Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Charles Olson’s Table

My job ain’t a job
it’s a damn good time
library to archive I’m running my rhymes

Standing in line early in the morning at the Dunkin Donuts located at the service area on Route 128 North heading into Gloucester, I thought to myself that this “mole” brought into town, not just the tourists, businessmen, and developers so feared and despised by Charles Olson as bringing ashore the downfall of his Tyre on the Atlantic. No, for slightly more than half a century, artists, activists, writers, and scholars used this causeway to visit Olson, and these intellectual and cultural tourists sought to open up Gloucester Harbor to all manner of new currents in art, literature, and culture. I guess I could be considered just another in a long line of such tourists. In 2007 I came up here to check out 28 Fort Square, the Mecca of Maximus. Olson’s humble squat by the sea, just a short swim away from Ten Pound Island. Almost a decade later, 108 East Main Street became my port of call, just down the road from my digs at the Gloucester Writer’s Center on 126 East Main, the former home of poet Vincent Ferrini, who published Four Winds and received some of the first Maximus Poems in the post. Technically, I arrived as a Writer-in-Residence, in order to work on my nebulous Floating Bear book project, the idea for which has been gestating since well before my last visit here, as well as to give a presentation on the William Burroughs archive, but in reality what got me on the road was the opportunity to lock myself in the two small rooms housing the Ralph Maud/Charles Olson Library.  

A little background on this treasure chest chock full of bibliographic booty. Ralph Maud was a scholar and academic, who served as the Boswell to Olson’s Johnson. For me Maud is best known as the author of Olson’s Reading: A Biography, which listed the books Olson read and lived with, arguing that books were the driving passion of Olson’s life. It is an incredible example of making the bibliographic biographical. This is a road not travelled as extensively by Michael Stevens in his The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs’ Reading. Such is the future of Burroughs studies. Maud’s book is superlative, but the crowning achievement of his career proves to be his material replication of Olson’s library by collecting versions of all the books Olson may have come into contact with. Over the years even after his study of Olson’s reading was published, Maud’s collection kept growing and growing, a bibliographic Mad Ludwig’s Castle that could never be completed even if it must have had a finite end. I remember hearing that Milton was the last person to read every book published; this must be a myth since even by Milton’s time I believe there were many thousands, if not millions, of publications. Likewise, Olson did not read everything. But there always seemed to be something for Maud to add. A book, which, for example, Olson may have, or, even, should have, read found a place in Maud’s facsimile library. The collection ended only with Maud’s death, by which point it approached 5000 volumes.

What was I hoping to find in Maud’s library? My own personal interests drew me to the alternative press and little magazines that Olson read, a chapter on which appeared in Maud’s book. Subcategories and mini-archives multiply endlessly, and a collection of little mags is surely one of these. Here are a few that jumped out at me from my browsing of the shelves: Tish, Fuck You, Duende, Wild Dog, The World, Evergreen Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Rivoli Review, Coyote’s Journal, Origin, and Intrepid. I found it cool to know that Olson possessed the Mad Motherfucker Issue of Fuck You and even cooler to find that Maud went through the effort of getting a copy with Warhol’s “couch” cover attached.  

Naturally I looked through the index of Olson’s Reading in order to find out what of Burroughs might be lurking on the shelves. The answer is nothing. And Maud’s collection seems to back that up. But again as with my article on John Wieners’ Measure, even Burroughs’ absence can be interesting. Olson definitely knew of Burroughs’ work and owned anthologies and magazines with Burroughs appearances, such as some of the mags I listed above. In connection with The New American Story anthology, edited by Robert Creeley and Donald Allen, Olson wrote in a letter that what most interested him in the collection was “Burroughs on bureaus.” In a letter to Ed Dorn, Olson admitted that he did not feel he was cool enough to read Burroughs, and the closest thing to a Burroughs title in Olson’s library was Fuzz Against Junk, published by Olympia Press in 1959 under the pseudonym Akbar del Piombo. For years many readers, puzzled by the pseudonym, clued in by the publisher (the same as Naked Lunch), and given the subject matter, thought Burroughs wrote it. Norman Rubington actually did. Thus, the presence of Burroughs in Olson’s library is a case of mistaken identity and a false tip.

Burroughs is largely missing in another sense, in that the Burroughsian seldom appears on Olson’s shelves. By that I mean books on lemurs, science fiction or other pulp material, scientology — all those books that make Burroughs’ library such a fun, weird, and wonderful place. In part Burroughs’ library is that of a crank. Or an eccentric genius depending on how you look at it. Olson’s library is a more serious type. It is the library of an academic, such as one Maud himself might possess in his office on campus. There is little to no leisure reading there.  

That said there are some intriguing overlaps with Burroughs’ interests. Most notable to my eyes were on the topics of drugs and the Mayans. Regarding drugs, Olson was as big a proponent of psychedelics as Burroughs was wary of them. Timothy Leary invited both men to Harvard as part of his program to dose the best and the brightest. Turning on with the Boston crowd turned Burroughs off. Olson became a supporter for the rest of his life. As a result it is no surprise to see R. Gordon Wasson‘s books on mushrooms in Olson’s library and I for one was a bit surprised that Burroughs’ The Yage Letters did not make it on the shelves. Hallucinogenic vines seemed to me to be a topic that Olson would be interested in. In any case, the Mayans fascinated both men. Olson possessed several books on the subject. In fact Olson and Burroughs studied the Mayans in Mexico at the same time in the early 1950s — Burroughs at the University in Mexico City and Olson in the Yucatan. Robert Creeley at his Divers Press published Olson’s letters to him from the period as The Mayan Letters in 1953. I absolutely adore Divers Press and The Mayan Letters is one of my favorite books from Creeley’s press. It is a biblio-fantasy of mine that Burroughs and Olson might somehow have gotten in contact with each other at the time and that Creeley would have printed their correspondence as a Divers Press title. If it would have happened the results just may supplant The Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive as my most interesting Burroughs collectible.

The Maud collection also includes Maud’s correspondence with various literary and academic figures over the years relating to Olson issues. Some of this stuff is run of the mill business correspondence but some of it is of scholarly interest or just plain gossip. Recently I have been thinking about Donald Allen and his editorship of the New American Poetry Anthology a lot. The Maud correspondence contains a large folder related to Allen. Maud edited the correspondence between Olson and Allen, entitled Poet to Publisher, which was crucial to the development of the Anthology. Just as Olson directed Creeley on the editing of Black Mountain Review or Cid Corman on Origin, he instructed and inspired Allen in his work. In preparing the introduction for the Allen/Olson letters, Allen writes Maud about his recollections of how he and Olson first met. In addition Maud picked Allen’s brain or I should say pickpocketed Allen’s archives for gems for Maud’s collection of Olson’s selected letters. In one envelope, Allen enclosed six photographs he took from a pilgrimage to Gloucester made by himself, LeRoi Jones, David Cummings, and Michael McClure.  

Now you might think, “What an incredible collection!!” But as they say on late-night TV infomercials, “Wait, there’s more!!!” The gathering of 5000 volumes Olson may have read is not the most interesting, or should I say, most obsessive part of the library. Maud followed in Olson’s footsteps in gathering Olson’s library in more ways than one. You see, when Olson was a young man he had the intention of being an academic and in that pursuit gathered together the fragments of Herman Melville’s library by tracking down Melville’s relatives. Olson’s collection of Melville’s books went to Harvard where Olson studied as a graduate student in the newly formed American Studies department. Just in his 20s, Olson already made his mark in Melville studies. The revitalization in Melville studies would rely in part on the books Olson located. Olson himself relied on the Melville’s library for his book, Call Me Ishmael, which analyzed Melville’s annotations in King Lear as one means to unlock Moby Dick‘s mysteries. Call Me Ishmael is far from a boring dissertation; it is creative criticism from the heart, mind, and soul of a newly emerging poet, a poet who found his source material in his wide-ranging reading and whose poems became a form of annotation and marginalia.

So Maud understood just how important annotations were to Olson and to his work. Therefore it is natural that Maud attempted to not just recreate Olson’s library but that he painstakingly transcribed in hundreds of books Olson’s in some cases extensive annotations from Olson’s original library now maintained at the University of Connecticut Special Collection in Storrs. Perfectly natural. And perfectly insane. I took several pictures so you can get an idea of what I am talking about. Each book has Maud’s book plate which briefly sets out the reason for the book’s inclusion and the nature of the annotations. You can use Maud’s Olson’s Reading as a Baedeker for going through the collection. As a result, I knew that Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality and Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato contained heavy annotations so I took a few pictures of those books to give some sense of the extent of the annotations on Olson’s part and the job it took to transcribe them. These two books have hundreds of annotations that reflect years of reading and serious thinking on Olson’s part and hours of transcription on Maud’s.  

Olson was a legendary conversationalist and talker. Everybody who came into contact with him mentioned the sheer endurance and breadth of knowledge it took to engage him in conversation. More often than not these talks lasted until sunrise. By all accounts a simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating experience. Very little recorded evidence of Olson in conversation survived. Nobody caught on tape Olson in the wild at Black Mountain College in the Winter of 1954 railing as his backwoods empire fell around him. Olson is a bit like Bigfoot. Many claim to have experienced his presence but scant material evidence exists. Yet by browsing Maud’s reconstructed library you can get a sense of it, because by turning the pages of Process and Reality or Preface to Plato, you can catch a glimpse of Olson in conversation with his books and with their authors. This conversation is wide-ranging and lively. One page might show Olson deeply processing Whitehead’s process; the next might feature Olson calling Havelock a prick.  

Or you can catch Olson napping. Maud purchased a 1962 Sentry reprint edition of Brooke Adams’ The Emancipation of Massachusetts, which Olson read and annotated. Olson also recorded “Some fuck dream seen Feb 13th [1966]” on the title page and back endpapers which go as follows:  

She’d suck your — his — soft cock your soft cock and swallow every spoonful how many spoonfuls of my cereal-cold cereal milk

And her raven blackness soft soft knees her mouth was to dance with her ladle to between the legs the pussy like her that

So what you might say? Olson was just another horny guy. But the bibliographic ties in here to the biographical. Olson clearly had sex on the brain and in 1966 sexual drama overtook Olson as he hooked up with patron and poet collector Panna Grady, who the previous year tried to marry William Burroughs when he was living in New York. Sweet, sweet Panna appeared to love a challenge. She moved on from Burroughs to John Wieners, which led to Olson and resulted in messy and tragic complications involving an abortion, a broken heart, and a mental breakdown. Wieners went into a downward spiral and Olson and Panna absconded to England.

Maud’s system of organization keeps the conversation lively in another manner. The technologically challenged Maud possessed no database or devised no complex organizational structure. Maud simply organized the books alphabetically by author or editor and then numbered A1, A2, A3 until all the As were done and then so on down the alphabet. So the books are not arranged relationally by subject or chronologically as they were in Olson’s Reading. On the surface this may seem unfortunate but Maud’s system creates some fascinating juxtapositions, which really suggested to me that this library was not merely the work of an academic or biographer but instead the work of an artist. A form of installation or performance. I thought immediately of the work of Buzz Spector, who stacks and arranges books like sculptures. For example, Spector gathered Robert Creeley’s copies of Olson books, which captures the essence of Creeley’s conception of Olson. Maud’s organizing principle manages to demonstrate just how vast and wide-ranging Olson’s mind and interests were. So Freud can perform a reach-around on Sanders’ Fuck You. Or a history of Gloucester sits between Preface to Plato and an account of prehistoric Europe. In just those three books, you have a microcosm of Olson’s intellectual macrocosm. Browsing through the library, connections like these can be made wherever you look. There is a method to Maud’s madness.

Coming to see the Maud/Olson Library I thought I was going to get into contact with Olson like never before. No doubt that happened but what really touched me what just how touched Maud was — not by bibliography but by bibliomania. I like to think I am normal in my collecting. Sure, I get into it pretty deep, but I have not lost perspective. If an outsider looked at my collection, I like to think he would understand and appreciate it and not think I am crazy. As an obsessive book collector, I always like to think that I am not THAT GUY. There is always somebody worse out there. Well, let me say that Ralph Maud is THAT GUY as well as being THE MAN. Quite simply, the Maud/Olson library is the most remarkable and interesting book collection I have ever seen in person. (BTW: You might wonder who Maud bought his books from. I sure did. I am sure there were several dealers involved but one stood out: Richard Aaron. I have written about Richard before but you might remember that he helped broker the sale of the William Burroughs archive in 1973 and issued what I think is the most interesting Burroughs collectible. The Maud correspondence contains several invoices from Aaron to Maud. In some cases, Maud bought almost 50 items from one Aaron catalog. Yes, Maud had it bad, which meant that certain lucky book dealers definitely had it good.).

Without a doubt, the collection gives you a unique insight into Olson, but more fascinating is the glimpse into the mind of Maud. And how much for me that was a look in the mirror. The Maud/Olson archive should not just be written up in academic literary journals; it also deserves a place in journals of psychology as a case study on the pathology of book collecting. I have never thought so much about what I am doing as a book collector as when I sat for hours soaking in the Maud/Olson library. Sitting at Olson’s table with the sunlight coming in through the windows overlooking the harbor, you are surrounded by ghosts and spirits. Forces of fascination, obsession, and compulsion are everywhere. At one point I pulled a copy of A Controversy of Poets from the bookshelves, a book I have written about in terms of my own relationship to Olson and collecting, and turned it over in my hands, all the while turning over in my mind — a mind blown open — my relationship with Maud. 

Besides immersing myself within the Maud/Olson Library, I arrived in Gloucester on October 29th eager to hear Hettie Jones deliver the Charles Olson Lecture at the Cape Ann Museum. Around 90 people showed up in the lower level of the museum to hear Hettie talk about her years with Leroi Jones, her experiences as a woman in the “boy town” of the New American Poetry scene, and her decades-long correspondence with Helene Dorn, Ed Dorn’s first wife, who eventually settled in Gloucester. A few days after the talk I bumped into Wendy at the Maud/Olson library, where she spends time reading through the holdings. I recognized her from Hettie’s lecture and we got to talking about what is so interesting and important about Hettie Jones. Quite simply I told her, Hettie wrote one of the best and most insightful books into the Beat Generation around. One of the most valuable things I was introduced to at college, when taking Ronna Johnson’s class on the Beats, was the complex and complicated role of women in that circle. Professor Johnson assigned How I Became Hettie Jones and Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters. Later with these books in mind, I read Diane di Prima’s Reflections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years and Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road. I cannot emphasize enough just how crucial, informative, and insightful these books were and remain to this day. You cannot get a full picture of the Beat Generation without them. And not just about gender issues, but about the nuts and bolts of the publishing process during the Mimeo Revolution. Jones and di Prima provide detailed accounts of how magazines like Yugen and Floating Bear got published, edited, and distributed.  

Looking through Maud’s correspondence at the Library I saw a folder labeled “DORN” and inside were a couple of letters to Helene asking her when she was going to write her memoirs. The answer was not right now, maybe someday. Without a doubt, Helene’s book would have taken its rightful place alongside those of Jones, Johnson, Cassady, and di Prima. As far as I know that day never arrived, so the publication of Love, H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones, serves, in a way, as that memoir, which never came to be, but was so much anticipated by the likes of Maud and others. Hettie read selections from the letters and they reveal Helene to be an insightful and introspective woman, the traits of a gifted memoirist. The letters give insight on the day-to-day trials and tribulations of artists and writers of the period as well as women within that circle. I was excited to hear letters from Helene from Pocatello, Idaho (home of the mimeo mag Wild Dog) and Colchester England from the days Ed Dorn taught in England, but the later letters from Gloucester, Massachusetts, were really moving as were Hettie’s photographs of Helene’s mosaics made of beach glass and other recycled materials. Hettie and Helene in their lives and art make clear that that which is discarded maintains a dignity and beauty and despite what one might think a creative utility as well.

After reading Hettie’s memoir in college several questions bubbled in my brain for years and Hettie’s lecture provided the perfect opportunity to corner her and ask them all, but I have to admit public readings really intimidate me and make me feel like a sycophant, especially the Q and A sessions, which did not bode well for my own talk on Wednesday November 2nd at the Writer’s Center. So instead of asking my questions, like a coward, I walked down the street to The Topside Grill and fantasized about sitting in this cozy bar off Main Street with Hettie and a small group of friends shooting the shit over a few beers.

Some questions not directed to Hettie Jones (for whatever that is worth):

Q: Can you speak to the role of women in the publications of the Mimeo Revolution and little mags?

This was my primary reason for going to the lecture. Was it too hard to ask this simple question? Not asking Hettie about this aspect of her life is my biggest regret of the entire trip. Now Hettie talked a little bit in this regard when she read some letters from around 1966 and discussed her working relationship with Lita Hornick of Kulchur Press. Hornick hired Hettie to edit an anthology of poetry for the press. According to Hettie, the whole deal fell through and her letters of the period to Helene are great in capturing the rollercoaster ride of excitement and disappointment regarding the project. Eventually the project did happen. A few days later when I was in the Maud Library I saw a copy of Poetry Now on the shelves. It would have been nice to tell Hettie that Olson had her work in hand and read it, since Hettie stated how important and inspiring it was when Olson mentioned to her at a party that he admired her language. So sitting at The Topside with my pint of Fisherman’s Ale, I thought of what it would be like to talk to Hettie about the putting together of Yugen, her role in Totem Press, the different kinds of women who were attracted to the alternative press such as patrons like Hornick and Panna Grady or creative writers like herself. So instead of talking with Hettie, I will have to go back and reread her memoir. A not so poor a substitute, but an eternal reminder of how pathetic I am.

Q: You mentioned that if you did not become Hettie Jones you would have literally died. But can you speak to just how dangerous that life was for women? I am thinking of all the casualties like Elise Cowen and Natalie Jackson.

This was a real fascinating part of Hettie’s talk and she mentioned several times throughout that she would have died if she did not make the choices she did to live her life as a Bohemian woman and writer. She insisted that she would have literally died. I took the “literally” as the death of her creative self, her literary self — that is, her full potential as a woman would have died if she did not make certain life choices. There were clearly real issues of life and death in that decision. Several women made the same choice Hettie did and their lives became tragedies and footnotes. Not the subject of triumphant, life-affirming memoirs. Suicide, exploitation, and addiction were very real for women living in bohemia. Why couldn’t I have asked her if she felt that danger personally? What was it about her personality that made her safe from such a threat? Maybe it was the life she left behind, the traditional domestic life of her childhood, which in some paradoxical way prepared her for her life underground. Again this is not a question I wanted to ask Hettie so much as a conversation I wanted to have with her. I knew there was a get-together after her talk. As a Writer-in-Residence maybe I could have crashed the party. Having no balls on my part prevented me from learning more about women and the Beat Generation.  

Q: Do you think the most important, most mind-expanding drug of the 1960s was the Pill?

This question ties into the one on the dangers of living the Bohemian lifestyle as a woman. I would guess that in answering that question she might address this one as well. At the time having sex on one’s own terms meant in some cases having an abortion, taking a risk with your well-being, both physical and mental. Diane di Prima’s memoir addresses these issues in detail. In interviewing Dr. Andrew Lees on what made the 60s happen, he answered the Pill. I suspect that this answer would be even more obvious for a woman. There is a lot of focus on the events that shifted the 1950s into the 1960s. Lots of talk about 1963 as a pivot point with the coming of The Beatles and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I do not hear as much about the spread of the Pill to the general public in the years after FDA approval in 1960-1961. I wonder how many women were using the Pill in 1963/1964 when the decade shifted. One million users as early as 1961. Maybe not as many as I think since court cases about the Pill’s legality continued into the 1970s. I should know this stuff if I claim to know my stuff about the 1960s. Again I am not talking to the right people. Time to read a history on the Pill. I have read all the books out there on LSD. Maybe I am focusing on the wrong drug. All the more reason to crash a party with Hettie. In any case, I am sure she would tell me that Enovid was no picnic either, with the first blood clots and other health defects appearing in users almost immediately.  

Unlike Hettie’s lecture, the setting for my conversation with Gerrit Lansing was more to my liking: lunch at Halibut Point on Main Street in Gloucester. Greg Gibson set up the lunch and we walked into the restaurant together to find Gerrit at a back table waiting with a glass of white wine. I ordered a pint of Guinness and the waitress arrived without a word from Greg with a Ballantine Ale in a bottle. Membership has its privileges. Or I should say being a regular. I immediately felt comfortable and within seconds Gerrit, Greg, and I got deep into conversation. I should say there was a brief introductory period where Greg told Gerrit where I was coming from biographically and bibliographically. I should do the same regarding Gerrit on behalf of readers out there listening in on the conversation without knowing who Gerrit is.

I first knew of Gerrit through his little magazine Set, which ran for two issues in the early 60s out of Gloucester. Like Vincent Ferrini’s Four Winds before it, it put Gloucester on the map as a literary polis. Set captured the dying embers of the Boston Renaissance, a group of poets centered in Boston in the mid-to-late 1950s including Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer (who was living there at the time), and John Wieners. Olson loomed large in this group from a distance at his roost on 28 Fort Square in Gloucester. Gregory Corso ran in and out from his unofficial writer’s-in-residence at Harvard. Harvard students took a liking to Gregory and put up the money for the publication of his first book The Vestal Lady of the Brattle. Over the years, Stephen Jonas proved to be the poet who caught my eye and ear. Gerrit is the literary executor of the Jonas estate and planned on travelling down to Harvard the very next day for a reading in honor of Jonas. A minor poet in his lifetime, a poet who wrote from the margins, and who after his death remained in obscurity, Jonas is in the midst of a bit of a revival. An African-American, gay, junkie, outlaw poet in the tradition of Pound hits many of the trigger points in today’s academic scene. Maybe Jonas’ time has come. In our conversation Gerrit wondered what took so long. I think Pound is to blame. Jonas took the Poundian idiom into the world of drugs and madness but Pound’s own paranoia, such as his economic conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism, rubbed off on Jonas as well. I suspect that the negative aspects of Pound in Jonas’ poetry stunted the spread of Jonas’ work. As Gerrit suggested, it probably halted publication of the Spicer/Jonas letters. In any case, as the Harvard reading proves, word is getting out on Jonas and Gerrit is part of the reason.  

The 86-year-old Gerrit still gets around quite a bit himself. He looked dapper in a green shirt under a sport coat. His was face bright with color and lit up with a smile. In his long life, Gerrit has always mingled with an interesting crowd. In the 1950s, he hung out in New York City with the circle around John La Touche, a lyricist who died of a heart attack at 41 in Vermont. Paul and Jane Bowles married in La Touche’s apartment. Around that same time, Gerrit rubbed shoulders with Kerouac and others at the San Remo and other famous New York watering holes for writers and artists. Gerrit’s interest in the occult and mysticism brought him into contact with numerous exotic texts and equally exotic characters, like Harry Smith, the polymath who lived by his wits and the generosity of others at the Chelsea Hotel, collecting everything from paper airplanes to early folk and blues recordings. Living in Gloucester, Gerrit was good friends with Olson and Gerard Malanga stayed with Gerrit when he came up to Gloucester to interview Olson in the late 1960s. Gerrit knows where all the bodies are buried and specializes in subterranean history: everywhere from the Village in New York to Hammond’s Castle in Gloucester.  

Greg told me after our lunch that he enjoyed just sitting there listening to two book geeks completely geek out together over the full breadth of New American writing. To be honest I do not remember saying all that much because Gerrit had so much to say. Somebody should be following Gerrit around with a tape recorder capturing everything he remembers from days gone by as well as his statements on the current literary scene. On the topic of the occult, we talked briefly about Ira Cohen, and I was reminded that one of my great regrets was not interviewing Cohen when I had the chance. I had the contacts and the opportunity but I always pushed it off to another day until it was too late. I often wonder what stories Cohen could have told about Burroughs and Tangier as well as the publication of Gnaoua magazine and the circle around it. Ouija boards and séances are the only recourses now.

Gerrit and I talked about Burroughs for a bit and he placed the first issue of Set on the table because rumor had it that the Dorn poem in the issue was about Burroughs. Here is the poem in its entirety:

SOME, MAN, ON THE STREET

Have a Habit? (No Art?)
Walkin up when there is
no up? (the inclined level)
That cradle of What? effort
not civilization, puke, it must be
his back is bent and the hat
how are hats? Romantic
they always conjure always
better places we have been 
that hat

walkin with an effort up 
the down street a grinning adam
smith in his hip pocket where
he thought his pay was, Modern Times:
Shit.

The habit of blue or brown shirts
goddamn his dressing man had a big
arm. You name it give him 
what habit you want, but not
more, leave 
him there, yess, la la
with it.

And tell him what a clod he is
or how simple (beautiful or otherwise)
how he belabours you and lets the wrong 
people rule him.

Have you, has yours, his song
has ended. That’s true, Si
Wow, oh yes, Why not, what a clod
yah.

Catch him quickly, before he hits
the hay, whisper in his ear more exhaustion
as he sleeps, about some dream you had of him
and his lot, how he look back
and was made the salt of the earth (disinherited?)
about his sex, fantasies which through you 
reached a great perversion, a great starkness

But man, not inflation, Newsweek does that dance
drugs? that’s goodly, but he can’t get ’em, you 
oughta be in Morocco for that OK
tell him about Morocco, be his 
bullshitter National Geographic
with a couple of fucks and cunts
thrown in just to keep it going
and esoteric to him (not erotic

Or that bit about Bureacrasy how 
you and H. Hoover and Rickover
and Bar Goldwater and whoever agree
it’s gotta go (leave out how you’d all 
be dead without it)

Naw, you’d be bored as usual and this man
is just tired, first of all of you and them 
and three centuries of penny mayhem, of his
burden which was called white, the color
being the mistake he was stuck with. . .

So come back in the night to cornhole him
tell him he wanted it when he yawns
make it right with a corkscrew motion
I mean leave no room for an incognizance
On his part tell him when he farts it is 
because hypothalmouse kicked him
beans have nothing to do with it, (Si)

and from what’s the source he derives
his incomparable stink, which you feed upon
like a vulture a like deadman’s body
who may have breathed I dare say for
a grace of only such food-love’s lost
of what it is, was once for that man
and you too

will come one day to such an end (that meaning
is intended) as a man’s whose foot was truly
upon the earth the ankle grabbed by Ernest Jones
and will have made it simply that way, unyielding
as an opinion.

Throw in a fuck, and a cunt or two,
and that old tale about the best fuck is 
a chicken with its neck snapped, the one
he heard when he was 9 years old but 
what he didn’t hear leave out what you might
have told him
years ago
but you were in Morocco
living off one of the very fortunes that put him down.

Gerrit said that the Burroughs connection was much debated back in the day and many thought it may have been about John Cooke, another junkie expat in Tangier at the time. Cooke is definitely a possibility, as he walked with difficulty down the street (as mentioned in the poem) after being paralyzed mysteriously, possibly by a curse, in Tangier in 1956. Such a line does not appear to apply to Burroughs. That said I told Gerrit that Burroughs was much on Dorn’s mind at the time the poem appeared in Set in the winter of 1961/1962. In autumn 1962, “Notes More or Less Relevant to Burroughs and Trocchi” appeared in Kulchur 7. In the introduction, Dorn writes that the notes were accumulated over the past year. So the set and setting are definitely right. Dorn definitely interrogates Burroughs and questions Burroughs’ place in New American Writing, his hipster stance, and ideas behind Naked Lunch as a novel. At our lunch, Gerrit and I never reached a definitive conclusion on the subject of the poem but rereading both the poem and “Notes” afterwards, Burroughs is clearly one of the subjects of the poem, if not the primary and only subject. Many lines are unmistakably about Burroughs. Here are just two examples compared to Dorn’s “Notes”:

From the poem:

Or that bit about Bureacrasy how 
you and H. Hoover and Rickover
and Bar Goldwater and whoever agree
it’s gotta go (leave out how you’d all 
be dead without it)

From Notes:

Bureaucracy as virus is so close to the objections to bureaucracy by Herbert Hoover, Robert Welch, and Barry Goldwater as to make me wonder if he means it that way or is this one of the jokes I don’t get. This again is a spot in which he chooses to object to people who don’t like addicts.

From the poem:

Throw in a fuck, and a cunt or two,
and that old tale about the best fuck is 
a chicken with its neck snapped,

From the Notes:

Certain parts of T.N.L. involved that quality of hesitant curiosity in men. But even these props — the recurring act of breaking the neck, snapping the spine or neck in the midst of anal-sodomy — is straight from the farm, in the form of an anecdotal joke. An old farm joke, usually involving chickens because chickens wiggle so when their necks are snapped, not very important; but then neither are rubes not are those jokes. That all comes through anthropology. Edgar Anderson says anthropologists should pay more attention to the midwestern farm. The Burroughs machine is I believe now located in Indianapolis. Cornhole is a word for sodomy with animals in the midwest. Sodomy is very strong in the midwest, the fantasy of sodomy at least, or should I say was; to a large extent, I understand, animals have been isolated on the present farms for various reasons — sanitation, confined quarters to insure “thriftiness,” etc.

Dorn’s working class roots and his homophobia come out in his criticism. Dorn no doubt disliked Burroughs’ privileged status as well as his reliance on a trust fund to live his hipster lifestyle. The poem and the Notes make this clear. In addition, the hanged chicken, think gay slang and chicken hawks, references Burroughs’ fascination with hanging boys with spurting cocks. Without a doubt, Dorn spent considerable time thinking about the work of Burroughs in this period, it seems clear that “Some, Man, on the Streets” transforms his “Notes” into poetry. What do you think?

In any case listen to the question and answer section of my talk in order to get a sense of how sharp Gerrit is and what a good listener. As an extra bonus, he weighs in on a book from my collection that has been puzzling and fascinating me for years. No spoilers here. Listen to the audio of my talk.

Coming to Gloucester I planned on having lunch with Gerrit but one of the wonderful things about this city by the sea is that you never know who you will strike up a conversation with hanging out in restaurants and bars. What I love about Gloucester is its mix of blue collar and artist types. The Writer’s Center is halfway between The Crow’s Nest, the dive bar featured in The Perfect Storm and the Rocky Neck artist colony. So one afternoon I stopped in the Nest to down some Miller High Lifes and to soak in the local conversation and then I got up and walked down into Rocky Neck to clear my head with some sea air as the sun went down.  

The night of my talk I sat down at a bistro just down the street and ordered a hanger steak with mashed potatoes and braised carrots with a glass of tap water to wash it down. No beers from me; I take my speaking obligations very seriously. Natch! As I was eating an older gentleman sat next to me at the bar and ordered the ubiquitous salad and a glass of wine. He found out I was at the Writer’s Center, which as was par for the course during my time I was in Gloucester, initiated a conversation.  

A rough transcription:

Carl: You a poet?

Jed: No, actually I am a book collector.

Carl: Well, I was friends with an obscure poet back in the day. You probably never heard of him.

Now, I love a challenge like that. I consider myself pretty well read and I like to think that I have heard of just about everybody. More likely than not, I am humbled when whoever I am talking to drops a name that has slipped past my nets and has yet to land in my library. Gerrit consistently dropped names of that nature. “Jed, have you read [insert writer of the occult]?” And I would have to mumble, “That one seems to have escaped me.” Happily, Gerrit would proceed to fill me in with an engrossing story, making me wish I had cast my nets further afield. So when Carl laid down the gauntlet, I felt that delicious feeling of anticipation. What poet could he possibly have known?

Jed: Try me.

Carl: Ted Berrigan. I was friends with Ted in New York City.

I literally dropped my fork. My mouth dropped open. Unfortunately, it was full of hanger steak. Now my first thought was that Carl was putting me on. He was playing around with me. Ted Berrigan??!!! At the Writer’s Center, I was writing about William Burroughs and Floating Bear #31, and the meeting of Ted and Burroughs was much on my mind the entire time. So coming into the bistro my head was full of thoughts of Berrigan. Was this guy reading my mind? I tried to play it cool.

Jed: You are kidding, right? Of course I know about him. Berrigan is a fucking god.

So much for playing it cool. The dribbles of hanger steak made that tough to do in any case. I filled in the disbelieving Carl on the cult status of Ted. He listened shaking his head.

Carl: I knew Ted when I was attending NYU for graduate school. I lived on 6th Street down in the Lower East Side. Ted and I walked around together. I remember one time we were in one of the local parks and a guy was playing fetch with his dog. Ted leaned over and said to me, “Look, Carl. He is teaching his dog to kill.” Ted had a weird way of looking at things.

Jed: When was this?

Carl: Around 1963.  

So before the publication of The Sonnets. Ron Padgett was still a student up at Columbia University. As Carl rightly remembered, at the time, Berrigan was an unknown poet.  

Jed: You ever hear of C: A Journal of Poetry or The Sonnets?

Carl: No. I really was not into that kind of stuff. I wonder why we were friends. I remember Ted becoming very excited about one thing I showed him. I had an old Superman comic, which struck me as really funny when you just looked at the illustrations without the blurbs. So Ted and I whited out the balloons and wrote in our own captions. Ted thought this was fantastic. I wish I still had that Superman comic. Maybe I do.

I think I stared at Carl for about a full minute. Again you have to be fucking kidding me.

Carl: What?

Jed: That is incredible. You ever hear of C Comics? Ted played around with the comic form throughout the 1960s, doing just what you guys did with the Superman comic. Ted would get Joe Brainard, ever meet him? [Shake of the head]. Well, Brainard would draw these comics and the poets, like Ted and Ron Padgett, Bill Berkson, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, would write the text. They are really funny.

Carl: Never saw C Comics. Ted was always talking about Frank O’Hara. Ted asked me one time about O’Hara and I thought he was talking about this novelist.

Jed: John O’Hara?

Carl: Yes, and I felt embarrassed for knowing the wrong O’Hara. I did not hang out with Ted long after that. I went to his new apartment around then and they had painted it entirely black and painted pornographic drawings all over the walls. That was it. Ted was getting too weird for me.

The conversation went on for a little bit. He knew Sandy Berrigan but was not aware of the collection of letters between Ted and Sandy although he knew a little bit about the story of their early relationship, with Sandy’s parents’ disapproval of their marriage and their placing of Sandy in a mental hospital to cure her of her ill-advised love of Ted. The conversation then turned.

Carl: You ever hear of a book called Beside the Shadblow Tree?

Yes!!! Two for two.

Jed: Hayden Carruth’s memoir of James Laughlin.

Carl: Right, I knew Carruth when he lived up in Vermont. A remarkable poet.

Mind blown yet again, which led to a conversation about Carruth and his time in Vermont. Meanwhile time ticked away and the hour of my talk approached. Sadly, I pulled myself away from the bar.

Jed: Really great talking to you. Incredible.

Proof positive that you never know who is going to sit next to you at a bar. Especially in Gloucester.

Here is yet another example. Now to be honest only about seven people showed up for my reading. It was the night of game seven of the World Series. Fifty million people watched the game on television. Almost 75% of Chicago watched and apparently a good portion of Gloucester as well. Oh well, I was happy anybody showed up, as long as Greg, Henry, and Gerrit were there it seemed like a full house to me. Henry arrived at my reading with a guy that reminded me of Samuel Beckett. All angles with a silvery, spiked haircut. He stood out in a Burroughsian way. Had that el hombre invisible feel about him. You know what I mean, invisible yet with an incredible presence simultaneously. Who the fuck is this guy? Turns out it was Willie “Loco” Alexander. I must admit I had to look him up later. Turns out Alexander is a Boston punk rock legend. His song “At the Rat,” for example, captured the essence of the Boston punk scene in the 1970s. He toured with The Velvet Underground in 1971, when they made a go of it without Lou Reed. What was he doing in Gloucester and most of all what the hell was he doing intellectually slumming it by listening to me? I suspected that the Burroughs angle was the draw, but nowadays Alexander is obsessed with Gloucester, where he grew up as a child and which has by now attached itself like a barnacle onto his poetic imagination. Alexander worked with Henry and Gerrit on various projects. The Writer’s Center may not be The Rat but with people like Alexander in the audience I felt like a rock star. Okay, maybe not a rock star exactly, but at least a punk rocker with a cult following, because as the Velvet Underground and the publications of the underground press demonstrate that is the audience that really matters. I love you Gloucester; you’re the Rock and Roll Capital of the World!!! If you have a mind to, put my talk on the listening devices of your choosing and put it up to eleven. Raise your lighters high and smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Lines Press

Aram Saroyan
Aram Saroyan

Aram Saroyan
Works

Gertrude Stein

Richard Komar
Games

John Perreault
Camouflage

Lines

Lines 1
September 1964

Lines 2
December 1964

Lines 3
February 1965

William Burroughs and Tom Veitch
“Naked Express“
Lines 3

William Burroughs and Tom Veitch
“Naked Express“
Lines 3

Lines 4
March 1965

Lines 5
May 1965

William Burroughs
“Rex Morgan MD”
Lines 5
May 1965

Lines 6
November 1965

Table of Contents

Lines #1 — September 1964 

Cover:  Drawing by Aram Saroyan

Louis Zukofsky — “Can a mote of sunlight defeat its purpose”

John Perreault — Each Day; Disguised

Ronald Bayes — Passus 25 — Branch Line

Ted Berrigan — A Life in Trough (A Dream)

Jenni Caldwell — 8 Poems (“with the elaborate framework”; Day; “sometimes I think about”; “that chair your chair”; Admission; “If her name offended”; “i see you like a dissected”; “there are not many times”; 

Fielding Dawson — Different People (II)

Joel Sloman — The Casino; Folk Song

Ronald Caplan — 4/64 (“that he could walk straight”)

Richard Kolmar — Apples

John Keys — Key’s Cantos; “returning to some sources via”

James Brodey — jacket for years; The Buffalo Report

Robert Grenier — Old Blue Sneakers; Tune for Beanie; Dusk Road Game; A Sort of Plea

Leith Heagy — Vanguard in Babylon

Ken Irby — Visit

Lorenzo Thomas — The Color Section; The Unnatural Life

Allen Katzman — The Act of

Archie Minasian — Beyond the Gage

Ted Greenwald — “I hear a step.  A Step.”; Capsule; Breakout; “A taste of salt on my lips bothers me”; Privets come into season at high tide”

Tony Towle — World War II; The Life of the Emotions Has an Attractive Scheme

Aram Saroyan — The Paradox; After Waking at Six P.M.; Bus Ride

Lines #2 — December 1964

Cover:  Joe Brainard

Ron Padgett — Policeman Dan

Aram Saroyan — N.Y.C.

Jonathan Greene — dancing all the while  (to William Kemp)

Some Feathers — Dick Gallup

Jack Anderson — Snorksnot

John Keys — Chisllers Verse (to George Washington Wakoski)

Joe Brainard — Story

Aram Saroyan — “My arms are warm”

Fielding Dawson — The Moving Men

Rich Klein — The Moon; “the fourth world/will”

Joe Brainard — Colgate Dental Cream

Kenneth Irby — Slow Dance

Ted Berrigan — Rusty Nails:  A collected Prose for Tom Veitch

William Dodd — The Assertion

Robert Grenier — The Light

Philip Whalen — Delusions of Reference

Jenni Caldwell — poem dream

Ronald Bayes — Passus 30:  Portrait

Aram Saroyan — Placitas to L.Z.

Joseph Ceravolo — Monsters; Skies; Drunken Winter

Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan — Noh

John Perrault — Boomerang

David Shapiro — Other Friends

David M. Cull — vine maple

Ron Padgett — Poem after Reverdy; Light in the Nineteeth Century

Fielding Dawson — The Goddess (for Gabe Kohn)

Lapstrake — Ted Greenwald

Richard Kolmar — Fragments of a Diary

Aram Saroyan — IS

Joel Sloman — Jet to New York

Richard Kolmar — The Song

Lines #3 — February 1965

Philip Whalen — The Best of It

Dick Gallup — After Alcman

Joe Brainard — Polly

Aram Saroyan — Work Poem; Old Poem; Aces; Well; A & P; “Gray pants & the mail”; “Go!” 

Dick Gallup — Eskimos Again

Ted Berrigan — Dick Gallup at 30 (A Play); Corridors of Blood

Larry Swingle — The Cheese #1

Ted Greenwald — Face Lifting; And, Hinges

Ted Berrigan — An Interview with Ron Padgett

Aram Saroyan & Richard Kolmar — Stand Up

Richard Kolmar — Denial; Aristophanes’; Amore :Traditore

Ron Padgett — Milkman Bill

Kenward Elmslie — Song; The Verandas

Tony Towle — Cable and the Telephone; Song (“Here are the wheels of the new kingdom, and here”)

Lorenzo Thomas — The Judgment of Paris; The Fall of Paris

Tom Veitch — The Naked Express

Ted Berrigan — The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford (Then I’d Cry; Stop Stop Six; Reeling Midnight; Fauna Time; Destination Moon; On His Own; Some Troubles; The Dance of the Broken Bomb; Putting Away; Owe; We Are Jungles)

Joe Brainard — Sunday July the 30th 1964

Lines # 4 — March 1965

Cover — Richard Kolmar

Ian Hamilton Finlay — “A . . . blue boat”; “ring of waves”; Catch 23; “wind”; tug at bay; “Green waters”; landsman’s tea; fisherman’s tea; the ABC of tea; funnel geography

Fielding Dawson — West Side Story

Aram Saroyan — “Had West followed up her fine opening lead by dropping”

E. San Juan, Jr. — Ballad of the Honeysuckle Rose

Aram Saroyan — Lean

John Perreault — Nothing

Tom Veitch — Moon Device

Richard Kolmar — Letters (to L. H.); This Should Pull Us

Joe Brainard — Poem (“Dance with me I said”)

Ron Padgett — An Idea that Clara Related to Wallace

Aram Saroyan — Poem (“Does it ring?”)

Gerard Malanga — Gateway to the Palace of Sargon

Richard Kolmar — Sleep; Marion; Games; 1234567890; Sentences; Live and Learn

Aram Saroyan — Sentences; From the Village Voice (to Ted Berrigan); Nice Ron Thinking; “My feet are tied to a pebble”; “Andre Breton is” Two Poems; “Picture, if you can, these beautiful paintings in their”; “WABC”; “Lovely”; “O . O . O .”

Lines #5 — May 1965

Cover — Fielding Dawson

Aram Saroyan — 17 from Works

Jack Anderson — Paper Clip

John Perreault — Hatbox

Ron Padgett & Joe Brainard — Nancy

William Burroughs — Chlorhydrate d’Apomorpine Chabre

Charles Olson — “A Maximus — As of why thinking”

Philip Whalen — “Hum  Scandal!  Abdication.

Jonathan Greene — “Chillingsworth”

Dan Saxon — fall colors

Clark Coolidge — The Death of Floyd Collins

Ron Padgett — Comics

William Burroughs — Rex Morgan M.D.

Ted Berrigan — On the Road Again

Tom Clark — Are Victors

Clark Coolidge — Everley Formation 

Aram Saroyan — Sentences II

Dick Gallup — Hygiene Sonnet

Bob Brovar — “Fleen pleen”; “Guush-shee”; Flaanczongdoogy”

Ted Greenwald — Landscape

Fielding Dawson — From The Dream

Lorine Niedecker — “Lights lifts”; “The obliteration”

Mike Silverton — I Am A Silent One; Seeing the Road

Aram Saroyan — Sentences III

Mike Silverton — The Sniper’s Song

Lines #6 — November 1965

Aram Saroyan — 11 Works (“in the room”; July; Poem (“later”); “a window to walk away in”; A Poem to K.Q.; “In the corner of my room an American!”; 2 Sentences; “incomprehensible birds”; “The floor passing through the hole in the bag”; For Charles Olson; “crickets”; “I leaps”)

John Perreault — Here on the Edge of this Island

Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett — Saturday Night at the Movies

Clark Coolidge — Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric

Bernadette Mayer — Pope John

Joseph Ceravolo — “How do you know when”; “Feast.  Turtle.  Wide arms.”

Al Fowler — “are you a root or a tendermint”

Vito Hannibal Acconci — Blowstalk

Robert Viscusi — An Edison on Messaien

David Sandberg — Mime Play ”

Robert Lax — “no one was better”

Mike Silveron — Cork

bp Nichol — cycle #21; Tribute to Vasarely

Tom Clark — “oooooooooo” 

Dom Sylvester Houédard — “sand    rock    tide”

Carl Fernbach — Flarsheim

John Furnival — The Fall of the Tower of Babel, 1964

William Burroughs — The Last Post — Danger Ahead

Ron Padgett & Joe Brainard — “All roses are bad ideas”

Domine Falcone — “The girl with the fat lips”

Aram Saroyan — “A”

Joseph Pinelli — Excerpts from Book I

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 1 (May 1963)

Cover Page: A title page and table of contents [i]

Endless Resoundings Fill the RCMM — Dick Gallup [1]

Ember Grease — Dick Gallup [2]

It’s Everywhere, Like So Much Glue — Dick Gallup [3]

Out West and Back East — Dick Gallup [4]

Persia is Falling Beneath the Blue Triremes — Dick Gallup [5]

Sonnet I (“Three thoughts about a bad boy. Chapped punk”) — Ron Padgett [6]

Sonnet II (“As the blue cup sits upon the table, postcards”) — Ron Padgett [7]

Sonnett III (“The stone house your father built by hand, thirty”) — Ron Padgett [8]

Untitled (“Most sensual of recluses, faint” — Ron Padgett [9]

A Play — Joe Brainard [10]

A Diary August 4th — 15th — Joe Brainard [11-13]

Poem in the Traditional Manner — Ted Berrigan [14]

Poem in the Modern Manner — Ted Berrigan [15]

Homage to Beaumont Bruestle — Ted Berrigan [16]

Two Scenes (after John Ashbery) — Ted Berrigan [17]

Homage to Mayakofsky — Ted Berrigan [18]

It is a Big Red House — Ted Berrigan [19]

In Place of Sunday Mass — Ted Berrigan [20]

From a Secret Journal — Ted Berrigan [21]

Sonnet I (“His piercing pince-nex. Some dim frieze”) — Ted Berrigan [22]

Sonnet II (Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.”) — Ted Berrigan [23]

Sonnet III (“Stronger than alcohol, more great than song,”) — Ted Berrigan [24]

Sonnet IV (Lord, it is time. Summer was very great.”) — Ted Berrigan [25]

Sonnet V (“Squawking a gala occasion, forgetting, and”) — Ted Berrigan [26]

Sonnet VI (The bulbs burn phosphorescent, white”) — Ted Berrigan [27]

Real Life — Ted Berrigan [28]

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

Cover Page [i]

Title Page and table of contents [1]

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

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

From The Lady — J. Richard White [4]

From a Letter from Joe Brainard to Ted Berrigan/20 May 63 — Joe Brainard [5]

Words for Love — Ted Berrigan [6]

Doubts (to Dave Bearden) — Ted Berrigan [7]

I Am Alone. You Are a Jungle. These Are the Ties That Bind — Ted Berrigan & Dick Gallup [8]

Untitled (“Dear Aunt Rose and Uncle Bert,”) — Sandra Alper [9]

Homage to Max Jacob — Ron Padgett [10]

Gamma Rays — Ron Padgett [11]

X (“I hope somebody else writes your story you zombie!”)– Ron Padgett [12]

Ash Tarzan — Ron Padgett [13]

Tristan Tarzan — Ron Padgett [14]

The Portable Life of Dr. Reverdy — Ron Padgett [15]

Sonnet XVIII (“Dear Marge, hello. It is 5:15 a. m.”) — Ted Berrigan [16]

Sonnet XXIII (“On the 15th day of November in the year of the motorcar”) — Ted Berrigan [17]

Sonnet XXXII (“The blue day! In the air winds dance”) — Ted Berrigan [18]

Sonnet XXXVI — Homage to Frank O’Hara (“It’s 8:54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 28th of July [and]”) — Ted Berrigan [19]

Sonnet XXXVIII (“Sleep half sleep half silence and with reasons”) — Ted Berrigan [20]

Sonnet XL — (“Wan as pale thighs making apple belly strides”) — Ted Berrigan [21]

Sonnet XLI (“bangin around in a cigarette she isn’t ‘in love'”) — Ted Berrigan [22]

Sonnet XLII (“She murmurs of signs to her fingers”) — Ted Berrigan [23]

For Richard White Sonnet LII (“It is a human universe: & I”) — Ted Berrigan [24]

Sonnet LIII: “for all the history of grief” (“The poem upon the page is as massive as” — Ted Berrigan [25]

A Mother’s Love is a Blessing — Joe Brainard [26]

Sally — Joe Brainard [27]

Poem (“Last night was blue or maybe arabia”) — Joe Brainard [28]

Penn Station — Ted Berrigan [29]]

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

Cover: Image by Joe Brainard [i]

The Waking — Theodore Roethke [1]

Title page and table of contents [2]

A Sonnet for Dick Gallup / July 1963 (LXXII) (“The logic of grammar is not genuine it shines forth”) — Ted Berrigan [3]

$$$$$ from Re-Establishing Raymond Roussel — John Ashbery [4]

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

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

Now in Another Way (for Andy Warhol) — Gerard Malanga [6]

Some Feathers — Richard Gallup [7]

Sonnet XXXI (“And then one morning to waken perfect-faced”) — Ted Berrigan [8]

Sonnet XXXIV (“Time flies by like a great whale”) — Ted Berrigan [9]

Sonnet XXXVII (“It is night. You are asleep. And beautiful tears”) — Ted Berrigan [10]

Sonnet XLIV (“The withered leaves fly higher than dolls can see”) — Ted Berrigan [11]

Sonnet XLV (“What thwarts this fear I love”) — Ted Berrigan [12]

Sonnet XLVII (“Frances Marion nudges himself gently in the big blue sky”) — Ted Berrigan [13]

Sonnet LVIII (“A glass of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-“) — Ted Berrigan [14]

Sonnet LXXIV (“The Academy of the future is opening its doors”) — Ted Berrigan [15]

A Final Sonnet for Chris (LXXXVIII) (“How strange to be gone in a minute! A man”) — Ted Berrigan [16]

Two for Barbara Guest — James Brodey

(“Muscular, standing past the station’s rim”) [17]

(“Melancholy changes its constant vigorous heart”) [17]

Three Sonnets After Frank O’Hara — Ron Padgett [18]

Poem Play (A Beautiful Day) — Ruth Krauss [19]

A Play (In a Bull’s Eye) — Ruth Krauss [20]

A Play (untitled) — Ruth Krauss [21]

A Play (There’s a Little Ambiguity Over There Among the Bluebells) — Ruth Krauss [22]

Homage to Pierre Reverdy — Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan [23]

Egg Plants Are Not Green — Ron Padgett [24]

Lettuce — Unattributed (Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan) [25]

Instead of a Man in Black the Men in Blue — Ron Padgett [26]

Choctaw — Ron Padgett — [27]

Sonnet Written in the Time it Took Lauren Owen to Walk 100 Feet — Ron Padgett [28]

Building a house — Richard Gallup [29-30]

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 4 (September 1963)

Cover: Andy Warhol [1]

Title page and table of contents [2]

The Poetry of Edwin Denby — Frank O’Hara [2-4]

An Introduction — John Wieners [5]

Grace After a Meal — Ted Berrigan [6]

Edwin’s Hand — Frank O’Hara [7]

Poems from In Public, In Private — Edwin Denby

The Climate [8]

The Shoulder [8]

Standing on a Street Corner [9]

Summer [10]

The Silence at Night [10]

City Without Smoke [11]

Elegy — The Streets [11-12]

From a Sonnet Sequence 

13 (“Suppose there’s a cranky woman inside me who”) [13]

21 (“The street is where people meet according to law”) [13]

Aaron [14]

The Friend [14]

Long Island City [14]

A Domestic Cat [15]

Poems from Mediterranean Cities — Edwin Denby

Ravenna [16]

Florence [16]

Siena [17]

Rome [17]

Via appia [18]

Villa Adriana [18]

Naples [19]

Amalfi [19]

Paestum [20]

Syracuse [20]

Segesta [21]

Taormina [21]

Forza d’agro [22]

Brindisi [22]

Athens [23]

The Parthenon [23]

Attica [24]

Mycenae [24]

Thebes [25]

Delphi [25]

Snoring in New York, an elegy — Edwin Denby [26-27]

Some Notes — Ted Berrigan [28]

Back Cover: Andy Warhol

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

Cover: Joe Brainard (i)

Title page and table of contents [1]

The New Realism — John Ashbery [2-3]

A Game of Chess — Ron Padgett [4-7]

Passivation — Joseph Ceravolo [8-9]

Kerygma — Sotero Torregian [10]

Prose Poem (“The soul clings with its tenacity to the broken edge”) — John Wieners [11]

Sickness — John Wieners [11]

Untitled (“Do not let the silent, secret reaches of the night”) — John Wieners [12]

Happiness Is Just a Thing — John Wieners [13]

The Frightened City — Ted Berrigan [14]

Cathedral Towns — Ted Berrigan [15]

New Junket (for Harry Fainlight) — Ted Berrigan [16]

Wind — Ron Padgett [16]

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

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

Late December — John Ashbery [18]

Copy of a Copy — John Ashbery [19]

Undated — John Ashbery [20-22]

Political Science — Lorenzo Thomas [22]

The Infant Jesus of Prague — James Schuyler [23-28]

Poem II (“Muezzins, buzzards, newspapers — like”) — Harry Fainlight [28]

Olivetti Ode — Barbara Guest [29]

Hands — Barbara Guest [30-31]

Florida Hillocks — Kenward Elmslie [31]

Piazza of the Bananas — Kenward Elmslie [32]

Another Island Groupage — Kenward Elmslie [33]

The New World — Leroi Jones [34]

*The Success — Leroi Jones [35]

*Predicates/Categories (after M.H.) — Leroi Jones [36]

*Cant — Leroi Jones — [36]

*Poem (“There were more dirty”) — Joseph Ceravolo [37]

*Grass — Joseph Ceravolo [37]

*Poem (“Come and go see over there”) — Joseph Ceravolo [38]

*Poem (“Lapping water”) — Joseph Ceravolo [38]

*Funny Day — Joseph Ceravolo [39]

*Happiness in the Trees — Joseph Ceravolo [39]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 6 (December 1963/January 1964)

Cover: Joe Brainard

Dedication Page: Trista Tzara (4 April 1896 — 24 December 1963) [1]

Title page and table of contents [2]

Canzone — Ted Berrigan [3]

Presence — Ted Berrigan [4]

Destination Moom — Ted Berrigan [5-6]

Prose Keys to American Poetry — Ted Berrigan [6]

Andy Warhol: Andy Do It — Joe Brainard [7]

Nancy — Joe Brainard [8-9]

Inside the Park — Dick Gallup [10]

Stillness — Joe Ceravolo [11]

I Am Lonely in My Crib — Joe Ceravolo [11]

Five Poems — Joe Ceravolo [12-13]

The Night Passes Through April Wind, No One Wants to Sleep — Joe Ceravolo [13]

Non-Sonnet IV — Gerard Malanga [14]

Non-Sonnet XII — Gerard Malanga [14]

Across the Table — Robert Dash [15]

C’est Toi Qui Dors Dans L’Ombre — Harlan Dangerfield [16-17]

Johnny — Joe Brainard [17]

From the Beaumont Series — Dick Gallup [18]

Duet — Ruth Krauss [19]

Poem in Honor of Some Bombs — Ted Berrigan [19]

The Pastor — Harlan Dangerfield [20-21]

Orange Jews — Harlan Dangerfield [21]

Enureseis — Lorenzo Toumes [22]

The Blind Dog of Venice (To Pat) — Ron Padgett [23]

The EMS Dispatch (To Ted)– Ron Padgett [23]

Blimps — Kenward Elmslie [24]

Poem (“the wooden junk flood closed the city”) — Kenward Elmslie [24]

Television Scenario: The Users — Kenward Elmslie [25]

Your Fun is a Snob — Kenneth Koch [26]

Sweethearts From Abroad — kenneth Koch [26]

Rapping Along — Kenneth Koch [27]

The Cat’s Breakfast — Kenneth Koch [27]

Sun Out — Kenneth Koch [28]

The Dead Body — Kenneth Koch [28]

In Every Victim Awaits the Guest of Honor — Ted Berrigan [29]

It Makes You Think, — Ted Berrigan [29]

The Complete Works: A Story-Poem (To Joe) –Ron Padgett [30-32]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 7 (February 1964)

Covers: Joe Brainard [i-vi]

Title page and table of contents [1]

Some Troubles — Ted Berrigan [2]

Cremations — Tom Veitch [3-4]

A Story from the Bushmen — Joe Ceravolo [4]

Warmth — Joe Ceravolo [5]

Ending — Joe Ceravolo [5]

The More You Take It — Joe Ceravolo [5]

From A Sonnet Sequence — Ted Berrigan

Sonnet LXXIII [6]

Sonnet LXXVI [6]

Sonnet LXXVIII [6]

Sonnet LXXX [7]

Sonnet LXXXI [7]

Sonnet LXXXII [7]

Sonnet LXXXIV [8]

Sonnet LXXXVII [8]

After the Broken Arm — Ron Padgett [9]

I’d Give You My Seat If I Were Here — Ron Padgett [9]

Sonnet / To Andy Warhol — Ron Padgett [10]

Rome — Ron Padgett [10]

Nothing in That Drawer — Ron Padgett [10]

The Windows — John Wieners [11]

Les fenetres – Guillaume Apollinaire [11]

Prologue — Tony Towle [12]

Apology — Tony Towle [12]

Thoughts Near the George Washington Bridge — Tony Towle [13]

Somebody Else, Black Poems, Brown Poems — Tony Towle [13]

Gilbert and Sullivan — Lorenzo Thomas [14]

Another Abstract etc — Lorenzo Thomas [14]

The Conscience of Cole Porter — Lorenzo Thomas [14]

Abuela’s Wake — Frank Lima [15]

In Memory of Eugene Perez (drowned may 25, ’62) — Frank Lima [16]

John Perreault — John Perreault [16]

Yesterday Down at the Canal — Frank O’Hara [17]

Poeme en Forme de Saw — Frank O’Hara [17]

To jane: And in Imitation of Coleridge — Frank O’Hara [18]

Unpacking the Black Trunk — James Schuyler & Kenward Elmslie [19-26]

*Poem (“I do not always understand what you say”) — James Schuyler [26]

Two poems — James Schuyler

(“In the café I sat and watched the rain”) [27]

(August, smelling of ripe grapes and afternoon sleep”) [27]

From a Sonnet Sequence: Sonnet 30 (“Roar drowns the reproach, facing him) — Edwin Denby [28]

Political Poem on a Last Line of Pasternak’s — Frank O’Hara [28]

The Lay of the Romance of the Associations (to Kenneth Koch) — Frank O’Hara [29]

Commercial Variations — Frank O’Hara [30-31]

34 mile wind — Frank O’Hara [31]

Rhapsody — Frank O’Hara [32]

Those Who Are Dreaming, A Play about St. Paul — Frank O’Hara [32-33]

Ah, London — Harry Fainlight [34]

Meeting – Harry Fainlight [35]

Lyric — Harry Fainlight [35]

Echo & co — Harry Fainlight [36]

28 — Harry Fainlight [36]

You Have Wasted Your Life — Harry Fainlight [36]

The Home Book — James Schuyler [37-44]

Recoting — Dick Gallup [44]

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

Cover: Love Pictures by Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard [i]

Title Page and Table of Contents [1]

From a Sonnet Sequence: Sonnet 20 (“the grand republic’s Poet is”) — Edwin Denby [2]

In His Distant Camp, Ted Awaits the Priests — Ron Padgett [2]

Mess Occupations (after Henri Michaux) — Ted Berrigan [3]

The voyage of the Argonauts (for Lionel Trilling) — Harlan Dangerfield [3]

From We Are Gentle Part I — David Shapiro [4]

Invention (to John Ashbery) — Ted Berrigan [4]

Literary Days — Tom Veitch [5-7]

Boils — Ted Berrigan, Gerard Malanga, Peter Orlovsky & Ron Padgett [8-11]

Theme and Variation — Harry Fainlight [12]

(“The chant, le chant, the song”) — Harry Fainlight [12]

Childhood — Harry Fainlight [13]

Poem (“what matter of luxury is this?”) — Al Fowler [13]

A letter from Tom Veitch/ April 5, 1962 — Tom Veitch [13]

Book III: The Concluding Book — Joseph Ceravolo [14-19 

Eskimos again — Dick Gallup [19]

From The Gobble Gang Poems — Ed Sanders [20-21]

Some Bombs (Mistranslations) (after Reverdy) — Ron Padgett [22-25]

Prick Song — J Richard White [25]

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

Poem for Things — J Richard White [26

San Francisco Ephemeris — J Richard White [26]

Early Sunday Afternoon — J Richard White [27]

Conversation — J Richard White [27]

Il penseroso — Ted Berrigan [27]

The Secret Life of Ford Maddox Ford (for carol clifford) — Ted Berrigan

Stop stop six [28]

Then I’d cry [28]

Fauna time [28-29]

The upper arm (for Andy Warhol) — Ted Berrigan [29] 

Sonnet XXVI (One sonnet for dick) — Ted Berrigan [29]

A Poem of the Forty-Eight States — Kenneth Koch [30-32]

Rain dunce (after Ted) — Ron Padgett [32]

Hygiene Sonnet — Dick Gallup [32]

Hatred — Frank O’Hara [33-35]

Reeling Midnight (to Pierre Reverdy) — Ted Berrigan [35]

The Jolly Abyss — Tom Veitch [36-40]

(“Spooky-wooky-wooky”) — Joe Brainard [40]

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

Cover: Joe Brainard

Title page and table of contents [1]

Y..R D..K — Ron Padgett [2]

Begun — Ron Padgett [3]

The Rodent — Ron Padgett [3]

Jimmy — Ron Padgett [4]

To Henry James — Ron Padgett [4]

Some Plays — Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett

Looking For Chris [5]

Teresa (A Play) [5]

Seventeen (A Play for Kay Boyle) [5]

Seventeen (A Play)

Teresa [6]

Seventeen (A Play for Signor Melone of Venice) [6]

The Rest of the Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford — Ted Berrigan

On His Own [7]

The Dance of the Broken Bomb [7]

Putting Away [8]

Owe [8-9]

We Are Jungles [9]

What Is That Flying Away? — Joe Ceravolo [10-16]

Life in Darkness — Dick Gallup [17-21]

From Newstand Report — John Stanton [22-23]

Sally — Joe Brainard [24-26]

Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch — William Burroughs [27]

From The Jolly Abyss — Tom Veitch [28-31]

Two Poems — David Shapiro

(“Light became audible, that is, a child, and took the empty place”) [32]

(“The most terrible spasms”) [33]

Three Poems — Tony Towle

Attached Poem [34]

Poems (to Joe LeSueur) [34]

Skylarks [34]

Juvenglandia — Harry Fainlight [35-37]

To the Autumn Sunbeam God — Harry Fainlight [37]

White — John Ashbery [38]

Vocalise — John Ashbery [38-39]

Evening Quatrains — John Ashbery [39]

At the Railway Station — Kenneth Koch [40]

Dostoevski’s The Gambler — Kenneth Koch [40]

Triste E Una Donna — Kenneth Koch [41]

Morro Rock — Kenneth Koch [41]

Schweitzerreich — Kenneth Koch [41]

Mateeyanah — Kenneth Koch [41]

Wahego — Kenneth Koch [42]

In Harmonium — Kenneth Koch [42]

Chiaroscuro — Kenneth Koch [42]

Heanorupeatomos – — Kenneth Koch [43]

An X-Ray of Utah — Kenneth Koch [43] 

Religiously — Kenneth Koch [43]

Givers of Winds Is My Name — William Burroughs [44-48]

Strum Night — Barbara Guest [49]

Looking at Flowers Through Tears — Barbara Guest [49-50]

Dada Proverb — Tristan Tzara [50]

The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express July 18, 1963 — Allen Ginsberg [51-54]

The Return of Yellow May — Kenneth Koch [55-57]

The Revolt of the Giant Animals — Kenneth Koch [58]

The Building of Florence — Kenneth Koch [59-60]

The Beverly Boys Summer Vacation — Kenneth Koch [61-64]

For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson — Frank O’Hara [65-67]

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

Cover: Joe Brainard

Title Page and table of contents [1]

Poop — Francis Picabia [2]

Fits of Candor (A Manifesto) — Dick Gallup [2]

The Return of Philista — Dick Gallup [3]

Washington, July 5 — John Giorno [3] 

Inside Speech — Harlan Dangerfield [4]

December — Giuseppe Ungaretti [4]

Brett — Ted Berrigan [5]

Brett (A Play) — Ron Padgett [5]

After Breakfast — Giuseppe Ungaretti [5]

Richard Cory — Ron Padgett [6]

Revised Poem — John Stanton [6]

Montana — Giuseppe Ungaretti [6]

Poem (“I stand last night near a lonely son-of-a-bitch.”) — Aram Saroyan [7]

From the Poetry Machine — Al Katzman [7]

Blandford, England, Sept. 23 — John Giorno [7]

December — Ron Padgett [7]

“Yes, I Am William Burroughs. . . .” — Tom Veitch [8-9]

To the Imperial Wizard — Jeff Giles [9]

A Grave — James Schuyler [10]

Moving — Aram Saroyan [10]

Georgia — Philippe Soupalt (trans. By Peter Schjeldahl) [10]

Dirge (South Africa) — David Shapiro [11]

From Five Songs — David Shapiro [11]

*From The Mutation of the Spirit — Gregory Corso [12-14]

*Precipice: A Story — Tom Veitch [15-17]

*The Day Before the Windowshade Fell — Les Gottesman [18]

*Apologies for the Angry Postcard — Les Gottesman [18]

*Principia Mathematica — Ron Padgett [18]

*Anecdote of Mumbly at Home — Louis Nasper [19]

*Homage to _______________ – John Perreault [19]

*Ragtime Cowboy Joe — Louis Nasper [19-20]

*From the Paris Sonnets — Peter Schjeldahl

Sonnet 16 (“Darkness rises from the sewers of Paris which I hear”) [20]

Sonnet 20 (“I cannot go on like this a mother hen”) [20]

*We Hardly — Richard Huelsenbeck [21]

*”My arms are warm” — Aram Saroyan [22]

*Falling in Love in Spain or Mexico — Ron Padgett [22]

*Prison of Souls — Jeff Giles [22]

*Pomp Ilk — Dick Gallup [23]

*Mother Cabrini (a play) — Ted Berrigan [23]

*Poem (“In the corner of my room an American!”) — Aram Saroyan [24]

*My First Story — Szabo [24]

*Poem (I don’t belong to you”) — Harlan Dangerfield [24]

*Preface to “The Champ” — Kenward Elmslie [25-27]

*The Champ — Kenward Elmslie [27-34]

*Craze Man Wiliiker — Pierre Reiter [35]

*Memoirs — Douglas MacArthur [35]

*Secret Wallpaper — Ted Greenwald [36]

*The Pirates — David Shapiro [36]

*A Memory Filled with White — Giuseppe Ungaretti [36]

*(“There was an old prude from St. Paul”) — Harlan Dangerfield [37]

*(“A young maid awalking alone”) — Harlan Dangerfield [37]

*The Groundhog — Ted Berrigan [37]

*Song — Richard Kolmar [38]

*To Modigliani, to Prove to Him That I’m a Poet — Max Jacob [38]

*The Fernandez — Ron Padgett [39]

*Miss America — Kenneth Koch [39]

*Did Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate Plan to Enter Medicine — Joe Brainard [40-41]

*The Custard Sellers — James Schuyler [42-43]

*Ghost Tantra #9 — Michael McClure [43]

*Excerpt from The Jolly Abyss — Tom Veitch [44-46]

*Recipe Department — Hasheesh Fudge — Brion Gysin [46]

*(When the mercenaries ran away . . . “) with image [47]

Ten When My Eyes Were Hurting — Larry Swingle [48-50]

A Man Saw a Ball of Gold — Ron Padgett [50]

John Button Birthday — Frank O’Hara [51]

Can’t Keep — Joseph Ceravolo [51-52]

Sestina with a Lost Line — Bruce Kawin [52]

Poem (“A new telephone on the table”) — Aram Saroyan [53]

The Bermudas — Richard Kolmar & Aram Saroyan [53]

Balance of Payments — John Ashbery [54]

Supplements — Tony Towle [55-57]

Ave Maria — Frank O’Hara [57]

Fits of Affection — John Dent [57]

The Ecclesiast — John Ashbery [58]

The Woman — Frank Lima [59]

In Three Parts — Ted Berrigan [59]

Fortune — John Ashbery [60-61]

Revolting (A one act play) — Dick Gallup [62]

The Courtier — Kenneth Koch [63]

En L’an Trentisme de Mon Eage — Kenneth Koch [63-65]

Leapfrog (for Jim Sears) — The Poem Machine [65]

Hoboken — John Ashbery [66-68]

(“From Aphrodite”) — Ed Sanders [68]

The Ode to Music (for Morton Subotnick) — Philip Whalen [69-72]

Fits of Nerves with a Fix — William Burroughs [72-73]

Street — Joe Ceravolo [74] 

Ed Sanders’ Language — Charles Olson [74]

Music — Joe Ceravolo [74]

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

Cover: Joe Brainard [i]

Title page and table of contents [1]

On Frank O’Hara’s Birthday — Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan [2]

Adios Lecture — Ken Weaver [3]

Police Lock — Aram Saroyan [4-5]

The Luis Armed Story — Tom Veitch [6-15]

From Looking For Chris — Ted Berrigan [16-23]

From The Bingo — Dick Gallup [24-26]

From Motor Maids Cross the Continent — Ron Padgett [27-32]

Two Stories — Barbara Guest

Another Daddy [32]

The “Adventures of Tin-Tin” Story [32]

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

Barbie and Ken — Kenward Elmslie [35-39]

From A Sonnet Sequence — Edwin Denby

(“New York, smog dim under August”) [40]

(Neighbor sneaks refuse to my roof”) [40]

(In tooth and claw red, not nature”) [40]

(“Disorder, mental, strikes me; I”) [41]

(“In a hotelroom a madman”) [41]

(“Nocturnal void lower Fifth, I”) [42]

“Drenched saw Doris home, midnight gale” [42]

Sonnet 18 (“Sunday on the Senator’s estate”) [42]

Sonnet 19 (“The size balls are sudden Lamarch”) [42]

Sonnet 20 (“The grand republic’s Poet is”) [43]

Sonnet 21 (“Blue grey ridge, green grey leafage”) [43]

Sonnet 23 (“Heavy bus slows, New York my ride”) [44]

Sonnet 24 (“New year’s near, glass autumn long gone”) [44]

Sonnet 30 (“Roar drowns the reproach, facing him”) [44]

Advertisement for an Ed Sanders Catalog [45]

From The Red Robins — Kenneth Koch [46-55]

Frost – Harlan Dangerfield [56]

Saturday Night at the Movies — Harlan Dangerfield [56]

A Fine Thing — Tom Veitch [56]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 2 No. 12 (NEVER ISSUED)

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 2 No. 13 (May 1966)

This issue has printed page numbers in the upper right corner beginning with page 2 after the cover and title page. As a result , the page numbers are not placed in brackets.

Cover page: Image of a stencil cutter by Joe Brainard

Table of contents and title page [1]

In Praise of the Postal System — Stéphane Mallarmé p. 2

From The Bingo — Dick Gallup pp. 3-7

Mortality — Théophile Gautier p. 8 

The Suitor – Théophile Gautier pp. 8-9

From Julius Caesar — tran. John J. Murphy p. 10

The Heavenly Skater — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

At Dawn — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

The Traveller and His Shadow — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

Fetish — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

Natural Greatness — Pierre Reverdy p. 12

The Hard Heart — Pierre Reverdy p. 12

From Clear the Range — Ted Berrigan pp. 13-15

The Great Melancholy of an Avenue — Phillipe Soupault p. 15

Fragment — William Saroyan p. 16

Saving Japan — Theresa Mitchell p. 17-18

Two Sad Birds — Harry Mathews pp. 19-20

Brunswick Stew — Joe Brainard p. 21

Alas! — Max Jacob p. 21

History of France — Kenward Elmslie pp. 22-23

Valiant Warrior on Foreign Soil — Max Jacob p. 23

Juile ou la rose — Guillaume Apollinaire pp. 24-29

Julie ou j’ai prete ma rose pp. 24-25

Corona di Cazzi p. 25

Epithalame p. 25

In Vase Proepostero p. 26

Petit Balai p. 26

Le teint p. 26

VIII (“Linda la noire aux paumes roses”) p. 26

CartesPostales pp. 27-28

Le Chat p. 28

Le Negre p. 28

Quelques Distiques Pour Plaire a Dupuy pp. 28-29

Bibilographie p. 29

Justification p. 29

Notes on this C Edition p. 29

The Julie or the Rose Newsletter — Ron Padgett ed. pp. 30-31

Introduction p. 30

Commentaries, blurbs p. 30

Two letters from Pascal Pia pp. 30-31

Letter from Leroy Breunig p. 31

Notes p. 31

Notices p. 31

Blank back cover [32]

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 14 (1967)

Behind the Wheel — Michael Brownstein

No Empty Hands [2]

Nations [3]]

Sunny Barn, Special Guests [4]

Behind the Wheel [5]

The Plains of Abraham [6]

Large Blue [7]

Fingertips [8]

Janice [9]

*Lily Flower [10] — Missing from Harter Index

*Waitress [11] — Missing from Harter Index

*News [12]

*Florence Was Fine in the Summertime [13]

*Clean & Clear [14]

*Poem (“Yours the taught climb borne security”) [15]

*Navel [16]

*Pond [17]

*A Final Storm [18]

*Coincidences [19]

*Moving You Along [20]

*Massachusetts [21]

*Against the Grain [22]

*Typhoon [23]

*A Modern Instance [24]

*Pounds and Ounces [25]

Colophon [26]

Author Bio [27]

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Charles Olson to Elaine Feinstein (1959)

Burroughs, I notice, is marvelously after the libidinal, and does exactly the opposite of Creeley: he makes his own body into a literal corpus (text), a precise physiology to the t of the bottom of his foot for a fix. Burroughs wants a post-libidinal like Creeley wants a post-speech. It’s terrific, both these drives. Clean.  

I would revive the old sense of a precise plurality of “forms” (zzz). Dose Muses. I’m sure each man has one as firm a shape as a locality. Forget the proper nouns of same Muses. Remember only their mother. They have nothing, I’m sure, to do with literary forms. They are, I our gab, archetypes.

Thus the psyche, and them, bound, vertically, and shot from the “side” (by habit or choice, Burroughs or Creeley, as instances) comes Morphe. Genes to speech, morphs to me and you, and yr chains, senors, will drop off, comes the strawberries mit cream.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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Front

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Title Page

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Table of Contents

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William Burroughs
“The Conspiracy”

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Erick Hawkins
“Here and Now”

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Donald Phelps
“The Muck School”

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Diane Di Prima
“Whims”

Charles Olson
“Pieces of Time”

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Basil King
“Drawings”

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Paul Bowles
“Ketama-Taza”

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Allen Ginsberg
“Paterson”

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John Fles
“The Root”

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Martin Williams
“The Innocent Bystander”

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Richard Kraft
“The Jazz Age in the American Film”

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Back cover

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Announcement

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

It is said that a long journey begins with a single step. And sometimes one heads on the road in order to sit at the feet of a master. Seemingly, hundreds of Burroughs fans made the trek to Lawrence to catch a glimpse of el hombre invisible. Even at the dawn of his celebrity at the Beat Hotel in Paris, the curious would knock on his door hoping to be invited in for a talk, a toke or a shot. Some, like Ian Sommerville and Mikey Portman, stayed at Burroughs’ side for quite some time. When Burroughs was alive, I never felt the urge to track him down with an arm full of collectibles and a head full of questions. I hesitate to contact my idols. Looking back I wish I had written him a letter or shared with him an unusual little magazine. Judging from many of the inscribed copies of little mags I have seen over the years, he got a small charge seeing his early efforts in print. He would congratulate the collector on a nice find in his inscription. Gary Lee Nova tells a story of how Burroughs paid particular attention to a rare mag placed before him.

In college, I wrote an essay on Andre Dubus‘ short story “The Pitcher” for a baseball literature class. The instructor thought highly of it and it just so happened that he dated Dubus’ daughter for a time so he had the author’s address. I took great pains over a letter of introduction and sent along my essay. It was torture wondering if I was going to get a reply. Diligently I trudged to my mailbox everyday looking for a response. After a few weeks it came in a hand-addressed envelope written in pen on spiral-bound notebook paper. In one and a half pages, Dubus assured me that everything I read into his story was my own fabrication, and he implored me to drop out of the English Department since being an English major would only destroy my ability to read and enjoy literature. Over several moves and the accompanying shifting of boxes and documents, the letter has been misplaced but I hold out hope that it will turn up like sunken treasure in one of my periodic salvaging missions in the basement. Sadly, it remains elusive like the legendary suitcase of Ernest Hemingway that contained his early manuscripts and short stories before The Sun Also Rises. The loss is one of the great shames of my collecting career.

Except for that letter, for years I kept largely to myself and have had a limited correspondence. That has begun to change recently but for the most part I still remain wary of my idols despite all the wonderful insight they could bring. Charles Olson would have been an exception to that rule had I been fortunate enough to have been born a full two decades earlier. From all accounts, Olson was one of the great talkers of all time at home, in the library, looming over the lecture hall, sitting at the kitchen table, or holding forth in the barroom. The depth and breadth of his thought coupled with his mythic endurance made for an exhausting and, for many listeners, a life-changing experience. I like to think I would have tracked him down at 28 Fort Square in Gloucester for an evening of strong drink and heady talk as the fog rolled in off of Ten Pound Island and mixed with the cigarette smoke.

During my recent vacation to Maine, I made my pilgrimage to Olson’s place 27 years too late. It was a rewarding experience nonetheless. Gerard Malanga, Ann Charters, Robert Creeley, seemingly everybody at the University of Buffalo in the 1960s, and many others made the journey while Olson was alive. Charter took some iconic photos of Olson in the city he made such a part of his life and work. When I think of Olson I always think of these late images with the cigarette, the rumpled clothes, and his hair looking like that of a wild man of the woods mixed with Biblical sage. Olson sitting on a set of wooden steps or Olson standing smoking on the beach. My girlfriend and I took our pictures too.

Exiting Route 128 — completed in 1959, Olson felt this link would be the downfall of Gloucester as a similar link was for Tyre — and winding through downtown Gloucester on the way to Fort Square, you pass the Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center on the right just off of Main Street and Rogers. The Center is within a stone’s throw of Olson’s house but you will not find any brochures or indication of Olson there. The Cape Ann Museum blurb mentions Fitz Hugh Lane, Winslow Homer, Mardsen Hartley and Stuart Davis but not Olson who was one of the great historians of Gloucester. I got the sense that the opinion of Olson in Gloucester is much the same as that of Kerouac in Lowell. There are a few interested parties keeping the flame alive, and the occasional Olson-inspired tourist, but by and large the city and its residents look on Olson with embarrassment or confusion if at all. The figure of the town drunk or a local character comes to mind. More tolerated than revered or respected. I could be wrong.

Driving into 28 Fort Square the first thing that struck me was its isolation. A small plaque stating Charles Olson 1910-1970 is all that adorns Olson’s home base from the late 1950s after his tenure at Black Mountain. The three story building stands in a small community of homes of about 15-20 along a looping road. The house is subdivided into three apartments and an older man about half the size of Olson stepped outside to take out his trash as I was getting my picture taken. I apologized for the inconvience but he waved me off and said no problem. He must experience these interruptions from time to time.

Olson lived on this small point or peninsula in a second story cold water flat dominated by Ten Pound Island just outside his window. The third volume of The Maximus Poems is full of references to the island that lays low in the near distance looking like an ironclad from the Civil War era. There are spectacular views of the Harbor from a small park around the corner. The park was dedicated in 1951 and was rededicated in the 1990s. A small basketball court, a playground, and a few benches overlooking the water comprise the entire park. A little further on is a small beachhead in the shadow of the Good Harbor Fillet factory. On a telephone pole there was a flyer written in three languages including Vietnamese warning people not to eat the shellfish living in the waters off the beach due to contamination. In town local bistros proudly advertised local lobster on their menus. Olson would have had a lot to say about such ironies of present-day Gloucester.

Based on The Perfect Storm and Olson’s writing, I prepared myself for the depressing sight of a cross between fishing village and factory town dedicated to canning the day’s catch. 28 Fort Square on the land side sits among several such factories and the smell of the sea mixes in with the stench of fishy waste from the processing plants. In the park, two women and a small girl spoke in what I took to be Italian or Portuguese. On occasion Olson wrote about the immigrants who worked in the plants and lived around him at Fort Square. These scenes coupled with the harbor views, the lobster pods, and the fishing boats seemed straight out of The Maximus Poems and my expectations.

As for Gloucester and the surrounding area, it was not what I expected at all. Main Street was all bistros, boutiques and bookstores. The street was cheery and upbeat, full of people walking by saying hello and offering our dog treat after treat. There were many small independent businesses catering to a summer resident clientele. Gloucester has become “tansy,” or overrun with commercialism and the inauthentic, as feared by one of the earliest Maximus Letters. I think Olson would have disliked present-day Gloucester and bemoaned that it has gone soft and flabby like a successful middle-aged businessman confident of his place in the world. Gloucester and the environs revolve around whale tours and yachts not lobster boats and sword fishing. Yet the seafood auction is right below Fitz Hugh Lane’s house on Harbor Loop and a large Groton’s sign stands right in the center of downtown. As Olson realized, America was built on the corporatization of the fishing industry that occurred smack dab in the middle of Gloucester. Yet I have been told that the local bars Olson used to frequent are gone, replaced by the aforementioned bistros selling local lobster dishes and $10 hamburgers. Walking down Main Street and driving around 127A through Rockport and Annisquam I have to admit that I was captivated. The views were breathtaking and the towns were bustling and full of good cheer and smiling faces. Yet everything seemed straight out of a postcard and the shoreline was sunny, too safe and serene to inspire feelings of the sublime. Where were the rugged landscape and rugged individualism depicted in Olson’s poetry? Maybe I was blinded to it by the sunny weather. Maybe I should have driven by Dogtown? Maybe the cradle of America has evolved beyond its origins? Gloucester engenders such thoughts which is why Olson found it such a place of inspiration.

Due to its tourist trade, its artistic and literary history, and the summer artists’ colony, Cape Ann is full of galleries and, happily for me, bookstores. All the bookstores I visited reserved a small space for Olsoniana. There is a Beat presence as well, given the interest in New American writing spawned by Olson in the area. Dogtown Books is located right on Main Street. It possesses a mixture of collectibles and used books. The Olson selections were pretty basic such as a few Four Seasons Foundation (Donald Allen’s publishing venture after the New American Anthology and his work with Grove Press and Evergreen Review) publications like a reprint of In Cold Hell, In Thicket. More interesting to me was a trio of early City Lights Pocket Books editions. I was happy to see Kenneth Rexroth’s Spanish translations (No. 2) as well as Kenneth Patchen’s Poems of Humor and Protest (No. 3). They were $100 and $75, respectively. Pocket Books Number Four, otherwise known as Howl, sat behind glass. It was a first edition as it had Lucien Carr on the dedication page. Carr, ever shy of publicity after the Kammerer murder and hoping to distance himself from the Beats, requested that Ginsberg remove his name from its original place alongside Kerouac, Cassady and Burroughs for the second edition and thereafter. In the dedication, Ginsberg announced the existence of Naked Lunch three years before it would be printed by Olympia Press having been previously “published in heaven.” The Howl at Dogtown Books had some slight condition problems but the black and white wraps looked fairly good to me. Originally, Howl sold for 35 cents. Dogtown offered it for $4000. The first American edition of The Wild Boys by Grove Press caught my eye as well. Again it was a nice copy and was available for $125.

One of the fun things about wandering a strange city is the surprises that you come upon. A great out-of-the-way lobster pound with only four tables and a scenic view of the coastline. An inspiring view that opens around a bend in the road. And on Main Street in Gloucester, a well-stocked record shop that barely has an internet presence and seems to operate on word of mouth. I knew about Dogtown Books before I arrived in Gloucester, but Mystery Train Record Shop was a complete surprise. The store is packed with records including plenty of jazz on the second floor. Tucked in the back of the second floor is a spoken word section with the usual suspects like Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot but after some digging I found a copy of Voices of the Angels issued by Freeway Records. A companion piece to English as a Second Language also on Freeway, Voices is a 2 LP set that documents the LA scene in the early 80s. Sprawled passed out among the over 50 selections on the album is a short piece by Charles Bukowski, one of LA’s finest poets if not the best. Among the comedy LPs were a few Lord Buckley records. Mystery Train definitely had a Beat feel to it. The owner pulled a copy of the Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading at the Cellar on Fantasy. Fantasy also issued a Ginsberg LP including Howl in the late 1950s. The Rexroth / Ferlinghetti LP was $72.50.

If Mystery Train was not already a welcomed surprise, throughout the store there were small piles of magazines. They were mostly science fiction magazines, but a few Whole Earth Catalogs and some issues of Ralph Ginzburg’s Fact were sprinkled about. Ginzburg published Eros in the early 1960s, a hardcover magazine similar to the more salacious later issues of Evergreen Review and the Olympia Review. Eros ran into some trouble with the censors over pornographic content. Looking at the magazines today it is a joke. I had a set a long time back that I sold in a time of desperation — another sad episode in my collecting career. Ginzburg held tough and went to jail. His court case along with the trials involving Lenny Bruce, Lady Chatterley, Howl, Tropic of Cancer and lesser known but maybe most importantly the publisher Samuel Roth, established the legal climate that surrounded the Naked Lunch trial in 1966.

Coincidentally, I found a late issue of Evergreen Review from 1969 with Robert Kennedy on the cover. This issue happens to contain not one but two Burroughs appearances. One was an interview selection with Daniel Odier from what would become The Job in 1970. The other was a Burroughsian travel piece called “My Mother and I Would Like to Know,” an excerpt from The Wild Boys. Given that I was on vacation, this seemed appropriate. “Nobody gets through my cover. I assure you. There is no better cover than a nuisance and a bore. When you see my cover you look the other way fast. For use on any foreign assignment there is nothing like the old reliable American tourist, cameras and light meters slung all over him.” I snatched it up for $2 along with the second and third issues of Scanlan’s, the magazine that was the birthplace of Gonzo Journalism having brought Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman together. Thompson’s seminal piece on Jean Claude Killy appeared in the first issue. The equally important piece “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” appeared in the fourth issue. The Kentucky Derby essay, if you can call that unholy mess of drink and drug-induced genius an essay, was the first time Steadman and Thompson worked together. The two both graced the pages of the first Scanlan’s in separate articles. Mystery Train had the second and third issues. Issue two still possessed the Vietnam War flexi-disc attached to the magazine. Unlike many of the LPs for sale at Mystery Train, it had never seen a turntable.

After a lunch at The Lobster Pool just outside of Rockport, I headed on Route 127A into Annisquam. If you drive too fast you will pass Ten Pound Island Books sitting just of the road to your left. Like The Lobster Pool, Ten Pound Island Books is little more than a shack. I expected a boutique-type atmosphere given owner Greg Gibson’s presence on the rare book fair circuit and the high quality of his nautical and maritime books. Gibson, the author of Goneboy and an account of a lesser-known but fascinating mutiny of the Whaleship Globe, came to Cape Ann following in the footsteps of Olson. The small building is weather beaten and crowded with everything you could possibly want on the history of Cape Ann and other seafaring communities and topics. I was searching for a photography book entitled Olson’s Gloucester by Lynn Swigart and sure enough it was tucked away in the Gloucester section alongside several other Olson books. The photo book has an informative foreword by George Butterick, the foremost expert on Olson, as well as an interview with the photographer conducted by Sherman Paul, author of Olson’s Push, a solid study of Olson’s work, if a bit on the dry side. The black-and-white photos contrasted greatly with the sunshine-splashed vistas that I experienced in Gloucester and Cape Ann, and they served as a wonderful addition to my view of the area. I especially appreciated the pictures of Our Lady of Good Voyage in Gloucester and Whale’s Jaw in Dogtown that I did not get a good look at or at all.

I left Cape Ann with an entirely different sense of the area than when I arrived and a deeper understanding of Olson and his work. I also headed North on Route 128 towards Maine with a small but diverse collection of books and records. I came searching for Olson, but Burroughs made an appearance as he always seems to do no matter where I go. The more I think about it the more I feel that Burroughs was not invisible, but instead he was looming over everything lending him certain anonymity. The forest for the trees. Or as Burroughs states it in “My Mother and I Would Like to Know”: “I have a thousand faces and a thousand names. I am nobody. I am everybody. I am me and I am you. I am here there forward back in out. I stay everywhere I stay nowhere. I stay present I stay absent.”

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I am going to take a break on Burroughs here for a second and focus on another interest of mine: Charles Olson. A few years ago a friend from my used bookstore days gave me a call and offered up three boxes of little magazines from the fifties to the eighties. He did not have to offer twice. I rushed to the store and picked them up. I was like a kid at Christmas. Some of the magazines related to Burroughs, like Big Table and The Chicago Review, and as a result fed right into my book collection. Over time what has proven far more interesting and educational for me are all the magazines that do not feature Burroughs. These magazines were the core of a library dealing with the New American Poetry outside of the Beats. The collection strongly felt the influence of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Stein. The father figure poets were Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Charles Olson who inspired second and third generation San Francisco and Black Mountain schools.

Most of these magazines, like sixteen of the twenty issues of Caterpillar, a reprint of complete Tish, the first four issues of Sulfur, isolated issues of the Henry Rago edited Poetry, and a nice run of Io, were completely new to me. Reading Ron Silliman’s blog late last year encouraged me to give these magazines a closer look. To pour over them, in fact. The boxes were full of absolute gems. Some interested me on a collecting level like the Baseball Issue of Io (Number 10) (featuring Stephen King’s second appearance in print). Others provide material on poets that I am dying to learn more about like the Jack Spicer issue of Caterpillar (Issue 12). This is required reading after finishing Spicer’s Vancouver Lectures edited by Gizzi and the Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God. The first three issues of Sulfur featuring letters between Edward Dahlberg and Charles Olson were a welcome discovery. These three boxes are a complete wonder and a re-education.

I want to focus on one book in particular, because like the inscribed copy of the Olympia Ticket That Exploded it tells an important story in literary history. As I picked up the boxes, my friend pulled out a worn out copy of A Controversy of Poets, an anthology edited by Robert Kelly and Paris Leary. He pointed to a cigarette burn the size of a dime and told me that the stain was from the cigarette of Charles Olson, possibly set aside as he launched into one of his legendary riffs that could very well touch on and explain Everything.

Sadly, Olson died of cancer in January of 1970, but I always have associated a cigarette with the man. The prop is part of his myth, like his physical size. My view of his late night, if not all night, discussions is veiled in smoke. His hand, as it gestures and pokes and prods (like his words and thoughts,) always clutches the tail end of a butt. The Ann Charters photograph of Olson in Gloucester on the cover of the University of California Press The Maximus Poems is a case in point.

A closer look at the anthology lends credence to my friend’s claim. The book bears the ownership inscription of Gerrit Lansing. Lansing is a poet and scholar residing in Gloucester. In the early 1960s, he edited SET, an important magazine that ran for only two issues, but like Vincent Ferrini’s Four Winds before it, placed Gloucester on the map as a polis for publishing poetry. SET was featured in Secret Location on the Lower East Side. Naturally, Lansing knew Olson well. In 1960, Lansing helped arrange a reading for Olson at the house of John Hays Hammond, Jr. Lansing has addressed the Charles Olson Festival. In addition, Lansing provided the introduction to Ten Pound Island Books’ (bookseller and author Greg Gibson’s publishing venture) publication of Olson’s Letters to the Gloucester Times. Lansing wrote, “It was the eyes I noticed and was noticed by when I first came on the man sitting behind the kitchen table at 28 Fort Square. You climbed the paint-cracked wooden stairs outside the 2nd floor apartment and through the glass of the door you saw the kitchen table, crowded with books, dishes, coffee cups, saucers of spent cigarettes, newspapers and manuscripts.” Roughly a decade later, Gerard Malanga stayed at Lansing’s home when he interviewed Olson in Gloucester. The interview appeared in the Paris Review shortly after Olson’s death. Possibly Lansing, Olson or Malanga brought the anthology to the interview where it got damaged “in the kitchen on the table cluttered with beer cans, cigarette and cigar butts, and unanswered correspondence.” Over the years, not much had changed regarding the clutter on the kitchen table in Gloucester.

A Controversy of Poets tells an interesting story without the cigarette stain. Much has been made over the politics of anthologies and their role in canon formation. For example see these essays by Marjorie Perloff and Christopher Kuipers. In the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, three anthologies attempted to spread their version of the gospel. In 1957, Robert Pack, Louis Simpson, and Donald Hall edited New Poets of England and America. The placement of England before the United States tells you something of their vision of the new and important in poetry. The anthology looked back first and foremost to England and Europe for its tradition. The anthology placed the future of poetry firmly in the hands of formalists like Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin of England. The editors also place their faith in Americans such as Sylvia Plath who had close ties to Great Britain in their poetics if not personal lives. Olson does not appear in this anthology. The poetics of Pound and Williams championed by Olson found no favor here. Olson’s expansive view of form expressed in Projective Verse (1950) clashed with the closed forms favored by the featured poets.

In 1960, Donald Allen responded empathically with the New American Poetry anthology suggesting a new version of contemporary poetry as well as a tradition rooted in Pound and Williams. The next generation of poets would be from Black Mountain, New York, San Francisco or On the Road (Beat Generation). Don Allen gave Olson pride of place in this anthology. Olson, older than the other poets, appeared first and his poetic theories dominated the appendix of the volume. Clearly, Allen believed that Olson’s Projective Verse heralded the new in American poetry. Olson presided over the anthology like a father figure.

A Controversy of Poets published in 1965 attempted to provide both arguments in one volume. Paris Leary represented the formalists and Robert Kelly, editor of Trobar and then a Deep Image poet, edited the new radicals. As Ron Silliman makes clear, Kelly redefined in his image just who those new radicals were. Gerrit Lansing made it into A Controversy of Poets and Olson remained in as well. Once again the Black Mountain School faired very well. Black Mountain poets appear often in the anthology. Additions like Lansing and a host of other Olson influenced younger poets speak to Olson’s strong presence. So once again Olson made his mark on contemporary poetry. The cigarette stain marks his presence in the volume and his hold on the poetry community.

Yet Olson no longer stands tall as “the” dominant figure. Olson’s voice blends in with a chorus of others unlike in the Allen anthology where Maximus threatens to drown out the other poets. In addition the anthology shows that by 1965 Olson appeared as an establishment figure and someone to be reacted against. Jack Spicer felt that way and expressed his views in the Vancouver Lectures comparing Olson to President Johnson. I feel that Bukowski and the blue collar / skid row school viewed Olson in that manner. Younger poets sought to knock Olson off his pedestal. Kelly’s anthology begins that process. Therefore, the tobacco stain can be viewed as an act of dismissal or disapproval towards his threatened position in the poetry world. An anthology that challenges Olson’s pride of place was nothing more than an ashtray that Maximus would relegate to the dustbin of literary history.

This is all playful speculation. As my friend reminded me, “Then again it might only be a misplaced fag at the end of a long night of smoke and drink.” But clearly, A Controversy of Poets speaks volumes as content and object. In any case the book has become very special to me. Reading about Olson, almost all commentators agree that he was a larger than life figure with a super-human appetite and intellect. The anthology makes me wonder just what it would be like to take the full force of Olson for an evening: the cigarettes, the alcohol, the talk. Most of all the talk, as Olson welded it like a weapon with the power of a blunt instrument. The Maximus LP by Folkways gives little hint of his strength. Could I withstand the onslaught? Could I hold my own? And most of all would I understand what the hell he was talking about?

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Several years ago, I wrote on the potential joys of collecting Charles Olson. Olson loomed as a literal giant over the small press and little magazine scene from 1950 until his death in 1970. As a result, his work appeared in some of the most interesting chapbooks and magazines of the period. His books are beautiful and expansive (I am thinking of the Jargon Press Maximus Poems) as objects above and beyond the epic scope of their contents.

Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka, but Jones for the purposes of this column) appeals to me in a way similar to Olson and, of course, William Burroughs. My interest in Jones centers on his Beat phase lasting until the mid 1960s. This work would make an outstanding collection. In 2000, Brown University showcased its Jones holdings and the Beat pieces really spoke to me. I was especially struck by Jones’ work as an editor. It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur. This does not include his founding of Totem Press and that press’s publications with Cornith Books. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.

I am going to focus here on Yugen. Yugen ran for eight issues from 1958-1962. The magazine filled a void for newly emerging schools of poets that were denied publication in the academic and mainstream venues, like Poetry or The Kenyon Review. Jones stated, “It was started because I didn’t see publications coming out that carried poetry or writing that I was interested in. Therefore, I thought I should start one to try to gather that poetry that I thought was interesting… I just thought nothing was happening on the poetry scene as it should be so I started publishing.”

Yugen is often described as a Beat outlet. Work by Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen definitely appears frequently, but I think the content is much broader than that. Yugen billed itself as a “new consciousness in arts and letters.” The poetry dovetailed with the groundbreaking and monumental New American Poetry anthology of Don Allen published in 1959/1960. Jones included the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch), Black Mountain (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson), and San Francisco Renaissance (Robin Blaser) poets alongside a healthy helping of the Beats. The Black Mountain poets made a very strong showing. In the last issue, the table of contents reads like a who’s who of New American Poets. By 1962, Yugen‘s work was done. On ending the magazine, Jones stated, “Well, I think it just outlived its usefulness as far as I was concerned. By the time Yugen stopped publishing there were innumerable magazines that were publishing poets and writers that I had some respect for.”

Much of the work of constructing Yugen was done by Jones’ wife, Hettie Cohen. Cohen worked as an editor as Partisan Review which gave her invaluable experience in putting together a magazine. She performed many editorial tasks as well as designing the layout. Like with many magazines of the period, the construction process, such as collating, folding, mailing, and stapling, provided a center for the literary community. Collating parties became literary events. Hettie Cohen’s How I Became Hettie Jones is mandatory reading on the literary community in New York City in the late 1950s, early 1960s, as is Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman. Both books provide detailed accounts of the day-to-day process of running a literary magazine. I highly recommend them.

Yugen was printed by Troubador Press in New York City. All eight issues have a similar design and feel. They are simple yet handsome chapbooks, much like the small books published by Jones’ Totem Press, like O’Hara’s Second Avenue and Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. The defining characteristic of a Jones chapbook was arresting cover art drawn by an artist closely affiliated with the literary scene. The artwork for Yugen possessed a strong Black Mountain feel with illustrations by Basil King and Norman Bluhm. The covers contained elements of Eastern calligraphy and the brushwork of the abstract expressionists like Franz Kline. Yugen shows how printing cheaply does not have to detract from richness of design. All Jones productions of this period appeal to me as objects saying nothing of the appeal of the writing within. Highpoints include Kerouac’s “Rimbaud” in Issue 6 as well as defining work by Charles Olson. While all the work is not of a high quality (it is uneven like most little magazines), the sense of a newly emerging literary community shines through. Yugen captures a snapshot of alternative poetics as the New American Poetry anthology broke things open.

William Burroughs appeared in two issues of Yugen: Issue 3 and Issue 8. These appearances highlight a change that occurred in Burroughs as a writer between the late 1950s and early 1960s. In issue three, Burroughs submitted “Have You Seen Pantapon Rose?,” an early piece of the still gestating Naked Lunch. Issue eight features an essay: “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin.” In 1958, Burroughs was still searching for himself as a writer and unsure of both his work and his method. As I have mentioned before, Yugen proved instrumental in giving Burroughs confidence as a writer, providing publication at a crucial time in Burroughs’ development. Burroughs’ collaborator at the time was Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs’ letters containing routines were addressed to him. Oliver Harris details letter writing as a key to Burroughs’ method in William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination.

By 1962, Burroughs was a completely different man and writer. Burroughs discovered the cut-up which replaced the routine as his major literary technique. Similarly, Gysin replaced Ginsberg as the major collaborator and confidante. The effects of the change can be seen in Burroughs’ essay on Gysin and the cut-up. Burroughs writes an authoritative essay featuring a cut up, not a routine. He has become a spokesman on writing technique and history. His belief in his style is absolute. Everything is a cut-up and all literature can be subjected to the cut-up. “ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD?” Burroughs’ voice is more confident and strident. Burroughs speaks from the mountain top; he has seen the light. You get the sense of a power shift between issues three and eight. In issue three, Burroughs benefits tremendously by appearing in Yugen. In issue eight, Yugen benefits tremendously by featuring Burroughs. Between the two issues, Burroughs went from literary unknown to an international cult figure.

To this day, Yugen remains fresh and vibrant, like the New American Poetry it featured. Putting together a complete run of Yugen is tough but not impossible. Issue four marks a turning point in the magazine’s availability on the collector’s market. Issues 1-4 are tough to find and are expensive, roughly $100-150 per issue. Issues 5-8 are much more common and cheaper. The later issues provide a good bang for the buck. Issue 6 includes Kerouac’s “Rimbaud” before it was published as a broadside by City Lights. Of course, issue 8 has the early Burroughs appearance. Visually and textually they are worth the $35-50 price tag. For anyone interested in the Beats and modern poetry in general, Yugen is a fun purchase. Truly, Yugen was a laboratory in which poets of the post-WWII era experimented before their work became accepted as mainstream.

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