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

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.

Yugen Archive