Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I distinctly remember seeing Richard Hell prowling around — not at the New York City Book Fair at the Armory on Park Avenue but at the satellite fair on 18th Street. If you are hitting the satellite, you have the fever. I was not really in awe of seeing a punk god in the flesh, but I was struck by how cool it was that the singer of “The Blank Generation” is a book dork. Patti Smith: another book dork and proud of it. Reading Victor Bockris‘ With William Burroughs, it was cool to realize that Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie are book dorks. Burroughs is considered the Godfather of Punk. The father of Punk, Lou Reed, is a book dork, a former student of Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse University.

Obviously, New York Punk of the mid-1970s was a revolution in music and a revelation in fashion. In a series of essays being published in various academic journals, Daniel Kane explores the relevance of literature to Big Apple Punk beginning with the two book dorks mentioned above: Richard Hell and Patti Smith. As author and editor of All Poets Welcome and Don’t Ever Get Famous, Kane navigates the city’s — particularly the Lower East Side’s — literature (as well as this literature’s geography, landmarks, and secret locations). Like the most savvy cab driver reads the mean streets of Alphabet City, Kane takes you to places you never knew existed or thought of exploring. At their best, Kane’s essays get your motor running and your mind thinking in new and exciting ways about all the topics he covers. This can be a topic that threatens to become clichéd in established histories, in memoir accounts, and in my own preconceptions. An example for me is that of his treatment of Fuck You Press in All Poets Welcome.

Richard Hell, Genesis: Grasp, and the Blank Generation: From Poetry to Punk in New York’s Lower East Side

> Download Daniel Kane’s Essay, “Richard Hell, Genesis: Grasp, and the Blank Generation”

In a recent issue of Contemporary Literature, Daniel Kane suggests that “Richard Hell is a particularly interesting figure to consider in light of both the poets’ and punks’ engagement with and interrogation of underground and mainstream economies and their attendant aesthetics” and proceeds to give his close attention to Hell’s little magazine Genesis: Grasp. I was completely unaware of just how wide-ranging Hell’s connections within the poetry community actually were. Kane’s reading of Hell’s correspondence with Clark Coolidge and Bruce Andrews was a revelation for me. As always, Kane packs his footnotes with great information. For example, I spent some time thinking about the reference to Creeley’s Pieces in terms of the structure of Hell’s poetics, to say nothing of Hell’s songwriting.  

If anything, I feel that Kane is a bit conservative in his readings. Case in point, Kane expresses reservations about his take on Richard Hell’s hairstyle with its links to Rimbaud, Baudelaire’s “The Abyss,” Artaud, and Johnny Rotten. No need to worry; Kane’s reading was merely deeply thought-provoking. Kane’s trepidation stems from his position in academia and from the essay’s venue: Contemporary Literature. It must be tough for Kane to justify his interest in art and literature that sit on the fringes (if not totally outside) the canon to tenure boards. It is a shame that Kane has to look over his shoulder at certain points in his essays. In my opinion, Kane is at his best when he throws academic caution to the wind and lets his mind wander a bit.
 

Here is the drift of some of my thoughts as I meandered through Kane’s essay:

In the final issue of Genesis: Grasp, an image of Theresa Stern appears on the cover: “a person who, at first glance, appeared to be either a very rough-living, gaudy woman or a member of the New York Dolls. In fact, ‘Theresa’ was a composite shot of Tom Miller/Verlaine and Richard Meyers/Hell, with liberal doses of makeup.” The persona of Stern was a “breakthrough moment” in Hell’s transition from poetry to punk. Kane asks the question: “Who was this fictional Theresa Stern?” Kane makes some fascinating points in trying to answer that question but I think he misses a major reference point: Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy. Stern and Sélavy work in remarkably similar ways. Both emerged out of a series of photographs; both inspired playful speculations about their personal histories; both personas were used to authorize works of art and writing. Duchamp helped pioneer the idea of the artist as performer, as celebrity, which Hell draws on for his breakthrough moment from a little magazine to punk band. When you talk punk, the focus is on Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Artaud and other poètes maudits, but I think Duchamp is also a major figure of inspiration in terms of the connections between lifestyle and art.

Through his analysis, Kane provides some interesting food for thought regarding Hell’s grasp of the literary and the genesis of his engagement with punk. With Hell’s little magazine and his Dot Books project, I was struck that Hell obviously views those publications as physically beautiful objects. Yet the magazine Hell loves the most and sees as a guide, C: A Journal of Poetry, was actually sloppy and low-fi in terms of production. C: A Journal of Poetry, especially the later issues, barely holds together, since the magazine is too thick for the staples. The legal-size paper makes the magazine clumsy to store on bookshelves. Furthermore, its size lends itself to torn or bumped pages. The idea of mimeo as torn, ripped, stained goes back to a mag like Berrigan’s. C and other mimeo productions, like My Own Mag and Floating Bear, have more punk rock in their look and construction than Hell’s literary productions as I visualize them. There is something conservative underlying Hell’s literary enterprises, particularly in their appearance, which Hell sheds in favor of his punk rock persona of spiked hair, ripped shirts, etc. My Own Mag, C, and Floating Bear are ripped, torn, stapled, water-stained, mis-collated, cut, painted, etc. Later punk publications will be as well. But not Hell’s literary productions, like Dot, which will have “flashy glossy covers — blurbs, exclamation points, code numbers, pulpy paper inside. Hottest looking books that mimic drugstore paper backs.” This is POP art, not punk. Also if we take a mimeo publication as a stand-in for the physical body, as Hell, in fact, does in a letter to Bruce Andrews on 5th Collaboration, Hell proves reluctant to “Clip, Stamp, Fold,” to create something “Ripped and Torn,” or to “Slash,” as punks will do with both their publications and their bodies. Hell has a fetish towards print that places the little magazine and other publications on a pedestal and surrounds them with an aura. Hell is hesitant to destroy or desecrate his literary objects. Yet Hell’s poems do precisely that, particularly in literary acts of aggressive sexual fantasy. I think there is something interesting to be made of this, but it would take some thinking and more knowledge of Hell’s work than I have. Kane’s essay provides a great start to further academic work of this nature.
 

“Nor Did I Socialize with Their People”: Patti Smith, Rock Heroics, and the Poetics of Sociability

> Download Daniel Kane’s Essay, “‘Nor Did I Socialize with Their People’: Patti Smith, Rock Heroics, and the Poetics of Sociability”

Kane’s article on Patti Smith appeared in Volume 31/1 of the journal Popular Music earlier this year. Kane breaks it down as follows:

As I show, from her time as a young performance poet in New York in the late 1960s to her current position as punk rock’s éminence grise, Patti Smith foregrounded the image of the poet as privileged if dissident seer, and used this stance to inform her own projection and reception as rock’n'roll star. This, I will argue, was predicated on Smith’s initial attraction to, subsequent argument with, and ultimate rejection of an adamantly grass-roots poetry culture based in downtown New York, committed to a poetics of sociability — a term I will illustrate on subsequent pages. By reading Smith’s investment in poetry within the context of Smith’s activity in the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church, the pre-eminent public face of the Lower East Side poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s, we can begin to see how Smith’s complex negotiations between poetry and music fed into the development of her own brand of proto-punk rock.

Yet another fascinating article by Kane. Kane chronicles Smith struggling within the New York art and poetry community to establish her voice and make her voice heard. Reading the essay again recently, I spent a couple late nights on YouTube watching various Patti Smith readings and concerts to get a sense of Smith’s “complex negotiations between poetry and music.” For years, I have been returning obsessively to Smith’s performance of “Hey Joe/Horses” in 1976 on the Old Grey Whistle Stop. The Patti Smith persona would be fully under her command by the time of “Because the Night” in 1978. All complex negotiations are established by this point.

This was not always the case. Searching yet again on YouTube for my coveted performance of “Hey Joe/Horses,” I came across a simple black and white short, filmed by photographer Bob Gruen, of Smith performing “Hey Joe” at Max’s of Kansas City in 1974. Max’s is a place in-between. Not just a restaurant, not just a bar, not just a concert space, not just a coffeehouse or gallery. It defied categories. Max’s was just Max’s: a one-of-a-kind spot that could only exist in the unique time and space of New York’s alternative art scene.

Like a Warhol screen test, Gruen’s camera never moves; there are no edits. Smith stands, simply dressed in a white T-shirt, in front of a tape deck, which plays the previously recorded instrumental track of “Hey Joe,” probably as performed by her band. Yet Smith is painfully alone here. This is a solo performance. In fact, it is a poetry reading. What we have in this footage by Gruen is the bridge from the readings of the Poetry Project to the “live” performances on television venues, such as the Old Grey Whistle Stop. As such, it perfectly captures Smith navigating between poetry and music and developing “her own brand of proto-punk rock.”

Immediately, I sent the footage to Kane, and he, like me, was blown away. It is no doubt rare footage, as neither of us had ever seen it before. But will we ever see it again? Almost as soon as I saw the video, it was pulled for copyright reasons. Possibly Gruen (or his estate or agent) objected to the posting. This is a real shame. I do not want to get all hot and bothered about the fact that information, like this video of “Hey Joe,” needs to be available for download where it can be free. I also do not want to get all indignant and start screaming about fair use, but clearly there is a scholarly need for videos like this to be available for study, as Kane’s article proves. Leaving aside academic use and its small audience, having Smith’s Max’s performance freely available, to my mind, only increases a deeper appreciation and understanding of the work of Smith (and Gruen). I would think that would be a good thing, including on a commercial level, for all involved.

Watching this video and reading Kane’s article got me thinking about Anne Waldman. Much is made of all the macho posturing and pissing matches among the men in the art and literary scene of the Lower East Side, but there was no doubt just as fierce competition between women. Anne Waldman and Patti Smith seem on point in this regard. Smith’s “initial attraction to, subsequent argument with” the Lower East Side community in large part relates to Waldman. If there were a king and a queen of the prom that was the Lower East Side poetry scene, Berrigan would be the king and Waldman would be the queen. In the late 1960s, Waldman’s apartment was the secret location for all manner of poets and artists. A clubhouse, a hangout. The Poetry Project, with Waldman running the show, was the public face of a more informal community. In this Breakfast Club of the Lower East Side scene, Smith is Ally Sheedy to Waldman’s Molly Ringwald.  

Smith would eventually leave the Poetry Project behind but Smith left her mark there and on Waldman as well. Is there anything to the fact that Waldman writes and then publishes “Fast Speaking Woman,” a performance poem that makes full use of the shaman as poetess persona, around the time Smith is negotiating her version of the shaman through Rimbaud and Jim Morrison? Was it just in the air? Did Smith prepare Waldman to make the jump to reading in a concert setting in the Rolling Thunder Revue? Did Smith’s performance and reading style, such as that at Max’s “Hey Joe,” influence Waldman’s reading delivery? Listen to early Waldman doing “Fast Talking Woman” and then listen to her later readings. They definitely get more punk rock and theatrical. Again this was definitely in the air. Waldman could point to Jim Carroll, Allen Ginsberg (and the Clash), Bob Dylan, even Richard Hell as influences, but I would think Smith plays in here as well. What about Waldman’s and Smith’s sense of fashion? Did everybody wear vests, scarves and men’s shirts? Did everybody look like Annie Hall?  

Yes, both Waldman and Smith did the poet as rock star thing, but clearly Waldman’s “Uh oh, Plutonium” of 1982 is miles away from Smith’s “Hey Joe” of 1974. So maybe I am forcing connections because they are both female poets, and there is a tendency (a prejudice) to compare within genders, races, sexualities. All white basketball stars are the next Larry Bird. But even the differences between Smith and Waldman are interesting and say a lot about each poet-performer and her aesthetic. And, I think, ultimately how Smith and Waldman influenced each other; even if in terms of something to react against or steer clear from. Okay, maybe “Hey Joe” and “Uh, Oh Plutonium” reveal more about my aesthetic. I much prefer Smith’s scalding, electric version of “Hey Joe,” which moves from the garage to the alleyways of the LSE to Waldman’s cause-rock drenched in the look of the early 80s. In the world of poet rock, I think Waldman is better served when she draws on the performance style of Smith, as in some renditions of “Fast Speaking Woman,” rather than leaning on Allen Ginsberg. “Don’t smoke” is a drag.  

Wholly Communion, Literary Nationalism, and the Sorrows of the Counterculture

> Download Daniel Kane’s Essay, “Wholly Communion, Literary Nationalism, and the Sorrows of the Counterculture”

The essays on Smith and Hell provide the foundation to what should prove to be a fascinating and informative collection of essays along the lines of the Kane-edited Don’t Ever Get Famous, or, even more on point, Kane’s We Saw The Light: Conversations Between New American Cinema and Poetry. If the punk book ever does get published, he should consider including his recent essay on the Royal Albert Hall Reading of 1965 and Whitehead’s documentary Wholly Communion as a preface of sorts. Published in 2011 in Framework, Kane argues that

Wholly Communion is a film that is both deeply moving and markedly melancholic. It reveals the belated status of British poetry and poetics as it is manifested through its relationship to the American avant-garde. It shows not merely that American writers were “ahead” of their British counterparts, but, I would propose, makes larger (if perhaps unintended) claims about the difficulty in trying to forge a community-oriented, internationalist, hierarchy-free counterculture.

Where is the connection to punk? Well, the Royal Albert Hall reading was one of the first instances of poets taking on (or attempting to take on) the personas of rock stars and staging a poetry reading not as a jazz session but as a rock concert. It is in effect proto-punk in a similar manner as performances by The Velvet Underground, The MC5, or The Fugs.

The question I was left with after reading the essay is whether the Royal Albert Hall Reading and the atmosphere surrounding it really demonstrate the belated status of British poetry and how American poets felt about the British poetry scene. Whitehead’s film may express such a belief, but I have always been struck by just how behind American poets felt they were to their British counterparts. Of course, their peers were not really British poets, but British rock stars. In some respects, English pop culture was far more hip and progressive than Beat culture. In fact, the Beat writers (and poetry in general) with its Ginsbergian comb-over were old, out of fashion, and in danger of becoming irrelevant. Around this period, Ginsberg writes that Liverpool was the cultural center of the world, and it is clear that, if Ginsberg was not threatened by the Liverpool poets, he was terrified, fascinated, and envious of the Fab Four and their brethren. British writing might suck, but the scene across the pond was really hopping at this point in all other cultural respects from fashion to art to hairdressing. That is why the Warhol crew was in London at the time of the Royal Albert Hall reading. Warhol, like Ginsberg, was stalking the competition. New York’s status as the center of taste-making was being threatened by Swinging London.

With this in mind, the Albert Hall reading can be viewed as an attempt to reverse the British Invasion that Ginsberg witnessed in 1964 in the United States. Ginsberg was in New York City at the time of the Beatles landing, and would have seen the Ed Sullivan Show, the greeting of fans at the airport, and the hip interviews. In short order the Beatles wiped the top 10 pop charts clean of American music and American culture. The Beach Boys and Motown were no longer relevant. British culture seemed to be sweeping across the United States. Whitehead’s movie reveals not so much literary nationalism but, in fact, an act of literary imperialism.  

For example at the Royal Albert Hall, Ferlinghetti did not so much attempt to build a global community as challenge the rest of the world to follow the American model. Cold War imperialism hovers over Ferlinghetti’s challenge to Voznesensky and Neruda, his scolding of Czechoslovakia, and his entire reading. I am thinking of the role of Abstract Expressionist art in the Cold War: The goal was to create an umbrella out of American creative freedom and culture under which all endangered nations could gather in protection from the oncoming Red Storm.

Similarly, Ginsberg came to Britain in order to bring its upstart culture under his control. Kane suggests a sexual relationship or attraction between Harry Fainlight and Ginsberg. In his written account, Whitehead writes of Fainlight’s reading, “But Harry knew. The mood had gone. Cut off in full thrust. Denied the orgasm. He was crying now with abject misery, frustration and rage. He’d lost his erection.” Ginsberg takes Fainlight into his lap after Fainlight’s reading with a refrain of “COME COME” echoing throughout the Hall. It is no doubt true that this episode demonstrates the virility of American poets and the impotence of British poetry. And yet it also reflects the anxiety of an American such as Ginsberg. Interestingly, Ginsberg replaces the spent British poet, Fainlight, with Barbara Rubin, who was Bob Dylan’s girlfriend for a time and a member of the Warhol circle. She was also a talented underground filmmaker in her own right. Ginsberg’s attraction to Rubin can be interpreted as a way of attempting to gain power over the much more relevant and vibrant mediums of rock music, Pop Art, and underground film. 

It is telling that Kane compares Ginsberg’s reading at the Royal Albert Hall to music. For example, Kane refers to the presence of a dancing girl in Whitehead’s film. Kane also mentions the Grateful Dead in this context. Truly, rock music is crucial to understanding why Ginsberg arrived in London in 1965. The Beatles, like sirens, drew the wandering Ginsberg in from his travels throughout Europe and inspired him to organize a reading at the specific location of the Albert Hall. Ginsberg wanted to put on a rock concert. The melancholy of the movie may be due to the fact that Beat poetry as social force was in decline, and that a poetry reading may never again be an effective way to connect with the mass populace. Beat poetry will never be the center of a counterculture, as in the Age of the Romantics and of Shelley’s Legislator. The scenes of miscommunication among the poets and the audience not listening during the reading reflect the irrelevance of Beat poetry in the face of rock music. On June 11, 1965, the Beat poets perform their Last Waltz. By the following summer, the Beatles will take back Albert Hall and the role of poetry from Ginsberg and company. With Sgt. Pepper, rock music and rock musicians officially become poetry and poets. The popular audience will in turn lavish close readings on rock lyrics in a way that was once the privilege of poetry. In my eyes, there is a reference to the Royal Albert Reading in “A Day in the Life.” How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall? This represents the Beatles’ triumph over, and kiss off to, their Beat namesakes. The once powerful Beat poets and their audience are now merely assholes.  

I highly recommend spending some time with Kane’s three most recent essays. They demonstrate that he continues to provide some fresh licks to the tired old song and dance of literary criticism. When you are a solo artist like Daniel Kane, working for a media corporation, like the University of Sussex, you have to put your material on vinyl, i.e., in a codex, preferably from a well-known academic label. I would prefer that he belt out his hits in a different venue, such as online. The Wholly Communion essay suggests a move in that direction. The potential audience seems much greater and the ease of access definitely is. This would truly be punk rock.  

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The 1960s began in Britain exactly forty-five years ago on 11 June 1965. The International Poetry Incarnation at Royal Albert Hall featured Alexander Trocchi, Harry Fainlight, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Anselm Hollo, Simon Vinkenoog and host of others. The disembodied voice of William Burroughs via tape recording filtered through the hall as well. Here is the program for the event, which was handed out as one entered the hall, and a handbill announcing the reading. It was probably mimeo’d by Bob Cobbing at Better Books.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti read To Fuck Is To Love Again and brought down the house. Fuck You Press printed this poem in a standalone edition. Long Hair and Residu were two little magazines that captured the literary scene on display at Royal Albert Hall. Long Hair reflected the Better Books / Indica Bookshop community and was edited by Barry Miles. Residu was edited by Royal Albert Hall attendee Daniel Richter.

Program
International Poetry Incarnation at Royal Albert Hall
11 June 1965

Program
International Poetry Incarnation at Royal Albert Hall
11 June 1965

Handbill
International Poetry Incarnation at Royal Albert Hall
11 June 1965

Residue
Issue 1

Residue
Issue 2

Long Hair

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
To Fuck Is to Love Again

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Date: February 14, 1965

The first thing I think about when I consider William Burroughs’ St. Valentine’s Day Reading is the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. On that date, five members of the Bugs Moran Gang and two others were shot at SMC Cartage Company on the North Side of Chicago mostly likely under the orders of Al Capone. The crime was never solved.  

Burroughs was fascinated by the underworld and no doubt the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre played into his reading in 1965, which featured a tape-recorded version of the last words of Dutch Schultz. Schultz was murdered at the Palace Chophouse in Newark by Mendy Weiss and Charlie “The Bug” Workman in 1935. Famously, Schultz slipped in and out of consciousness for 22 hours after the shooting as police stenographers recorded his dying words. Burroughs viewed the transcript as a natural cut-up. The cut-ups were all about revealing hidden links — ones that Burroughs believed were a form of prophecy and time travel.

While writing about Dutch Schultz, Burroughs was pleased to discover that Schultz had arranged the murder of Mad Dog Coll in 1931 on 23rd Street. Coll was 23 years old. Dutch Schultz died on October 23, 1935 and Charlie Workman served 23 years of his life sentence before he was paroled. The number 23 haunted Burroughs and he kept a scrapbook dedicated to the number. This interest in numerology began when Burroughs met a Captain Clark in Tangier who piloted a ferry to Spain. Clark navigated the route for 23 years without incident, yet after talking to Burroughs the ferry sank. That same night a flight from New York to Miami, Flight 23, crashed. The plane was piloted by a Captain Clark. And the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre occurred on 2122 North Clark Street.

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that the death of Joan was also on Burroughs’ mind as he dictated the dying words of Dutch Schultz on St. Valentine’s Day? St. Valentine’s Day was not associated with romantic love until Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1300s linked the day with the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. Later, as the day became increasingly commercialized, the martyred St. Valentine was tied to marriage as well. A priest during the reign of Claudius, Valentine secretly arranged marriages for young soldiers to their brides despite the fact that Claudius had outlawed such ceremonies. Claudius discovered Valentine’s secret ceremonies and had him executed. Further embellishments suggested that the doomed Valentine wrote the first Valentine’s Day card to his beloved on the eve of his execution. Thus St. Valentine became a martyr for marriage. As I have suggested in my piece on the death of Joan, the William Tell shooting can be viewed as a perverse wedding ceremony, a shotgun wedding of sorts in which Joan is sacrificed on the altar to free Burroughs from family obligations into a life of creative freedom. Joan may have been, like St. Valentine, a martyr tied to love and marriage.  

Much has been made of the fact that the last words of Dutch Schultz fascinated Burroughs due to its cut-up qualities, but equally haunting is the forgotten fact that Joan did not die instantly after she was shot. Accounts vary but it is generally agreed that Joan clung to life for up to an hour. She received blood transfusions in an effort to save her life. As Joan was shot, she emitted a death rattle like a snore. She lost consciousness, but possibly, like Dutch Schultz, she muttered some last words in her final hour. If she did speak on her death bed, Burroughs did not transcribe her words. Did she curse her killer? Did she say good-bye? Maybe she remained silent. What is clear is that Burroughs did not speak of it.

The Time: Sunday 4:00pm

The American Theatre for Poets held poetry readings on Sunday afternoons. Plays were performed on Saturday nights. Given that Burroughs’ reading occurred not just on Valentine’s Day but on a Sunday, the liturgy comes to mind. Dutch Schultz died at the age of 33, the same age as Christ. “The Priest they called him.” Is the fallen Burroughs giving a Black Mass? Is he asking for forgiveness for his sins? Or is this all coincidence?  

Venue: American Theatre of Poets at the East End Theater on 85 E. 4th Street, near Second Avenue.

East 4th Street was known as Off-Off Broadway Row, the epicenter in New York City for experimental theater. The Fourth Street Theatre, located at 83 E. 4th Street, housed theater productions and poetry readings. The New York Theater Workshop was at 79 E. 4th Street. In 1958, the Royal Playhouse was located at 62 E. 4th Street. La Mama Experimental Theatre Club was at 74A E. 4th Street. La Mama became a landmark, staging work by Diane Di Prima, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard among others.  

The American Theatre of Poets evolved out of the New York Poets Theatre, which had been established by Alan Marlowe, James Waring, Leroi Jones, Diane Di Prima and others to provide an outlet for drama, poetry and dance created by the multitude of artists in their circle. By 1965, the theater specialized in one-act plays by New York School poets accompanied by set design by a host of local artists. The American Theatre moved around a bit, but found a home at 85 E. 4th Street, The Downtown Theater. By the time Di Prima and company moved in, the theater was renamed The East End Theater. The building was actually the Ukrainian Labor Home, a home base for Ukrainian socialists. Known around the neighborhood as the Ukrainian Dance Hall, the tenement building had a large dance hall on the first floor, and a bar and a club upstairs. The American Theatre for Poets rented the dance hall, which held about 129 people. The bar would be open at intermissions. Burroughs read in this dance hall. Alan Marlowe spent quite a bit of energy fixing the space up and Frank O’Hara declared that it was “a jewelbox of a theater” on par with European art theatres. Today, the KGB Bar and the Red Room Theater are at this location, continuing the long tradition of experimental poetry and theater at this location. The KGB bar has a nice history of the location. 

Burroughs’ return to the East Village must have come with bittersweet memories. In 1953, Burroughs had stayed in Allen Ginsberg’s third-floor apartment (No. 16) at 206 E. 7th Street in the shadow of St. Brigid’s Church and near Tompkins Square. It could be argued that Burroughs the writer was conceived here and not in Mexico City. In this cramped apartment, Queer and The Yage Letters were put together with Ginsberg’s assistance and the initial notes to Naked Lunch were jotted down. The view from the fire escape proved pivotal in the development of Interzone and The Composite City. Yet ultimately, the Lower East Side must have been a place of great sadness for Burroughs, since Ginsberg had rejected his “tired, old cock” here, thus spurring Burroughs into exile in Tangier. Maybe that is why Burroughs stayed in the Chelsea Hotel and the financial district (210 Centre Street) during his return to New York in 1964/1965. There were too many ghosts haunting the Lower East Side.

In the 1970s, Burroughs would live six blocks south at 222 Bowery. Leroi Jones and Hettie Cohen (Jones’ first wife) lived right around the corner from the Theatre at 27 Cooper Square at 5th Street. In 1965, Jones would leave Cohen and his children to become a black radical. He would relocate to Harlem. Diane Di Prima lived at 35 Cooper Square. She had an affair with Jones in this period and had a child with him. The Floating Bear was edited and published in this apartment.

The Program

The American Theatre for Poets issued a program to be distributed at Burroughs’ reading. It is a simple mimeo publication that looks just like an issue of Floating Bear. I suspect Diane Di Prima printed them up on her mimeograph. Around this time, Di Prima acquired an offset press and began Poets Press. The press operated out of 35 Cooper Square. The Beautiful Days was the first publication of the press with poems by A.B. Spellman and an introduction by Frank O’Hara. Di Prima self-published Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin and Huncke’s Journal in 1965. The program, however, is clearly mimeo. The paper has a nice shimmer to it as silver sparkles appear on the paper. The seven-page program reprinted the official deathbed transcripts of Dutch Schultz as transcribed in shorthand by police stenographer F. J. Lang. As a result, I do not consider this version of Dutch Schultz an original Burroughs piece. Interestingly, the transcript of the last words of Dutch Schultz had appeared in The New York Times in 1935. In a sense, the paper of record printed a cut-up years before Gysin and Burroughs rediscovered the technique. This is hinted at in the Burroughs program, which concludes with a reprinting of The Coldspring News. This cut-up piece had appeared in a newspaper three-column format in The Spero in 1965. The version published in the program is not in the original three-column format but the references to the newspaper remain in the title and the listing of Burroughs as editor.

The Reading

On Saturday February 13, 1965, the American Theatre for Poets presented New York poet Barbara Guest’s play, Port: A Murder in One Act (collected in the June 2008 issue of Chicago Review). According to Di Prima, production for this play was disorganized at best and subsequently Di Prima became more involved in directing the plays. By 1965, the plays of the American Theatre were more East Coast, more New York than ever before. I wonder if the selection of a murder-mystery was a comment on the mysterious circumstances of the William Tell shooting?

The next day Burroughs read selections from Naked Lunch and Junkie, but the most interesting part of his reading was the tape-recorded cut-up derived from the deathbed ravings of Dutch Schultz intercut with news articles on Vietnam and air crashes. This reading shows Burroughs at his most Pop. Harry Gilroy, reviewing the reading in the New York Times, describes the audience’s shock and nervous laughter. In reviewing another Burroughs reading at Wynn Chamberlain’s apartment in April, Gilroy again focussed on the bewildered audience reaction. At this time, Burroughs was interested in Happenings and participated with Brion Gysin and others in such events.  

Gangster funerals, airline crashes, and Vietnam. Sound familiar? It should. The Dutch Schultz recording echoes the Death and Disaster series initiated by Andy Warhol in 1962 and concluded in 1965. Burroughs’ obsessions parallel Warhol’s closely. The Dutch Schultz cut-ups make me think of Warhol’s Gangster Funeral (1963) or his Electric Chair silkscreens. The 1962 silkscreen 129 Die in Jet touches on Burroughs’ fascination with airline crashes, such as that involving Captain Clark. Furthermore 129 Die compares in form and content with Burroughs’ scrapbook pages, particularly Tornado Dead: 223. Warhol used a June 4, 1962 Daily Mirror front page for this silkscreen. In fact, Warhol used newspaper and magazine imagery for much of the Death and Disaster series. In this period both Warhol and Burroughs manipulated and detourned mass media images for artistic and political effect.  

For me nowhere are the similarities between Burroughs’ and Warhol’s artistic obsessions more noticeable than in Warhol’s Death and Disaster thermofaxes of 1964-1965. Much of this imagery came from tabloids. This is Warhol at his most literary and most involved with the New York literary scene. Warhol thermofax work appeared in Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts (the infamous Couch cover) and in connection with New York poets like Ron Padgett (2/2 Stories for Andy Warhol) and Ted Berrigan. Berrigan published C: A Journal of Poetry, and Issue 9, which featured Burroughs’ work, was published on the day of Burroughs’ reading.  

The Death and Disaster thermofaxes were collaborations between Gerard Malanga, who provided poems, and Warhol, who provided the images. These pieces merge text and image much like Burroughs’ cut-up scrapbooks such as Time or APO-33. The Dead Star by Burroughs as published by My Own Mag or Jan Herman‘s Nova Broadcast reads like Burroughs’ spin on Warhol’s Death and Disaster thermofaxes. Unpublished and largely unseen Burroughs works of the period have even more of a Warholian feel. “Birdie Does the Watching” or “Sturdy Steel Snap-Tight,” pictured in the landmark and hugely important monograph Ports of Entry, in particular, have the gritty, raw photocopy look of Warhol’s thermofaxes.

At one time, Warhol was closely involved with major figures of The American Theatre for Poets. Alan Marlowe and Diane Di Prima were filmed by Warhol and entered Warhol’s circle, but the major point of intersection was dancer Freddie Herko, an intimate of Warhol, Marlowe, and Di Prima. Herko committed suicide in his final “performance,” dancing out of Johnny Dodd’s apartment window on October 27, 1964. Warhol had little to do with the members of the American Theatre after Herko’s death, and this suicide served as an end of an era for the New York art and dance scene, much like the shooting of Warhol would for the art and film scene in 1968.

Despite the fact that by 1965 Warhol had moved on to other interests, I see Warhol present at least in spirit at Burroughs’ reading at The American Theatre. Perhaps those silver flecks on the cover of the program are a sly reference to Warhol. Probably not. I must admit that I consider Warhol and Burroughs the most interesting and important artist and writer of the post-WWII era, particularly in the 1960s. I find the Death and Disaster series to be Warhol’s finest achievement and the cut-ups of the same period to be Burroughs’ creative pinnacle. In short, I see Burroughs and Warhol everywhere. In that case, the program serves as a mirror, and my own interests and obsessions are merely reflected back from the mimeographed page.  

The Recording

At the reading, a tape was recorded of Burroughs. It is unclear to me if this refers to the Dutch Schultz tape itself, a recording of that tape, or a selected recording of Burroughs’ other readings on that day. It is merely a selection and not the whole reading. OU, a magazine run by Henri Chopin, which published the Electronic Revolution in 1971, issued a 10? LP in 1972 and 1973, which includes this recording. The 1972 LP (OU Revuedisque 40-41) provides 10’15″ or 9’45″ (accounts vary) of Burroughs’ reading on Side A and was included in each of the 500 copies of the magazine. The 1973 LP (OU Revuedisque 42-43-44) contain a slightly shorter portion of the reading at 8’40″ and was tipped into the each of the 500 copies of the magazine. Like Aspen, OU came in a box and was a multimedia affair. In both cases, LPs were available separate from the magazine. In 2002, the complete recordings of OU were released on 4 CDs (1500 copies), which contain both versions of the reading. I have tracked down a standalone copy of OU Revuedisque 40-41 (roughly 75 copies were available in this format), which also contains recording of J.A. da Silva, Brion Gysin, Bernard Heidsieck, and Henri Chopin.

• Download Track 1 of the Valentine’s Day Reading
• Download Track 2 of the Valentine’s Day Reading

Bibliography

The program for the reading was reprinted in whole or in part in little magazines on rare occasion. Those that I am aware of include:

Krea Kritiek 5 (May 1965) (The Transcript of Dutch Schultz)
Intrepid 14/15: The William Burroughs Special (Winter 1969) (the entire program)

If anyone attended the Valentine’s Day reading and has photos or reminiscences, please contact RealityStudio to share. Thank you.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

On Monday, November 5th, I attended the John Ashbery reading at the Folger Library in Washington DC. I found out about it at the last minute and assumed that it would be sold out (like a Ferlinghetti reading years before) but tickets were still available on Friday afternoon. I was surprised, but apparently a lot of people have never heard of the man considered by many to be “the greatest living American poet.” And of those who have, quite a few have not read his work. Ashbery is like Pynchon, a name to be thrown around and discussed at a certain kind of dinner party to demonstrate your wide reading even if you have not done the heavy lifting of actually turning the pages. In the case of Pynchon’s Against the Day that is a lot of pages.

As I have written in the Bunker, Ashbery’s and Burroughs’ literary concerns and personal lives seem to circle around each other without actually meeting. Paris in the 1950s, New York in the mid-1960s, the use of the cut-up technique at roughly the same time (Tennis Court Oath in 1962 overlaps chronologically with Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy). In addition, both writers made a much anticipated return to the United States after long exile. Their arrival in New York City occurred at roughly the same time. On their returns, both writers exerted a tremendous influence on the New York scene, particularly the Lower East Side, right before the Summer of Love. Ted Berrigan, for example, courted both Ashbery and Burroughs in 1964-1965. Burroughs and Ashbery appeared in some of the same little mags and, more interesting to me, Ashbery included Burroughs in the mags he had a hand in creating: Locus Solus and Art and Literature. Clearly, Ashbery recognized that Burroughs, unlike most of the Beats, had a tie to the European avant garde back to Dada and Surrealism. These ties went forward as well to the post-abstract expressionist concerns that circulated on the Continent in the early 1960s.

Anyway I see a lot of connections between the two, but when I ask around about this most people want to maintain the personal and creative distance between them. I think it has to do with the level of respectability and acceptance that Ashbery has achieved despite his radical beginnings. By those beginnings, I am thinking of the general reception for Tennis Court Oath. It was a stink bomb in the ivory tower, like the cut-up novels. Nobody knew what to do with Burroughs and Ashbery at the time, but with the success of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery’s radical past has been covered up.

Burroughs’ reputation has come a long way, but as much as it pains me to say it, he is still a cult figure in the mind of the mainstream (read: New York-based publishing houses that control the more established awards and fill the bulk of what passes for literary reviews with content and advertising). At present, Ashbery has left the literary scene represented by Locus Solus and Art and Literature behind. Ashbery described those publications to me as “fringe.” In a way, Ashbery is still fringe as is all poetry in this day and age, but he is one of the big fish in the small pond. A peculiarly and particularly exotic one that in the past three decades has been reclassified and reexamined into something more mundane and common. A rare koi in a ornate Japanese rock pool dressed down into a goldfish in a Ziploc bag.

Marjorie Perloff wrote about this transformation in an article entitled “Normalizing John Ashbery” in 1998. Ron Silliman has been talking about it in his blog since 2002. Poetically, conservative critics ignore the fact that Ashbery came out of the New American Poetry Anthology of 1960 and that he was and is a participant and influence on all the more radical aspects of New American poetry since that point. Instead, Ashbery is placed more comfortably in the tradition of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. He becomes a lyric poet. The interest in this co-opting and transformation go back to 1976 when Ashbery won the poetic equivalent of the Triple Crown for Self Portrait (the Pulitzer, the Book Circle Award and the National Book Award). He became simply too important a poet to ignore.

So the Folger Reading is part and parcel of a process that has been going on for years. The reading was co-sponsored by The Poetry Society of America. Moderators included Michael Collier, the director at Breadloaf, and Alice Quinn, the director of the Society and editor at the New Yorker. You had some idea of the type of Ashbery that was going to be presented at the Folger when he was introduced as one of the finest practitioners of the lyric. I think Ashbery sized up his audience during the various introductions and did an about face as a result. He seemed a little flustered at the beginning of his reading searching for what to read. He stated he was going to scrap his planned reading and choose some poems on the spot. He basically called an audible. So what did he choose? He read four poems but two of them stand out. He read the double sestina derived from Swinburne from Flow Chart and the title poem of Hotel Lautréamont, another complex poetic form in this case a pantoum. Interesting choices. The more poetically conservative elements in the literary world, called the School of Quietude by Ron Silliman, have been grasping onto poems like these from Ashbery’s career to place him within their ranks. Surely the presence of closed forms (and obscure ones at that) make Ashbery a poet of a traditional nature and not one of Whitman’s Wild Children, like the Black Mountaineers or the Beats. Clearly, these forms translate into a stable, recognizable meaning. But not so fast. Ashbery stressed at the reading that he found incredible freedom in such restrictive forms. In addition, Ashbery’s comments and answers at the reading highlighted his continued support for innovation, fluidity of meaning, difficulty, complexity, obscurity, and freedom in poetry.

The questions and answers regarding W.H. Auden show Ashbery staining against the normalizing process. The moderator opened his questions by asking about the influence of Auden on Ashbery. This is a fairly standard question given the fact that Auden was responsible for the publication of Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees, in the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. O’Hara came in second. Commonly the link to Auden highlights a view of Ashbery as part of the tradition of Eliot and Stevens. Again the key is what Auden you are linking to. Ashbery took great pains to associate himself with the early Auden whom Ashbery described as a “gnarly” and difficult poet. Ashbery stated that when he first approached Auden’s work it confused and startled him unlike other work (like Robinson or Frost) in the Louis Untermeyer Anthology that indoctrinated many a poet of Ashbery’s generation. Ashbery stressed complexity, difficulty, obscurity. Ashbery also expressed his regret that Auden edited and distanced himself from his early work in his later life. As Auden got older, he attempted to tailor his work to fit his more conservative and mainstream poetic position. Ashbery saw this as unfortunate just as the same process was for T.S. Eliot and Wordsworth. Ashbery linked himself with early Auden, early Eliot, and early Wordsworth. Likewise, critic Marjorie Perloff sees early Auden and the more radical early Eliot as key influences on Ashbery.

For me an entirely different Auden came to mind when his name was brought up at the Folger. I immediate thought of his underground poem “The Platonic Blow” published by Ed Sanders’ Fuck You Press in 1965. Rumors of the poem had been in circulation for years, and Sanders basically stole the poem from a library and pirated it on his mimeo. It throws into the forefront the gay Auden. Similarly, critics have attempted to out Ashbery. I am thinking of the study On the Outside Looking Out by John Shoptaw that reads a gay subtext into Ashbery’s work. I think Auden was also an influence on Ashbery because he provided a model of how to be a gay poet in his art and in public. Like Auden, Ashbery played his sexuality close to the vest and never became a public figure as a sexual being like Ginsberg or O’Hara. Possibly, Auden chose Ashbery over O’Hara for the Yale Younger Poets Series because he saw more of himself in Ashbery on a literary and personal level. As person and as poet, Ashbery was more reserved and private, while O’Hara was more flamboyant and public.

I also thought that Robert Frost hovered over the reading, but I did not know why. Ever since I read The Tennis Court Oath I have felt that the title poem and the book was a response to Frost’s statement that “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the nets down.” I cannot get other people to see a connection, but Frost was much on the New York School’s mind in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Frost was the granddaddy of American poets, the definition of the establishment. Not surprisingly, the younger New York Schoolers were interested in Frost as poet and public figure. Kenneth Koch wrote Mending Sump as a parody on Mending Wall. In The Last Avant Garde, David Lehman suggests that one of the reasons O’Hara does not like Lionel Trilling in Personal Poem (written in 1959) was because of a talk Trilling gave on Frost at the time. At the Folger, Ashbery mentioned that Frost was one of the poets he encountered and confronted while reading the Untermeyer Anthology.

Yet that did not explain why I was thinking of Frost. After a little research, I discovered why. In 1995, Ashbery won the Robert Frost Poetry Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the Poetry Society. His acceptance speech, published in Ashbery’s Selected Prose, touches on many of the archetypal moments and anecdotes that came up at the Folger. Ashbery’s reaction to the 1936 issue of Time featuring the Surrealists or Ashbery’s decision to become a poet and not a painter because, like William Carlos Williams, he felt poems were easier to carry are two examples. The Frost Award, like the Folger reading, is an example of the conservative elements in poetry trying to claim Ashbery for their camp. Not surprisingly, Ashbery presented himself in a similar manner in these two instances. But as I have suggested, Ashbery not only played to his audience, but also subverted these attempts by remaining true to his avant nature.

I think the figure of Frost, like Auden, is interesting in light of Ashbery for another reason on view at the Folger. At 80 years old, Ashbery is the celebrated poet in old age — a role both Frost and Auden played as Ashbery became established as a poet. Unlike Auden, Ashbery has refused to edit out his early poetry from the canon even if conservative critics are trying to do it for him. Yet he seems like Auden and Frost in his aloofness to the poetry scene around him. At the Folger, Ashbery was asked about his role as poet laureate of MTV. He was quite funny on this topic. He thought it was great as long as he and MTV did not have to do anything. Ashbery wondered when he was getting paid. During the audience Q & A, the question arose on Ashbery’s impressions of slam and performance poetry. Ashbery admitted he knew little about it stating that he preferred poetry on the page and in solitude. This ties Ashbery back to the more conservative elements in poetry. When asked about readings, Ashbery said they were nice as they got him out of his apartment. This is speculation but I got the sense that he has little contact with the larger poetry community and liked it that way. I got the sense that Ashbery’s apartment was not a Mecca for young poets. In these ways, Ashbery differs from William Carlos Williams and Pound in their old age. Despite their isolation, Williams and Pound remained in close contact with the poetry scene of the times. Williams mentored a young Allen Ginsberg from Rutherford as well as Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Lew Welch in his late readings. Pound provided advice from afar to writers like Creeley and Ginsberg. Despite his silence late in life, poets sought to sit at the feet of Pound at various poetry festivals in Italy deep into the 1960s. Poets fed off Pound’s mere presence. Does Ashbery serve a similar function or is he impersonal and unapproachable like late Auden and Frost? I do not know. It would be interesting to know the makeup of the audience of the Folger. Who comprised the majority of the audience? Young poets, grad students, professors, or wealthy patrons of the Folger and the DC Arts scene?

As I drove home to Baltimore after the reading, my mind went back to another Ashbery reading almost 45 years earlier. I do not know if this is fair but it provides some interesting contrasts. In September of 1963, Ashbery read at the Living Theatre. The contrast of the Living Theatre with the Elizabethan Theatre of the Folger is very interesting to me. The home of The Connection or The Brig versus As You Like It. In 1963, Ashbery read in the physical and geographical center of the New York avant garde. In exile in Paris for close to a decade, Ashbery came home to a particular New York: the city at the dawn of the creative boom of the Sixties. By 2007, Ashbery was celebrated in a shrine to Shakespeare and not be treated as an invader or an outsider. Emily Dickinson is receiving similar treatment this year. Interestingly, there are competing views of Dickinson’s legacy with various poetic camps claiming her legacy. In addition, the reading in Washington DC highlights how Ashbery has been used to further a political and cultural program in the Arts. The more conservative elements in poetry are tied to the mainstream publishing industry and the government. Take the Poetry Society with their big push in support of the conservative tradition. This year their Robert Frost Award went to John Hollander. This has caused some degree of controversy and highlights the Society’s poetic and political conservatism. It should be remembered that Hollander slammed Howl in Partisan Review which resulted in an important response by Ginsberg in 1958 that crystallized Ginsberg’s firm grasp of an alternative poetic tradition and politics. Hollander later published a retraction.

I am unaware of who attended the Folger reading, but Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and Ron Padgett attended the Living Theatre reading. Ashbery’s presence energized the poetry and art community. It was an event. As Reva Wolf has shown in her book on Warhol, the Living Theatre reading forged relationships between Ashbery and Warhol as well as second generation New Yorkers like Berrigan. I felt the Folger reading lacked that energy. I could be wrong, but it is not a mere question of Ashbery’s age. Williams’ reading at Reed in 1950 at Reed College launched the careers of Whalen, Snyder, and Welch. Williams was close to 70 and in failing health since 1948. Does a reading at the Folger have such creative potential? Possibly, as there were a number of young people at the reading. But I think the answer lies in whether the audience viewed Ashbery as a tool to build something new or a tool to protect something established.

I found it interesting that Ashbery established a relationship with Warhol and the Factory. Given such experiences, I expected Ashbery to be more receptive the question about performative and slam poetry. These “new” poetic styles come out of the happenings of the 1960s, like Warhol’s, and as Ashbery would be particularly aware, out of the performances of Dada and the Surrealists. One could go even further back to Alfred Jarry. Such recognition by Ashbery would suggest to me that he was still actively searching the creative landscape for new inspiration and material. Instead I think Ashbery has finished innovating and settled into a routine. As Ron Silliman has shown with the trajectory of Robert Creeley, this is not a negative but a fact of just what Creeley wanted to accomplish as a poet late in life. Such endeavors worked for and pleased him at that stage. Ashbery is in a similar place. As a result Ashbery at 80 is more at home at the Folger than the Living Theatre. Isn’t that true of all older artists? Was it true of Burroughs with his final trilogy and pronouncements that Love was the best painkiller? I would like to hear from readers on that. But as Ashbery insists he has not forgotten the relevance of his early work and he is not ashamed of it. In fact such work continues to express Ashbery’s concerns as a poet. He embraces complexity and difficulty. Like Auden’s early work, Ashbery’s poetry remains tough to unlock and may definitely be called “gnarly.”

At the end of the reading at the Folger, there was a reception where Ashbery was available for signing. Although I am a collector, I always dread approaching an author for a signature. Too many times I have seen somebody confront an author with a shopping bag full of a single title. I am reminded of the middle aged guy at a baseball game clamoring for a foul ball or an autograph among a crowd of kids. At the same time, such encounters can be very rewarding. Meeting with Carl Weissner in a New York bakery and having him sign my copies of My Own Mag was a great experience. He had some remarkable stories and his inscriptions are priceless to me.

I had been warned that Ashbery gets cranky at signings especially when confronted with a sack of books. As a result I decided to bring two books. But what to bring? I do not own any Ashbery hardcovers but I have several little mags with Ashbery appearances such as C Journal or Big Table. I was tempted to bring a couple issues of C Journals as I thought this rare mimeo would interest Ashbery and maybe engage him in conversation. But unlike most readers of Ashbery, I am drawn to Ashbery as an editor. I view Locus Solus and Art and Literature as major little mags of the mimeo revolution. Those mags are great insights into the influences and obsessions that resulted in Ashbery’s greatest poems, particularly of the 1960s.

So Locus Solus III-IV and the first issue of Art and Literature it was. As I suspected, there was a limit of two books for signing and the line for signatures was quite long. When I approached, Ashbery looked worriedly behind me and commented on the length of the line. I placed the two magazines before him. He picked up and spent some time leafing through the Locus Solus. He read the table of contents and signed the book. I mentioned that I was surprised that he included Burroughs in Art and Literature given the European and avant-garde nature of the magazine. He stated it was not surprising at all as both mags were fringe publications thus suggesting that Burroughs was suitably fringe as well. And then he gestured for the next in line.

Thinking back on the experience, I wonder what I would have asked Burroughs to sign if I had met him in person. On a financial level, the Digit Junkie would be the choice. Signed copies must be almost unheard of. It would also be interesting to present any of the early material like the British Journal of Addiction Letter offprint, Semina IV, or Man’s Wildcat Adventures. These are all neglected but important pieces in the Burroughs bibliography. That said I would have to choose my copies of My Own Mag. Even though collector Nelson Lyon got there first with his complete set, getting Burroughs to sign my copies would be a very personal experience. It is while reading My Own Mag that I feel that I get closest to Burroughs as an author. In addition, the contacts I have made while collecting and researching My Own Mag have been truly special. Given that Burroughs signed rather willingly, a trip to Lawrence would not have been out of the question when I was in college. I can only wonder about the conversation that might have ensued with Burroughs about the magazines. In any case, Burroughs has been speaking to me through My Own Mag for quite awhile now and he has had quite a few remarkable things to say.

Ashbery as Editor: Art and Literature

Art and Literature 1

Art and Literature 2

Art and Literature 3

Art and Literature 4

Art and Literature 5

Art and Literature 6

Art and Literature 7

Art and Literature 8

Art and Literature 9

Art and Literature 10

Art and Literature 11

Art and Literature 12

For more on Ashbery as editor, see the Locus Solus archive.