Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Last Times was an underground newspaper published in San Francisco in 1967 by poet and printer Charles Plymell. It contained works by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Antonin Artaud, and others. Issue one has become collectible for the contribution by Crumb, printed just a few months before Zap Comix #1. At least two variants of the second issue were published.

Charles Plymell Holding The Last Times
Photograph by Guy B. Taken at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on 26 May 2011.

The Last Times I

The Last Times I
Collage by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“Day the Records Went Up” by William S. Burroughs, photograph of Herbert Huncke

The Last Times I
“Do It Yourself & Dig It” by Claude Pélieu, interview with Buckminster Fuller, photo and text by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“The Orion Dream Stuff” by Carl Weissner, “Introduction” by D.A. Levy, texts by Carl Solomon and Bob Kaufman

The Last Times I
Text by Dennis Williams, drawing by Jeff Nuttall, poem by Roxie Powell, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” by Charles Bukowski

The Last Times I
“Television Baby Crawling toward that Death Chamber” by Allen Ginsberg

The Last Times I
Conclusion of poem by Allen Ginsberg, text by Dave Harris

The Last Times I
“Head Comix” by R. Crumb, collage by Jean-Jacques Lebel

The Last Times I
Found photo

The Last Times II (variant a)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall

The Last Times II
Poems by Charles Plymell and Philip Whalen

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Poems by Yvonne Bond and Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Mini-poster

The Last Times II (variant b)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall, “Dominion” by Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Poem by Philip Whalen

The Last Times II
Centerfold by Bob Branaman

The Last Times II
Poem by Yvonne Bond

The Last Times II
Poem by Charles Plymell

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Rhinozeros #5
Front cover

Rhinozeros #5
“Song” by David Meltzer

Rhinozeros #5
“Song of the Tusk” by Anselm Hollo

Rhinozeros #5
“Attention!” by Gregory Corso

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Michael McClure

Rhinozeros #5
“An Africa Ode” by Edward Dorn

Rhinozeros #5
“Spel 1″ by Robert Kelly

Rhinozeros #5
“Song” by David Meltzer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Larry Eigner

Rhinozeros #5
“Oil” by Gary Snyder

Rhinozeros #5
Poems by Gael Turnbull and Michael Horovitz

Rhinozeros #5
“The End” by Allen Ginsberg

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Peter Orlovsky, “Apples” by Gregory Corso

Rhinozeros #5
“Wind Hand Caught in the Door” by William S. Burroughs

Rhinozeros #5
“To Fidel Castro Somewhere in the Sierra Maestre” by Marc D. Schleifer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by David Ball

Rhinozeros #5
Poems by Theodore Enslin

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Anselm Hollo

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Dell Hymes

Rhinozeros #5
“Pome (for Rhinozeros)” by Jack Kerouac

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Piero Heliczer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Philip Whalen

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Yugen 3
Front

Yugen 3
Table of Contents

Yugen 3
Gary Snyder
“Praise for Sick Women” and “Another for the Same”

Yugen 3
William S. Burroughs
“Have You Seen Pantapon Rose?”

Charles Farber
“Morning Highway”

Yugen 3
Barbara Moraff
C. Jack Stamm

Yugen 3
Philip Whalen
“Soufflé”

Yugen 3
Philip Whalen
“Soufflé”

Yugen 3
Gilbert Sorrentino
“The Darkness Surrounds Us”

Yugen 3
Allen Ginsberg
“A New Cottage in Berkeley”

Yugen 3
Mason Jordan Mason
“The Curse of Ham”

Diane Di Prima
“Lullaby”

Yugen 3
George Stade
Poems

Peter Orlovsky
“First Poem”

Yugen 3
Charles Guenther
Translations

Ray Bremser
“Part III (Poems of the City Madness)”

Yugen 3
Robin Blaser
Thomas Jackrell

Yugen 3
Contributors

Yugen 3
Back

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In July 1976, Gordon Ball took a photograph of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen sitting in a sauna or sweat lodge. It has become an iconic image for me. Even more so after having just read Whalen’s Collected Poems edited by Michael Rothenberg and published in late 2007 by Wesleyan University. This is the Beats in old age. The enfant terrible Allen Ginsberg who once confronted audiences with his nakedness is there old and wrinkled sitting in swimming trunks. Burroughs wears trunks and is covered with a towel. His once obscene novel, Naked Lunch, has been packaged and processed and safely explained into the canon. And Whalen, often described as a large physical presence, here looks a bit shrunken sitting between Ginsberg and Burroughs. He centers the photo but I have for too long considered Whalen a third wheel. Here was a writer who, even more than Burroughs, flourished in the small pond of the small press. What do you do with him, this poet’s poet who never reached, and never aspired to reach, a wider audience like Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg?

If you are like me, you attempt to place him in context with that with which you are most familiar. I have always linked Whalen to Kerouac. The two were frequent correspondents, and it has been pointed out that Whalen felt a kinship with Kerouac’s theory of spontaneous prose, transporting those techniques into his poetry. This really hit home when I walked through the Kerouac exhibit at the New York Public Library in 2007. The Berg had a manuscript copy of Whalen’s Goofbook under glass. Written in 1961 and dedicated to Kerouac, the book clearly displays the influence of Kerouac’s theories. Kerouac encouraged Whalen in the writing of Goofbook and thought it was some of Whalen’s best work. Letters from 1961 discuss Goofbook in some depth. In describing the book, Whalen wrote, “A book for Jack, saying whatever I want to say, whatever I feel like saying.” Such a statement links Goofbook to less-known works of Kerouac like Old Angel Midnight and his volumes of poetry. For many years considered a lost masterpiece, Goofbook was published by Big Bridge Press in 2001. I have only experienced the briefest of snippets (Kerouac quoted the book in his letters). The book is now available for $11. It is one of many small press Whalen titles on my list after reading Whalen’s collected poetry.

Kerouac has a reputation of being able to capture the essence of someone or something with a phrase or telling description. Take his naming of Naked Lunch or Big Table. Likewise, Kerouac’s characterization of Whalen (as Warren Coughlin) as “one hundred and eighty of poetmeat” in Dharma Bums has stayed with me for years. After reading Whalen’s Collected Poems, I have a better idea why. On a simple level, Kerouac seized on Whalen’s weight. As the poems reveal, Whalen always fretted about his physical appearance. As he grew older, descriptions of himself as fat grow even more frequent. (“People can forgive all my faults / They despise me for being fat.”) This might seem a minor point but it gets to the heart of the Beats’ — and particularly Whalen’s — ambivalence about bodily pleasures and bodily existence. As with Kerouac and Burroughs, there is a strong desire to leave the body behind and ascend into a higher plane, but as Whalen demonstrates there is also a strong appreciation of food and sex. Yet the dissatisfaction with these pleasures (and their lack of abundance) is always close at hand. Take the “food opera,” “My Songs Induce Prophetic Dreams.” The pains induced by the belly weigh heavily on the mind. Whalen’s last poem in the Collected (and this after an almost ten-year silence in the Collected beginning in 1988) was inspired by the act of eating. The concern with the body remained front and center as Whalen prepared to leave that body behind.

Going back to Gordon Ball’s photograph, I also see the presence of Allen Ginsberg hovering over Whalen’s poetics much more clearly after reading the collection. Whalen addressed a few poems to Ginsberg including the late poems: “Lines for a Celebrated Poet” (which I take to be about Ginsberg) and “For Allen On his 60th Birthday.” These poems show the relationship of two aging men who grew up together as poets from the Six Gallery to Naropa. They are the literary equivalent of Ball’s photograph.

More interesting to me is Whalen’s “Scenes from Life in the Capital” written in late 1969 / early 1970 and dedicated to Ginsberg. To me, this poem was the highlight of the entire collection, an example of Whalen at the height of his powers. After reading the poem and considering the dedication, Ginsberg’s mantra “If the mind is shapely, the art is shapely” kept coming back to me. This phrase takes us back to the influence of Kerouac mentioned earlier. Much of Ginsberg’s poetics (like First Thought, Best Thought) were inspired by Kerouac. Whalen’s idea of the poem as a “picture or graph of the mind moving” fits in nicely with the axioms of Ginsberg and Kerouac. In “Scenes from Life in the Capital,” the quickness, depth, and range of Whalen’s mind is put on display.

As I thought more about “Scenes of Life,” the poem that echoed most in my mind was Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” written in 1966. More than “Howl” or “Kaddish,” I find myself returning to this original “long poem of these States” in the new millennium. It seems to me that Ginsberg’s poem captured Whalen’s attention as well. In Whalen’s long poem, the capital is Kyoto, but like Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Whalen is much concerned with state of the union in America. While Ginsberg travels across the Big Table of the United States, Whalen observes his homeland while maintaining a more stationary position abroad. These opposing stances can be considered as a major difference in the poetics of Ginsberg and Whalen. Yet both poems graph the United States of the 1960s: the Vietnam War, rock music, drugs, the counterculture. All facets of the Age of Aquarius are incorporated into the poems.

Yet for me, the central concern linking both poems is that of the manipulation of language. At the end of “Scenes of Life in the Capital,” Whalen quotes Attorney William Kunstler in the Chicago Seven Trial: “The whole issue in this case is language, what is meant by…” Similarly Ginsberg writes, “[W]ar is language, / language abused / for Advertisement / language used / like magic for power on the planet…” Ginsberg through his prophetic voice as mantra lifts and purifies language and declares an end to all war. Whalen looks for a solution by turning toward the natural world and natural speech. At the end of the poem, Whalen finds solace in “revisit[ing] Kitano plum blossoms.” The plum tree provides a sign of hope and renewal as it grows out of the “shattered trunk” of the “big tree in front of central sanctuary.” Direct observation of the natural world helps to cleanse a language and perception that have been dulled by consumerism and militarism.

Such observations also cleanse language by revitalizing American poetry, which Whalen describes as a “steam piano.” Throughout the poem Whalen references William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1798, these poets were agents of change. Their Preface to the Lyrical Ballads ushered in the Romantic Era and swept away the verse and culture of the 18th century. It did this in part by introducing to British poetry the language and life of the rural common man. Yet the lives of these poets also serve as a cautionary tale. Wordsworth started as a poet of revolution and change. For example his Prelude as published in 1805 and earlier somewhat embraced the revolutions of France and America, yet as he aged he grew more conservative and cut ties with the ideals of his youth. Wordsworth became a part of the British Poetry establishment demonstrated by his becoming Poet Laureate in 1843. Coleridge provides an example of the destructive nature of drugs. Like Jimi Hendrix who is mentioned in “Scenes of Life,” Coleridge was a drug casualty. Due to an addiction to opium, Coleridge ceased to be a force for innovation in British poetry scarcely a decade after Lyrical Ballads.

Whalen juxtaposes Wordsworth to the Modernist Stephen Spender, who wrote poems of protest and class struggle but eventually revealed himself to be a member of and agent for the Establishment. During Spender’s tenure as editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1966, the journal was revealed to be covertly funded by the CIA. Spender resigned and claimed he had no knowledge of CIA influence. In 1965 Spender became Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. For Whalen, Spender’s acceptance of the post reveals his essentially conservative poetics. That the Library of Congress looked to such a poet (and a British poet at that) to serve as the figurehead for poetry reinforced the submissive, secondary position of poetry and poets in the United States. Despite the example of Pound, Stein and Williams — for Whalen, the Modernists who matter — official American Poetry looked to England for validation and inspiration.

Yet Whalen was not willing to toss aside the poetics of the Romantics and Modernists as useless. For Whalen, there was much still to be recovered from and said in the language of the Common Man. In 1963, Whalen wrote two poems entitled “Native Speech.” In a 1965 poem entitled “The Second Day of May 1965,” he tied “NATIVE FOLK SPEECH” to the “possibilities for song.” The poetics of Romanticism, particularly the return to common speech, is one aspect of the “shattered trunk” at the end of Scenes of Life in the Capital.

The Modernism of Stein, Pound, and, particularly, Williams (think of the poem “This Is Just to Say”) is the plum tree. Whalen had an ambivalent attitude towards Williams but he was much influenced by Williams’ yoking of native American speech to a poetics of direct perception (No ideas but in things). Despite his disagreements with Williams, Whalen acknowledges that the blossoms of the plum tree give off a wonderful scent and even occasionally bloom with undeniable beauty. It would be up to the poets of Whalen’s generation and beyond to spout alongside the shattered trunk and the plum tree. If successful, American poetry, and thus the language of the “these States,” would be revitalized and in full flower.

Given Ginsberg’s influence on Whalen, Burroughs would actually seem to be the third wheel in Ball’s photograph. In 1965, at the height of Burroughs reputation in the post-WWII avant-garde, Whalen wrote “Homage to William Burroughs.” The poem opens: “The best way to wreck something is to take it seriously.” More parody than homage, Whalen takes Burroughs and the critical hype surrounding the cut-up technique down a peg. Reading through the Collected Poems it becomes clear to me that Whalen incorporated the cut-up technique to some degree In his work. One of the last poems in the collection, “The Expensive Life,” refers to Burroughs and the cut-up technique (“‘Cut the word lines,’ Burroughs recommends”). Whalen’s poetics dovetailed with Burroughs’ theories of composition. In his essay for Donald Allen’s 1973 anthology The Poetics of the New American Poets, Whalen makes the comment: “I also enjoy cutting and revising what I’ve written, for in the midst of those processes I often discover images and visions and ideas which I hadn’t been conscious of before, and these add thickness and depth and solidity to the final draft, not simply polish alone.” Much of Whalen’s work utilizes the techniques of collage and assemblage. His poems have a cut-and-paste quality like Burroughs’ representative work of the period.

Yet it is in the manuscripts of Whalen’s poetry that I see the closest parallel to the cut-up work of Burroughs. Scattered throughout the Collected Poetry are reproductions of Whalen’s poems in manuscript. For years these poems have been hard to read in their original state. They found publication in little magazines and the small press if at all. In 1966, a collection of them was issued by Coyote’s Journal entitled Highgrade. Coyote’s Journal issued a pamphlet of Wichita Vortex Sutra that same year. Several of Whalen’s peers, like Michael McClure, expressed dismay that Whalen’s work could not be experienced and appreciated by a larger audience in its ideal state. Burroughs’ work of the same period, like The Third Mind, suffered a similar fate.

In an article on the Whalen Collected, a reviewer remarked that “Scenes of Life from the Capital” would make a remarkable pamphlet. It would and sort of did. In 1970 Maya Press (David Meltzer and Jack Shoemaker, I believe) issued the poem in a seventy-four page edition of 300 copies (50 signed by Whalen). This edition serves as a history lesson of sorts today as the book was designed and printed by Clifford Burke of Cranium Press and the initial letters were drawn by Michael Myers of Zephyrus Image. The cream of the San Francisco small press scene was involved. This is the case with many of Whalen’s books throughout his career. In 1971, Grey Fox Press (Donald Allen was CEO) reissued the poem as in an expanded edition. These publications are now considered collector’s items by some but are easy enough to get a hold of for around $40-50. There are several copies of the Grey Fox edition on Abebooks (On the other hand, there are only three copies of Highgrade available. All again around $50). The audience for these editions is limited, but even in 1970 / 1971 given the book’s small print run; Scenes of Life had a restricted distribution. I have never held or read these editions but I imagine the reviewer is right and that Whalen’s long poem makes a quite a handsome solo piece. It would certainly be a different experience than reading it in an 800+ page Collected Poems. I have read Burroughs’ cut-ups in The Burroughs File, in little magazines, and in solo publications. Each experience is very different. There is something special about reading The Dead Star as a broadside pamphlet as opposed to reading it in My Own Mag. I can only imagine what reading Time in a collected works would be like, but I suspect it would pale in comparison to reading it as C Press published it.

Yet the Collected Poems‘ format serves an important function. Before I read the Collected Poems, I barely considered Whalen poetry at all. Now I am eager to comb the bookstores and libraries for his small-press output. Like Charles Olson and like William Burroughs, collecting the work of Philip Whalen gives one a terrific means to build a solid collection of the Mimeo Revolution, particularly in San Francisco, at the same time. In the case of all three writers, the little magazine and the small press are central to their development as writers and pivotal in their theories of composition and distribution. They cannot be fully appreciated through Collected, Selecteds, and reprints. A Collected may get you acquainted with them, but considering and even reading (as much as I hesitate to do so); the earlier editions really build and solidify the relationship.

Homage to William Seward Burroughs

by Philip Whalen

The best way to wreck something is to take it seriously.  (Vast

Horrible plaster equipment) When I eat liver the back of my neck

feels funny.  (I was at home in the Army.  They liked me, they

paid to look at my dong once a month.)  Grotesque random cock-

suck: radio jamming on all frequencies.  Russian bastards blunk

out Ma Perkins

o classical plaster fruit?

All that smooth heavy equipment,

An arrangement of grapes and oranges &

melons.

Random absurdity on all reality levels

Ball-pene hammer for metal work

Random energy particles jam horrid cocksuck

Smooth heavy trigger

Smooth my forehead (Random Camus)

Fruity plaster grotesque and cupid.

Long cock was.  Suck.  Declare.

Falling.  Clerk-Maxwell.

Punishment.

(We are discovered, our joints “mis a nus“

I’m always in the Army.  I still don’t know how it works

I told you to bring it around by the road by the Firing 

Range)

Soldier denies everything: “I was.”  Random was cupid factor

“gigantic upsurge,”

“WAS YOU PUSHED OR WAS YOU SHOVED?”

Ball-pene forehead Army equipment praised

Classical metal fruit denies everything

Energy particles declare heavy jam punishment

Horrid grapes & oranges & melons refuse to work trigger

Level?  Really is level?  “I was.”

Russian cock liver hammer simply absurd

Ma Perkins “mis a nu,” “don’t know how it works”

Metal brain for wounded soldiers.  Look at seriously grotesque

Equipment behind neck (“C”)

When I eat marble particles the back of my

wreck everything       MAYDAY       MAYDAY

MAYDAY

gigantic liver cupid smooth heavy neck

and falling arrangement.   Was?  Pushed?

Absurdity denies the best.  Take it.

Watch out for the pee-hole bandit.  Declare

Long dastard horrible.  Ma Perkins denies.

Local man honored by Army, awarded

Military Order of Purple Shaft.   That’s what our generation talked

about 20 years ago.  Horrid.  Grotesque.  Falling.  All reality levels

wounded.  We couldn’t talk for years afterwards.  Beautiful was

equipment shoved or pushed heavy smooth punishment.  Vast

ball-pene trigger arrangement.  I was at home in Blunk City.

Watch out.  Random jamming of Russian cocksuck upsurge of

marble heavy dong particles at incredible speed.  All armies once

a month deny shafting local fruit.  Metal soldiers in vast horrible

home.  Liver wax?  Level melons?  Work my dong once, brain refuse

metal upsurge random particles grotesque denial of honored shaft

MAYDAY.  JOINT MAYDAY JOINT LONG HEAVY

MAYDAY

WAX

20:ii:65

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Several months ago I received an email from an editor at Black Dog Publishing which operates out of London. Black Dog prints books on a variety of topics such as photography, architecture, film and design. They did a book on Independent record shops that I am dying to own. One of the publisher’s upcoming projects is a book on German rock, experimental and electronic music, and the 1960s counterculture. The editor contacted me for some images of Rhinozeros, a German little magazine published out of Hamburg, edited by brothers Rolf-Gunther and Klaus-Peter Dienst from 1960-1965. Klaus-Peter provided the iconic calligraphy. Burroughs appeared in four of the ten issues. I had Issues Five and Seven, which I purchased at the legendary Nelson Lyon Sale in 1999. I happily provided the images.

The request got me obsessed with Rhinozeros. I have touched on this remarkable little magazine in a piece I wrote about Burroughs’ early 1960s mag appearances in Germany and Belgium. There is not a lot of information on Rhinozeros in English, and I do not have much to add to what I wrote in that piece, but I did start digging around the internet looking to piece together a complete run of this visually stunning publication. A bookseller in Switzerland had several issues and a click to Powell’s website filled in the holes. Now I have all ten issues.

So here are the covers of all ten issues as well as scans of all the Burroughs appearances. The images make clear that some of the most exciting visuals in all of Burroughs’ oeuvre in any format, be it novel, broadside, magazine or painting, reside within the pages of Rhinozeros. The Dienst brothers were interested in the Beat Generation, concrete poetry, and the cut-up technique. Klaus-Peter knew Brion Gysin and would have been aware of the cut-up soon after its rediscovery. The Dienst brothers then discovered Burroughs through Gysin. In turn, Rhinozeros helped introduce the cut-up to a small German audience. Not surprisingly, Burroughs was a major presence in the magazine, but his influence spread throughout Germany during a renaissance in that country’s poetry and literature of the 1960s. German writers like Carl Weissner, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and Jurgen Ploog took immediately to the work of Burroughs, particularly the cut-up.

Issue Five usually gets singled out for special attention by American collectors. This is the Beat Issue and features Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure and Peter Orlovsky in its pages. The issue is also the only one in color which makes for some remarkable visuals. Peter Ellis Booksellers, operating out of London, has a truly special copy of this issue for sale. Tipped in with the mag are four T.L.S. from Rolf-Dieter Dienst to Whalen and David Meltzer requesting material for his magazine and a projected anthology. Whalen has doodled on one of the letters and has written: “How far off is our history” and “How far off our history is.” The letters makes this special issue of Rhinozeros even more so.

My copy is signed by Burroughs and Gregory Corso. Interested parties might be aware of Burroughs’ importance in German literature of the 1960s, but Corso’s equally important role might be less well known. After a trip to Venice in the Summer of 1960, Corso arrived in Berlin in July of that year and stayed there for several months. In that time, Corso performed readings, wrote poetry, and met with poets and academics. Two years earlier, Corso began work on a German anthology of Beat writers with Walter Hollerer, a professor out of Berlin. In letters from late summer / early fall 1960, Corso writes on the topic of Beat anthologies and he hoped his anthology would be published within the year. Junge Amerikanische Lyrik was eventually published in 1961, introducing the poets of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology to Germany. So it could be argued that Corso was the face of the Beats for German poets at this time. Not coincidentally, Rhinozeros was started in 1960, possibly around the time of Corso’s sojourn in Germany. Without a doubt, Corso’s presence raised awareness of the Beats in Germany and helped spread the word about New America Poetry throughout the country.

Rhinozeros Covers

Rhinozeros 1
1960

Rhinozeros 2
1960

Rhinozeros 3
1961

Rhinozeros 4
1961

Rhinozeros 5 (View complete issue)
1961

Rhinozeros 6
1962

Rhinozeros 7
1962

Rhinozeros 8
1963

Rhinozeros 9
1964

Rhinozeros 10
1965 (?)

Burroughs Texts in Rhinozeros

Wind Hand Caught in the Door
Rhinozeros 5
1961

Novia Express
Rhinozeros 6
1962

Be Cheerful, Sir (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 7
1962

Der Doktor auf der Bühne (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 9
1964

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

When I began collecting William Burroughs in 1993, the junk that fed my book habit was the signed titles derived from and relating to the Naked Lunch Word Horde. The Olympia Press Naked Lunch was the ideal fix, and I would have crawled through a gutter to get one. Then came the Nelson Lyon Auction at PBA Galleries in 1999, and my entire focus changed. The Lyon Sale showed me the wonders of literary magazines and opened up a whole new world to me. What made the Lyon Sale special was the fact that his rare magazines were all signed. Lyon, as producer on a Burroughs spoken word album and as the man responsible for Burroughs’ Saturday Night Live appearance, had special access that I could never hope to have. Burroughs’ death in 1997 assured that. In an effort to do Lyon one better, I decided to collect complete runs of all the little magazines with a Burroughs appearance from the mimeo revolution period (roughly 1945-1970).

Thankfully, most of the magazines from this time had short life spans. The number of issues rarely climbed out of the single digits and in some cases comprised only a single issue. The exceptions like Evergreen Review (96 issues in its initial run from 1957-1973) and Floating Bear (38 issues) loom large. I always feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction whenever I successfully put together a complete run of a magazine, particularly if I do it in pieces and not as a bulk purchase in one fell swoop.

So my stomach dropped when I saw a copy of Issue One of Charles Plymell’s NOW magazine for sale on Abebooks. NOW ran for three issues in the mid-1960s. Burroughs appeared in Issue Two and Three, and I tracked down those issues without too much trouble in recent years. William Reese currently has a copy of issue three for $35. The description states that copies of this issue are getting harder to find. This assessment might be spot on. I always remember a copy or two of the later issues of NOW as being available, but these appear to be drying up. Reese has the only copy currently. Issue One has always been tough. In the last three years, I had never seen a copy until, well, NOW. The first issue proved as elusive as Insect Trust Gazette 2. Yet in the digital age, most bookstores, as well as everybody’s garage and basement, are within reach. The Gazette turned up in Germany, the NOW surfaced in San Francisco.

San Francisco makes sense, because the first issue of NOW is a time capsule of the pre-Summer of Love era by the Bay. Plymell printed the premier issue of NOW in 1963 when he was living at 1403 Gough Street. Beat fans might recognize this address. In 1954, Allen Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky there. At the time, Orlovsky lived with painter Robert La Vigne. La Vigne painted a portrait of a naked Orlovsky that hung on the wall of La Vigne’s apartment. Ginsberg was smitten with the painting and fell in love with the subject.

Flash forward almost ten years and Charles Plymell moved in. Plymell was one of several Kansas natives who shook up the counterculture scene, particularly in San Francisco. Bruce Conner, Michael McClure, Bob Brannaman were some others. In the summer of 1963, 1403 Gough Street became the epicenter of a scene: counterculture San Francisco before the hype and paranoia of the Summer of Love. Plymell has mined this period for a series of essays that appeared in Kevin Ring’s Transit and in Grist, a mag published out of Kansas. Ring recently printed a reworked essay entitled “Neal and Anne at 1403 Gough Street” for his chapbook series.

For sure, proto-hippies (called heads at the time) hung out at Plymell’s residence, but so did writers and poets associated with Auerhahn Press (Dave Haselwood, Andrew Hoyem), members of Wallace Berman’s Semina Circle (Bruce Conner, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell), left coast Beats (Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure and Lew Welch), and soon-to-be-celebrity drug dealers, like Owsley. In the summer of 1963, Plymell shared the seven rooms with Neal Cassady and his girlfriend, Anne Murphy. Allen Ginsberg blew into town coming down from the legendary Vancouver Poetry Conference of that summer after an extended stay in India and the Far East.

My copy of NOW documents this magic time in a special way. The mag bears the library stamp of Ben Talbert. Talbert was an artist associated with the Semina Circle. His works are perfect examples of funk assemblage, like the work of George Herms or Bruce Conner that was coming out of California at the time right before Warhol exhibited in LA and brought in Pop. Talbert contributes a woodcut drawing to Issue two of NOW. Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure appear in Issue One, and each poet signed, and in some cases, inscribed their contributions. Whalen signs and dates his poem, October 20, 1963. It just so happens that this was the date of Whalen’s 40th birthday. Ginsberg inscribed his poem to celebrate this event with a drawing of a vagina and a cock and balls. McClure provided a snippet of beast language in honor of Rimbaud’s birthday. Rimbaud shared Whalen’s birthday albeit almost 70 years earlier: October 20, 1854. McClure sketched what I take to be a profile of Rimbaud along the gutter of the magazine. This mag may have been signed at a birthday party for Whalen at 1403 Gough Street. Quite a remarkable document that captures a special moment in SF literary history.

Whalen’s work of this period deserves some extra attention. I first read Whalen’s work in the basic Beat anthologies and inevitably these volumes excerpt the Six Gallery era stuff, like “Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” This is basic Zen Beat material in content. The form of these poems is rather traditional as well: left margins for the most part; initial caps at the start of lines. Unfortunately, I did not dig further until recently. I have only dabbled in Whalen’s work, but the publication of the collected Whalen really opened my eyes. Yet the more radical Whalen was always there in the magazines on my shelf like NOW. Whalen’s poetry of the 1960s is a wonderful combination of Eastern thought / American West Frontier (called “Cowboy Zen” by Ron Silliman), O’Hara (and later Ted Berrigan) I do this, I do that notation, calligraphy (like Gary Snyder), and composition by field / projective verse à la Charles Olson. For anyone who thinks of Whalen only as the poet of “Sourdough Mountain,” I encourage them to dig deeper in order to find out why Kerouac considered Whalen 180 pounds of poetmeat.

Roughly a month after Whalen’s birthday, the curtain closed on the scene at 1403 Gough Street. John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 ushered in the revolutionary / psychedelicized / overhyped 1960s. Ginsberg captured this watershed moment in “Nov. 23, 1963 Alone.” Ginsberg was anything but alone on the day of the assassination. Ginsberg, Cassady, Anne Murphy and Plymell (and his girlfriend Ann) were all together at Gough Street. The poem provides not only a eulogy of Kennedy but also of a moment in time for San Francisco and the rest of the United States. The innocence of Camelot was over, and the spirit of the Kennedy era was about to get much darker and more violent. Issue One of NOW was of that earlier moment before the decade officially became the SIXTIES. Ginsberg writes of being alone “with Now, with Fuck You, with Wild Dog Burning Bush Poetry Evergreen C Thieves Journal Soft Machine Genesis Renaissance Contact Kill Roy etc.” These magazines represent the underground before the counterculture went mainstream.

Shortly after November 1963, Plymell began to disassociate himself from rock and roll / emerging hippie SF and align himself with William Burroughs and the cut-up. This becomes clearer in the second issue of NOW entitled NOW NOW published in 1965. NOW NOW is much more ambitious in form and content than the previous issue. The first thing that jumps out at you is the presence of color and artwork. Color is unusual in the mimeo revolution. Plymell features Burroughs on the back cover with a color-coded selection from Nova Express. The idea of Burroughs organizing his fiction based on color is nothing new. He tinkered with this idea in the Olympia Soft Machine. I would suspect that this use of color tied back to Rimbaud and his poem linking vowels to colors. Another cut-up appears in NOW NOW under the name of William Lee: “Where cumith Bozo the Clown, frum the start to a nevr endin.”  According to Maynard and Miles, this is not Burroughs but a taxi driver of the same name. (If you do not have a copy of this bibliography, let alone Goodman or Shoaf’s, get at least one immediately.  They are wonderful sources of information.)  As for Bozo, it is no doubt a weird piece and I am sure Plymell and readers in the know appreciated the confusion that ensued, but Burroughs generally cut-up sentences and phrases.  He did not go down to the individual word or syllable.  He experimented with word blocks, more than words.

NOW NOW NOW, the third and final issue of NOW, is one step beyond the previous two issues. It is oversized, almost poster size, and presents some difficulty in sending it through the mail. It is an art piece. By this time, Plymell was intimately involved with Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, two of the most dedicated followers and practitioners of the cut-up technique. NOW NOW NOW reminds me of another little mag of the period: Bulletin from Nothing. Both mags incorporate the visual as much as the textual. Both introduce collage into the mag in terms of content and in the patchwork way the mags are put together. Plymell worked as an artist as well as a writer. In 1963, he exhibited a show of collages at the Batman Gallery. Like the Ferus Gallery, the Batman had ties to the Semina Circle.

Burroughs appears in NOW NOW NOW: “Afterbirth of Dream Now.” Like Bozo, it is a standalone effort that in an interview Plymell states was created from an article that he sent to Burroughs. Burroughs received the article and sent it back cut-up. Several other magazine editors of the period tell a similar story. Daniel Lauffer of Brown Paper is one example.

The visual elements of NOW NOW NOW remind me of the collage / mixed-media work that the Fluxus artists might do. Maybe NOW NOW NOW seems like Fluxus in the shared influence of Dada. Norman Mustill contributes a collage. Cut-ups in the form of telegrams come from Claude Pelieu. I have not seen Burroughs described as a fully fledged member of Fluxus, but his radical experiments with text, image, art, film and audio tape in the 1965-1970 period seem to have much in common with that group that goes beyond merely being published by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press.

The changing title of NOW over its run is instructive. What I like best about the magazine is that it changed from issue to issue and always attempted to expand and to do itself one better. Issue one is a simple chapbook, not much different from a host of other little mags of the time. I am thinking of Trace, Yugen, or Nomad. The Whalen poem suggests an interest in typography and the page as canvas, but this is largely unexplored. Not so in NOW NOW. Visual art is a major component of the second issue; in the presence of reproductions, in the use of different typographies (as expressed in the interlocking bodies that form the title or in McClure’s poster-like beast poem), and in the layout of work on the page (for example, McClure’s poem is landscaped and utilizes the whole page). NOW NOW also has an expanded format in the number of pages and page size.

NOW NOW NOW makes the link between page and canvas explicit. The large format with the string binding suggests an artist’s portfolio or a collection of posters. NOW NOW NOW is slight in number of pages but it challenges what a literary magazine can be in form and content. The final issue is a logical progression from Plymell’s work with collage: artwork described as “sadistic” by Jeff Nuttall. Plymell surely plays rough with the reader’s expectations of a literary magazine in this issue.

After the final issue of NOW, Plymell continued to experiment with writing. He published Apocalypse Rose with Auerhahn Press in 1967 and The Last of the Moccasins with City Lights in 1971. In 1968, Plymell continued to explore the merging of the textual with the visual. The first issue of Zap Comix, printed by Plymell, introduced early work by R. Crumb. This roughly produced publication helped usher in the underground comix and presaged the graphic novel in terms of introducing adult themes to the comic. Zap Comix #1 is a legendary rarity and a highly prized collectible — the equivalent of Action Comics #1 that introduced Superman in April 1938.

In the 1970s, Plymell continued on as a publisher manning a xerox machine for a series of publications under the Cherry Valley Editions imprint. Cherry Valley was Ginsberg’s retreat / sanctuary / sanitarium for poets and writers in distress in rural New York. Ray Bremser and Gregory Corso landed there as did Plymell. By this time, Plymell married Mary Beach’s daughter, Pamela, and started Coldspring Journal (possibly a reference to Coldspring, Texas, a locale that appeared in Burroughs writing over the years based on his time near the Texas-Mexico border in the late 1940s). A Burroughs piece titled “Coldspring News” appeared in Spero 1, a one-shot from 1965. Spero is a cool item, and they have been turning up online recently for those interested. Four issues of Plymell’s journal appeared in the mid-1970s. Some other publications include Ray Bremser’s Blowing Mouth (1978), Joshua Norton’s The Blue and the Gray Poems (1975), Maureen Owen’s The No-Travels Journals (1975) and Dan Raphael’s Energumen (1976). Plymell brought out Burroughs’ Cobblestone Gardens in a Cherry Valley Edition in 1976; it was followed up years later with Tornado Alley. Burroughs wrote the foreword to Mary Beach’s Electric Banana and provided a blurb for Pelieu’s Coca Neon/Polaroid Rainbow collection; both books were printed by Cherry Valley. Cherry Valley Editions soldiers on in the present publishing new work by Plymell and others.

Plymell is something of a forgotten figure. Currently he is best known as a gadfly commenting on the Beat Generation and the poetry scene generally taking on the role of the departed Gregory Corso. Plymell lays low the sacred cows of the post-WWII counterculture. In my opinion, his work as a publisher deserves a second glance. NOW stands out visually from the mass of 1960s little mags. In Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall singled out NOW and Plymell as contributing factors that helped build the counterculture and helped form an alternative network of information and contacts. Nuttall also comments on the important role that Kansas played in providing energetic individuals as well as an element of funkiness and grit into the scenes on both coasts. This Kansas connection is well documented on the Beats in Kansas website, and Plymell is a major figure in that group.

Over the years, Plymell had ties to Burroughs in Lawrence. Despite being critical of the Beats, Plymell speaks highly of Burroughs. In return, Burroughs blurbed Last of the Moccasins. More importantly, but less known, is the fact that Plymell introduced a young James Grauerholz to the work of Burroughs in a Kansas bookstore. The recommendation struck a chord, because soon after Grauerholz went to New York and became Burroughs’ right hand man. The rest is history. When the counterculture gathered, like at 1403 Gough Street, Plymell was usually in the room, and in many cases, he had something interesting (and controversial) to contribute to the conversation. His publications, like NOW, are testament to that. Check them out if you get the chance.

Gerard Malanga
Charles Plymell: Outlaw Poet
PDF of feature article that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Rain Taxi.

NOW

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NOW NOW NOW

NOW NOW NOW
Artwork by Norman Mustill, Charles Plymell, Ralph W. Ackerman, and Antonin Artaud

NOW NOW NOW
Poems by Charles Plymell and Philip Whalen, “Afterbirth of Dream Now” by William S. Burroughs

NOW NOW NOW
Poems by Roxie Powell, Sculpture of Bob Branaman by Dion Wright, Drawing by “Manny Lipshitz” aka Dean Stockwell

NOW NOW NOW
Drawings by Duarte, Telegrams by Claude Pélieu

NOW NOW NOW
Telegrams by Claude Pélieu

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Back

NOW ARCHIVAL MATERIALS

William S. Burroughs
Afterbirth of Dream Now
Manuscript of cut-up collaboration with Charles Plymell published in NOW NOW NOW.

William S. Burroughs
Now the Judgement of Things to Come
Manuscript of cut-up collaboration with Charles Plymell published in NOW NOW NOW.

William S. Burroughs
“Long Lost Cut-Up”
Manuscript of cut-up sent to Charles Plymell for use in NOW NOW NOW.

Gerard Malanga
Letter to Charles Plymell
Letter accompanying poems submitted to Plymell for NOW.

Charles Plymell
Collage

Charles Plymell
Collage

Charles Plymell
Collage

Robert Branaman
NOW artwork

Allen Ginsberg
Typescript

Diane Wakoski
“From A Go to B, If You Can Find It”

Diane Wakoski
“From A Go to B, If You Can Find It”

Paul Lundgren
“Without Rancor”
“Poem by Paul Lungrund, the mad bookstore owner in Wichita who was in WW2 intelligence” — Note by Charles Plymell

NOW NOW flyer

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Throughout my columns in the Bunker, particularly in the Floating Bear pieces, I have touched on the collectible and downright fun nature of association copies. In the world of rare books, association copies are “books once belonging to the author, signed or annotated by the author, or someone associated with the author of the book in some way. Book inscribed by author to a famous person, or owned by someone of interest, or someone connected to the book or author.” Books from a famous person’s library with their bookplate are included in this definition. How did this book get into this person’s library? Did the book have any influence or importance to the owner? Ralph Maud wrote a book on Charles Olson entitled Charles Olson’s Reading that explores just these questions. In fact, Olson made an early name for himself in academic circles when he reconstructed Herman Melville’s dispersed library. This project proved the foundation for Olson’s influential study of Moby Dick, Call Me Ishmael, published in 1947.

In collecting, the focus is on the second part of the definition stressing the inscription to a famous person or somebody of interest to the author. Some collectors seek only material of this nature. For me, items of this type have always been very seductive. The first collectible book I ever bought was an association copy. When I graduated college and started earning a steady paycheck, one of the first things I did was start ordering rare book catalogs. I also stepped up my tour of the local rare bookstores and book fairs. I did this for months getting progressively more obsessed with actually buying something. With no idea what to collect and no sense of what books were worth both for me personally and on the market, everything seemed so expensive. To pay $100 for a book seemed crazy. Finally I could take it no longer and on an impulse I called Antic Hay Books in New Jersey and bought Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye published by Frontier Press in 1965 inscribed by Sanders to Philip Whalen: “With Tender Squirts.” Years later the mimeo nature of this book fit into my collection but when I bought it I knew nothing about it except that for $65, I could get a book linking two famous Beat writers. The association was everything. The book brought together a second generation East Coast Beat with a primary West Coast Beat who read at the Six Gallery. How did Sanders and Whalen know each other? Did they meet in person? Did they have a correspondence? I have yet to answer these questions.

Now the pleasure of Peace Eye has little to do with the signature and lies in the series of associations that I make with the publisher. Harvey Brown founded Frontier Press when he was attending the University of Buffalo in the 1960s. Brown came from a family of considerable wealth and, like the Hitchcocks who associated with Leary at Millbrook, Brown gave freely to the counterculture. The biggest benefactor of Brown’s generosity was Charles Olson. Buffalo in the 1960s was the epicenter of Olsonmania. (For more on Olson in Buffalo, see “Olson’s Buffalo” and Albert Glover’s “Charles Olson: Recollections.”) Literally and figuratively a huge figure in the decade, Olson rocked the University of Buffalo upon his arrival there in 1963. An Olson circle developed that championed the poet in the seven years until his death. This promotion continued through works of scholarship by the likes of Ralph Maud or George Butterick. Few in this circle were more fascinated with Olson than Harvey Brown. Brown founded Frontier Press to publish work that related to modern poetics or that Olson thought should be in print. The press was prolific. From just 1967 to 1971, Frontier Press published 25 books and pamphlets. Brown used his press to publish pirated editions of out of print work forcing larger publishers to issue forgotten texts by important writers. The Frontier edition of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All is a perfect example. This work proved to be one of the Ur-Texts in the emerging poetics of the 1970s, like LANGUAGE poetry.

Frontier Press published Sanders’ Peace Eye in 1965. Peace Eye was an early book initiated by the Vietnam War and an example of the political nature of Frontier’s efforts. The book links the Olson circle in Buffalo with the mimeo and freak scene in the Lower East Side. Both Frontier and Fuck You Presses would publish the late numbered Cantos of Ezra Pound. Sanders, like Brown, was deeply influenced by Olson’s poetry and considerable presence. By all accounts, Olson was a force of nature and his powers of conversation are legend from Black Mountain to Buffalo to the Poetry Conference in Berkeley to the University of Connecticut right before his death in 1970.

Peace Eye was reissued in an expanded edition by Frontier in 1967 out of Brown’s hometown of Cleveland. Again the presence of Frontier Press in Cleveland creates a web of associations. Cleveland in the 1960s was home to as vibrant and diverse an underground publishing scene as any in the world. Like Sanders in New York, D.A. Levy served as the figurehead of the mimeo scene in Cleveland. This scene deserves much closer study. Hopefully, I can get to it in the near future. The various incarnations of Peace Eye link several vital communities of 1960s alternative poetry and that is the magic of the book for me now, not the more obvious linkage of names and coasts through the wonderful inscription.

Yet from my earliest days as a Burroughs collector, I have sought first editions with a signature. Like many collectors, I preferred a book simply adorned with the author’s name over a book inscribed to a regular Joe. The initial focus of my book collection was all Burroughs first editions from 1953-1965 simply and plainly signed by the author. In line with that plan, the first Burroughs book I bought was a signed copy of the 1969 Nova Broadcast printing of The Dead Star published by Jan Herman. So much for well laid plans.

Ken Lopez changed my thinking on this issue. Lopez wrote a very well reasoned and informative article laying out the debate between signed and inscribed copies. Inscribed copies include anything from just the simple signature with a brief “To John Doe” to an unpublished, improvised poem handwritten on the title page by the author. Charles Bukowski was famous for the latter especially in his Loujon Press publications early in his publishing career. Before Lopez’s article, I would buy established association copies like Peace Eye, but I steered clear of simple inscribed copies to people I did not recognize. For years, the hierarchy of signed copies went dedication copy, association copy, presentation copy, and signed copy. In recent years, the simply signed copy superseded the simple inscribed or presentation copy (To John Doe, signed Y) in terms of desirability. Lopez convincingly argues for a return to traditional values. Inscribed or presentation copies can over time become something more important like an association copy as well as establishing provenance and authenticity. A simply signed copy will remain static, but even a dated signature can evolve into something more with added research and the passage of time.

As Lopez demonstrates, a signature is a signature but the inscribed copy carries the possibility of telling a story. Throughout literary history, certain individuals who started as mere book collectors have become intimately involved with the authors they collect. Louis Cohen with Hemingway and Carl Peterson with Faulkner are perfect examples. Cohen and Peterson’s collections formed the cornerstones of major bibliographies.

The same is true of William Burroughs. The first William Burroughs bibliography grew out of Joe Maynard’s book collection. In his introduction to the bibliography, Maynard writes, “From 1964 onward, I read and collected everything by WSB I could beg, borrow, steal, or buy, each new book, story, poem, or magazine article revealing some new technique, idea, experience, or facet of an author joyously, totally involved with being a writer and advancing the art of writing…” Sounds familiar. Maynard’s copy of any Burroughs book would be a major find and a true association copy.

The major Burroughs auction of the last twenty years was gathered together by Nelson Lyon. Auctioned by Pacific Book Galleries in 1999, I was lucky enough to buy several books inscribed to Lyon. A writer for Saturday Night Live and a producer, Lyon possesses some degree of notoriety in his own right. Lyon wrote with Terry Southern on SNL and started collecting Burroughs after his reading on the show in 1981. Lyon produced a few Burroughs spoken word CDs including Spare Ass Annie and Dead City Radio. The sheer breadth of material available at the Lyon sale would have made the collection special, but the fact that the items were owned and gathered by Lyon makes them even more unique and valuable. Given the relationship between Burroughs and Lyon, the inscriptions sometimes include a little extra something. As Lopez points out, each book related to Lyon tells an added story.

Several years ago I purchased a copy of Roosevelt After Inauguration signed by Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Roosevelt was originally written as a letter to Ginsberg so the presence of both signatures is very important to me. Burroughs’ signature was addressed to William Gambell dated August 1, 1996. The late date in 1996 (just a year before Burroughs’s death) adds significance. I am unsure if Ginsberg and Burroughs were present together signing my copy but if so this was one of the last meetings between the old collaborators and Beat icons. Their last public appearance occurred in Lawrence on November 2, 1996. When I bought the item, I knew nothing about Gambell. Turns out Gambell is an old friend of Burroughs and an original Merry Prankster to boot. The link with the Pranksters ties into the literary history and drug culture of the 1960s in which Burroughs played such an important part. On one level, I bought the piece because of the connection between Ginsberg and Burroughs but the inscription to Gambell proved a nice bonus. Researching Gambell and the August 1st meeting keeps this piece fresh and alive for me.

I own a few other association copies that provide a glimpse into Burroughs’ history including a British Ticket That Exploded inscribed by Burroughs to his agent Michael Henshaw. Henshaw was one of the founding editors of the British Underground newspaper, International Times, along with Barry Miles and Jim Haynes. He served as the accountant to Swinging London and was the respectable face behind the UFO shows that launched Pink Floyd. This copy of Ticket highlights Burroughs’ stay in London from 1966-1973 and shows how plugged-in to the British Underground he was.

My copy of the Olympia Press Soft Machine has seen better days but it is inscribed by both Maurice Girodias and Burroughs to Bruce Bailey. The name sounds very familiar to me but I have not been able to place it although I try from time to time. While the signatures fill me with joy, Bailey’s name adds a bit of mystery making the book one of the favorites of my collection despite all its flaws. The search goes on. Any information on Bailey out there?