Category Archives: C

Chicago

Magazines & Presses

Chicago

Alice Notley
Chicago and Wivenhoe, Essex, UK

Six issues published in Chicago (Feb. 1972–Mar. 1973) from vol. 1, no. 1, to vol. 6. See image captions below for complete enumeration.

Three issues published as “European Edition,” nos. 1–3 in Wivenhoe, Essex, UK (Oct. 1973–June 1974).

All covers by George Schneeman.

Chicago, vol. 1, no. 1. Feb. 1972.


CHICAGO is one of the most important mimeograph magazines of the 1970s, not only for being edited by Alice Notley during the beginning of her career but also for how it traces the movement of New York School-style poetics between the Midwest and England. Published shortly after her graduation from the Iowa Writers Workshop and marriage to Ted Berrigan, a time when, as Notley writes, “I was in danger—I saw it that way—of not becoming a poet,” Chicago offered a publishing context in which to maintain a necessary autonomy as a woman and artist and to trace her own sense of overlapping aesthetic lineages as she, Berrigan, and their children followed a migratory teaching circuit. As poet and scholar Stephanie Anderson writes in Mimeo Mimeo No. 5 (Fall 2011), “For Notley, the magazine becomes a way to keep the participants of various geographically scattered communities in communication.”

Characterized by Notley’s interest in publishing large collections of poems by individual writers, sometimes over 20 poems, and an art gallery-like approach to how pieces sit on the page, Chicago is a record of the aesthetic experimentation and associations in the early 1970s that bend outside standard narratives of the New York School. It is also a record of Notley’s establishment of her editorial vision that would extend into the editing of Scarlet and Gare du Nord with Douglas Oliver. The magazine’s run of nine issues is composed of two distinct publishing formats: six legal-size mimeographed issues published in Chicago, with the fifth issue guest-edited by Berrigan, followed by three 8.5 x 11 in. mimeographed “European Editions” published in Wivenhoe while Berrigan was teaching at the University of Essex in Colchester. Poets such Tom Clark and Ed Dorn had previously taught at Essex, making the small riverside town of Wivenhoe—Doug Oliver called it the “campus village”—an unlikely but vital outpost in the transnational networks of American avant-garde poetry. As Berrigan wrote jokingly to Bill Berkson soon after he began teaching at Essex, “Wivenhoe is enrolling en masse in the 2nd (3rd?) Generation NY School, as you must know by now.” Notley and Berrigan befriended poets such as Pierre Joris, Gordon Brotherston, Ralph Hawkins, Charlie Ingham, Simon Pettet, and Doug Oliver during their time in England, the latter four of whom edited the magazine The Human Handkerchief from 1973­–1975.

George Schneeman contributed cover art to all nine issues of Chicago, including a series of interconnected collage covers for the first six issues that offer a stunning visual unity to the magazine. Berrigan handled mimeographing, but Notley was completely in control of the rest of the magazine. Recalling the process of assembling the early issues, Notley notes, “I remember collating right before I gave birth to Anselm, just having all of the pages spread throughout the room and walking around pregnantly and collating everything and doing all the writing.” Highlights from throughout the magazine include poems by Lorenzo Thomas, Bill Berkson, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, Maureen Owen, Joe Ceravolo, and F.T. Prince, textual-visual work by Philip Whalen, Joe Brainard’s comic strip collaborations with John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, over 50 pieces by Notley herself, Ron Padgett’s translation of “Zone” by Guillaume Apollinaire, Anne Waldman’s 1964 “From the Egypt Journal” documenting a trip to Egypt with Brainard, and a conversation between George Oppen, Mary Oppen, and Berrigan arranged by Ruth Gruber. Poems by Berrigan’s students at Iowa and Chicago also appear, including work by George Mattingly, Neil Hackman, Henry Kanabus, Merrill Gilfillan, Art Lange, and Richard Friedman.

— Nick Sturm, Atlanta, May 2021

Chicago, European Edition, no. 2. Feb. 1974.

Chicago, European Edition, no. 3. June 1974.

Chicago, vol. 2, no. 2/3. Mar.–Apr. 1972.

Chicago, vol. 3, no. 4/5. May 1972.

Chicago, vol. 4, no. 6. Summer 1972. Cover only.

Chicago, vol. 5, no. 1. Nov. 1972.

Chicago, vol. 6. Mar. 1973.

Chicago, European Edition no. 1. Oct. 1973.


Chumolungma Globe

Chumolungma Globe

Benjamin Friedlander and Andrew Schelling
Berkeley

Chumolungma Globe (Halloween 1987). Sole issue.


The single issue of Chumolungma Globeproduced by Benjamin Friedlander and me is dated Halloween 1987. It is fifty-four pages long. We had two further volumes of Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K” to complete, which must be why we never did a second Globe. I believe we had work in hand for no. 2, returned most of it to contributors, and kept a few items for our future enterprise, Dark Ages.

Chumolungma is the Tibetan name for Mt. Everest. I’d recently been up near base camp and returned to the States with a tube of Mt. Everest toothpaste, so we hit on the mountain, and added Globe to sound newspaper-like. “News that stays new.” Highlights of the issue: an interview with Larry Eigner by BF (“all that’s left of an hour tape accidentally erased.”). A few book reviews. The rest is poetry: Ronald Johnson’s “Ark 59, Spire of Liberty (Torch & Arm),” Fanny Howe, Laura Moriarty, Jean Day, Norman Fischer, P. Inman, and a Robert Grenier handwritten scrawl like bird tracks on a glacier.

One rule: editors should include their own writing. Ben and I contributed poetry. We did the book reviews. Then closed the issue with “Rules to get home safe,” nos. 1–17. “Don’t start off dreaming … Snap the wigwam shutters shut … Close the door, slap the dog & sleep peaceful in the fitful dark.” Looking at that final page I think we knew there would be no second Globe.

— Andrew Schelling, Boulder, Colorado, January 2017


A Curriculum of the Soul

Magazines & Presses

A Curriculum of the Soul

John Clarke and Albert Glover
Buffalo and Canton, New York

Nos. 0–28 (1968–2002).

All covers are by Guy Berard.

A Curriculum of the Soul 0 (1968). First printing.


Sometime after Charles Olson’s death in January 1970, I told Jack Clarke I wanted to publish some kind of tribute to Olson. He responded by sending me a copy of “A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul” which Olson had sent to us for publication in The Magazine of Further Studies no. 5. On the copy Jack had selected 28 terms as “subjects” and to each one he had written the name of a poet who might write a “fascicle” using the term as a title. We agreed that he would request the text and forward it to me and that I would publish and distribute it. I imagined that the project would take about two years, but in fact it took thirty. Many of the fascicles were printed mimeograph, texts and covers. But as the decades passed I began to employ commercial printers. The issues were sold by subscription or through book dealers. Press runs were usually close to 300 copies. After the final issue (“one’s own Language” by Lisa Jarnot) appeared in 2002, I began editing the whole toward a single volume limited edition of 51 copies designed and produced by Michael Russem at Kat Ran Press and bound in Japanese silk by Sarah Creighton. The book was released in 2010 at the Charles Olson Centennial celebration in Vancouver. In 2016 a two-volume trade edition was published by Spuyten Duyvil press.

— Albert Glover, Canton, New York, 2016

A Curriculum of the Soul 23 (1983). Gerrit Lansing's Analytic Psychology.

A Curriculum of the Soul 23 (1983). Analytic Psychology by Gerrit Lansing.

A Curriculum of the Soul 5 (2002). Lisa Jarnot's one’s own Language.

A Curriculum of the Soul 5 (2002). one’s own Language by Lisa Jarnot.

The issues of A Curriculum of the Soul were

Billowitz, Edgar. American Indians. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 14.

Blaser, Robin. Bach’s Belief. 1995. A Curriculum of the Soul 10.

Boughn, Michael. one’s own Mind. 1999. A Curriculum of the Soul 4.

Brown, Harvey. Jazz Playing. 1977. A Curriculum of the Soul 15.

Butterick, George F. The Norse. 1973. A Curriculum of the Soul 12.

Bylebyl, Michael. Ismaeli Muslimism. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 18.

Clarke, John. Blake. 1973. A Curriculum of the Soul 7.

Dalke, Robert, trans. Novalis’ Subjects. 1973. A Curriculum of the Soul 11.

Duncan, Robert. Dante. 1974. A Curriculum of the Soul 8.

Glover, Albert. The Mushroom. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 1.

Grenier, Robert. Attention. 1985. A Curriculum of the Soul 28.

Hadley, Drummond. Vision. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 21.

Hollo, Anselm. Sensation. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 27.

Jarnot, Lisa. one’s own Language. 2002. A Curriculum of the Soul 5.

Kissam, Edward. The Arabs. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 13.

Koller, James. Messages. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 22.

Kyger, Joanne. Phenomenological. 1989. A Curriculum of the Soul 26.

Lansing, Gerrit. Analytic Psychology. 1983. A Curriculum of the Soul 23.

MacAdams, Lewis. Dance. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 16.

McClure, Michael. Organism. 1974. A Curriculum of the Soul 24.

McNaughton, Duncan. Dream. 1973. A Curriculum of the Soul 2.

Notley, Alice. Homer’s Art. 1990. A Curriculum of the Soul 9.

Olson, Charles. Pleistocene Man. 1968. A Curriculum of the Soul 0.

Sanders, Edward. Egyptian Hieroglyphs. 1973. A Curriculum of the Soul 17.

Thorpe, John. Matter. 1975. A Curriculum of the Soul 25.

Tirrell, David. Alchemy. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 19.

Wah, Fred. Earth. 1974. A Curriculum of the Soul 6.

Wieners, John. Woman. 1972. A Curriculum of the Soul 3.

Zimmerman, Daniel. Perspective. 1974. A Curriculum of the Soul 20.


Change

Magazines & Presses

Change

Richard Brautigan and Ron Loewinsohn
San Francisco [1963].

Change vol. 1, no. 1 [1963]. Sole issue.

change


Joanne Kyger:

I remember, in the winter of 1964, coming back from Japan, where I had lived for four years, and realizing that Richard was almost a different person. He and Ron Loewinsohn had started a magazine, Change, in 1963, and I had sent them some poems to publish. Despite its title it was a very modest typing-paper size stapled publication with a photo of Richard and Ron looking very solemn. Only one issue came out.

The cover photograph is by Joan Gatten, the wife of Ron Loewinsohn; Brautigan was living with the couple at the time. Change included work by Philip Whalen, Bob Miller, Hugh Madden, Robert Duncan, Ken Irby,  Joanne Kyger, Gerald Gilbert, Richard Duerden, and the editors. According to Loewinsohn, the magazine folded after the first issue due to the difficulty of working with Brautigan.

Don Carpenter, one of Brautigan’s closest friends, wrote the following in an unpublished memoir:

Back then it seemed possible to take control of American literature by simply starting your own magazine, printing your friends, and letting the world come to you. City Lights bookstore was a tiny triangle of cramped space with Shigeyoshi (Shig) Murau at its center, behind the cash register. The front rack, under the window and to Shig’s left, was littered with hopeful new poetry magazines, ranging in price from FREE to $10.00. Brautigan and his friend Ron Loewinsohn decided to add to this blizzard of literature.

Change was the name of their magazine, a bold announcement of what was about to happen to the world of art and letters. Change was mimeographed on cheap 8 x 10 paper. It was priced at one dollar per issue and four dollars for a year’s subscription. Brautigan and Loewinsohn met me at a cafe on the corner of Columbus and Pacific. The place was shabby and full of poets, all glowering at each other and themselves. We sat near the window and glowered out at the citizens passing by. Ron Loewinsohn was and is a small handsome man with snapping eyes and a bright laugh, a poet with ambitions.

To keep us from being thrown out, I ordered coffee and probably paid for it, too. After all, they were poets and editors, and I was only a part-time teacher. Over coffee they talked and I listened. Their magazine was ambitious—they would be printing in their first issue Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and I don’t remember who-all. It sounded pretty good to me, and I said so.

“That’s just it,” Richard said, looking at me fondly. “We would like to offer you the position of first subscriber.”

I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. Had they combed North Beach and discovered that I was the only person they knew with four dollars? Maybe so, but I decided to be flattered.

“Thank you,” I said, and forked over the money.

Some time later I got my copy of Change, volume one, number one. As advertised, it was full of poets who have now, with the passage of more than twenty years, become famous as the centerpieces of the Beat. I still have my copy, tucked away in lightsafe storage. Volume One, Number One was, of course, the only issue of the magazine to appear.

There is more to life than editing other people’s work, Brautigan and Loewinsohn must have decided. As for me, their only subscriber (it turned out), they owed me three dollars. At that time, three dollars was a hell of a lot of money, and I frankly never expected to see it again.

But no. These were honorable men. About three months after I had forgotten all about the whole thing, Richard came up to me on the street.

“Ah,” he said, “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been keeping yourself?”

I explained that I had a wife and family over in Noe Valley, and that domesticity and work kept me out of the Beach, often for days at a time.

Not hearing the sarcasm, Richard pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. “This is yours,” he said. “Your refund from Change.”

I was very pleased. In the world of poetry, in the North Beach of then, money was a scarce item. This bit of businesslike honesty was endearing to me. I liked Brautigan better than ever.

The fact that the envelope contained three-cent stamps instead of cash was irrelevant. People can always use stamps.

— Don Carpenter, My Brautigan: A Portrait from Memory. Quotation from John Barber’s website, BRAUTIGAN.net.


Contour Quarterly

Magazines & Presses

Contour Quarterly

Christopher Maclaine and Norma Smith
Berkeley

Nos. 1–4 (1947–49).

Contour Quarterly 1 (April 1947).

contour-quarterly-1-1947


Filmmaker, poet, and editor Christopher Maclaine, together with Norma Smith, produced four issues of Contour Quarterly (1947–49). Filmmaker Jordan Belson was the art editor for no. 1. The magazine published such writers as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Bern Porter, Chris Rambo (a San Francisco poet, he was among the conscientious objectors group at Waldport, Oregon), Philip Lamantia, Madeline Gleason, Curtis Zahn, James Schevill, Kenneth Patchen, and Denise Levertov. No. 3 included the first publication by photographer Charles Brittin (writing as C. William Brittin), who went on to become an important figure in Los Angeles documenting local Beat culture, Venice Beach, the Civil Rights Movement, antiwar activities, and much more. He exhibited at Wallace Berman’s roofless Semina Gallery in 1960. Maclaine published four books of poetry: The Automatic Wound (1948), The Crazy Bird (1951), Words (1954), and The Time Capsule (1960). His four films are The End (1953), The Man Who Invented Gold (1957), Beat (1958), and Scotch Hop (1959). He was a major catalyst in the early Beat days of San Francisco; according to J. J. Murphy in Film Culture, he was known as “the Antonin Artaud of North Beach.” After years of prodigious drug and alcohol use, Maclaine was institutionalized in the late sixties and died in 1975.

contour-quarterly-no-2-1947

Contour Quarterly 2 (September 1947).


Clothesline/Jim Brodey Books

magazines & Presses

Clothesline/Jim Brodey Books

Jim Brodey
New York

Vol. 1, no. l–vol. 2, no. 2 (September 1965–1970).

James Brodey, Fleeing Madly South (Clothesline Editions, 1967).

jim-brodey-fleeing-madly-south-clothesline-editions-1967


Clothesline was edited by young poet Jim Brodey, whose charm and wit were winning enough to secure the likes of Frank O’Hara (his teacher at the New School), Kenneth Koch, Tony Towle, John Giorno, John Perreault, Kathleen Fraser, Michael Goldberg, and Bill Berkson for the magazine, which lasted for only two (very distant from each other) issues (1965 and 1970). Brodey returned the graciousness of his own elders when he was barely an elder himself, and became an important force for poetry in the 1970s, as suggested by poet John Godfrey in his preface to Brodey’s Heart of the Breath, Poems 1979–1992: “On several occasions he directed workshops at The Poetry Project, and his hour-long visits to fellow poets could, on a good day, be workshops in themselves. North America contains reams of collaborations aired-out during such visits.

Eileen Myles, The Irony of the Leash (1978). Jim Brodey Books. Cover by Steve Levine.

Eileen Myles, The Irony of the Leash (1978). Jim Brodey Books. Cover by Steve Levine.

Brodey could be extremely sensitive to and appreciative of the poems of others, and his encouragement led many younger poets to publish and often edit their own magazines. He could be an intense and inspiring friend.” Jim Brodey Books was personal and very small, publishing only four books, including Brodey’s own Piranha Yoga (published to coincide with a reading Brodey gave with Allen Ginsberg on December 8, 1977) and Eileen Myles’s The Irony of the Leash. Jim Brodey Books was occasional in the best sense of the word, belonging as it did to the core of the poet/publisher’s life (“…there is one poem we all write out of our entire existence alive. There is also the poem in the air we breathe, its vapors and juices renew us always.”). There were always, after all, newer and more exciting things to be done.

Jim Brodey, Piranha Yoga (1977). Jim Brodey Books. Introduction by John Godfrey. Photographs by James Hamilton.

Jim Brodey, Piranha Yoga (1977). Jim Brodey Books. Introduction by John Godfrey. Photographs by James Hamilton.

Jim Brodey Books/Clothesline Editions books include

Brodey, Jim. Fleeing Madly South. 1967. Cover by Bill Beckman.

Brodey, Jim. Piranha Yoga. 1977. Introduction by John Godfrey. Photographs by James Hamilton.

Myles, Eileen. The Irony of the Leash. 1978. Cover by Steve Levine.

Savage, Tom. Personalities. 1978. Cover by Alice Notley.


Contact

magazines & Presses

Contact

Jeff Goldberg
Philadelphia

Nos. 1–7 (1972–73).

Contact 4 (January 1973). Cover photograph of Larry Fagin by Bockris-Wylie.

contact-4-january-1973


Published over the course of only two months in the winter of 1972–73, Contact consisted of seven issues and was the creation of poet-lyricist-musician Jeff Goldberg, egged on by a combine known as Bockris-Wylie (Andrew Wylie and Victor Bockris, recently formerly of Telegraph Books). The attitudes and poses of the cover stars gave the magazine a tinge of rock glory or Rimbaudian flair, most evident in the first three issues, which focus on the work of Goldberg (“A Week in Philadelphia” in all three) and his friends Ken Bluford and Marty Watt, Philadelphians all. These issues of the magazine are graced with the New York savoir faire of a great number of collaborations between Bockris and Wylie (culminating in a long review article on Wylie by Ken Bluford in issue 3).

Contact 7 (April 1973). Cover photograph of John Weiners by Bockris-Wylie.

Contact 7 (April 1973). Cover photograph of John Wieners by Bockris-Wylie.

With number 4, the Larry Fagin issue, the magazine changes course, devoting most of its nearly thirty pages to one poet, a formula it continued using to great effect. The Fagin issue includes tributes by friends in prose and poetry, and a sampling of Fagin’s own poetry. The cover of the issue is, of course, a photograph of Fagin with a typewriter. The next and final three issues follow the same format (as does Opal Nations’s London-based Strange Faeces, which came out at this time, and with a Larry Fagin issue too). Contact ends with issues devoted, respectively, to Anne Waldman, British poet Tom Pickard, and John Wieners. This last issue (number 7) includes an excellent survey of Wieners’s work by the late Burroughs scholar Eric Mottram that was also published in Poetry Information (employing another important strategy developed by entrepreneurial little magazine publishers of the 1970s: reprinting).

Contact 4 (February 1973). Cover photograph of Tom Pickard by Bockris-Wylie.

Contact 4 (February 1973). Cover photograph of Tom Pickard by Bockris-Wylie.


Center

magazines & Presses

Center

Carol Bergé
Woodstock, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico

Nos. 1–13 (1970–84), and Supplement: Special Issue, vol. 1 (1983).

Center 1 (1970).

center-no-1


My career as a writer burgeoned as one of the LIGHT YEARS poets who met at the Deux Mégots Coffeeshop in the East Village in the 1960s. We read our work aloud weekly and were published in early magazines of the “Mimeo Revolution,” as well as in traditional media. By 1970, I knew that half of us had moved into prose, with a plethora of eager experimentation in modes hitherto unexplored, and I sensed there was a place for a magazine to represent this new writing. The first issue of Center set the tone: I invited friends to send me “non-form prose from known writers, exciting work unacceptable in the usual media”…Susan Sherman produced number 1 on a mimeo machine: thirty-four pages; the response was so enthusiastic that numbers 2 and 3 went to fifty-two and sixty-two pages, which established the median size of issues. I printed an issue when I’d received “enough” interesting manuscripts. If a piece excited me, I felt it would interest, excite, and challenge my peers to try new ways to create, to innovate. Center became a forum for writers whose avant-garde ideas have become, over the ensuing years, part of the tradition in literature.

Center 2 (July 1971). Cover photograph by Tobe J. Carey.

Center 2 (July 1971). Cover photograph by Tobe J. Carey.

Of the 150 writers published in Center, about sixty have produced books since 1970 containing material which was first seen in its pages. Writers wanted to be published in it. The print run was always tiny, from 200 to 450 copies, yet the circulation was triple that, because copies circulated hand-to-hand, mind-to-mind, in a flurry of excitement. Editing and publishing Center, from 1970 to 1984, was a joy: the energy produced by the writing coming to my desk in Woodstock (1970–74) and five subsequent loci was an intensely stimulating ingredient in my life. I met many incredibly talented people through their writings, many of whom became close friends. Generous grants to publish plus pay the authors came from the NEA through the Coordinating Council of Little Magazines starting with number 2, and I went to offset and saddle-stitch or perfect-binding through number 13 (the “Final Issue”). In the 1980s there were two Center Chapbooks of new prose, and in the early 1990s Center Press published two books of innovative fiction by other writers, and copublished with Tribal Press my own collected fiction, Zebras, or, Contour Lines—these are all Center magazine offshoots. It has been a steady stream for twenty-seven years of applied devotion to adding to the literature, with lovely perks alongside.

— Carol Bergé

Center 9 (December 1976).

Center 9 (December 1976).


“C” Press

magazines & Presses

“C” Press

Ted Berrigan
New York

Vol. 1, no. 1–vol. 2, no. 14 (May 1963–May 1966).

No. 12 was not produced; no. 14 is Behind the Wheel by Michael Brownstein.

Ron Padgett, 2 / 2 Stories for Andy Warhol (1965). Cover by Andy Warhol.


Begun in May 1963 by poet and editor Ted Berrigan (with Lorenz Gude as publisher), “C” Press and its mimeograph-produced magazine and books provided an important early outlet for the writings of younger poets and their immediate predecessors. The first issue printed work by the core group of Dick Gallup, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard (who was also a visual artist), and Ted Berrigan. These four had recently relocated to the East Village from Tulsa, where they had produced and/or contributed to the White Dove Review (five issues, 1959–60). However, the immediate precursor to “C” was The Censored Review, which was published, also via the mimeo machine, in 1963; its contents had been gathered by Columbia student Ron Padgett for the university literary magazine, but had been suppressed by the dean. The title poem, by “Noble Brainard,” was a collaboration between Berrigan and Padgett.

C Press. Ted Berrigan. Mixed-media portrait by George Schneeman, 1966–1967.

Ted Berrigan. Mixed-media portrait by George Schneeman, 1966–67. Painter George Schneeman and poet Ted Berrigan met in June 1966 just after Schneeman moved to New York City. This is probably the first of the many paintings of New York School poets executed by Schneeman at his new studio on East 7th Street.

Berrigan’s “C” magazine published poems, plays, essays, translations, and comics by a growing number of writers and artists, but always bore the distinctive imprint of its charismatic editor. Issue 4 featured poet and dance writer Edwin Denby and included contributions by Frank O’Hara, John Wieners, and Berrigan. The cover sported a silk screen by Andy Warhol of an image of Denby and Gerard Malanga. 2/2 Stories for Andy Warhol by Ron Padgett, also with a cover by Warhol, was published by “C” Press in 1965, as was Joe Ceravolo’s Fits of Dawn. Berrigan’s own great book of the period was The Sonnets (1964), which featured a cover by Brainard. For many people, this work has come to symbolize Berrigan, who was, in the words of Ken Tucker, “fiercely unpretentious, intensely self-absorbed, prodigious in his ambition and energy, [and who] did more than create a substantial body of poetry. He also embodied a spirit that gave meaning to many other writers’ lives.”

C Press. Cover by Joe Brainard

“C,” vol. 2. no. 11 (Summer 1965). Cover by Joe Brainard.

“C” Comics

Edited by Joe Brainard. Nos. 1–2 (1964). No. 1 was published by Boke Press.

“C” Press books include

Berrigan, Ted. The Sonnets. 1964. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Brownstein, Michael. Behind the Wheel. 1967. “C” no. 14. Cover by Alex Katz.

Burroughs, William S. Time. 1965. Four drawings by Brion Gysin.

Ceravolo, Joseph. Fits of Dawn. 1965. Cover by Rosemary Ceravolo.

Elmslie, Kenward. The Power Plant Poems. 1967. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Gallup, Dick. Hinges. 1965. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Notley, Alice. 165 Meeting House Lane (Twenty-four Sonnets). 1971. Cover by Philip Whalen.

Padgett, Ron. Quelques Poèmes/Some Translations/Some Bombs. 1963. Translations by Padgett of poems by Pierre Reverdy. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Padgett, Ron. 2/2 Stories for Andy Warhol. 1965. Cover by Andy Warhol.

Schneeman, Elio. In February I Think. 1978. Cover by George Schneeman.

Veitch, Tom. Literary Days. 1964. Cover by Joe Brainard.

The Censored Review (1963).

The Censored Review (1963).


El Corno Emplumado

magazines & Presses

El Corno Emplumado

Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon
Mexico City

Nos. 1–31 (1962–69).

El Corno Emplumado 22 (1967).

el-corno-emplumado_1967_22


In 1962, Sergio Mondragon and Margaret Randall, an expatriate American in Mexico City, founded El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn (“the jazz horn of the U.S. and the plumes of Quetzal-coatl”), an international magazine that in its heart intended to help heal the break between the Americas, North and South. Randall wanted to provide “a showcase (outside politics) for the fact that WE ARE ALL BROTHERS.” About this use of gender, she later commented: “We really thought we could all be brothers. (We didn’t think, then, about being sisters. We were a few women, a minority among mostly men. Our intellectual pretensions took care of that ratio—women’s consciousness was not part of us then.)” In its thirty-one issues, El Corno Emplumado introduced Latin American literature to the North, printing English translations of work by Vallejo, Neruda, and Gabriel García Márquez, among many others (a generation of new Cuban writers in issue 7, for instance). Conversely, the magazine, under the direction of coeditor Sergio Mondragon, printed translations into Spanish of work by Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Paul Blackburn. Increasingly political as the decade wore on, the magazine was vociferously opposed to US intervention in Vietnam and just as vociferously positive about the Cuban revolution.

El Corno Emplumado 27 (1968).

El Corno Emplumado 27 (1968).

Supported for its first seven years by various departments of the Mexican government as well as by private contributions from many Americans, the magazine was eventually harassed out of existence by the repressions of 1968–69, which culminated in the massacre of nearly a thousand students in Mexico City. In an eloquent description of her own magazine, Randall could well have been describing any number of other American little magazines of the period: “El Corno Emplumado was never just a magazine; it was never just a collection of words and images on paper, put together by two people (it was always only two people: editing, raising money, supervising the printing, handling the secretarial work and distribution). El Corno was a network—letters going back and forth between poets, between people. It was a meeting of poets like spontaneous combustion….”

“In the United States Black Mountain Review was already a classic, to be drawn upon. We saw ourselves connected in one way or another to Evergreen Review before it became slick, City Lights Journal, Trobar, George Hitchcock’s hand-wrought Kayak, Kulchur, the outer edges of Poetry, Robert Bly’s The Sixties for his concern with the great Latin voices, and many, many others. The radius included Duende in New Mexico, d.a. levy’s Renegade Press in Cleveland, Elizabeth in New Rochelle, and Leavenworth’s New Era (written and run by prisoners).”

— Margaret Randall, “El Corno Emplumado, 1961–1969: Some Notes in Retrospect, 1975,” TriQuarterly 43 (Fall 1978)

El Corno Emplumado books include

Note: some are in English, some in Spanish, and some bilingual

Bowering, George. The Man in Yellow Boots/El Hombre de las Botas Amarillas. 1965. Collages by Roy Kiyooka.

Enslin, Theodore. This Do and The Talents. 1966.

Greenberg, Alvin. The Small Waves. 1965. Drawings by Don McIntosh.

Kelly, Robert. Her Body Against Time. 1963.

Kelly, Robert. Weeks. 1966.

Kiviat, Erik. Museum of Memnon. 1966.

Lowenfels, Walter. Land of Roseberries. 1965. Drawings by David Siqueiros.

Mondragon, Sergio. Yo Soy el Otro; I Am the Other. 1965. Drawings by Arnold Belkin.

Moreno Colmenares, José. Prontuario [Compendium]. 1966.

Ossman, David. Set in a Landscape: Poems and Sequences 1960–1964. 1966. Drawings by Mowry Baden.

Randall, Margaret. October. 1965. Photographs, sculpture by Shinkichi Tajiri.

Margaret Randall, October (1965). Photographs, sculpture by Shinkichi Tajiri.

Margaret Randall, October (1965). Photographs, sculpture by Shinkichi Tajiri.

Rossi, Matti. The Trees of Vietnam. 1966. Translated from the Finnish by Anselm Hollo.

Rothenberg, Jerome. The Gorky Poems/Poemas a Gorky. 1966. Translated into Spanish by Sergio Mondragon.

Silva, Ludovico. Tenebra. 1964. Drawings by Julius Tobias.

Swaan, Silvia de. Dibujos de Vida y Muerte/Drawings of Life and Death. 1966.

Truesdale, Calvin William. In the Country of a Deer’s Eye. 1966. Drawings by Judith Gutierrez.


Caterpillar

magazines & Presses

Caterpillar

Clayton Eshleman
New York, and Sherman Oaks, California

Nos. 1–20 (1967–73). 20 issues in 19.

Caterpillar 1 (1967). Cover by Nancy Spero.

caterpillar-1-1967


Caterpillar was started by Clayton Eshleman as a series of chapbooks by such writers as Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Paul Blackburn, and Louis Zukofsky. “The Caterpillar Glyph,” an image of a small napalmed Vietnamese girl, was printed on the cover with the statement “until the end of the war this black caterpillar,” revealing the outspoken and controversial stance taken by Eshleman as an editor. Caterpillar, “a magazine of the leaf, a gathering of the tribes,” began publication in October 1967. Commercially produced and substantial in size, it provided considerable space, over the course of its twenty issues, for work by a wide range of younger writers and artists as well as many of those associated with its precursors, The Black Mountain Review and Origin.

Clayton Eshleman, ed., A Caterpillar Anthology: A Selection of Poetry and Prose from Caterpillar Magazine (New York: Anchor Books, 1971).

Clayton Eshleman, ed., A Caterpillar Anthology: A Selection of Poetry and Prose from Caterpillar Magazine (New York: Anchor Books, 1971).

Says Eshleman: “I saw a poetry magazine as a granary of sorts, where writing could be stored until it was to be consumed or consummated in a book, a midpoint between its inception and its ultimate form.” Caterpillar’s special attention to translation included a “test of translation” in which differing versions of a poem were set “side by side and with a minimum of comment, [to] encourage the reader to measure them as articulations of the original poem.” Works of Vallejo, Montale, Cavafy, and Rilke, among others, were thus presented. The magazine was also attuned to important work in film, visual art, music, and performance; it was not unusual to find film stills by Carolee Schneemann or Stan Brakhage; or drawings and collages by Nancy Spero, Jess Collins, Leon Golub, Robert LaVigne, or Wallace Berman. Issue 12 devoted some 150 pages to work by Jack Spicer. Other regular contributors included Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Margaret Randall, Cid Corman, Diane Wakoski, Robert Kelly, and Jerome Rothenberg. On the name of the magazine, Eshleman recalled, “That special word was given me by Will Petersen on a Kyoto street corner in 1963, when he quoted Blake’s couplet, ‘The Caterpillar on the Leaf / Repeats to thee thy Mother’s grief.’”

Caterpillar books include

Alexander, D. Terms of Articulation. 1967. Caterpillar 7.

Antin, David. Definitions. 1967. Caterpillar 6. Book design by Eleanor Antin.

Blackburn, Paul. Sing-Song. 1967. Caterpillar 4. Published with the Asphodel Bookshop, Cleveland.

Césaire, Aime. State of the Union. 1966. Caterpillar 1. Translated from the French by Clayton Eshleman and Dennis Kelly.

Eshleman, Clayton. Lachrymae Mateo: 3 Poems for Christmas 1966. 1966. Caterpillar 3.

Eshleman, Clayton. Walks. 1967. Caterpillar 10.

Mac Low, Jackson. August Light Poems. 1967. Caterpillar 9. Cover by Iris Lezak.

Sampieri, Frank. Crystals. 1967. Caterpillar 5.

Vas Dias, Robert. The Counted. 1967. Caterpillar 8.

Zukofsky, Louis. At: Bottom. 1966. Caterpillar 2.

David Antin, Definitions (1967). (Caterpillar 6.) Book design by Eleanor Antin.

David Antin, Definitions (1967). Caterpillar 6. Book design by Eleanor Antin.


City Lights

magazines & Presses

City Lights

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
San Francisco

Nos. 1–4 (1963–78).

City Lights Journal 2 (1964).


The very image of the counterculture, the City Lights Bookstore opened its doors on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1953. At first, under the name of the Pocket Bookshop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin sold only paperbacks and magazines; the name was changed in 1955 when the famous Pocket Poets Series began with Ferlinghetti’s own Pictures of the Gone World. The series and the bookshop flourish to this day. In 1956, a few months after the famous Six Gallery reading, Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, causing a firestorm of controversy when he was arrested and tried for the sale of obscene material in 1957. Ferlinghetti was acquitted, and the powerful little book of poems has since sold over a million copies. The poem itself was a watershed work for the New American Poetry, and is still contemporary in its angry protest.

City Lights book. Charles Plymell, Last of the Moccasins (1971).

Charles Plymell, The Last of the Moccasins (1971).

Ferlinghetti started the City Lights Journal in 1963, basing it on such older and distinguished European literary journals as Botteghe Oscure and Transition and on the yearly American anthologies from New Directions. The entire Beat pantheon, including Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, and Neal Cassady, contributed to the first issue. The Journal did not stay on schedule, however; it numbered only four issues, the last of which was not published until fifteen years after the first. But the Journal was notable for the catholicity of its taste, combining writing from around the world. Under the City Lights imprint, Ferlinghetti has published a truly international selection of avant-garde literature, including works in translation by García Lorca, Rimbaud, Picasso, Prévert, Neruda, and others, as well as original work by almost all the Beat, Black Mountain, and San Francisco Renaissance writers. Ferlinghetti today is an incarnation of his own hero, Charlie Chaplin, a symbol of integrity, of a life lived for art. Chaplin’s famous film provided Ferlinghetti with the name for his equally famous and truly exemplary bookstore.

City Lights book. Denise Levertov, Here and Now (1957). Pocket Poets Series, No. 6).

Denise Levertov, Here and Now (1957). Pocket Poets Series, No. 6.

City Lights book. Nicanor Parra, Anti-Poems (1960). Pocket Poets Series, No. 12.

Nicanor Parra, Anti-Poems (1960). Pocket Poets Series, No. 12.

City Lights books include

Beatitude Anthology. 1960.

Corso, Gregory. Gasoline. 1958. Pocket Poets Series, No. 8. Introduction by Allen Ginsberg.

Di Prima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. 1971. Pocket Poets Series, No. 27. Cover design by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Duncan, Robert. Selected Poems. 1959. Pocket Poets Series, No. 10.

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. Pictures of the Gone World. 1955. Pocket Poets Series, No. 1.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. 1956. Pocket Poets Series, No. 4.

Ginsberg, Allen. Kaddish and Other Poems 1958–1960. 1961. Pocket Poets Series, No. 14.

Kerouac, Jack. Book of Dreams. 1961. Cover photograph of the author by Robert Frank.

Kerouac, Jack. Scattered Poems. 1971. Pocket Poets Series, No. 28. Cover photograph of the author by William S. Burroughs.

Lamantia, Philip. Selected Poems 1943–1966. 1967. Pocket Poets Series, No. 20.

Levertov, Denise. Here and Now. 1957. Pocket Poets Series, No. 6.

Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. 1957. Cover negative of photograph by Harry Redl.

McClure, Michael. Ghost Tantras. 1964. Cover by Wallace Berman.

McClure, Michael. Meat Science Essays. 1963.

O’Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems. 1964. Pocket Poets Series, No. 19.

Parra, Nicanor. Anti-Poems. 1960. Pocket Poets Series, No. 12.

Pickard, Tom. Guttersnipe. 1971. Cover photograph of the author by Elsa Dorfman.

Rothenberg, Jerome, ed. and trans. Nine Young German Poets. 1959. Pocket Poets Series, No. 11.

Waldman, Anne. Fast Speaking Woman. 1975. Cover photograph of the author by Sheyla Baykal.

Watts, Allen. Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. 1959.

Weishaus, Joel, ed. On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing. 1971. Cover photograph by Steven Lazar.

Williams, William Carlos. Kora in Hell. 1957. Pocket Poets Series, No. 7.

Resource

For further information about City Lights, the reader is referred to: Ralph T. Cook, City Lights Books: A Descriptive Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992).


Corinth Books

magazines & Presses

Corinth Books

Ted and Eli Wilentz; later Ted and Joan Wilentz
New York

1959–1973

David Ossman, The Sullen Art (1963).


One of New York’s literary landmarks was the Eighth Street Book Shop, which began in 1947 when brothers Ted and Eli Wilentz bought an old Womraths “bookstore” (really a lending library and card shop) and transformed it into a thriving center of literary activity. In addition to selling books, the Wilentzes began a small publishing concern in 1959. As Ted remembers: “Both of us were interested in publishing, so we jumped in. For a while we thought we might make Corinth into a full-fledged business, but that fantasy dwindled as time went on…. These new writers, then, began appearing sometime in the early fifties. They would come in the shop, often to leave their books….

Ted Joans, The Hipsters (1961). Text and collages by the author.

Ted Joans, The Hipsters (1961). Text and collages by the author.

There were many now-important writers whom I had the pleasure of working with and getting to know. LeRoi Jones, for instance, who today prefers to be known as Imamu Amiri Baraka. I met Roi when Hettie Jones, his first wife, worked as my secretary for a time…. I still recall the time when Ginsberg came to me and asked if I would lend him some money to bring Philip Whalen and Mike McClure to New York City for a reading…. Jonathan Williams, at some point, used to pack books for us at the shop. We did four books with Jonathan, and published them under the Jargon/Corinth imprint.” A remarkable number of important writers of the period were published by Corinth, including, in cooperation with Jargon, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky. Corinth also copublished books with LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press, including Frank O’Hara’s Second Avenue (1960), Gary Snyder’s Myths and Texts (1960), Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror (1961), and Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1961). For a number of years the press was active in publishing the work of promising young African American poets, including Tom Weatherly, Al Young, Clarence Major, and Jay Wright. Some of the second-generation New York Schoolers were also published by the Wilentzes, including Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan.

Ted Berrigan, Many Happy Returns (1969). Cover by Joe Brainard.

Ted Berrigan, Many Happy Returns (1969). Cover by Joe Brainard.

Jay Wright, The Homcoming Singer (1971).

Jay Wright, The Homecoming Singer (1971).

Corinth books include

Berrigan, Ted. Many Happy Returns. 1969. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Di Prima, Diane. Dinners and Nightmares. 1961.

Ginsberg, Allen. Empty Mirror. 1970. Introduction by William Carlos Williams. Cover collage from photographs by Ann Charters and Elsa Dorfman. Revised edition.

Guest, Barbara. The Blue Stairs. 1968. Cover by Helen Frankenthaler.

Joans, Ted. The Hipsters. 1961.

Jones, LeRoi, ed. The Modems: An Anthology of New Writing in America. 1963. Introduction by LeRoi Jones.

Major, Clarence. Symptoms & Madness. 1971. Cover by Joan Wilentz.

Schjeldahl, Peter. White Country. 1968.

Waldman, Anne. Giant Night. 1970. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Warsh, Lewis. Dreaming as One: Poems. 1971. Cover by Joe Brainard.

Weatherly, Tom. Maumau American Cantos. 1970.

Wilentz, Eli, ed. The Beat Scene. 1960. Photographs by Fred McDarrah.

Wright, Jay. The Homecoming Singer. 1971.

Resource

For a more complete list of Corinth and Totem/Corinth books, the reader is referred to the list by Ted Wilentz and Bill Zavatsky, appended to their article “Behind the Writer, Ahead of the Reader: A Short History of Corinth Books,” which appeared in Tri-Quarterly 43 (1978) and is reprinted in Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie’s The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History (Yonkers, NY: Pushcart Press, 1978).