Sunday, March 26, 2023

jim leftwich, notes on some of the lesser-known contributors to Ted Berrigan's C: A Journal of Poetry (2017)




jim leftwich

notes on some of the lesser-known contributors to Ted Berrigan's C: A Journal of Poetry

2017



J. Richard White


C: A Journal of Poetry No. 2 (June 1963)

The Birth of Lamantia — J. Richard White [2]

February in San Francisco — J.Richard White [3]

From The Lady — J. Richard White [4]


C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 5 (October/November 1963)

What Price Salvation? — J. Richard White [17]

Spelunca (for A.R.) — J. Richard White [17]


C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 8 (April 1964)

Prick Song — J Richard White [25]

February in San Francisco] — J Richard White [26]

Poem for Things — J Richard White [26

San Francisco Ephemeris — J Richard White [26]

Early Sunday Afternoon — J Richard White [27]

Conversation — J Richard White [27]




from BEARDEN UNBOUND

by Robert Dumont


"After dropping his wife off in Tulsa, David drove on to San Francisco to meet up with Richard White, a friend and fellow poet from the TU days."


Richard White, his friend for nearly 50 years, wrote the following:

“David was brilliantly angry, caught somewhere between civilization and barbarism. He was a scholar and a lunatic, and maintaining a relationship with him often involved exercising enough grace to avoid a fistfight. Sometimes, there was nothing either the most gracious or most cowardly of us could do. He would challenge even his closet friends, among which I was counted, on both trivial and metaphysical issues, issues ranging from the color of a dead poet’s eyes to whether Pound’s use of Chinese ideograms was truly effective. Despite the physical risks, though, all David’s friends cherished their friendship with him.


“He was committed to the job (and he did consider it a job) of being a free poet; he did, what many of us did but most could not: he put his life where his heart and mind were. It was not possible to disrespect him; it was just sometimes difficult to avoid being attacked by him. But liking David was also a job, not a social pleasure. To be David’s friend required hard work. He demanded the toil.”




from On Bruce Conner (may he rest in peace) and Assorted Kansan Cohorts

A Memorial and Memory Lane Meditation, by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, 2008


"...J. Richard White, elegant almost Victorian and certainly romantic in his sensibility (and always it seems with wife troubles)."




in Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971: Pocket Poets Number 30

Hiway Poesy LA - Albuquerque - Texas - Wichita

"J.Richard White departed left no address"






John Stanton


Johnny Stanton, The Day Our Turtle Was Kidnaped, Siamese Banana Press, 1978




Johnny Stanton

Mangled Hands

Sun & Moon, New American Fiction Series: 2 (1985)




in The Poetry Project Newsletter, No. 6

1 May 1973


"The recent reading/performance by Johnny Stanton and his Siamese Banana Goon Squad at the 98 Greene St. loft was a riot, figuratively and almost literally. Stanton read one of his inimitable stories while the Siamese Banana Gang acted out and illustrated parts of it. Never in the course of history was so much owed to so few."




First it was a NEWSPAPER,

Then it was a PRESS,

Then it was a GANG.

I worked at a neighborhood youth center and one day our fearless director barked at me, “Jumping butterballs, you’re supposed to be a writer, why don’t you start a center newspaper.”

“You betcha,” I meowed. This idea for a newspaper collected a bunch of oddball kids: Fat John, Ginzo, Pokey, Caggie, Lilley, et al. The painter Joe Brainard had suggested the newspaper’s name in another context:

The SIAMESE BANANA from Vol. XXVII of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The paper’s motto became: If the Facts Don’t Fit, Change Them. After that it was easy to start up an artsy-literary press. The philosophy was simple: Writers and Artists, you have nothing to lose, so unite in the SB Press. The technology was easy: electronic stencils. Meanwhile, back in the ’hood, wiseguy newspaper kids got infected by literary bugs. But these kids were from the TV dope fiend generation. They wanted to form a gang. “How about a name?” “Exterminator Angels?” “No way!” “Military Gangsters from the Super Id?” “Fuck off, Mr. Stanton.” “Please, you guys, just call me Stanton.” “Okay Stanton, how about the SBG?” “Right on! The SBG. I’m a member.” We tore up and down every house we performed in. Kicked ass and then some. Ahead of our time and underneath it.

— Johnny Stanton, New York City, November 1997




Siamese Banana books include:

Anderson, David. Under Western Eyes. 1970.

Auster, Paul, trans. A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems. 1972. Cover by George Schneeman.

Brainard, Joe. The Banana Book. 1972. Cover and drawings by the author.

Brainard, Joe. The Friendly Way. 1972. Cover and drawings by the author.

Brainard, Joe. Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself. 1971.

Brainard, Joe, ed. The Cigarette Book. 1972. Cover by the editor.

Brainard, Joe, and Anne Waldman. Self Portrait. 1972.

Brown, Rebecca. Mouse Works. 1971. Cover and illustrations by Martha Diamond.

Cohen, Keith. Madness in Literature. 1970.

Obenzinger, Hilton. Thunder Road. 1970.

Stanton, Johnny. The Day Our Turtle Was Kidnaped—. 1978.

Veitch, Tom. Death College. 1970. Cover by the author.

Weingarten, Don. Lord Scum’s Hotel. 1971. Cover and illustrations by the author.




C: A Journal of Poetry No. 3 (July/August 1963)

Sonnet (In this house I feel sad”) — John Stanton [5]

Sonnet (“Is the effort of my poem worth Manhattan:”) — John Stanton [5]


C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 Number 9 (Summer etc. 1964)

From Newstand Report — John Stanton [22-23]


C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 No. 10 (February 14, 1965)

Revised Poem — John Stanton [6]


C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 2 No. 11 (Summer 1965)

Selections from a Novel — John Stanton [33-34]


from The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan

edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan

2011

"1963: Most of the art in 'C' was by Joe Brainard, with the occasional cover by Andy Warhol. This was and would be a period of intense friendship and collaboration with Padgett and Gallup, as well as one of artistic collaboration with Brainard. But by 1963 Ted knew Johnny Stanton, Joe Ceravolo, Tom Veitch, Jim Brodey, Harry Fainlight, Tony Towle, Lorenzo Thomas, and other writers of his generation. At the same time, Ed Sanders was editing and publishing his journal, Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, and Sanders and Ted 'spent a lot of time together."




Ted Berrigan

Personal Poem #7

For John Stanton


It is 7:53 Friday morning in the Universe

New York City to be somewhat exact

I'm in my room wife gone working Gallup

fucking in the room below

                     had 17 1/2 milligrams desoxyn

last night 1 Miltown, read Paterson, parts

1 & 2, poems by Wallace Stevens & How Much longer

Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine Sepulchre

(John Ashbery). Made lists of lines to

steal, words to look up (didn't). Had steak & eggs

with Dick while Sandy sweetly slept.


At 6:30 woke Sandy

fucked til 7 now she's late to work & I'm still

high. Guess I'll write to Bernie today

and Tom. And call Tony. And go out at 9 (with Dick)

to steal books to sell, so we can go

to see A Night At The Opera




Ted Berrigan

Personal Poem


It's 5:03 a.m. on the 11th of July this morning

and the day is bright gray turning green    I can't stop

loving you says Ray Charles    and I know exactly

what he means because the Swedish policeman in the

next room is beating on my door demanding sleep

and not Ray Charles and bluegrass    does he know

that in three hours I go to court to see if the world

will let me have a wife    he doesn't of course it wouldn't

occur to him    nor would it occur to him to write

"scotch-tape-body" in a notebook but it did occur to

John Stanton alias The Knife Fighter age 18 so why

are my hands shaking I should know better




Ruth Krauss


This Breast Gothic, Bookstore Press, 1973


This breast boom-boom yippee slurp strawberries cabañas

This breast as we go whizzing along




The Cantilever Rainbow, illus. Antonio Frasconi, Pantheon Books, 1965


A Beautiful Day.

Girl: What a beautiful day!

The Sun falls down onto the stage.

End.


from Cafe Cino

by Wendell C. Stone

Southern Illinois University Press

2005

"Shows produced by Cino at La Mama include Beat poet Diane di Prima's Poet's Vaudeville and poet Ruth Krauss's Cantilever Rainbow."




There's a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells and other theater poems

by Ruth Krauss

Something Else Press 1968


ONE:

What a poet wants is a lake in the middle

of his sentence

(a lake appears)


TWO:

yes and a valid pumpkin

(a pumpkin appears)


THREE:

and you should slice up language like a

meatcutter abba dabba dabba dabba yack

(sliced up language appears)


FOUR:

It's fine we have inhibitions

otherwise we'd all be dead

(all drop dead)


FIVE:

or flat on our backs

(all roll over onto backs)


SIX:

yes and everyone on rollerskates in bed

(everyone on rollerskates in bed appears)


SEVEN

and a delayed verb


EIGHT:

and an old upright piano

(an old upright piano appears)


(all bow together to the audience and then to each other)


NINE:

goes to the piano and begins to play

(everyone dances)



|||||



Winnie-The-Pooh and William Shakespeare


Winnie: How sweet to be a cloud


WS: when daisies pied and violets


Winnie: floating in the blue


WS: and lady-smocks all silver-white

and cuckoo-buds of yellow hue


Winnie: Iniquum fatum fatu


WS: Cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo


Winnie: every little cloud

always sings aloud

it makes him very proud


WS: on every tree for thus sings he


Winnie: Winnie Ille Pu

Winnie Ille Pu


Together: Ecce Pu Ecce Pu

it makes him very proud

cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo

to paint the meadows with delight

to be a little cloud




Camille Gordon

Camille's Reports #1 (Something Else Press, n.d.)

"I must be getting old, because I can remember way back to the early 1960s when, at the Judson Poet's Theater, Florence Tarlow bounded and grinned, Mae West-like, to Al Carmine's music in Ruth Krauss's "This Breast'. It was glorious and looks it too in Ruth's There's a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells. Count the colors in the book, by the way. They're all made from blue and yellow, but because of tints and secondary reflectances they make ochres, blacks, even a brown at one point."




Robert Dash


The Poetry Project Newsletter, No. 5

1 April 1973

"Robert Dash has completed a series of twelve lithographs using lines from unpublished notebooks of James Schuyler. This suite, called GARDEN, will be shown in New York at the Far Gallery, 746 Madison Ave., April 17 - May 15.


Interview with Robert Dash Conducted by Paul Cummings At the Artist's studio in Sagaponack, New York September 22, 1974


RD: I think every child has poetry in him. Every child growing up writes three to four good poems then they blow the scene or continue. There's more in them, or there isn't. I had eleven in me which were all published. Oh, stacks of poems I'd written which I don't think were good at all. But eleven were published.


RD: My first show was in '60, so I guess I had been doing it before. But when I came back to New York I was 26 or 27 and then I went to Italy for slightly under a year. When I came back I was working for Arts, then Art News. First Arts and then Art News. During that time -- I can't remember which period -- it was a very hair-raising time as I was reviewing during lunch hour, working full-time at day, and then painting at night. I lost thirty pounds. And I was then working just totally abstractly. Abstract Expressionism was my academy as I think it really is now for a lot of people. And the paintings, I think, are very poor. I don't think I have more than three from that period. They were poor in the sense that they were wildly imitative of everybody but nowhere was the signature of my wrist. I was even painting with toothbrushes to get effects.




Harlan Dangerfield


Ron Padgett, author's note to If I Were You: "My earliest collaborations were done just after I had graduated from high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the spring of 1960; Joe Brainard and I did a poem-picture print and Ted Berrigan and I wrote a poem together. The latter was a hoax designed to raise the dander of the editor of a particular little magazine; we signed it "Noble Brainard," a hybrid of the names of two friends, Don Noble and Joe Brainard. A few years later, in New York, we adopted our new moniker, Harlan Dangerfield. When Ted and I published our collaborative book Bean Spasms (1967), we abandoned pseudonyms but left the authorship of individual pieces in the book mostly unidentified. Some were by him, some by me, a few by him and me and other people, many by the two of us: poems, mistranslations, short prose pieces, a play, letters, and parts of a novel entitled Furtive Days. Collaborating with Ted was like having a comic wrestling match with Rabelais."


Harlan Dangerfield's fictitious interview with Ashbery; first published in the periodical The World, 1967-11-00


AUTHOR/EDITOR

Waldman, Anne (editor); Warsh, Lewis (editor)

LANGUAGE

English

PLACE OF PUBLICATION

New York, NY

PUBLISHER

Poetry Project [i.e., St. Mark's Poetry Project]

PUBLICATION DATE

1968-06-00

This issue of the World also includes a fictitious interview with Ashbery by Harlan Dangerfield


Harlan Dangerfield

Poem


When I see the words

"writing-across-the-curriculum,"

for a split second

I see and hear a horse galloping

in slow motion

from left to right

down an endless road

of different-colored corrugated metal sheets,

ridden by a wavering mass of electrons

that'll go anywhere

as long as it's everywhere,

a faceless, smiling cowboy.


from Teachers and Writers Magazine



Frank Lima


from An Interview with Frank Lima, by Guillermo Parra, Spring 2001


I write poetry because I have to, not because I want to. My intentions were never to be a poet. It just happened in a unique situation. It was Sherman Drexler, the painter, who suggested I write poetry. He was nuts, so I thought at the time. He said, "Write like you talk." End of story. The sources I draw from for "inspiration" are universal. I do not want to be a "Latino" poet. That tag is limiting to a particular group and style, although a necessary means as a vehicle and a point to start from, especially for those amongst our people who are not familiar with this peculiar form of writing. All well and good. But it does not end there, and that is the impression being cast that I do not want to be a part of. I do not feel I have to pontificate to any one of my origins and roots. To me, they are nonexistent in a cloudy past. We are not going to get California and Texas back, never. Puerto Rican Independence is just a charming idea at best. Art is much bigger than that. My poetry is much bigger than that. I do not want to be limited to screaming and bombast for the sake of being heard. That is esthetic colonialism and just too fuck'en easy to do. Our culture is richer and classier than glorifying El Barrio. Our humanity is more enduring than slang, although it can be cute at times. We have an enormous language. Many groups are envious of that, because we have retained it. We have endured along with our language. I advocate speaking it better and learning our history, since Caesar invaded the Iberian penninsula. The ancient politics of Spain are our politics and continue to stain our progress in other Spanish-speaking countries. They are part of us too. Why are these poetic groups so exclusive? Why not keep and translate our classical Spanish tradition of language into what we're creating today? I'm not defending the Royalist, but Franco had Lorca whacked, never for an instant taking into account that he was the greatest living poet Spain has ever given birth to. That's our history, too. We're not just "Latinos." To me, the theater is much bigger than that. It's history and heritage, and a magnificent language that is almost half Arabic. I know this of my own blood, half Mexican and half Puerto Rican that I am. This is my culture, not one or the other. To be true to myself, the price has been terribly high: I usually get excluded from New York P.R. anthologies and other events celebrating our culture. I am not one culture, but of two Latino cultures, including the one that killed thirty-eight million Native-Americans in North and South America! He was one of us too, Hernando Cortez.




Incidents of Travel in Poetry


Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27


We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy

and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became

Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the

steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants

were waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The clouds

were as cool as a dog’s nose pressed against our cheeks. I

notice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion’s armpit as we

cross the horizon on strands of Yeats’ silver hair. There is a

light coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish house

cleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie.

Yeats’ lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry with

his youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanish

the sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger.

There was nothing left after that. We cross the equator

heading north following Emily Dickinson’s black bag containing

stems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memory

like wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanish

pirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child’s

aquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across the

waxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Whitman’s past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth century

in the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head was

set on fire by God’s little hands. The hands that circumcised

the world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a young

woman’s pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen. We cross

the green Atlantic into World War One. We are met by Rilke

dressed in his Orpheus uniform wearing white sonnet gloves

that once belonged to a stone angel. Rilke offers us a glass of

amontillado made from Lorca’s private stock of gypsy tears.

The sherry is not quite as dry as Wallace Stevens’ lush mango

metaphors of familiar objects. Although Stevens’ poems are

fragrant, there is a lingering afterthought of Pound on the

tongue. Pound collected his misty feelings to make raindrops

into European and American poetry. Vagueness became as

sharp as a pencil. Our blue box is not allowed to attend

Apollinaire’s birthday party held by the august Académie

française on the Eiffel Tower. He is being awarded the “Golden

Frog Souffle Award” and a one-way ticket to the Greek and

Roman past to spend afternoons with Williams filling wheel-

barrows with the twentieth century. Both Apollinaire and

Williams could hail a cab on Madison Avenue in any country.

After the bash we toured Paris and London with D.H. Lawrence

who kept stopping to relieve himself of the great mysteries of

life whenever we went by a Bavarian gentian plant. He claimed

he was writing poetry for his new book: Acts of Attention for

Love Poems. Eliot was rebuilding London when we left. It

reminded him of Detroit or Cincinnati or Saint Louis. He was

removing despair from the weather. He thought it affected

people’s minds and did not want to overload Mayakovsky’s

emptiness with old English churches that pray for water heaters

and cloudless nights. Mayakovsky, on the other hand, insisted

there were bugs in Russia who could write poetry just as

interestingly as Eliot. The Russian winter is elegant cruelty

compared with the English milk-toast weather: “A man without

a cloud in his trousers is not a man.” Eliot thought this was the

most boring statement he had ever heard. Although

Cummings’ poems appear unintentional on the surface, he did

not act like a drunken amputee at the dinner table and always

said pleasant things that came out of nowhere. His

conversation was experimental but logical and he investigated

words, mixing them on paper with a pencil. Cummings was all

etcetera after a few drinks. We move the sun to South

America. Neruda had become an organic poet writing about

the fulcra of yes and no. He wasn’t home when we got there,

so we went over to Allen’s for some microbiotic poetry. As

usual, Allen was rolling incense and howling at America. Allen

was always mystical and beautiful when he walked on the

Lower East Side. When he stepped into the old Jewish

pavement, he mystified the habitués. David Shapiro, the Djinn

of subatomic poetry, asked Allen what was the future of poetry

in the borough of Queens? Allen placed the palm of his right

hand on David’s glistening forehead and said: “David, don’t you

know? The future has no future. It is very old and doesn’t

worry about its future anymore, because it has so little left of

it.” Allen made suicide exhilarating when he wrote Kaddish.

Finally, suicide could talk about the pain of living with

unbearable beauty. Beauty was Frank O’Hara talking to Second

Avenue with a diamond in his head. We were the personal

details in Frank’s harem of private lives when LeRoi insisted on

becoming black, abandoning us for a noble cause, according to

Frank, who loved Imamu Amiri Baraka. We were the details in

Frank’s poems and living one’s life was a detail in Frank’s life.

John Ashbery arrived from Paris on a plane made of expensive

suits, shirts, and ties. Like his poems, he was sparkling and

squeaky clean, dressed in elegant language. He is the

daydream that had become a poet. His subject is to have no

subject. Perhaps a casual reference to someone special. He is

a poet of the less obvious in life: the sestina made of clouds.

We crossed the equator on our way to a cocktail party for Gary

Snyder. There is no other life for his outdoor poems,

hitchhiking on hands-on love. Gary seems to have time to

write poems about the notes in his life. Kenneth, on the other

hand, has a paper cup full of wonderful poems. He can write a

poem about a cathedral living in a paper cup. Kenneth travels

everywhere with his paper cup. At a certain time of day,

Kenneth finds room in his paper cup for perfect days and

perfect moments:

Perfect moments when Frank spoke to us.

Perfect moments when Allen spoke to us.

And they sang to us

with human wings

upon which we sleep.



Al Fowler


from Ed Sanders, The Poetry and Life of Al Fowler— with a Gathering of his Poetry


He came to my New Year’s Eve party at the end of 1961, held at my apartment at 509 East 11th, between Avenues A and B, and we became friends. I gradually grew aware of his talents as a poet, and started publishing his work in Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. During the magazine’s thirteen issues I published 27 poems by Al Fowler, including one 3-pager and one 5-pager. I felt certain that I had discovered an American poetic genius.


The Fugs, March 1965

Ed Sanders— vocals, Tuli Kupferberg— vocals, Steve Weber on guitar and vocals, Peter Stampfel on fiddle, Al Fowler on recorder, Ken Weaver on drums and vocals.


Fowler to Sanders: “Up until ’71, I was writing quite a bit, except that this broad I was living with, she had two teenage kids, and she used to get jealous, if I sat up and wrote, ‘I can’t sleep.’ She wanted to get fucked all the time. That was all right with me, but if I got out bed she was up tight about it. That kind of disrupted things. But when I got rapped on the bean, that really put the icing on the cake. All the time, since I came here to escape myself anyway, I never wanted— I associated all that writing with being a junky. I was trying to escape. I hate junk with a passion. I was trying to escape being what I was. So I wrote, because I had to. But I never did anything with it, because once it was written, that was it.”


Sanders:

From 1962 through 1966, when our lives most intersected, I always encouraged Al to write, and collected a good number of both typed (and hand corrected) as well as hand-written poems. Once I even hand-copied a few pages from one of his poetry notebooks. This resulted in around 100 pages of poetry and drafts written by him to wind up in my archives. In addition, there are 27 poems I published in my magazine, 1962-’65.

He also included poems in letters written to me in the 1960s and 1970s. After he passed away, his wife Karen Settevig typed a manuscript consisting of 107 poems, using original poems and versions of poems Al had placed in a filing cabinet at his mother Bertha’s house in New York City.

From this gathering of Al Fowler’s poetry in my archive, I have put together a sequence of his poetry, mostly, as best as I can determine, in chronological order.




Poem for Marilyn Monroe

1962


Marilyn;

Worms feast on your koshered mammaries,

(rendered quiet by lusting goofballs)

who must have been awed

entering that flesh cathedral.

i think of all the men who’ve beat their meat

in rhythm to your passage on the screen.

& all the dykes who’ve longed to give you suck

& panty-freaks yearning to flash behind

a snort of your lingerie.

i’m sorry i didn’t get to you

in time— when you were Norma-Jean

quivering lonely pigtails

in the orphan junior high

where your pussy squeaked

65 like a nubile billiard-cue


—from Poems for Marilyn

anthology, September 1962



Sandra Alper


Ted and Sandy

by DAMIAN WEBER


Ted Berrigan met Sandy Alper and seven days later they were married. She wrestled him to the ground, sat on his lap, and asked him to marry her. He agreed. She dropped out of college and boarded a bus with him to Houston, where she pawned her watch to pay for the marriage license. She said she dropped out of college because she could tell, in an instant, that “living with Ted would be far more educational than staying in school."


Sandy writes in the introduction,


I lugged a big suitcase out of the dorm, announcing that I was taking some props to the drama department, and we got a bus to Houston. We could stay with Ted’s friend there, Marge Kepler. In Houston we had a blood test and I pawned my watch to pay for the marriage license. We bought Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind as a wedding gift to ourselves. That afternoon we made love (I for the first time), in Marge’s bed. It turned out that she had been his lover in Tulsa. Later the three of us had to sleep together because there was only one bed in the house.


[...]


Ron Padgett insists that Berrigan’s The Sonnets were written by having Sandy pick her favorite lines, which he then arranged randomly based on their sound rather than their meaning. In his writing about his friend, Padgett explains that it was a long growing process for Ted to outgrow formalism and become loose. Ted says of The Sonnets, “Wrote by ear, and automatically. Very interesting results....All of this partly inspired by reading about DADA but mostly inspired by my activities along the same line for the past 10 months...working on collages with Joe.


"Ted," Padgett says, "with Sandy’s help, had set in motion the creative machine he had been assembling over the past two years, the machine that would enable him to create a 'big' work."


The letters span two months and end when Ted went down to Miami to rescue Sandy. She received permission from her doctor to go to the local library. It was her first time out of the hospital and she used it immediately to meet up with Ted. (Many of their letters back and forth contained secret plans for what to do if she escaped, but there was no mention of this attempt.) They hitched to Denver, then decided to head back to New York. They settld near Columbia University. She learned to shoplift and wrote a friend about it, who showed her mom, who showed Sandy’s mom. Her parents hired a private detective, again, to get dirt on Ted, and to find out where they were.


Again, Sandy was committed to a mental hospital, this time Bellevue in Manhattan."






Al Katzman

Jeff Giles

Tom Veitch

Les Gottesman

Louis Nasper


Pierre Reiter

Richard Kolmar

Larry Swingle

Bruce Kawin

John Dent

The Poem Machine (vol 1 number 10, feb 1965)

Ken Weaver

Theresa Mitchell


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