Category Archives: A

The Alternative Press

The Alternative Press

Ann and Ken Mikolowski
Detroit; Grindstone City, Michigan; and later Ann Arbor, Michigan

The Alternative Press Subscription Mailings [Art, Poetry, Melodrama] [1]–[20] (Fall 1972–2006). No. 14/15 is a double issue.

Ted Berrigan, [Umbrella] hand-drawn postcard from the Alternative Press Subscription Mailing 12 (1983). One of 500 unique postcards that provided the basis for Berrigan’s A Certain Slant of Sunlight.

 


The experimental, innovative, and unpretentious links forged by the Alternative Press between poets and painters recall other legendary collaborations: the poets and painters of the Dada and Surrealist movements in the early part of this century, and, closer to our own time, poet Frank O’Hara and his connection with the New York School painters. The Mikolowskis have sought out contributions from the major figures in the country in contemporary poetry, as well as some of the finest artists. The layering of work by Detroit artists and by artists around the country lends the Press its luster as an important showcase for Michigan artists while disdaining any regional label. Its modest production and low-key approach masks a truly revolutionary spirit.
— Mary Ann Wilkinson, Curator of Modern Art, Detroit Institute of Arts

The Alternative Press began its thirty-year run in a Detroit inner city basement in 1969. Ann Mikolowski, an artist, and myself, a poet, were the recent purchasers of a 1904 Chandler & Price hand-set letterpress. We had never printed before. For us it was the cheapest, but not easiest, way to publish the work of our friends, the poets and artists of Detroit. We provided the labor and all that needed to be bought was paper and ink. But the 1,500-pound press was an intimidating presence and demanded we quickly get up to speed.

After more than a bit of trial and plenty of error we established our functional format of broadsides, postcards, bookmarks, and bumper stickers.

Diane di Prima, “Blame God” bumper sticker from the Alternative Press Subscription Mailing 19 (1997).

Until, one day, we upped the ante. We found an easy answer to our printing labors: we turned artists and poets loose with 500 blank postcards each, to do with as they pleased. Each card was handmade and unique, no two alike: poems, paintings, collages, photographs, even metal works and ceramics. Everyone brought whatever they had and gave everything they had.

Eileen Myles, “Spider Cider,” letterpress postcard sent out as part of the Alternative Press’s Poetry Postcards, Series 3 [1986].

I’m not real modest about the impact of this; there’s nothing like it in publishing history. Random House could never do this. In fact, neither did we. It was the artists and poets who did it, and we were the distributors, sending those cards on to our subscribers, generally other artists and writers, for over thirty years. It was fun.

Ann Mikolowski, 1992 [Calendar]. Included in the Alternative Press Subscription Mailing no. 17 (1992).

Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, and Bill Berkson were just a few who participated. Faye Kicknosway, Alice, and Bill did more than one set. Faye holds the record of four sets of 500 originals. Ted, Alice, and Faye all published books from their postcards, but Creeley deliberately did not make copies of his: each was a handwritten, numbered, and signed original. Whoever received that poem has the only one in existence. A bibliographer’s nightmare.

Ted Berrigan [Night-Fishing on St. Mark’s Place]. Hand-drawn postcard from the Alternative Press Subscription Mailing 12 (1983). One of 500 unique postcards that provided the basis for Berrigan’s A Certain Slant of Sunlight.

Each package from the Alternative Press contained these multiple-original postcards and a variety of new printed work from writers such as Jim Gustafson, Donna Brook, Ron Padgett, Sherman Alexie, Allen Ginsberg, Eileen Myles, and Andrei Codrescu.

Envelope for the Alternative Press Subscription Mailing [20] “Final Issue, Finally” (2006). Mailed to Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.

With Ann’s death in 1999 the press came to an end. But it was quite a run.

— Ken Mikolowski, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 2017

Resource

Kevin Eckstrom, ed., Art Poetry Melodrama: 20 Years of The Alternative Press. Detroit Institute of Arts, 1990.


The Ant’s Forefoot

Magazines & Presses

The Ant’s Forefoot

David Rosenberg.
(Gerard Malanga edited no. 7.)
Toronto, later New York

Nos. 1–12 (Fall 1967–1974).

No. 7/8 is a back-to-back double issue; no. 10 is Night of Loveless Nights by Robert Desnos, translated and with collages by Lewis Warsh; no. 11 is The Necessity of Poetry by David Rosenberg; no. 12 is Brief Lives by Rebecca Wright, cover by Donna Dennis.

The Ant’s Forefoot 1 (Fall 1967).


In June of ‘67, in my draft-dodging last visit to NYC for several years, I walked into a letterpress outfit on lower Second Avenue to order stationery for The Ant’s Forefoot. I was twenty-three, a year removed from an MFA at Syracuse, where I’d oriented myself between Pound/Olson and the New York School. Before returning to Toronto, I went on to London and Paris, meeting up with contributors to the first issues—Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, Andrew Crozier, Wendy Mulford, Jeremy Prynne, Peter Riley, George & Chris Tysh—handing each a personal note under the mag’s stationery subhead: “When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an ant’s forefoot shall save you” (from Pound’s Pisan Cantos). And before I’d left NYC I’d done the same with Ted Berrigan and Paul Blackburn, among others. Those two were my touchstones, encountering Ted at Gem Spa and Paul in his East Village apartment a couple blocks away, where I was treated to a recording of Pound reading that Canto.

I wrote on that letterpress stationery as well to potential funders of the mag and received back charter subscriptions from James Laughlin of New Directions, Lita Hornick of Kulchur, and Margaret Atwood. My perch in the English Department of Toronto’s York University covered mailing costs and correspondence for early issues—most copies went gratis to poets I was writing to and exchanging work with, including Lewis Warsh, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, Tony Towle, Ted Greenwald, Bernadette Mayer, Gerard Malanga, and Tom Clark. When I got back to Toronto in the fall of ‘67, I found enough in my mailbox for more than one issue. Complimented by Canadians like Victor Coleman, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, Nelson Ball, and George Bowering, the mag would represent, for a while, a transcontinental locus that extended to translations made by Jerome Rothenberg, Anselm Hollo, Ron Padgett, Jonathan Cott, Lee Harwood, Clayton Eshleman, Lewis Warsh, and myself.

The Ant’s Forefoot 5 (Winter 1970). Cover by Jim Dine.

One night at Coach House Press I sat across from Victor Coleman and Stan Bevington as they showed me how you could typeset directly on paper plates, saving costs of offset photography and paste-up. It was like a slightly upscale version of typing mimeograph stencils, and you needed a keen hand because one typo and the plate was ruined. It also limited the run to a few more than 300 copies, which was all that paper plates could tolerate. Still, The Ant’s Forefoot was a legitimate cousin of the mimeo revolution, from those in Canada run by bill bissett, bpNichol, and Nelson Ball, to those of the second-generation New York School and San Francisco Renaissance, among others. By the fourth issue, fortified by a Canada Council grant, we switched to offset in order to up the run to 500–1,000 copies, but the unique graphics remained constant, including different page color and paper texture per issue.

The mag was designed in particular for a shapely page size of 5¼ x 17 inches (the folded-over size of a paper plate). At a foot-and-a-half tall, this human forefoot equaled an ant’s shadow while passing in front of a searchlight. Such were the less off-color metaphors tossed around at Coach House while stripping negs at the light table or working the linotype (Victor taught me). Coach House work was largely donated by super-idealistic Canadian whole-earth type craftspeople. The Ant’s Forefoot covers were by Victor Coleman, Jim Dine, Rick/Simon, Michael Sowden, Donna Dennis, Arlette Smolarski, Lewis Warsh, and myself; illustrations for my “The Necessity of Poetry” (no. 11) by Rudy Burckhardt, Hannah Wilke, George Schneeman, Larry Rivers, et al.

I mailed in contents for issues 4–6 while I was living in Essex and Paris. Sharing a house with poet Paul Evans in Brightlingsea, we ran off a series of Voiceprint chapbooks at UEssex, offshoots of The Ant’s Forefoot and Paul’s Eleventh Finger. Back in Toronto, a back-to-back double issue 7/8 was coedited by Gerard Malanga and myself. Somehow, Gerry had collected unpublished chestnuts by Creeley, Olson, Wieners, O’Hara, Parker Tyler, and Jim Carroll, while Kenward Elmslie, Bill Berkson, Maureen Owen, Clark Coolidge, and Ray DiPalma joined the mainstays. It was now 1971, the year I received an envelope from my Buffalo draft lawyer containing a terse telegram from Attorney General John Mitchell: “Rosenberg charges dropped.” I was soon in NYC again, from where issues 9–12 were edited on St. Mark’s Place: 9 and 10 printed in Toronto, 11 and 12 at Brooklyn’s Print Center as books: Lewis Warsh’s translation of Desnos and Rebecca Wright’s Brief Lives. Offshoots at the time under the imprint Coach House South were made possible by a CCLM grant and printed in collaboration with Larry Fagin (Ted Berrigan’s Clear the Range) and Bill Zavatsky (Tony Towle’s Autobiography).

In ‘75, a few months after the last issue, Annabel Levitt Lee collated and edited my voluminous editorial correspondence and other materials into an archive that now resides at the University of Pittsburgh. By then I was deep into a five-book contract for A Poet’s Bible and soon off to Israel for a few years, to live immersed in the old/new Hebrew language. I edited a journal from Jerusalem called Forthcoming, including the NYC likes of Phillip Lopate, Ann Lauterbach, and David Shapiro.

— David Rosenberg, Miami, 2017

Ant’s Forefoot books (complete)

Clark, Tom. The No Book. An Ant’s Forefoot Eleventh Finger Voiceprint Edition, 1971.

Cott, Jonathan (After Guillaume Apollinaire). The Song of the Ill-Beloved. An Ant’s Forefoot Eleventh Finger Voiceprint Edition, 1970.

Evans, Paul. True Grit. An Ant’s Forefoot Eleventh Finger Voiceprint Edition, 1970.

Rosenberg, David. Excellent Articles of Japan. Coach House Press, 1969. An Ant’s Forefoot Chapbox.

Rosenberg, David. Night School. An Ant’s Forefoot Eleventh Finger Voiceprint Edition, 1970.

Tzara, Tristan. Destroyed Days a Selection of Poems 1943–1955. An Ant’s Forefoot Eleventh Finger Voiceprint Edition, 1971. Translated by Lee Harwood.

David Rosenberg, Excellent Articles of Japan. Coach House Press, 1969. An Ant’s Forefoot Chapbox.

The Ant’s Forefoot 9 (Spring 1972). Cover by Rick/Simon.


Aion: A Journal of Traditionary Science

Magazines & Presses

Aion: A Journal of Traditionary Science

Charles Stein
New York

Aion: A Journal of Traditionary Science 1 (December 1964). Sole issue.


“AION is a Journal of the Traditionary Sciences which, in C. G. Jung’s phrase, include ‘Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self’ as understood in Alchemy, Astrology, Ceremonial Magic and related disciplines.

AION will serve as an exchange between purely ‘Occult’ and other concerns; literary, historical, scientific; thus, texts from, essays about, accounts of.

AION will be as open as possible in terms of doctrine, operating with few assumptions other than that these concerns are relevant now.

We would hope to effect an opening of the ‘occult’ to influences from without—at least an opening examination as well as presentation of ‘occult’ material in a more intellectually palatable form than in publications now out and correspondence courses generally available.”

Statement on the inside front cover of Aion

Contributors (complete)

Aleister Crowley
Robert Duncan
Robert Kelly
Gerrit Lansing
Charles Stein
Zosimos


Ashen Meal

Magazines & Presses

Ashen Meal

Dafydd ap Eryri [David C. D. Gansz]
[Ann Arbor, Michigan]

Nos. 1–5 (1995–99).

Ashen Meal 1 (1995).


“That of the world of Matter is ashen”.
— Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, Paris, 1972

“… ash is the most precious thing and a great mystery … The mysterious earth or ash  which forms the basic stuff of the human body is, accordingly, the substance of the resurrected body or of the Second Adam …”
— von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, Zurich, 1957

“In other words, the ash is the spirit that dwells in the glorified body.”
— Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Zurich, 1955

“When I lay down like ashes under flame … from the abyss I come to the shining light …”
— Éluard, Tarnished Emblems of My Dreams, Paris, 1952

“… how necessary, for fresh life, ashes and bones are …”
— Powys, Porius, London, 1951

“I kept nothing of myself but the ashes.”
— Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being, Paris, 1947

“The angel of the gate is clad in the colour of ashes …”
— Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, London, 1943

“…and ashes to the earth / Which is already flesh …”
— Eliot, East Coker, London, 1940

“Man’s imperishable part, his ashes!”
— Mann, The Magic Mountain, Berlin, 1924

“… a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath”; “… and with a kiss of ashes hast thou kissed my mouth”; “Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen breath.”
— Joyce, Ulysses, Paris, 1922

“… we’ll return to earth as obscure ashes.”
— Khlebnikov, Cracking the Universe, (traveling in Persia), 1921

“Many things turn to ashes before we reach our own.”
— Waite, Strange Houses of Sleep, London, 1906

“… the body is changed, first into earth, then into dust and ashes …”
— attributed to Synon in A Very Brief Tract Concerning the Philosophical Stone, in The Hermetic Museum, Frankfurt, 1678

“… ashes are not to be despised, since they contain the Diadem of our King … the glorified body of its resurrection.”
— Vaughan, A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby, London, c. 1645

“… burn him entirely to ashes in a great fire. By this process the King will be liberated”; “If you do not possess the ashes, you will be unable to obtain … a bodily form …”
— Maier, The Golden Tripod, Frankfurt, 1678

Ashen Meal 5 (1999).

“What Fire, Air, Water, Earth could not rob from the holy ashes of our Kings and Queens, the faithful flock of alchemists has gathered  in his urn”; “… of these ashes … the dead bodies would be brought back to life.”
— Rosenkreutz, The Chemical Wedding, Strasbourg, 1616 (1459)

“Despise not the ash … it is the earth of thy body …”
— Morienus, Artis Auriferae …, Basel, 1593

“What does it say, this supper of ashes? … l ate ashes like bread?”
— Bruno, La Cena de Ia Cenari, London, 1584

“… burnt ash and the soul are the gold of the wise …”
— Senior, De Chemia …, Strasbourg, 1566

“… the ash of things that endure.”
Rosarium Philosophorum, in De Alchimia …, Frankfurt, 1550

“… commend … thy body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”
The Book of Common Prayer, London, 1549

“If a man lived a hundred thousand years, he could never sufficiently marvel at the wonderful manner in which this noble treasure is obtained from ashes and again reduced to ashes.”
— ‘Rugl,’ The Glory of the World … The Science of the Philosopher’s Stone, Amsterdam (?), 1526

“Once they have eaten the mother’s ashes, they will never taste any other food.”
— ‘Map,’ The Lancelot-Grail, ‘Paris,’ c. 1220

“… our body … is called the black ashes … in them is the royal diadem …”
— Artephius, The Key to Supreme Wisdom (?), c. 1100s

“The ash is all.”
— Zosimos of Panopolis (Egypt, third century) citing Agathodaimon, in Collection des Anciens Alchimistes Grecs

“Dissolve the ashes … into the Stone. Let this be done seven times.”
—attributed to Hermes (The Second Table) in The Glory of the World …

“I am Osiris, a god and the ashes of man. I am the skin he takes on and sheds”; “… ashes become god’s truth”; “She burns flesh into ash and light”; “The ashes of ancients rise again as children …”; “A phoenix asleep in the ashes of night, I rise anew each day.”
The Egyptian Book of Coming Forth By Day (aka The Book of the Dead)

Ashen Meal is a re-collected assemblage of “incarnational” (“embodi-mental”) poetics revealing glimpses of the soul in its matrix, becoming in its being, the heart and crux of the matter, passions exhumed, words fleshed out, the secret whispered.

Ashen Meal is supported by grace, indexed in the heart, and distributed by the wind. It is a free gift, and is not for sale. This, the only extant copy, will disseminate itself into select library repositories in the dead of night without a trace or sound.

Ashen Meal is assembled by Logres as an outreach organ of the Secret College. Authors (or the Trustees of their Literary Estates) hold exclusive copyrights to their own works (which are reproduced in compliance with “fair use”).

Ashen Meal encourages practitioners on the Quest to utilize this venue as an artery for new work which, due to its esoteric nature, they otherwise would not entrust to leaves falling on a more general readership.

— from Ashen Meal 5 (1999)

 

Contributors (complete)

Leonora Carrington
Paul Celan (translated by Pierre Joris)
Jean Cocteau (translated by Kristin Prevallet)
O. V. de L. Milosz (translated by Edouard Roditi)
Joseph Donahue
Patrick Doud
Robert Duncan
Anne Dykers
George Economou
T. S. Eliot
Stephen Ellis
Lawrence Fixel
Phillip Foss
David C. D. Gansz
Geoffrey Hill
Alexander Hutchison
Kenneth Irby
David Jones
Barbara Jordan
Robert Kelly
Gerrit Lansing
D. S. Marriott
Sorley McLean
Abdelwahab Meddeb (translated by Charlotte Mandell)
Thomas Meyer
David Miller
Charles Olson
Kristin Prevallet
Kathleen Raine
Jerome Rothenberg
S. Marriott
Edward Schelb
Cathleen Shattuck
Amie Siegel
Pat Smith
Charles Stein
Nathaniel Tarn
Gael Turnbull
Charles Williams
W. B. Yeats


Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

Magazines & Presses

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

Franklin Rosemont
Chicago

Nos. 1–4 (Autumn 1970–1989).

Editorial board for nos. 3 & 4 included Paul Garon, Joseph Jablonski, Philip Lamantia, Penelope Rosement, and Jean-Jacques Jack Dauben (3 only).

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 1 (Autumn 1970).


We’re at the foreplay of history.
— Philip Lamantia

Surrealism began, point blank, with life-and-death questions that everyone else ignored or pretended to ignore: questions of everyday life, suicide, madness, nature, poetry, love, language, and absolute revolt. The most audacious dreams of centuries suddenly were dreamed anew and brought to fruition in this new and unexpected “communism of genius” that plunged its roots deep in the manifold forms of outlawed subjectivity. Here was a dialectical leap of world-historical implications, transforming once and for all the conditions of thought, art, poetry, and life itself.

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 2 (Summer 1973).

And today? To the extent that the tentative answers to surrealism’s questions have been reduced to any of the numerous and all-too-usual evasions—for example: literature, art; or worse: literary criticism, art criticism; or worst of all: a political career—the superficial observer could conclude, as so many have concluded, that surrealism has failed. But can the viability of surrealist intervention, and surrealist solutions, today and here or anywhere, really be proved or disproved by such obviously backhanded book-juggling in the money­making ideological sideshows of the dominant culture? All these “surrealist” dictionaries, encyclopedias, doctoral dissertations, TV documentaries, and the whole insidious complex of hypernicious academicynicism and museumification are ridiculous, no doubt about it, but can such sorry displays of commercial confusionism truly be said to have silenced surrealism for all time, so that its own authentic voice can never again be heard?

Most assuredly, if surrealism continues to develop it will be because surrealists continue to develop it. And even if every one of those who call themselves surrealists today threw in the towel, the fight would hardly be over. Surrealism’s questions, in any case, remain defiantly and even horribly open—festering wounds all over the bloated body of christian-capitalist hypocrisy—and quite unphased by the would-be curative incantations of those whose job it is to reassure society’s self-appointed managers that surrealism, like working-class emancipation, is safely obsolete.

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 3 (Spring 1976).

Even were we to join the inane conformists’ chorus that sings surrealism’s death, it would make little difference, for those who resolve to pursue these questions must sooner or later discover for themselves that inevitably it lives again, albeit perhaps in forms not immediately apprehensible to the pontifically glib horn-tooters of total counterrevolution. As my footsteps carry me along the redbrick backstreets radiant with fallen oak leaves in the morning mist—a raven on the highwire glances down as I glance up: What can this meeting of eyes portend?—it is none other than the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell who speaks to me, in a voice clearer than any other, and with a tone of urgency that admits of no mistake:

Without contraries is no progression … Energy is Eternal Delight … Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained … The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom … He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence … All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap … Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion … What is now proved was once only imagin’d …

To invoke Blake here reminds us that dialectics is not something to which Hegel was awarded an exclusive patent, but rather an insight, a gift of overflowing life, born and reborn ceaselessly in the fires of revolutionary thought and action. And so it is with the cause of poetry, love, and freedom—that is, with surrealism, in a word. In the exceptional and decisive moments and situations of daily life—breaking one’s fetters, falling in love, risking all—surrealism incessantly emerges anew, and ready for anything.

We are living, precariously enough, in a strange place called the United States, a nation founded on genocide, and whose government, the most murderous in history, is the deadliest enemy of human freedom in the world today. Eighteen years after the appearance of the first Arsenal, we surrealists are more than ever communists, anarchists, atheists, irreconcilable revolutionists, implacable enemies of things as they are, unrepentant seekers of a truly free society.

Surrealism continues to advance today, and to make a difference, because it refuses to compromise with unfreedom, because it holds true to its own irreducibly wild and untameable means, outside all repressive frameworks. Anti-statist, anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti­-religious, anti-anthropocentric, anti-academic, allergic to Western civilization and its values and institutions, surrealism passes with flying colors what John Muir, one of the greatest of American presurrealists, called the test of the wilderness.

“And how do we reach this truly free society?”
Start by dreaming.
Those who don’t know how to cross their bridges before they come to them will never get anywhere.

— Franklin Rosemont, “Now’s the Time.” Editorial in Arsenal 4 (1989)

 

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 4 (1989).


Abraxas

Magazines & Presses

Abraxas

Founded by James Bertolino and Warren Woessner. Currently (2017) Ingrid Swanberg is editor-in-chief with Warren Woessner, senior editor.
Madison, Wisconsin

Nos. 1–49 (1968–2015). Ongoing.

James Bertolino (1, 2, 3, 5); Warren Woessner (1, 2, 4, 6–22); David Hilton (18/19); and Ingrid Swanberg (23–49).

As of 2017, the complete run comprises 49 numbers in 36 items, including no. 24A, “The Daily Fate,” and double issues nos. 14/15 (published jointly by Abraxas and Chowder Review, “Stairway to the Stars”), 16/17, 18/19, 21/22 (“Twelfth Anniversary Issue”), 23/24 (“Special Madison Issue”), 25/26 (“Special Wisconsin Issue”), 27/28, 29/30, 31/32, 35/36, 38/39 (“First Special Issue of Selections from Vallejo‘s Trilce”), 40/41 (“Second Special Issue of Selections from Vallejo‘s Trilce”), 42/43, and 44/45.

Abraxas 1 (1968).


Founded in 1968 by James Bertolino and Warren Woessner, Abraxas was one of Wisconsin’s first independent little magazines. Bertolino coedited Abraxas 1 and 2, edited 3 and 5, and discontinued his association after 5. Woessner edited numbers 4 and 6–10, when David Hilton joined as a contributing editor. Abraxas 14/15 was a joint effort by Abraxas and Chowder Review (edited by Ron Slate). Issues 16–22 featured reviews of small press poetry books (excluding Abraxas 20, Bright Moments: A Collection of Jazz Poetry, now in its third printing). Abraxas Press has also published 11 pamphlets, chapbooks, and books, including Essays and Dissolutions by Darrell Gray, Clinches by Ray DiPalma, The Moving Journal by Jim Stephens, and The Part-Time Arsonist by F. Keith Wahle.

Abraxas 11 [c. 1976].

In 1981 Ingrid Swanberg assumed editorship, returning Abraxas to a format primarily featuring poetry (from an all-reviews format). Woessner remains Senior Editor; the late David Hilton discontinued his association as an editor in the 1980s, although he continued to publish his poetry in Abraxas into the late ’90s. Swanberg edited Abraxas 23/24, the Special Madison Issue, and Abraxas 25/26, the Special Wisconsin Issue. Subsequently, she put together nos. 27/28 (1983), 29/30 (1984), 31/32 (1985), 33 (1985), 34 (1986), 35/36 (1987), 37, the Twentieth Anniversary Issue (1988–89), 38/39 (1990), 40/41 (1991), 42/43 (1997), 44/45 (2006), 46 (2007), and 47 (2010). Under Swanberg’s editorship the magazine’s format has expanded to include poetry in translation, a commitment fully developed with 38/39 and 40/41, in which Abraxas published a substantial selection of César Vallejo’s poetic sequence Trilce, taken from the only authorized edition published by Vallejo in Lima in 1922, and published in Abraxas for the first time since that year. Abraxas 38/39 and 40/41 present 52 of the 77 poems of Trilce in the original Spanish and in a new English translation, with a critical commentary, by translator próspero saíz. Since 1983, Abraxas has offered poetry in translation from Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swedish, German, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese, and Sanskrit, including poems by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Siv Arb, Homero Aridjis, Christian Arjonilla, Antonin Artaud, Stanisław Barańczak, Yolanda Blanco, Yves Bonnefoy, Antonio Cisneros, Sandor Csoori, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Helen Dorion, Gunther Faschinger, Tu Fu, Thomas Jastrun, Margarita Leon, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Imre Oravecz, José Emilio Pacheco, Marcelin Pleynet, Hans Raimund, Liu Shahe, Yan Shih-Bo, Marie Uguay, Wang Wei, Yogeshvara, Zhu Xiao-Zang, and more.

Abraxas’s primary commitment is to contemporary American poetry, presenting work by both established and lesser-known writers.

Abraxas 13 [c. 1978].

Contributors over the years include A. R. Ammons, Michael Andre, Ivan Argüelles, marcia arrieta, John M. Bennett, Douglas Blazek, Jane Blue, Joseph Bruchac, Jeanne Bryan, Diane Burns, Charles Bukowski, Grace Butcher, David Chorlton, Leonard Cirino, Andrei Codrescu, Jack Collom, Mary Crow, Roselyn Elliott, David Lincoln Fisher, Stuart Friebert, Diane Glancy, Anselm Hollo, Albert Huffstickler, Will Inman, John Jacob, George Kalamaras, Maurice Kenny, T. L. Kryss, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, d.a. levy, Duane Locke, Gerald Locklin, Jami Macarty, John McKernan, Andrea Moorhead, Sheryl L. Nelms, B. Z. Niditch, Achy Obejas, Theresa Pappas, Simon Perchik, John Perlman, Judith Roitman, próspero saíz, Joseph Stanton, Thoman R. Smith, D. E. Steward, Carl Thayler, William Stafford, D. R. Wagner, Marine Robert Warden, Roberta Hill Whiteman, A. D. Winans, William Winfield, Christina Zawadiwsky, et al. As ever, Abraxas seeks to discover new and authentic talent. Recognized across the country as one of the best of the literary independents, Abraxas continues to offer an increasingly rare opportunity to emerging writers for their work to be chosen on the basis of merit, and to be presented in the company of the best contemporary poetry.

— Ingrid Swanberg, Madison, Wisconsin, September 2010

Abraxas 49 (2015). Cover painting by Willard Markhardt.

 

Abraxas books and chapbooks (complete)

DiPalma, Raymond. Clinches. 1970.

[NA]. Abraxas Christmas Gift Catalog. ca. 1979.

Gray, Darrell. Essays and Dissolutions. 1977.

Kryss, T. L. The Secret of the Bodhi Tree. 2011. Broadside. Momentaneous Monograph no. 1.

Stephens, Jim, ed. Bright Moments: A Collection of Jazz Poetry. 1980. Abraxas 20.

Stephens, Jim. The Moving Journal. 1980. Published under the imprint Furious Alto Break.

Stephens, Jim. Posthumous Work. 1975.

Trudell, Dennis. Eight Pages. 1975.

Trudell, Dennis, ed. Wire in the Blood: Political Poems from Madison, Wis. 1982.

Vallejo, César. Trilce. próspero saíz, trans. 1992. Abraxas 38/39 and 40/41.

Wahle, F. Keith. The Part-Time Arsonist. 1971.


All Area

Magazines & Presses

All Area

Roy Skodnick
New York

Nos. 1–3 (Spring 1980–1992).

Nos. 1 and 2, “From Gloucester out…,” designed by Bethany Jacobson. No. 3, “La Pelota Que Rebota, Santa Clara del Cobre,” designed by Yuri Yarmolinsky.

All Area 1 (Spring 1980).

All Area 1 (Spring 1980). Designed by Bethany Jacobson.


All Area grew out of Talking Wood, a bioregional journal about New Jersey, edited by video pioneer Paul Ryan, who worked with Peter Berg’s Planet Drum in California, the first publication to propose bioregion and watershed as forms of natural and cultural morphology. Ryan inspired me to put the work of Charles Olson into such terms. Ryan and Frank Gillette had already done that for Gregory Bateson in Radical Software. Thus in All Area 1, Ryan interviewed Bateson, Gillette mapped South Padre Island in Axis of Observation, and William Margolis recorded the geography of a Bedouin tribe in the Sinai. Paul Metcalf and Ken Irby were masters of landscape too. Charles Stein provided a reading of Olson’s alchemical landscape. David Finkelstein used Olson’s triad (topos, typos, tropos) to map space in terms of quantum theory.

Art, science, and technology intertwined. No. 2 put Olson in relation to Kenneth Burke and Julia Kristeva. Sherman Paul read Olson through Burke; and Gillette, my partner in the Burke interviews, engaged the earliest forms of the internet to attempt a “grammar” in dialogue with the noetics of Brendan O’Regan.

Bethany Jacobson and I published a graphically ambitious journal, mining archives of AT&T and Edison, as well as Charles and Ray Eames’s A Computer Perspective for the 1966 IBM exhibition. Thus Norbert Weiner, John Von Neuman, and Claude Shannon were put alongside Trent Shroyer’s Critique of the Domination of Nature.

No. 3 appeared “late in a slow time”: a catalog for sculptor Ana Pellicer’s La Pelota que Rebota that represented Mexico for the 1992 Quincentenary Celebration of El encuentro de dos mundos (Europe and the Americas).

Through All Area I met James Metcalf and Ana Pellicer, who invited me to document their work in Santa Clara del Cobre. From cod to copper: from the “Big O” to two revolutionary sculptors: from Gloucester to Michoacán.

— Roy Skodnick, New York City, October 2016

All Area 2 (Spring 1983). Designed by Bethany Jacobson

All Area 2 (Spring 1983).

All Area 3 (1992). Designed by Yuri Yarmolinsky.

All Area 3 (1992).


Art and Literature

Magazines & Presses

Art and Literature

John Ashbery, Anne Dunn, Rodrigo Moynihan, and Sonia Orwell
Paris

Nos. 1–12 (1964–67).

Art and Literature 1 (1964).

art-and-literature-1-1964


Very high style, intense, and European, following on the heels of Locus Solus, Art and Literature was published in Switzerland by the painters Anne Dunn and Rodrigo Moynihan, and primarily edited by poet John Ashbery, who relocated to New York from Paris soon after the journal was launched. (Sonia Orwell—George Orwell’s widow—was a contributing editor to the first six issues.) Ashbery produced a remarkable blend of poetry, fiction, and commentary dealing not only with the world of poetry and literature, but with avant-garde art, theater, film, performance, and installation art. In addition, Art and Literature ranged geographically and chronologically over a wide variety of literatures. Issue 11 alone, for instance, included Rilke, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, Iannis Xenakis (Greece), Witold Gombrowicz (Poland), Cyril Connolly (England), Caspar David Friedrich (Germany), Miroslav Holub (Czechoslovakia), Gunter Kunert (East Germany), and Adrian Stokes (England). The last and twelfth issue of Art and Literature has a section dedicated to Frank O’Hara as well as a portfolio of work by Lucian Freud, a group of prose poems by Francis Ponge, a long poem by Barbara Guest, minimalist work by Aram Saroyan and Clark Coolidge, and a portfolio of work by sculptor Ronald Bladen with an essay by Bill Berkson. A remarkably integrated magazine despite its wide range of subjects and sympathies, Art and Literature was an elegant showcase for important new work from a variety of sources.

Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965).

Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965).


Auerhahn Press

magazine & Presses

Auerhahn Press

David Haselwood
San Francisco

1958–1963

Philip Lamantia, Narcotica (1959). Cover photographs by Wallace Berman.

philip-lamantia-narcotica-2


In the unpublished “A Guide to Sources for a History of the New American Poetry,” Eloyde Tovey writes:

While he was stationed with the Army in Germany during the 1950s, David Haselwood conceived the idea of becoming a publisher. At the time he was corresponding with Michael McClure in San Francisco—who needed a publisher for his Hymns to St. Geryon. When Haselwood, a native of Wichita, Kansas, was released from the Army ca. 1958, he came to live in San Francisco’s North Beach and joined the Beats. He became familiar with all the poets and the new poetry being created at that time—some of it live, some in manuscript form—and saw that a small press would be a kind of surrogate wish fulfillment.

Charles Olson. Human Universe and Other Essays (1965). Edited by Donald Allen. Photograph of the author by Kennth Irby. Cover by Robert LaVigne.

Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays (1965), edited by Donald Allen. Photograph of the author by Kenneth Irby. Cover by Robert LaVigne.

He too had dreamed of becoming a poet. The first book under the Auerhahn Press imprint was John Wieners’s The Hotel Wentley Poems in 1958. An unfortunate experience with a commercial printing firm led Haselwood to decide to study the rudiments of printing and book design. Then, he figured, he could personally print all future titles bearing his imprint. The printers had expurgated Wieners’s text by removing certain “dirty” words and leaving the spaces blank. Haselwood’s first real printing job was Philip Lamantia’s Ekstasis (1959). He discovered what a difficult task printing really is, or what it means to “express” the poet’s intent. But he wanted it known that his was the first press on the West Coast seeking to print the works of younger poets—and in cooperation with them. Nothing was ever that simple…. David Haselwood first published the Beat writers: William S. Burroughs, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. He also published books by William Everson, Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Ronald Johnson, and Andrew Hoyem. Some of Haselwood’s later titles were considered outrageously overpriced when they were first offered for sale at $10 each.

Prospectus for Charles Olson's Human Universe and Other Essays.

Prospectus for Charles Olson’s Human Universe and Other Essays (1965).

Auerhahn Press books include

Lamantia, Philip. Destroyed Works. 1962. Cover reproduction of a no-longer-extant collage by Bruce Conner.

Lamantia, Philip. Ekstasis. 1959. Cover design by Robert LaVigne.

Lamantia, Philip. Narcotica. 1959. Cover photographs by Wallace Berman.

McClure, Michael. Hymns to St. Geryon. 1959. Cover emblem by the author.

Olson, Charles. Human Universe and Other Essays. 1965. Edited by Donald Allen. Cover by Robert LaVigne. Photograph of the author by Kenneth Irby.

Spicer, Jack. The Heads of the Town up to the Aether. 1962. Lithographs by Fran Herndon.

Van Buskirk, Alden. Lami. 1965. Collected from his writings by David Rattray, with an introductory note by Allen Ginsberg.

Whalen, Philip. Memoirs of an Interglacial Age. 1960. Cover by Robert LaVigne.

Whalen, Philip. Self-portrait from Another Direction. 1959. Broadside.

Wieners, John. The Hotel Wentley Poems. 1958. Cover photograph by Jerry Burchard. Drawing by Robert LaVigne.

Resources

See Jed Birmingham’s “Auerhahn Press Archive” at Reality Studio.

For further information on Auerhahn Press, including a complete bibliography of its publications, the reader is referred to: Alastair M. Johnston, A Bibliography of the Auerhahn Press & Its Successor Dave Haselwood Books (Berkeley, CA: Poltroon Press, 1976).


Adventures in Poetry

magazines & Presses

Adventures in Poetry

Larry Fagin
New York

Nos. 1–12 (March 1968–Summer 1975).

Covers by anonymous (10, 12), Gordon Baldwin (3), Joe Brainard (2), Rudy Burckhardt (8), Jim Dine (6), John Giorno (9), Rory McEwen (11), Ron Padgett (1), Ed Ruscha (4), Aram Saroyan (7), and George Schneeman (5).

Adventures in Poetry 1 (March 1968).

1fadventures-in-poetry-no-01-march-1968-r


Adventures in Poetry [10] [1974?], “The Anonymous Issue.”

The title derives from a children’s textbook, Adventures in Reading. I was trying for a kind of funky elegance like 0 to 9, a little fancier than “C” or Lines. A typical issue was 300–350 copies, consuming thirty reams of 24# mimeograph paper, run through the Gestetner machine of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Most numbers were as thick as possible—as many as fifty doublesided pages. I purchased a state-of-the-art Novus stapler from Germany that cut through an issue like it was butter, a very satisfying sensation. After the final editing, typing, proofing, correcting, and mimeographing, a bunch of us would set up long tables in the Parish Hall, often after a reading, and collate and staple late into the night. Working at the Project and attending hundreds of readings over the years was a big advantage. If I heard something I especially liked at a reading, I would rush to the podium and claim the manuscript for Adventures. I was rarely refused. Editing was a good way to make friends (and, hopefully, not many enemies). I loved what Joe Ceravolo was writing then, as well as poems by Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Dick Gallup, Tony Towle, et al.—the second-generation New York School crowd. But older poets contributed, too, and work from the West Coast, Chicago, and London was solicited. Adventures avoided the grab bag mode of publishing one or two pieces each from many contributors. Often, several poets were featured with up to a dozen poems each. One number was entirely devoted to three writers.

John Godfrey, Music of the Curbs (1976). Cover by Michael Goldberg.

There was an all-prose issue. Number 10 was the “anonymous” issue—no authors were credited; not even the name of the magazine appeared; the covers were pornographic comic strips. I couldn’t pay the authors or cover artists, though once I commissioned Dick Gallup, who was in a slump, at $5 per poem, and he came up with his wonderful “Charged Particles” and several other beauties. Few legitimate publishers were taking on the kind of writing I like, so in 1970 Adventures published its first pamphlet, Tom Veitch’s My Father’s Golden Eye. Books by John Ashbery, John Godfrey, Clark Coolidge, and John Giorno soon followed. Writers who were completely off the radar screen—Steve Malmude, Richard Snow, Richard Elliott, Jamie MacInnis, Curtis Faville, Rebecca Brown—and painters Joseph White and Jennifer Bartlett made their debuts with Adventures pamphlets. One unsolicited manuscript was accepted: We Are Integrated and Wonderfully Made, poems describing the major body organs, written in lilting doggerel by Mrs. Thazarbell Biggs, a registered nurse. There were a number of abandoned Adventures projects—an anthology of children’s poems, translations of French poets, and pamphlets by Dale Herd, Ed Marshall, Alfred Starr Hamilton, John Wieners, and others. The magazine lasted through 1975. Money was becoming scarce, and at the end of 1976, after about thirty-seven books, I gave it a rest.

— Larry Fagin, New York City, September 1997

Adventures in Poetry catalogs

Edited by Larry Fagin. Nos. 1–2 (1973–75). Covers by Bill Brodecky (1) and Alice Neel (2).

Adventures in Poetry books (complete)

Anonymous [Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin]. Tonto Lavoris. 1973.

Ashbery, John. The New Spirit. 1970.

Bartlett, Jennifer. Cleopatra I–IV. 1971.

Baxter, Glen. Drawings. 1974.

Baxter, Glen. The Khaki. 1973.

Berkson, Bill, and Frank O’Hara. Hymns of St. Bridget. 1974. Cover by Larry Rivers.

Berrigan, Ted. Clear the Range. 1977. Cover by the author and George Schneeman. Published with Coach House South.

Berrigan, Ted. The Drunken Boat. 1974. A translation of Rimbaud. Drawings by Joe Brainard.

Biggs, Thazarbell. We Are Integrated and Wonderfully Made. 1976.

James Schuyler, A Sun Cab (1972). Cover and drawings by Fairfield Porter.

Brown, Rebecca. For the 82nd Airborne. 1976.

Brownstein, Michael, and Ron Padgett. Kiss My Ass!/Suffering Succotash. 1971.

Carey, Henry. Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy, That Ever Was Tragediz’d by Any Company of Tragedians. 1971. Presented by Ron Padgett and Johnny Stanton.

Carroll, Jim, and Lewis MacAdams. [Two Poems]. 1973. Illustration by George Schneeman.

Cendrars, Blaise. Kodak. 1976. Translated by Ron Padgett.

Coolidge, Clark. Polaroid. 1975. Published with Big Sky.

Coolidge, Clark. The So (Poems 1966). 1971. Cover by Brice Marden.

Coolidge, Clark. Suite V. 1973.

Crabtree, Lee. An Unfinished Memoir. 1974. Edited by Peter Schjeldahl. Cover photograph by Linda Schjeldahl.

Dawson, Fielding. The Girl with the Pale Cerulean Eyes/The Man with the Grey Hair. 1974. Cover by the author.

Continue reading

Denby, Edwin. Snoring in New York. 1974. Cover photograph by Rudy Burckhardt. Published in association with Angel Hair.

Elliott, Richard. A Song and a Diary for A. 1973. Cover by Edward Gorey.

Elmslie, Kenward. City Junket. 1972. Cover by Alex Katz.

Faville, Curtis. Ready. 1975. Cover by Hugh Kepets.

Ferrari, Mary. The Flying Glove. 1973. Cover and drawings by Susan Hall.

Giorno, John. Cum. 1971. Cover by Les Levine.

Godfrey, John. Music of the Curbs. 1976. Cover drawing by Michael Goldberg.

Godfrey, John. 26 Poems. 1971. Cover by Robert Indiana.

Greenwald, Ted. Making a Living. 1973. Cover by Gordon Matta-Clark.

Larbaud, Valery. RLDASEDLRAD LES DLCMHYBDF. 1973. Translated by Ron Padgett. Covers by Lindsay Stamm Shapiro.

MacInnis, Jamie. Hand Shadows. [1974]. Covers by Bruce Erbacher.

Malmude, Steve. Catting. 1972. Cover by John Wesley.

Mann, Edward L. Central Avenue. 1971. Cover by George Schneeman.

Mayer, Bernadette. Studying Hunger. 1975. Published in association with Big Sky.

North, Charles. Elizabethan and Nova Scotian Music. 1974. Cover and drawings by Jane Freilicher.

Obenzinger, Hilton. Bright Lights! Big City! 1974.

O’Hara, Frank. Belgrade, November 19, 1963. 1973.

Owen, Maureen. Country Rush. 1973. Cover and drawings by Yvonne Jacquette.

Padgett, Ron, and Larry Fagin, eds. Book of Methods (For Getting Children Interested in Writing). 1971.

Padgett, Wayne. Three Kings. 1972.

Schuyler, James. A Sun Cab. 1972. Cover and drawings by Fairfield Porter.

Snow, Richard. The Funny Place. 1973. Cover by Red Grooms.

Spicer, Jack. Admonitions. [1973].

Stearns, Ethie. Some of the Story. 1985. Cover by George Schneeman.

Towle, Tony. Lines for the New Year (Poems 1963–65). 1975. Cover by Allan D’Arcangelo.

Veitch, Tom. My Father’s Golden Eye. 1970.

Waldman, Anne. West Indies Poems. 1972. Cover and drawings by Joe Brainard.

Warsh, Lewis. Today. 1974. Covers by Alan Saret.

White, Joseph. The Oriental Palace. 1973. Cover drawing by the poet.

 


Alcheringa

Magazine & Presses

Alcheringa

Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock
New York and Boston

Nos. 1–5 (1970–73); new series, vol. 1, no. 1–vol. 4, no. 2 (1975–80).

13 issues. Some issues contain phonodiscs.

Alcheringa 1 (Fall 1970).

alcheringa-1-1-1970


From the Arunta of Australia comes the word “Alcheringa,” “The Eternal Dream Time, The Dreaming of a sacred heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be, a kind of narrative of things that once happened.” The ethnopoetics magazine Alcheringa, “A First Magazine of the World’s Tribal Poetries,” was published from 1970 to 1980 and edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock (Rothenberg left the magazine in 1976 to found New Wilderness Letter). Their intention was to publish “transcriptions of oral poems from living traditions, ancient texts with oral roots, and modern experiments in oral poetry. There will be songs, chants, prayers, visions and dreams, sacred narratives, fictional narratives, histories, ritual scenarios, praises, namings, word games, riddles, proverbs, sermons. These will take the shape of performable scripts (meant to be read aloud rather than silently), experiments in typography, diagrams, and insert disc recordings.”

Alcheringa 2 (Summer 1971).

Alcheringa 2 (Summer 1971).

The editors encouraged against literal translation and toward innovation in transcribing what are often works located in an oral tradition. The first issue includes, in translation, work from the Seneca and the Quiche Maya; from New Guinea; and from the Serbo-Croatian. Over the years, contributors included Jackson Mac Low, Armand Schwerner, Jaime de Angulo, Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Clayton Eshleman, W. S. Merwin, Nathaniel Tarn, Anselm Hollo, Simon Ortiz, and others, who presented their own work as well as transcriptions from a broad range of the world’s tribal poetries including Eskimo, Hebrew Tribal poetry, Black Oral poetry, hunting and gathering songs, songs of ritual license, and much more. As Rothenberg noted, “The poets of ALCHERINGA start with the voice. The essayists will look, ultimately, to the very origins of poetry. ALCHERINGA will be radical—that is, going to the center—in approaching the Word.”

“Ethnopoetics—my coinage, in a fairly obvious way, circa 1967—refers to an attempt to investigate on a transcultural scale the range of possible poetries that had not only been imagined but put into practice by other human beings. It was premised on the perception that western definitions of poetry & art were no longer, indeed, had never been, sufficient & that our continued reliance on them was distorting our view both of the larger human experience & of our own possibilities within it. The focus was not so much international as intercultural with a stress…on those stateless & classless societies that an earlier ethnology had classified as ‘primitive.’ That the poetry & art of those cultures were complex in themselves & in their interconnections with each other was a first point that I found it necessary to assert—There are no primitive languages.”

— Jerome Rothenberg, “Ethnopoetics & Politics/The Politics of Ethnopoetics” in Charles Bernstein, ed., The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (New York: Roof, 1990)

Alcheringa 3 (Winter 1971).

Alcheringa 3 (Winter 1971).

Also issued

Jerome Rothenberg. Gift Event 2: From Alcheringa. Midwinter Poem 1973. Illuminated by Michael Manfredo after a traditional Seneca Indian beaver clan mask. Folded sheet.

Resources

Scans of the complete run of Alcheringa are available on the Alcheringa Archive page at Jacket 2. Record inserts can be found on PennSound.

 

 


Angel Hair

Magazines & Presses

Angel Hair

Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh
New York, and Bolinas, California

Nos. 1–6 (Spring 1966–Spring 1969).

Angel Hair 1 (1966).

Angel Hair 1


“Angel Hair sleeps with a boy in his head” was the line from the Jonathan Cott poem that caught Lewis Warsh’s and my fancy, our duetted “ear,” and we settled on Angel Hair as the name for our magazine and press. Jon was an old high school friend from New York, where we’d been literary pals exchanging Rilke, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Lady Murasaki, Beckett plays, Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” various “little” magazines (Jon gave me a copy of Ted Berrigan’s “C” magazine), and our own early and awkward poems. Lewis and I met at a Robert Duncan reading at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference through a friend of Jon’s and it was love at first sight. We seemed to be on a similar wavelength—both serious and romantic about poetry, studying it and the small press “underground” scene outside “the academy.” Lewis was already extremely knowledgeable. He knew the work of and had met Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, other “legends,” and was collecting White Rabbit Press books. A voracious reader and writer, he also had several novels under his belt that he’d composed in high school. We founded our press on the spot.

By September I had returned to school and Lewis was back on the Lower East Side, settling by Spring 1966 into the apartment at 33 St. Mark’s Place and working for the Welfare Department. His salary sponsored our first ventures, in fact. We decided to use printer Ronnie Ballou from Williamstown who printed Silo (the Bennington College literary magazine). His Chapel Press, with the exception of Silo, had printed mostly grocery lists until then and his prices were cheap. (I think the first issue was about $150 and the cover was leftover Silo paper.) Angel Hair had an ultimately modest run of six issues, although the press continued through marriage, separation, and divorce in myriad—both simple and elegant—ways: mimeo, offset, in addition to the occasional letterpress-printed broadsides and books.

Anne Waldman, Boulder, Colorado, September 15, 1997

Angel Hair editors Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, photomat portraits, New York City, 1968.

Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, photomat portraits, New York City, 1968.

Angel Hair helped define the community of poets on the Lower East Side in the late ’60s (as “C” magazine, Kulchur, Fuck You/ a magazine of the arts, Yugen, and Mother had done in the early part of the decade). Jonathan Cott introduced Anne Waldman and me to one another at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in summer 1965, and part of our impetus for starting the magazine was to publish his work along with our own, and the few other poets we knew, like Gerard Malanga and Chuck Stein. Anne was editing Silo at Bennington College, so it was convenient—once we gathered material for the first issue—to use the same printer and the same Fabriano paper stock for the cover (a different color for every issue). When Anne graduated in June 1966 she moved into my apartment, a large floorthrough at 33 St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan (now a body piercing shop) and within a year we began publishing books (Lee Harwood’s The Man with Blue Eyes and Gerard Malanga’s 3 Poems for Benedetta Barzini were the first titles) as well as continuing the magazine. We lived together in that apartment for three years, and the table of contents of Angel Hair reflects not only our evolving tastes as poets but the constant stream of visitors who passed through our door: Ted Berrigan was a nightly guest, and we invariably hosted a party every Wednesday night after the readings at The Poetry Project. Our plan as editors was to focus on poets of the New York School and also to include West Coast writers like Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Ebbe Borregaard, and Jim Koller whom we’d met on our travels. The magazine stopped after six issues when Anne and I separated, but we both continued publishing books under the Angel Hair imprint until 1978.

Lewis Warsh, Brooklyn, New York, September 1997

 

Jim Carroll, 4 Ups and 1 Down (1970). Cover by Donna Dennis.

Anne Waldman comments:

“Our first little pamphlet had been English poet Lee Harwood’s The Man with Blue Eyes. Artist and writer Joe Brainard (one of my all-time heroes!) had generously agreed to design a cover for the little book (Lee’s first) and offered us several possibilities. After we decided on the one with simple, unmistakable Brainard lettering I went ahead and had it printed on blue paper without further consultation. And the whole project went to press. Several weeks later I proudly handed Joe a copy and he seemed both surprised and amused. ‘Blue? I’d meant it to be white. But that’s okay.’”

The story of Angel Hair is beautifully told by Lewis and Anne in side by side
introductions to The Anthology. In celebration of Granary Books’ offer of a complete Angel Hair collection, we have made this text available online.

 

4alice-notley-incidentals-in-the-day-world-angel-hair-1973

Alice Notley, Incidentals in the Day World (1973). Cover by Philip Guston.

Giant Night, an Angel Hair book by Anne Waldman, cover by George Schneeman

Anne Waldman, Giant Night (1968). Cover by George Schneeman.

Angel Hair books include

Berkson, Bill. Recent Visitors. 1973. Cover and drawings by George Schneeman.

Berkson, Bill. Shining Leaves. 1969. Cover by Alex Katz.

Berrigan, Ted. Many Happy Returns. 1967. Broadside.

Berrigan, Ted. Nothing for You. 1977.

Brainard, Joe. I Remember. 1970.

Brainard, Joe. More I Remember. 1972.

Brainard, Joe. More I Remember More. 1973.

Brodey, James. Identikit. 1967. Cover photograph by Bob Cato.

Brownstein, Michael. 5 American Tantrums. 1970. Cover by Donna Dennis.

Bye, Reed. Some Magic at the Dump. 1978.

Carroll, Jim. 4 Ups and 1 Down. 1970. Cover by Donna Dennis.

Carter, Charlotte. Sheltered Life. 1975. Cover by Raphael Soyer.

Clark, Tom. Neil Young. 1970.

Clark, Tom. Sonnet. 1968. Broadside.

Clark, Tom, and Ron Padgett. Bun. 1968. Cover by Jim Dine.

Coolidge, Clark. Ing. 1968. Cover by Philip Guston.

Coolidge, Clark. Own Face. 1978.

Corbett, William. Columbus Square Journal. 1976. Cover by Philip Guston.

Cott, Jonathan. Elective Affinities. 1970.

Creeley, Robert. In London. 1970. Printed by The Grabhorn-Hoyem Press.

Denby, Edwin. Snoring in New York. 1974. Cover by Rudy Burckhardt. Published in association with Adventures in Poetry.

Elmslie, Kenward. Girl Machine. 1971.

Fagin, Larry. Parade of the Caterpillars. 1968. Cover by George Schneeman.

Fagin, Larry. Twelve Poems. 1972. Cover by George Schneeman.

Fagin, Larry, and George Schneeman. Landscape. 1972.

Gilfillan, Merrill. Truck. Cover by Joe Brainard. 1970.

Giorno, John. Birds. 1971.

Greenwald, Ted. Makes Sense. 1975. Cover by George Schneeman.

Harwood, Lee. The Man with Blue Eyes. 1966. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Kyger, Joanne. Joanne. 1970. Photograph of the author by Bill Berkson.

Malanga, Gerard. 3 Poems for Benedetta Barzini. 1967. Photograph of the author by Stephen Shore.

Mayer, Bernadette. The Basketball Article. 1975.

Mayer, Bernadette. Eruditio Ex Memoria. 1977. Cover by the author.

Mayer, Bernadette. The Golden Book of Words. 1978. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Mayer, Bernadette. Moving. 1971. Cover by Ed Bowes. Drawings by Rosemary Mayer.

Notley, Alice. Incidentals in the Day World. 1973. Cover by Philip Guston.

O’Hara, Frank. Oranges. 1969. Cover by George Schneeman.

Rosenberg, David. Blues of the Sky. 1974. Interpreted from the Ancient Hebrew Book of Psalms. Cover by George Schneeman.

Rosenberg, David. Some Psalms. 1973. Cover by Hannah Wilke.

Rosenthal, Bob. Cleaning Up New York. 1976. Cover by Rochelle Kraut.

Schiff, Harris. I Should Run for Cover But I’m Right Here. 1978. Cover by Rudy Burckhardt.

Schiff, Harris. Secret Clouds. 1970. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Schjeldahl, Peter. Dreams. 1973. Cover by James Rosenquist.

Schuyler, James. Verge. 1971. Broadside. Printed by Andrew Hoyem.

Continue reading

Stanton, Johnny. Slip of the Tongue. 1969. Cover and drawings by George Schneeman.

Stein, Charles. The Virgo Poem. 1967.

Thomas, Lorenzo. Dracula: A Long Poem. 1973. Cover by Britton Wilkie.

Thomas, Lorenzo. Fit Music. 1972. Cover by Cecilio Thomas.

Torregian, Sotère. The Golden Palomino Bites the Clock. 1967. Cover by George Schneeman.

Veitch, Tom. Eat This: A Story. 1974. Cover by Greg Irons.

Vermont, Charlie. Two Women. 1971. Cover photograph by Harry Gross.

Waldman, Anne. Giant Night. 1968. Cover by George Schneeman.

Waldman, Anne. Icy Rose. 1971. Broadside. Printed by the Cranium Press.

Waldman, Anne. O My Life! 1969. Cover by George Schneeman.

Waldman, Anne. Up Through the Years. 1969. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Warsh, Lewis. The Maharajah’s Son. 1977.

Warsh, Lewis. Moving Through Air. 1968. Covers by Donna Dennis.

Warsh, Lewis, and Tom Clark. Chicago. 1970. Printed by The Grabhorn-Hoyem Press.

Weiner, Hannah. Clairvoyant Journal (1974). 1978. Cover photograph of the author by Tom Ahern.

Wieners, John. Asylum Poems. 1969. Cover by George Schneeman.

Wieners, John. Hotels. 1974. Cover by Gordon Baldwin.

Wilkie, Britton. Limits of Space and Time. 1971.

For further information on Angel Hair the reader is referred to The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001), edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh.