Fluxus and related movements. An artistic involvement that gets lost in the shuffle, but is in fact a key aspect of what I find the most interesting and influential period of Burroughs’ career. (Jed Birmingham)
My Own Mag (ed, Jeff Nuttall) 1963 - 1966, London
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/my-own-mag/
"My Own Mag is a bibliographic nightmare. There is no general consensus on the correct order of the first eight issues of the seventeen issue run. This might be by design. Nuttall, like Ed Sanders, possessed a devilish air and a flair for the bibliographically ridiculous. In an effort to frustrate and confuse collectors as well as parody the numbering of magazines, Sanders altered his bibliographic system at issue five and then continued sequentially from there for eight more issues." (Jed Birmingham)
(Robert Bank) But there is a bibliographical trail and it’s laid in the strip cartoon “Perfume Jack”
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/my-own-mag/perfume-jack/
Michael Horovitz: In Jonathon Green's Days In The Life: Voices From The English Underground (1988), Jeff recalled "a shift between 1966 and 1967 from poetry and art and jazz and anti-nuclear politics to just sex and drugs, the arrival of capitalism. The market saw that these revolutionaries could be put in a safe pen and given their consumer goods. What we misjudged was the power and complexity of the media, which dismantled the whole thing. It bought it up. And this happened in 67, just as it seemed that we'd won".
Jeff Nuttall: What way we made in 1945 and in the following years depended largely on our age, for right at that point, at the point of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the generations became divided in a very crucial way.
The people who had passed puberty at the time of the bomb found that they were incapable of conceiving of life without a future. Their patterns of habit had formed, the steady job, the pension, the mortgage, the insurance policy, personal savings, support and respect for the protection of the law, all the paraphernalia of constructive, secure family life. They had learned their game and it was the only game they knew. To acknowledge the truth of their predicament would be to abandon the whole pattern of their lives. They would therefore have to pretend, much as they had pretended about ecstasy not being there, and they proceeded to pretend as cheerfully as ever. In any case, to look the danger in the eye might wreck the chances of that ultimate total security their deepest selves had contrived, death by H-bomb.
The people who had not yet reached puberty at the time of the bomb were incapable of conceiving of life with a future. They might not have had any direct preoccupation with the bomb. This depended largely on their sophistication. But they never knew a sense of future.
The hipster was there. Charlie Parker's records began to be distributed. The hipster became increasingly present in popular music and young people moved in his direction. They pretended too, but they did not enter the pretence at all cheerfully. In fact they entered the pretence reluctantly, in pain and confusion, in hostility which they increasingly showed. Dad was a liar. He lied about the war and he lied about sex. He lied about the bomb and he lied about the future. He lived his life on an elaborate system of pretence that had been going on for hundreds of years. The so-called 'generation gap' started then and has been increasing ever since.
C: A Journal of the Arts (ed, Ted Berrigan) 1963 - 1967, NYC
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/c-press-archive/
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/c-press-archive/c-press-index-intro/
"C is also a fine example of a case where mimeo mags should be judged on a different scale regarding condition. C is comprised of mimeograph legal sheets, stapled three times on the left-hand side. The legal size makes the magazine difficult to store. In addition, the magazine was poorly stapled. Berrigan seemed not to possess an industrial stapler, because often the staples just barely hold the mag together. C was also a legend in its own time and, unlike some mags, was actually read. Obsessively in fact. As a result, C is nearly always beat-up and falling apart. If present at all, the last few pages are rarely attached." (Jed Birmingham)
Floating Bear (eds, Diane DiPrima & Leroi Jones) 1961-1971, NYC & San Francisco
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/floating-bear/
" Leroi Jones left as editor with Issue 25, and Diane Di Prima took over full editorial duties. Issue 27 has a cover page like the title page of a book. By Issue 28, there are pictorial covers by a host of important artists like George Herms, Jess, and Wallace Berman. You can see the geographical shift from New York to California as well. Herms, Jess, and Berman were all active in the California art scene that moved between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Billy Linich otherwise known as Billy Name, the man who made Warhol’s Factory silver, assists with a few issues after Jones’s departure. This suggests Floating Bear‘s links to the speed culture of the New York art scene in the 1960s." (Jed Birmingham)
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/floating-bear-archive/
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fuck You, A Magazine of The Arts (ed, Ed Sanders) 1962 - 1965, NYC
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/fuck-you-press-archive/
In February of 1962 I was sitting in Stanley’s Bar at 12th and B with some friends from the Catholic Worker. We’d just seen Jonas Mekas’s movie Guns of the Trees, and I announced I was going to publish a poetry journal called Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts. There was a certain tone of skepticism among my rather inebriated friends, but the next day I began typing stencils, and had an issue out within a week. I bought a small mimeograph machine, and installed it in my pad on East 11th, hand-cranking and collating 500 copies, which I gave away free wherever I wandered. (…)
Fuck You was part of what they called the Mimeograph Revolution, and my vision was to reach out to the “Best Minds” of my generation with a message of Gandhian pacifism, great sharing, social change, the expansion of personal freedom (including the legalization of marijuana), and the then-stirring messages of sexual liberation.
I published Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts from 1962 through 1965, for a total of thirteen issues. In addition, I formed a mimeograph press which issued a flood of broadsides and manifestoes during those years, including Burroughs’s Roosevelt After Inauguration, Carol Bergé’s Vancouver Report, Auden’s Platonic Blow, The Marijuana Review, and a bootleg collection of the final Cantos of Ezra Pound. —Ed Sanders
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
http://www.clevelandmemory.org/levy/
The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle, ed, d. a. levy, 1967 - 1969, Cleveland, OH
"The valiant efforts of librarians, collectors and archivists who have saved the ephemera of the Cleveland scene from destruction are beginning to bear fruit. The levyfest in Cleveland is part party and part symposium. The word is getting out about levy beyond a handful of academics and collectors interested in the relics of the mimeo revolution. One proof of this is a recent publication by Bottom Dog Press: d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution. The book, edited by Larry Smith and Ingrid Swanberg, delves deep into the life and work of levy far beyond the usual mythmaking." (Jed Birmingham)
The Marrahwannah Quarterly , ed, d. a. levy, 1964 - 1968, Cleveland, OH
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Trobar, eds, Robert Kelly, Joan Kelly, George Economou, 1960-1964, NYC
http://www.deepimagewritings.com/?cat=8
Poems From The Floating World, ed, Jerome Rothenberg, 1959 - 1963, NYC
http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/poetry-jerome-rothenbergs-white-sun.html
"Rothenberg introduced the concept of the “deep image” in 1960, a term first used in his Poems from the Floating World magazine, which presented ‘international poets outside the New Critical framework.’ The Deep Image school of poets was one of the major movements of the 1960s, bringing Jungian theories of the subconscious to the tenets of Imagism(e), which Ezra Pound had launched in 1912. In the words of Paul Christensen, Deep Image poets assume that ‘order lay in the depths of the mind, where individuality vanished into primitive holism’. Deep Image poetry is relevant here as a precursor to Ethnopoetics, which would differentiate itself from this mid-century American manifestation of primitivism by involving poets and anthropologists. Ethnopoetics would also focus on the orality of tribal and indigenous (formerly “primitive”) poetries, and the poetics extant in situ, rather than applying exogenous concepts and forms.
In 1964, Rothenberg and other Deep Image poets began performing the songs and chants of various cultures at a series of readings dedicated to ‘primitive & archaic’ poetry, held at the Poets Hardware Theater in New York. By taking shamanism as a model for poetic practice from the mid-1960s onwards, Rothenberg demonstrates that poets may still be healers, if only in the limited sense that they articulate collective anxieties at times of cultural crisis.
By the time Rothenberg formally instigated the Ethnopoetics project in 1968, he intended to address the violence of the mid-20th century (reflected in his early poetry) with a new creative principal: the model of the poet as shaman, visionary, and healer. This use of the shaman is the most thoroughly scrutinized aspect of Rothenberg’s poetry, the poetry of Ethnopoetics, and indeed it is one of the major topoi of 1960s and 1970s American poetry."
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Alcheringa, eds, Dennis Tedlock & Jerome Rothenberg, 1970 - 1980, Boston
http://jacket2.org/reissues/alcheringa
New Wilderness Letter, ed, Jerome Rothenberg, 1977 - 1984, NYC
https://jacket2.org/reissues/nwl
Jerome Rothenberg’s impressive twelve-issue magazine New Wilderness Letter picks up precisely where Alcheringa left off, with a decisive change: “the present work will be more open – more ‘coarse and broad’ in Whitman’s vision for poetry & consciousness – than the previous one.” Having departed from the ethnopoetics focus of Alcheringa in 1976, Rothenberg delivered an expansive notion of poesis in his new magazine. David Antin outlines this territory in the first issue: “those linguistic acts of invention & discovery through which the mind explores the transformational power of language & discourse & invents the world & itself.”
Infolio, ed, Tom Raworth, 1986 - 1991, Cambridge, UK
https://jacket2.org/reissues/infolio
For both cover and interior, Raworth reproduced submissions of original manuscripts. In this way, from a media archeological perspective, the magazine records the writing tools of each of its contributors — or, as Raworth notes, “strange now to think there was a time when one could recognise a friend’s typewriting.”
Chain, eds, Jena Osman & Juliana Spahr, 1994 - 2005, Buffalo, NY
https://jacket2.org/reissues/chain
Robert Kelly
footnote to Path Moss
pp. 115 - 116, Chain 4, 1996
Constraints
working with Holderlin's text, trying to hear it in English.
As English. The point of the homoeophonic: to hear the other as own.
Keep listening. "In an unfamiliar tongue there are no commonplaces. " [William Weaver, "A Tent in this World. "
J Baptism by hearing.
So that: one proposes to hear a 'foreign' poem as if it were, as it is, in one's own language.
The methodology is obvious, intimate, exact: listen.
Listen till you hear. Listen till you hear your own.
Your own comes to you from the ends of the earth.
Here there is no hegemony, no appropriation of the humiliated original text, no bluster of meaning, no flag-waving of accuracy, no fascism of 'what it really means.' Instead, the substantial energy of one poem, in all the lucidity of its sound and form, generates a resultant structure in your hearing, another poem, and you hear.
And what you hear, you write. Write it down, just as mother taught you to do.
Ware chained by what we hear, liberated by what we speak.
"Write the poem. The poem unlocks hell." [Jerome Rothenberg, ca. 1960] Unlocks it by writing a door and going through .
Language is a prison, writing is a door.
And so on.
As to the homoeophonic (not homophonic, not same sound, but like sound, like enough, just like enough to get something started):
it is all too easy to use the homoeophonic energy to make jokes and parodies: Ernst Jandl's Wordsworth, Mots d'Heures Gousse Rames and so forth as well as my own infantine nasty parody of a poem by Horace I wrote in teenage sarcastic sneerology, I remember it ended" ... and with Vitalis comb my hair," so that the first homoeophonic translation I ever saw was one I did by myself, as a mean revenge on an unloved Latin author whose smugness still irritates me, lovely as I have come to find his docile measures. (Horace is the only ancient poet who went to Harvard.)
But to use the homoeophonic power to make poems not funny, not sarcastic, not even playfully amusing--poems of which no Mussolini will ever say, Ma questo e ... divertente.
The point is: to hear a poem that means, a poem that is as serious as the causal poem. Causal and resultant poems-that's a better way than 'original' and 'translation.'
Louis Zukofsky here (as so many elsewheres in our poetics) showed the way with his brilliant, alive, accurate, preposterous translations of Catullus, sound by sound into our souls . .. if we but listen.
So that's what I set out to do with Holderlin, 'my' favorite' 'German' poet. I chose the great hymn The Source of the Danube, both for its rigorous onrush of energy and for the tumult of reflection, if I may call it that, that makes a relatively short ode so rich with philosophical and formal arousals.
All that Americans have to know, I think, about the Holderlin ode and my vulnerable audition of it ("Unquell the Dawn Now") is that the Danube River rises in the Black Forest and flows east and south across all of central Europe and at length passes into the Black Sea-its waters come to lap the shores of Asia.
Five years or so later (a good Roman lustrum) I turned to the longer hymn called "Patmos," by which I had long been fascinated-to the extent of writing various poems of my 'own' so titled or so concerned. The resultant poem, "Path Moss," is finally finished.
The great moment comes when you begin to read and study the resultant poem that has come to expression through your ardent listening. You are studying a text that no one wrote. It is pure Revelation, a true and urgent Niemandsrose of the mind. Here, more than anywhere I know in all of literature, here is the embodiment of what we can learn by the act of writing.
24 October 1996
Roof, 1976-1979
https://jacket2.org/reissues/roof
James Sherry: As a publisher, I realized early on the negative economy of poetry. I could sell a piece of paper for a penny but if I printed a poem on it, I couldn’t give it away.
ROOF 2 contained Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner and others of what was to become the Language coterie.
[...] The tendency included a group of about 10 poets in NY, 15 in the Bay Area, 5 in DC and a few others scattered about the country and in Canada. We began to read each other in a different way than we read any other poetry.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, eds Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein, 1978 - 1981, NYC
http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGE/language.html
Bruce Andrews, in an interview, in 2005: "I don’t sit down and write poems. The major technical innovation in my writing occurred about 25 years ago when I bought a paper cutter. And for the last 25 years all of my writing is done on small pieces of paper that are cut-up on this paper cutter. I take a pile of sheets and cut them into six, so that’s two by three inch cards. I generate what I call raw material, just all the time, as a constant part of my everyday life. So pretty much wherever I am I have a little pile of my cards and I’ll write on those pieces of paper a single word, a phrase that I think of, a couple of words of a little cluster of words and I’ll take those cards and put them in boxes, mostly wine-boxes and I’ll fill a box every six months or year with tens of thousands of these cards. When I want to write a piece on a certain subject matter or with certain tonal quality I’ll go through them and I’ll find things that relate to that project and I’ll pull them out, and then I’ll sit on my sofa with a pile of cards and I’ll literally edit that project out of this collection. And I’ll do that years after I wrote the material. So when I’ll be editing that poem, I’ll have no memory of having written the words, so I’ll have no attachment to the material. I’ll look at the material just as I would as a reader looking at somebody else’s work. "
The Experioddicist, ed, Jake Berry, 1995 - 1997, Florence, AL
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/exper/
from The Experioddicist #1
MALOK - NOW I'VE GOTTA GET OBJECTIVE & I FEEL LIKE A MOVIE (AYN) My cat (PC) is telling. Me! My feet are on flame mode. And somehow the percepts are runnin' down the burning streets (on TV) screams. A period here nor there and socks(burrs) are clouds in the waste, a distance and x@c&#$ @@*xagain a distance and rakes and stealing shoes and mistakes in the morons!? Some basketballs violent in the chase(the speed & danger). Can't sit on this guy? Only 12(twelve) of us(with guns glued to our moralsx only a few knocks (56 thereabouts)xtech walks with an accident practicex81 neurons of America lockin' (he was my bunkmate in Navy basic training, under and aho! Shores)xRODNEY IS IN CONTROL! Only three million opportunities to clap the cuffs(gotta be able to pass the spasms!)xRACE WARS OF THE 90----sxchildhood so unpredictable. Bees! I can't see the faroff mellowness of mine titties(TAHROSNAUSNIS) of my mindx absolute inverse gazing the fire! Fucjk the looters. I don't want to be human anymore. The bottoms mindfuckx two humanoids target non-scan shots on Waukau Creek & I'm the fool the aliens come to meet (or contain, eh?)x my perceptual delusion-flits continue to codify the universe or so!? Vectors(the "v" was initiated by my left teat container, eep-really!)and Mrs. VEEx am i too worldly in my script? Whatever. i am godx prove it. Shetay-blau! Till the future negates itself, as is! Quassa Nova!
from The Experioddicist #2
Harry Polkinhorn: "Culture is dead. It committed suicide because it had become succeccful."
The Experioddicist #8 June 21. 1995
ON EXPERIMENTAL POETRY
by Michael Basinski
My first thought on experimental poetry is that it is hardly experimental
enough. There is far too little pushing and pulling and manipulating of
literary boundaries in the realm of the poem. I think that this is the result
of poetic careerism. Some of our best and potentially brightest poets are
more concerned with prizes and photo sessions than poetic limits.
Experimental poetry is left to poetically positive outsiders, radicals, and
eccentrics, and to the poets from the working classes or from working-class
backgrounds. Fortunately, at this time this is a fantastically rich loom of
writers who are not rich or suburban in mentality. There are two veins of
progressive marginal writing. There are those working with the visual and
aural potential of poetry and those pushing the moral content of poetry -
that is, those engaged in writing about the body (particularly anything that
has to do with human sexuality). Interestingly, both of these forms of
writing are locating their audiences in an increasingly growing non-literary
community. That is to say , there are non-poets listening and reading poetry!
True, it is a small audience, but real, and it is now as it has not been in
the near past. Experimental poetry is therefore a populace event. People are
interested in it! Experimental poetry has made the poem again an exciting
experience. And it must continue to do so. It is something that titillates
the senses (as well as the mind). A poetry slam is as experimental in
presentation as a performance in a dark, obscure gallery. Experimental
poetry's mission is to engage the ordinary (this means ordinary people and
ordinary readers too!) and make poetry alive again to those beyond the
egg-head world of too much of modern poemitry.
Juxta/Electronic, ed, Jim Leftwich, 1995 - 1997, Charlottesville, VA
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/juxta/
from JUXTA/ELECTRONIC #1, June 1995
Jake Berry
from ARTICULATING FREEDOM, THREE BRIEF NOTES REGARDING THE CONTEMPORARY UNDERGROUND/OTHERSTREAM
We should not concern ourselves with the establishment of movements or schools, by the name 'experimental' or any other. There is nothing noble in relinquishing our presence here to the status of artifact, shelved, another moment documented and weighed against the rest, even if that moment is granted fundamental importance. It falls on us to strive for a cognizance liberated from static ideologies and subservience to the symbol. The histories must be ended and the museums closed (they both are, as we now have them, closed anyway). We must find value in the moment's appearing rather than the misapprehended corpse of its past. With that approach it is our responsibility to be and allow creations presence that have in their character no tolerance for the spirit of closure no more than any other organism can tolerate imprisonment. They are creatures without dimension, the living courses of liberation through the infinite.
from JUXTA/ELECTRONIC 16 (Part 2) 1996
JOHN M. BENNETT / JIM LEFTWICH
STONES MILK
They sleep mist opened under waves tanks
simmered molten spoons her start
as folds unfurl or cool our tidal rites
compel snored stones milk in sleeves
fuzz pearled in ancient tidal skin our
golden blort rock sand slickens (sneeze
grieves soul moiled, abort or slough)
dressed siltish thigh pool combed moon
lists dissolve, her
*************************
Lost and Found Times, ed. John M. Bennett, 1975 - 2005
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/45310
Lost and Found Times has created its own vital culture which its readers and contributors continue to both add to and draw from. Many of the latter have had a long relationship with the magazine and, through it, with each other, generating a high proportion of collaborative works.
From its origins in mail art to its more recent participation at the edges of language (and what is coming to be called post-language) poetry, Lost and Found Times provides a model of how marginalized cultural workers can create productive areas of engagement within a network of activity. — from Loose Watch.
AVANT WORDART & WORDLESS 1975-2005
“I consider the magazine one of most outstanding compendiums of international experimental literature and poetry. It is one of the few periodicals that I subscribe to in duplicate because I believe that it will have long lasting importance as a poetic mark of our times.” — Marvin Sackner
“Insults...the past 3,000 years of literature.” — THE NATION
Lost and Found Times had its origins in 1975 as a Fluxus and mail art stunt hatched by myself and the painter Douglas Landies. The first two issues consisted of fake "lost and found" notices printed on single sheets distributed through the mail and by being put under car windshield wipers in a shopping center parking lot. Landies died suddenly after the fourth issue, and I continued it until 2005, publishing exciting, outrageous, and unacceptable writing, art, and unclassifiable materials that I considered beautiful and vitally important. They were also materials that no one else would publish. Many of the contributors, first published in Lost and Found Times, have become prominent innovative and experimental writers and artists. The magazine is an unparalleled resource for understanding North American and International avant-garde cultures during the 30 years of its existence. – John M. Bennett
Taproot, 1992 - 1995, ed, Luigi-Bob Drake, 1992 - 1995, Cleveland, OH
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/tree/
TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground,
and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years,
we have published 40 collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats. In the Summer of 1992, we
began assembling contact information and reviews of like-minded
publications, and distributing them as part of a local (Cleveland
Ohio) poetry tabloid, the Cleveland Review. This posting is an
experiment, to test the practicality of (and interest in)
distributing this information through the Net. Your response and
comments are vital in determining the fate of this project.
Please e-mail your feedback to editor Luigi-Bob Drake at:
au462@cleveland.freenet.edu
Hard-copies of The Cleveland Review are available from: Burning
Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107--$2.50. All reviews by
Luigi, and copyright 1992 by Burning Press, Cleveland. Burning
Press is a non-profit educational corporation. Permission
granted to reproduce this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES,
provided that this introductory notice is included.
TapRoot Issue #6.0, section a: zines 2/95
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/tree/taproot6a_Zines
JUXTA--(#1, 1994), 977 Seminole Trail No. 33l, Charlottesville VA, 22901. $4.50. Editors: Ken Harris and Jim Leftwich. The inaugural issue of an ambitions and impressive new journal of innovative writing, one in which innovation is widely enough conceived to include a broad spectrum of differing styles and approaches. If future issues are as well-edited and inclusive as this one, JUXTA will become a major forum for the best and liveliest of American poetry. The magazine is neatly and cleanly produced, perfect-bound, and includes textual and visual poetry, and some criticism: Susan Smith Nash's article on Language Poetry is one of the clearest and most balanced discussion of that phenomenon I've read. The contributors are many, but just to give an idea of the variety here, include Sheila E. Murphy, Cheryl Townsend, Hugh Fox, Marcia Arrietta, Jake Berry, Bob Grumman, Crag Hill, Spencer Selby, Harry Burris, Mark DuCharme, Peter Gannick, Nico Vassilakis, Linsay Hill, M. Kettner, John Byrum, Thomas Lowe Taylor... and many others. Highly recommended.--jmb (John M. Bennett)
An absolutely astonishing first issue. The poets and work assembled here are some of the most provocative current. The tone of the manifesto intensity of the essays is one hungry for blood and consummating inspiration. The poetry has all the authenticity and organism of Beat as well as the revelry of Blake's prophecies or Breton's automatism. JUXTA is one of a handful of mags now wise to the rising storm of poetry yearning to be restored to its essential impetus while not divorcing itself from the brink of the contemporary world abyss whereon we must dance to survive with vitality. As with Heaven Bone, Poetry USA, Lost And Found Times, and a few others, it holds the promise of what might be if we'll shed the scales and drink the sky raw.--jb (Jake Berry)
JUXTA comes roaring out of the wilds without the look of a virgin, and with the feel of practiced flesh. They studied the field, grabbed the right writers (Sheila E. Murphy, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Hugh Fox, etc.), and kicked out an issue so strong I'm still trying to work my way through it, having read every page to make sure I missed nothing going on. This isn't your usual poetic verse, but rather an exploration of breaking all the rules with language shifts that rip electrical discharges out of brain cells that aren't used to being tugged. Lines leap at you with sporadic bursts of: "It's hangers and bones it's sticks and stones/ The weather is the handsome tarp of God" (Lindsay Hill's "The Method of Steepest Descents"); "It is women in a place where nerves converge in a central system" (Nico Vassilakis' "She Looks Up Mythology"); and "gripped by the part shriek fast/ got sweat strip and into book sheer/ roar a long breaklanding only slow" (Peter deRous' "Desired Trope"). You'll be confused, and delighted, for a hundred hours or more.--o (Oberc)
Here is something new and unknown. Ambergris floating in the sea of tired magazines. And it is a goooood magazine. A thing like this needed. Reminds me of the first issue of Jon Edgar Webb's THE OUTSIDER: A wonderful magazine of the 1960s that published Olson next to Bukowski. It is good to see that the editors drink wide the map of poetry. The juxtapositioning includes: Spencer Selby, Cheryl Townsend, John Byrum, Hugh Fox, Crag Hill, Rod Smith. If Santa Claus wanted to give poets a present it would be more mags like JUXTA. The Easter Bunny would do the same. And the Ground Hog. And Venus.--mb (Michael Basinski)
0 TO 9, eds. Bernadette Mayer & Vito Acconci (1967 - 1969)
www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=46
"At a time when many were looking in other directions, Bernadette Mayer & Vito Acconci provided one of the truly germinal magazines in which experiments in poetry & language could be gathered & aimed toward an unforeseen future. 0 TO 9 they called it and made of it a necessary place for new beginnings. Nearly four decades on, the thrill of their enterprise persists in these pages newly reprinted—amazing to look at against all that has transpired, more amazing to consider what remains to be done." —JEROME ROTHENBERG, Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Diego
http://imforthebirds.blogspot.com/2009/02/0-to-9-complete-magazine-1967-1969.html
"For instance, the six blank pages that comprise issue six have been photocopied from an original copy of the magazine, instead of being represented by six clean sheets. These six photocopied pages, though, encapsulate the tension of Ugly Duckling’s reissue, as the reader is confronted with a shelf-ready reproduction of the disposable. A relic of the disposable to save for future reference." (Allen Mozek)
Aspen, the multimedia magazine in a box (1965 - 1971)
http://www.ubu.com/aspen/siteIndex.html
David Antin, William Burroughs, John Cage, Ian Hamilton Finley,
Allen Ginsberg, Geof Hendricks, Richard Huelsenbeck, Allan
Kaprow, George Maciunas, Jackson MacLow, Gerard Malanga,
Charlotte Moorman, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer,
Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Gary Snyder, La Monte Young,
Marian Zazeela and many many more
"Perhaps Aspen was a folly, but it was a vastly pleasurable one, with a significant place in art history. The list of contributors included some of the most interesting artists of the 20th Century. And as an examplar of creative publishing, Aspen was a wonder. Its contents, however, are all but lost: few copies of Aspen have survived. The aim of this web site is to make these contents accessible again."
xtant, edited by Jim Leftwich, Tom Taylor, Tim Gaze, Andy Topel, Michael Peters, and Scott Macleod (2001 - 2007)
Geof Huth
Extant Visual Poetry
Only a few times a year, at most, do I run across a collection of visual poetry that completely blows me away. The last was Maria Damon and mIEKAL aND’s chapbook, E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d., released back in July. Today, the cause of my joy isXtant 4, a perfectbound 308-page tome stuffed full of more visual poetry than I’ve seen together in a long while. In a real sense, this journal is an anthology of the current state of visual poetry on the planet, with samples of visual poetry from most of today’s active visual poets in countries across the world.
This book of a magazine begins with a beautiful color cover illustration by Michael Peters and ends with a poem-painting in shimmering colors by Pam Bartl. In between there are hundreds of black and white visual poems (most in the gritty, “dirty” style common today), but I won’t provide any illustrations of those since I don’t want to break the spine of my book to capture a scanned image.
I can’t really describe this book adequately, so I will skip through it, making a few brief comments.
It opens with a couple of stunning examples of severe xerogration from the hands of Reed Altemus. He degrades texts by photocopying copy after copy until the letters of the texts become blobs or spidery shapes—until the textuality of the letters all but disappears.
Working in a similar way with meaning instead of shape, Gregory St Thomasino produces seriously microherent poems (“Bolt ten” and “Bolt nine”) with phrasing like
Ritist mime a luau
Adobe 1ist
O1
Dung hut slung inflexion ritus awl 1ips
which circumambulates the outskirts of sense. (This journal includes other avant-garde textual poems, but I won’t focus on those.)
Willi Melnikov awards us a few dramatic poem-drawings, wonderful polyglot (or polytextual) forms that include Russian, English, Arabic, Greek, runic, Ogham, and south Asian scripts.
One of the treasures in this issue is the essay “Signification & Sinification” (along with a couple of visual textual pieces) by Christian Dotremont, the putative father of asemic writing.
The book is crammed full of collaborations, wonderful conjunctions of disjunctive verbo-visual styles, which made me flip the pages faster and faster to look for more. (Jim Leftwich is a collaborator in many of these visual poems.) John Cese and Paul Brandt contribute a text, called “liquid,” in which the text is distorted as if covered by puddles and streams of water.
One of my favorite pieces is “haiku # 6” by Scott Helmes, a simple but stylish text created out of isolated cuttings of 16 letters, forcing us to read the shapes instead of the meanings of letters.
Marc de Hay allows us the pleasure of a few collages based primarily on Dutch newspaper clippings. His style of focusing on small parts of the text and combining clippings with remarkably different textures produces poems that stun us with the variety of color he finds in black and white.
I immensely enjoyed two examples of the writing of Ross Priddle’s young son, Luke, whose naïve handwriting is visually attractive because of its unavoidable inexactness and his incomplete understanding of the rules of “writing.”
This journal will be a treat for anyone who has never before had a chance to see one of endwar’s endless bi-cards (two-sided cards that work against each other to exhibit the problems with our natural assumptions of the world and meaning).
Christian Burgaud presents a couple of op poems focused, appropriately enough, on the “word” OP.
John Crouse has a couple of very simple torn-paper collages that are, nonetheless, quite effect. One that I love is nothing but a page from a children’s book. In the middle of the page is an illustration about starting a fire at a campsite. Crossing over the center of this page are two torn pieces of paper covered in tiny-lettered text.
Ralph Eaton’s pages of visual poems are a wonder. I don’t see enough of his work, but Eaton is one of the most talented visual poets around. He presents a few poems in his signature style (distorting letters by presenting only parts of their outlines and merging these with other letters’ parts), but he also presents a couple of ancient/modern HOLYLAND poem-pictures. In these, a crucifix-like shape rests in the middle of the page surrounded by scraps of roughly handwritten text with obvious religious overtones.
Miroljub Todorovic haunts us with fuzzy photocopies of photographs of people holding, in front of their faces, rectangles covered with indecipherable writings.
Marilyn Dammann, a master calligrapher, deposits a septet of calligraphic poems in the corners of our brains. Her splashes and splotches of black inks (presented in a wide variety of styles) will stick to the inside of my skull for a long while. And I could spend days talking about each of these pieces, but I must continue.
Near the end of the book, we find a few asemic poems by Tim Gaze, the antipodean father of the form. One of these poems in particular—a sinewous slather of ink—you have to see to understand.
This litany is but a small sampling of the wonders of this book. Find it, if you can.
_____
Xtant 4. Edited by Jim Leftwich, Tom Taylor, Tim Gaze, Andy Topel, Michael Peters, and Scott Macleod. Charlottesville, Virginia: Anabasis, 2004.
If interested in the magazine, contact editor Jim Leftwich by mail at 1512 Mountainside Court, Charlottesville, VA 22903 or via email.
http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2004/11/extant-visual-poetry.html
textiamgepoem, a blogzine edited by jim leftwich (2005 - 2016...)
John M. Bennett
https://library.osu.edu/finding-aids/rarebooks/TextImagePoemArchive.php
Textimagepoem is a weblog managed by Jim Leftwich, which began in 2005. This is a non-interactive archival version of it through 2007. The live blog may be accessed athttp://jimleftwichtextimagepoem.blogspot.com/ .
Textimagepoem is an unparalleled source for avant garde and experimental poetry, visual poetry, mail art, collaborative art, and related materials.
Jim Leftwich has provided the following account:
Textimagepoem evolved from the print magazines, Juxta and Xtant. The first issue of Juxta was published in 1994 and only contained a couple of pages of visual poetry. The first issue of Xtant was published in 2001 and was almost entirely
visual poetry and mail art. When I started the blog zine Textimagepoem, in May of 2005, I thought of it as simply a continuation and expansion of these earlier magazines. Textimagepoem is archived weekly at the site. The average week has roughly 150 posts (though a few weeks are much larger, and a few are much smaller). As a blog zine it can be read as if it were a periodical, published weekly (in fact, it is updated almost daily). The weekly archives can be read online, or downloaded in pdf format (and anyone who wants to can print them, of course).
Juxta, 1 - 9, 1994 - 2000, (with Ken Harris)
Juxta/Electronic, 1 - 26, 1995 - 1998
Juxta, 10, 2000, (with Ken Harris and Chris Daniels)
xtant one, 2001, (with Ken Harris)
xtant two, 2001, (with Scott MacLeod and Tom Taylor)
xtant three, 2003, (with Tom Taylor, Scott MacLeod, and Andrew Topel)
xtant four, 2004, (with Tom Taylor, Scott MacLeod, Andrew Topel, Michael Peters and Tim Gaze)
xtant five 2007, (sound poetry CD), (with Michael Peters)
As of May 1, 2008:
Textimagepoem, 1 - 154 , 2005-
Jim Leftwich
Since then, Textimagepoem has gone through several stages.
From 2008 until 2011, in addition to mail art, visual poetry and experimental textual poetry, I posted photographic documentation of the annual Roanoke Marginal Arts Festivals and the bi-weekly Collab Fests. The Collab Fests ended in the summer of 2011 (all in all there were 88 Collab Fests, the ones numbered 1 - 83, plus the two Post-Neo Absurdist Solidarity shows in 2008, the event with the Magic Twig Collective at Elmwood Park to celebrate the opening of the Taubman Museum in 2008, Collab Fest 12.5 with the visiting Post-Neos in 2009, and the Collab Fest in Columbus in 2010, as part of Cathy Bennett's mail art show during the Avant Writing Symposium). The annual Marginal Arts Festivals continued through 2014, being replaced in 2015 by the afterMAF. Documentation of the festivals is ongoing, though most of it is now concentrated on my textimagepoetry flickr site.
Beginning in 2011 the blogzine has also included posts from the Pansemic Playhouse series. Shortly after it began the Pansemic Playhouse became a collaborative effort with local artist and experimental poet Bill Beamer. Since 2011 we have produced 1393 Pansemic Playhouse collections, most of which, again, are concentrated on my textimagepoetry flickr site.
Sometime early in 2014 (around April it looks like from checking my posts) the relationship between Flickr and Blogger either ended or changed dramatically, and the way I had been using them together since 2005 no longer worked. So, for the past two years all of my visual activity has been concentrated on my textimagepoetry flickr site. Textimagepoem has continued as a means of presenting excerpts from my long textual poem entitled Six Months Aint No Sentence, and as a way of informing readers about my activities with the TLPress archival project at archive.org.
These materials will provide valuable information for anyone researching early-21st century activities in the fields of visual poetry, asemic writing, sound poetry, experimental textual poetry, the history of the avant garde, Dada, Fluxus, performance art, collaborative writing, micro-presses, and much more.
Festival documentation at textimagepoetry
https://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/collections/72157614753858300/
Collab Fest documentation at textimagepoetry
https://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/collections/72157607712616733/
Collab Fest notes 1 - 60
https://archive.org/details/20082011COLLABFESTNOTES160
Collab Fest notes 61 - 83
https://archive.org/details/20082011CollabFestNotes6183
Pansemic Playhouse collections at textimagepoetry
https://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/collections
Six Months Aint No Sentence hosted by differx
https://app.box.com/s/l76xlrg78e5s8evbi4c4
TLPress at archive.org
https://archive.org/details/@textimagepoem
visual poetry by Jim Leftwich at textimagepoetry
https://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/collections/72157631422820798/
mail artists and visual poets collections at textimagepoetry
https://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/collections/72157631422992038/
Jim Leftwich
06.01.2016
