Category Archives: M

Momentum

Magazines & Presses

Momentum and Momentum Press

Bill Mohr
Los Angeles

Nos. 1–8 (1974–78).

Momentum 2 (Summer 1974).


When I moved to Los Angeles in 1968, I didn’t expect to meet so many poets living outside of the realm of academic affiliations. The intermittent reading series at Papa Bach Bookstore had prompted me in the fall of 1971 to undertake being the first poetry editor of the store’s nascent magazine, Bachy, and I had gone out in search of poets who were interested in being more than local, especially given that we were living in a city globally renowned for its industrial production of culture. While many clusters of poets in L.A. were too small at the start of the 1970s to be called scenes, one of my first realizations of their potential for creating an alternative narrative to the corporate consciousness of the East Coast publishing world came about through my reading of Invisible City, which was edited by Paul Vangelisti and John McBride. Both of them had also started Red Hill Press as a book publishing project.

Momentum 5 (Summer 1975).

After meeting poets such as James Krusoe, Harry Northup, Kate Braverman, and Lee Hickman at Beyond Baroque’s Wednesday night poetry workshop, I started my own magazine as a way of contributing to this conversation, and started receiving poems from other young poets such as Garrett Hongo, who was then living in the San Gabriel Valley, and Wanda Coleman, who had grown up in Watts. The amount of poetry available to be published far exceeded what any one magazine could possibly hope to encompass, and I found it impossible to resist the temptation to publish books, too. Other institutions, such as the Woman’s Building, also served as sites of inspiration for manuscripts, such as Holly Prado’s Feasts, which I published along with a score of other titles between 1975 and 1985.

Momentum 7/8 (Fall 1976/Spring 1977). Cover photograph by Michael Mundy.

My poetry magazine, Momentum (1974–78), primarily focused on poets living in Los Angeles County, but I also featured poets such as Alicia Ostriker (New Jersey), Len Roberts (Pennsylvania), Jim Grabill (Ohio; Oregon), as well as Minnesota poets Patricia Hampl and Jim Moore; I went on to publish books by Ostriker, Roberts, Grabill, and Moore. The first of two anthologies I edited in this period, The Streets Inside, only partially caught the flourishing quality of the L.A. scene by the late 1970s. By the mid-1980s, other editors and publishers such as Dennis Cooper (Little Caesar) and Lee Hickman (Bachy and then Temblor) had firmly established Los Angeles as a setting that refused to settle for predictable literature. I edited a much more comprehensive anthology (Poetry Loves Poetry) in 1985, after which I only published a few chapbook projects and limited edition books.

It should be noted that not all those associated with the academy remained isolated from this effusive embodiment of imaginative writing in Los Angeles during this period. Clayton Eshleman’s Sulphur also challenged the poets living in Southern California to read with unwavering commitment to the Republic of Literature. Finally, it cannot be said often enough that Beyond Baroque’s willingness to serve as a production center for many of these editors and publishers was the single most important factor in all of this coming to pass, and that the independent bookstores such as Chatterton’s, Sisterhood, Either/Or, and George Sand, as well as Papa Bach, remain blissful legends in my memories.

— Bill Mohr, Long Beach, California, March 5, 2017

Momentum Press books (complete)

Barnes, Dick. A Lake on the Earth. 1982.

Braverman, Kate. Milk Run. 1977.

Castro-Leon, Sophia. Before the Hawk Gets Off My Head. 1977.

Ellman, Dennis. The Hills of Your Birth. 1976.

Ford, Michael C. The World Is a Suburb of Los Angeles. 1981.

Grabill, James. One River. 1986.

Hickman, Leland. Great Slave Lake Suite. 1980.

Hansen, Joseph. One Foot in the Boat. 1977.

Hansen, Joseph. The Dog and Other Stories. 1979.

Krusoe, James. Small Pianos. 1978.

Krusoe, James. Notes on Suicide. 1976.

Kincaid, Michael. Inclemency’s Tribe. 1990. Drawings by Robert Johnson.

Levitt, Peter. Two Bodies Dark/Velvet. 1975.

Metzger, Deena. Dark Milk. 1978.

Mohr, Bill. Penetralia. 1984.

Mohr, Bill, ed. “Poetry Loves Poetry”: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets. 1985. Photographs by Sheree Levin.

Mohr, Bill, ed. The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets. 1978.

Moore, James. What the Bird Sees. 1978.

Northup, Harry E. Enough the Great Running Chapel. 1982.

Northup, Harry E. Eros Ash. 1982.

Ostriker, Alicia. The Mother/Child Papers. 1980.

Prado, Holly. Feasts. 1976.

Roberts, Len. Cohoes Theater. 1980.

Roddan, Brooks. The Second Dream. 1986.

Thomas, Jack. Waking the Waters. 1978.

Thomas, John, and Philomene Long. The Book of Sleep. 1991.

Warden, Marine Robert. Beyond the Straits. 1980.


Resource

Bill Mohr’s book on the poets, small presses, and little magazines of the Invisible City is dense with ideas and information. Highly recommended.

Bill Mohr, Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948–1992. University of Iowa Press, 2011.


Mulch

Magazines & Presses

Mulch

David Glotzer, Basil King, and Harry Lewis
New York; Amherst and Northampton, Massachusetts

Vol. 1, no. 1–vol. 4, no. 1 (nos. 1–8/9) (April 1971–Spring/Summer 1976). 8 issues.

Mulch, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1971). Cover by Basil King.


A Timeline for Mulch Magazine and Press

Basil King and I began talking about collaborating on a magazine around summer of 1968. I had in mind something that would be a cross between Kultur and Yugen. Basil was very clear that he wanted something different and not “following in” the wake of … We both wanted large sections of poetry and prose, and we wanted to be able to publish anything that interested us. And it certainly had to have an open and full visual feel with plenty of room for artwork and reviews; but early on Basil insisted it needed science and culture to be a regular part of the mix. I was particularly involved with anthropology at that time, and had close relationships with a number of younger anthropologists, who, it would turn out, became active in the gathering we set in motion.

Basil and I both wanted a third partner because it would make for a better balance, and I pointed out to Basil that we really needed someone who knew production. As it turned out I was working with a young guy who had dropped out of Columbia named David Glotzer. I was editing limited editions of small press books and magazines for a press that specialized in library sales. David was the head of production there, and he wanted desperately to be part of the literary scene that was still alive at that time. He wanted to join us as soon as he met Basil (and Martha).

Mulch vol. 1, no. 2 (October 1971). Cover by Jerry Shore.

By 1970 we had the basics together and had what looked like a strong first issue. BUT we still didn’t have a name. One late afternoon, on a weekend, I got a call from Basil and the only word he said was “mulch.” I laughed and knew we had it. He and Martha had been out at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and there was an exhibit on mulch and Basil knew immediately that was the name. David’s girlfriend at the time came up with the slogan for our venture—she said, “Mulch before the first hard freeze.” We all loved it and we were set.

We paid for the first issue with David’s credit card and in April 1971 the first issue appeared with Basil’s wonderful drawing of infant Carlos Blackburn’s face on the cover. The issue had poetry by Ted Enslin, Nicolas Gullen (translated by Paul Blackburn), Paul Pines, Toby Olson, and Paul Blackburn’s own work. There was a film script by Milton Moses Ginsberg (who made Coming Apart and later The Werewolf of Washington) and book reviews and photographs by Basil (most people are unaware of how good a photographer he was/is and that he was already connected to pigeons and was writing back then. He wrote the opening preface for the first issue, titled “Columbia Livia Domestica, the ordinary street pigeon … ”). We were on our way.

We did nine issues in all, closing the magazine with issue #9/10 in the summer of 1976. We published poetry by Martha King, Brian Breger, David Glotzer, George Economou, Susan Sherman, Harry Lewis, Toby Olson; fiction by Joan Silber, Merce Rodoreda; criticism and comment by Hayden Herrerra and Gene Swenson; documents by Hans Hoffman and John Graham; many reviews; art by Basil King, John Graham, Fritz Bultman, and others; and essays on anthropology by Marjorie Shostak and Melvin Conner. [Margie wound up developing what I edited with her, on the lives of !Kunk Bushwomen, into a wonderful and important book entitled Nisa: The Life of a !Kunk Bushwoman, and Mel wrote many books dealing with hunting and gathering cultures and lives and on human behavior and evolution. It was amazing that they both started in Mulch.] Every issue had a preface and one of Basil’s called “Spam” (in the last issue) stays with me to this day, as a point of cultural reference.

Mulch vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1972). Cover by Jerry Shore.

In 1972 we published our first book, Onion by Paul Pines, with drawings by Basil King. A strong and solid first book for Paul with drawings that were powerful and very memorable. We agreed that drawings for our books would not be illustrations or decorations but rather part of the whole. This had always been Basil’s intention about any art he did for books or magazines. In fact, integrating art became a defining part of Mulch magazine and the press, which we named Haystack Books. Books became more and more our primary focus; we finished the magazine in 1976 and by then had built a strong list of books by Paul Blackburn, Joel Oppenheimer, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sherman, Harry Lewis, Paul Pines, and Michael Stephens.

Around 1975 we agreed to let David Glotzer take over the business, with Basil
remaining as art director and me as executive editorial consultant. David had hoped to make the press self-sustaining. It was not to be. Within two years he would decide to close the whole operation and move to San Francisco.

For me Mulch was my most intense period of education as a writer and thinker. I think it shaped all of us. The relationship, and what I learned from Basil, was defining and became a deep part of me, in more ways than can be covered here.

— Harry Lewis, New York, March 2017

Mulch, vol. 3, no. 3 (7) (Fall/Winter 1975). Cover by Fielding Dawson.

 

Mulch, vol. 3, no. 4/vol. 4, no. 1 (8/9) (Spring/Summer 1976). Cover by Basil King.


The Magazine of Further Studies

Magazines & Presses

The Magazine of Further Studies

George Butterick, John Clarke, Albert Glover, and Fred Wah
Buffalo, New York

Nos. 1–6 (1965–69).

The Magazine of Further Studies 1 (1965).

magazine-of-further-studies-1-1965


The Institute of Further Studies emerged during the fall of 1965 in Buffalo, NY, when George Butterick, John Clarke, Albert Glover, and Fred Wah decided to continue their work with Olson after he had left SUNY-Buffalo and returned to Gloucester, Massachusetts. One result of their efforts was The Magazine of Further Studies, six issues of which appeared between 1965 and 1969. All issues were printed offset from stencils typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter on 8½ x 11 white stock and stapled within heavy paper covers cut from a roll of packing material. An image of some sort was then applied to the front cover. Issue no. 3 featured a patch of raccoon fur cut from an old coat; no. 6 presented one end of a piece of baling twine that led inside, etc. Contributors included the editors as well as Olson himself, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Ed Sanders, Duncan McNaughton, Ruth Fox, Stephen Rodefer, Harvey Brown, David Tirrell, and others.

Albert Glover, Canton, New York, 2016

The Magazine of Further Studies 5 (n.d.).

The Magazine of Further Studies 5 (n.d.).

The Magazine of Further Studies 3 (1965).

The Magazine of Further Studies 3 (1965).


Merlin

Magazines & Presses

Merlin: A Collection of Contemporary Writing

Alexander Trocchi
Paris

Merlin vol. 1, no. 1–vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 1952–Spring/Summer 1955).

Merlin 1 (Spring 1952).

merlin-1-1952


Alexander Trocchi was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1925. He studied literature with Edwin Morgan at Glasgow University and was greatly influenced by French existentialism, in particular Sartre’s concept of littérature engagée; to some extent, he invented himself as an engaged outsider. Trocchi moved to Paris in 1952 with his wife and children but left them there. He soon met and fell in love with a nineteen-year-old American, Alice Jane Lougee. Alice Jane was in discussion with Australian poet Alan Riddell about starting a magazine to be called Lines. After she met Trocchi, he was quickly brought in to be coeditor of Lines with Lougee as publisher (she regularly received a small sum of money from her father, a banker in Limerick, Maine). Trocchi soon split with Riddell—who went on to found the very successful Lines, which became Lines Review, in Edinburgh—and together with Lougee, founded Merlin: A Collection of Contemporary Writing. The first of seven issues came out on May 15, 1952. The name of the magazine was suggested by Christopher Logue, with reference to the falcon rather than the wizard. Merlin’s mission statement was articulated in a lengthy essay by Trocchi in no. 2, “MERLIN will hit at all clots of rigid categories in criticism and life, and all that is unintelligently partisan.”

Contributors to nos. 1–2 include: William Burford, Trocchi, Christopher Logue, Patrick Brangwyn, Alfred Chester, H. Charles Hatcher, James Fidler, Patrick Bowles, Richard Seaver, and A. J. Ayer (an essay on existentialism). Richard Seaver was on a fellowship in Paris, where he discovered the work of Samuel Beckett.

Seaver published an essay on Beckett in no. 2 and eventually brought Trocchi and Samuel Beckett together; Patrick Bowles would later, in collaboration with Beckett, translate Molloy. Beckett published a section of Watt (which was written in English) in no. 3. Trocchi, Seaver, Lougee, and others in the Merlin group were so taken with Beckett’s work they began the imprint “Collection Merlin” to publish Watt; they later published the first English-language edition of Molloy. Maurice Girodias took an interest in the publishing venture, as a result of which, “Collection Merlin” became an imprint of Olympia Press.

By vol. 2, no. 1, with Seaver as advisory editor and director, Merlin had contributions from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, Eugene Ionesco, Ernst Fuchs, William Sansom, Alan Riddell, and Paul Éluard, among many others. Merlin published eight issues and ended in 1955.

Collection Merlin books include

Beckett, Samuel. Malloy: A Novel. 1955. Translated by Patrick Bowles.

Beckett, Samuel. Watt. 1953. 1,100 numbered copies were issued.

Broughton, James. An Almanac for Amorists. 1955. Designed and illustrated by Kermit Sheets in an edition of 676 copies of which 26 are lettered and 150 numbered and signed by the author.

Genet, Jean. The Thief’s Journal. 1954. Translated by Bernard Frechtman, foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Logue, Christopher. Wand and Quadrant. 1953. Published in an edition of 600 copies of which 300 are numbered.

de Musset, Alfred. Passion’s Evil. 1953.

Wainhouse, Austryn. Hedyphagetica…. 1954.

Merlin, vol. 2, no. 2 (1953).

Merlin, vol. 2, no. 2 (1953).


Mag City

magazines & Presses

Mag City

Gary Lenhart, Gregory Masters,
and Michael Scholnick

New York

Nos. 1–14 (1977–83).

Covers by David Borchard (10), Rudy Burckhardt (14), Louise Hamlin (9), Yvonne Jacquette (6), Alex Katz (14, back cover), Barry Kornbluh (2, 13), Rochelle Kraut (11), Steve Levine (4), George Schneeman (12), and Lee Sherry (3).

Mag City 10 (1980). Cover by David Borchard.

mag-city-no-10-1980


Mag City was a party in print. It was started to give a form to a literary scene that existed in the East Village, disenchanted with mainstream values. In the mid-’70s this neighborhood provided for a confluence of young artists, poets, musicians. The workshops led by Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church were where the third generation of New York School poets began to develop. Everyone attended the Monday and Wednesday night readings at the Project and would then convene in various bars afterward—Les Mykta, Grassroots, Orchidia, El Centro. Most of the poets worked part-time jobs or worked a few months and took off a few months. We wanted to be ready for the poem. We lived for poetry and were grateful to have discovered there were others like us out there whose priorities were complementary.

Mag City 12 (1981). Cover by George Schneeman.

Mag City 12 (1981). Cover by George Schneeman.

Michael Scholnick, Gary Lenhart, and I lived in a tenement on East 12th Street. Other poets had preceded us there. We had no heat or hot water for two very cold winters. We didn’t know to be outraged. We assumed that was part of our training for being poets. The three of us were together a lot and we went to The Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in its early days on East Sixth Street. Michael had had Miguel Algarín as a teacher at Rutgers so we were welcomed there and encouraged to get up and read our poems. The tradition of small press publishing emboldened us to publish our poems ourselves. But by the time we got Mag City going in 1977, offset printing was cheap enough and then the Xerox copier became available. Michael came up with the name and we asked our comrades for their poems. From the beginning our idea was to publish hefty chunks of work, as no other magazines were doing that.

At a typical meeting, we’d read each poem aloud and come to a consensus. There were never any arguments. If one of us believed strongly enough in a work, the others usually trusted enough to defer. We usually drew from the locals and then sent off letters to others whose work we admired. Sometimes we received material from as far away as China, where our friend Simon Schuchat was sojourning. We were honored to also publish Allen Ginsberg, Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, James Schuyler, Ron Padgett, and Bonnie Bremser in our pages. Publishing precedents were Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman’s Angel Hair Press, Ted Berrigan’s “C” Press, Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/ a magazine of the arts, Larry Fagin’s Adventures in Poetry, and Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer’s United Artists magazine and books.

Among our friends, Simon Schuchat’s 432 Review, Eileen Myles’s dodgems and the one-shot Ladies Museum, Elinor Nauen, Maggie Dubris, and Rachel Walling’s KOFF magazine, Jeff Wright’s Hard Press poetry postcard series, Tom Savage’s Gandhabba, Tom Weigel’s Tangerine magazine and anthologies, served up similar delights. The work printed in the fourteen issues of Mag City is too diverse to classify. It’s mostly confessional and personal. The work is decidedly unacademic, meaning the poems’ emphasis is content, not form, leaving rough edges, all the more for impact. If the work wasn’t always politically engaged, it offered reactions and responses to the malaise in this company. We were weathering a decade of Republican leadership that was contemptuous of free expression, individual peculiarities, social justice, and fun. The poems were often chatty and attempted to be accessible and entertaining by discoursing in common speech. They celebrated the common, the daily, and the immediate.

Greg Masters, New York City, November 1995

Mag City 4 (1978). Cover by Steve Levine.


Migrant Books

magazines & Presses

Migrant Books

Gael Turnbull
Worcester, England, and Ventura, California

Nos. 1–8 (July 1959–September 1960).

Superseded by: Mica. Santa Barbara, California; Helmut Bonheim and Raymond Federman, eds. Nos. 1–7 (December 1960–November 1962).

Migrant 1 (July 1959).

migrant-1-1959-r-1


SCOTTish poet Gael Turnbull began Migrant Books by purchasing stock from several presses, including Origin, Jargon, and Divers Press, and his first solo publication was a single mimeographed sheet advertising these publications, which included Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. In a personal memoir of the press, Turnbull comments on his first real book publication: “In the summer of 1957, I published The Whip, a small volume of selected poems by Robert Creeley, who arranged and managed the printing for me on Mallorca (with Mosen Alcover who had printed the Divers Press books). There were 500 copies in paper wrappers and 100 hard cover…the bulk of the edition went out through Jargon (Jonathan Williams) in the United States. (I did have the intention of publishing Olson’s O’Ryan Poem but it didn’t get further than ‘an intention’ because I never got myself together enough to actually approach a printer in Worcester.)”

Turnbull immigrated to the United States in 1958 and settled in Ventura, California, where he began to publish his books on a hand-operated Sears Roebuck duplicator. He used this machine to produce the little magazine entitled Migrant, which he sent to friends and colleagues, partly as a way to retain contact with England, where he returned in 1964. Eight issues of Migrant appeared over the course of a year, and then Turnbull began publishing pamphlets, including Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s The Dancers Inherit the Party, which was printed in two editions. Although it lasted only a few years, Migrant was an example to certain other presses in the United Kingdom, influencing (at least editorially) both Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press and the more mainstream Fulcrum Press in London. An unassuming, simple affair, each Migrant book was focused on providing a readable text in more ways than one. The last publication of the press was Few by Pete Brown in 1966: “It was our biggest in sheer size, and somewhere, somehow, 1,000 copies vanished into other bookshops and presumably into the hands of readers.”

Migrant Press: Bibliographical History (1965?). The inside of a single-fold brochure.

Migrant Press: Bibliographical History [1965?]. The inside of a single-fold brochure.

Migrant Books include

Adele, David. Becoming. 1980.

Brown, Pete. Few: Poems. 1966.

Creeley, Robert. The Whip. 1957.

Creighton-Hill, Hugh. Latterday Chrysalides. 1961.

Dorn, Ed. What I See in the Maximus Poems. 1960.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton. The Dancers Inherit the Party: Selected Poems. 1962. Woodcuts by Zeljko Kujundzic.

Hardiment, Melville. Doazy Bor. N.d.

Harrison, Tony, and Philip Sharpe. Looking Up. 1979.

Hollo, Anselm. & it is a song: Poems. 1965. Cover design and section plates by John Furnival.

Mead, Matthew. A Poem in Nine Parts. 1960.

Mead, Matthew. Identities. 1964.

Morgan, Edwin, trans. Sovpoems: Brecht, Neruda, Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Mayakowsky, Martynov, Yevtushenko. 1961.

Pound, Omar S. Kano. 1971.

Shayer, Michael. Persephone. 1961.

Thayer, Michael. Poems from an Island. 1963.

Turnbull, Gael. Don’t Stop. 1980.

Turnbull, Gael. The Small Change. 1980.

Turnbull, Gael. To You, I Write. 1963.

Turnbull, Gael. Whitley Court Revisited. 1975. Broadside with drawings by Carey Blundun.

Turnbull, Gael. Twenty Words, Twenty Days: A Sketchbook & a Morula. 1966.

Anselm Hollo, & it is a song: Poems (1965). Cover design and section plates by John Furnival.

Anselm Hollo, & it is a song: Poems (1965). Cover design and section plates by John Furnival.


Matter

magazines & Presses

Matter

Robert Kelly
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Nos. 1–4 (1963–68).

Matter 1 (1963).

matter-no-1-r


Matter is when it is for the sake of the work, & is the work therein contained, no more…. That is my axe now, & I hope the chips fall in a pile fed by other wielders; to get some kindling these cold days,” says Robert Kelly in the editorial statement in the first issue. Overlapping only slightly with Kelly’s Brooklyn-published little magazine Trobar, Matter was a newsletter from up the Hudson River, created to produce a sense of literary community and to overcome the isolation created by distance. Matter was simply but elegantly produced in four issues of 16–22 pages each, mimeographed on yellow, white, and blue paper, and carefully designed with a poem to a page and spacious margins. The first, third, and fourth issues were printed at Bard College, where Kelly has taught for many years, and the second came out of Buffalo’s student bookstore (Kelly was a guest professor in the poetry program at the State University of New York at Buffalo). Like many mimeographed magazines, Matter was sold for a nominal amount ($1.00) at alternative bookstores such as the Eighth Street, Phoenix, and Peace Eye bookstores in New York, at City Lights Books in San Francisco, and at the legendary Asphodel Book Shop in Cleveland. The three New York bookstores no longer exist. Matter published a variety of material, including the anthropoetically influenced work of Clayton Eshleman of Caterpillar magazine and the deep-image/dream work of Kelly, Ted Enslin, Diane Wakoski, Rochelle Owens, and George Economou. Issue 2 includes Jackson Mac Low’s poem “TO SAVE/WILDLIFE AND AID US, TOO,” which consists of lines selected and arranged by schematic chance from a New York Times article by Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall. Issue 4 includes a three-page poem by the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage (who had, at the age of nineteen, been a poet living in the basement of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins’s house). Matter Books, edited primarily by Joan Kelly, produced a dozen fine works, among them Gerrit Lansing’s first book, The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward, and Charles Olson’s long poem Apollonius of Tyana.

Gerritt Lansing, The-Heavenly Tree Grows Downward (1966). Preface by John Wieners.

Gerritt Lansing, The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward (1966). Preface by John Wieners.

Matter Books include

Alexander, D. Mules Balk. 1967.

Bialy, Harvey. Love’s Will: Poems 1967. 1968.

Enslin, Theodore. The Diabelli Variations and Other Poems. 1967.

Greene, Jonathan. The Reckoning. 1966.

Irby, Kenneth. The Flower of Having Passed Through Paradise in a Dream: Poems 1967. 1968.

Kelly, Robert. Twenty Poems. 1967.

Lansing, Gerrit. The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward. 1966. Preface by John Wieners.

Kenneth Irby. The Flower of Having Passed Through Paradise in a Dream: Poems 1967 (1968).

Kenneth Irby, The Flower of Having Passed Through Paradise in a Dream: Poems 1967 (1968).


Maps

Magazines & Presses

Maps

John Taggart
Chicago, New York, and Newberg, Pennsylvania

Nos. 1–6 (1966–74).

Maps 6 (1974).

maps-6-duncan-1974


“One draws a map to show where one is” reads the motto of Maps, edited by poet, translator, and critic John Taggart. Number 1 was issued from Chicago in 1966 and includes an editor’s note that defines the purpose of the magazine: “In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes of the need for making new maps of man’s consciousness now, and of the past as seen from that now. The maps would be of those regions just discovered, somewhat known, but not to the extent of the older areas or of the most recent projections. MAPS, then, takes its tide and purpose from Kant’s observation. These poems are not on the furthermost borders of the avant-garde. They are of the now in the continuum sense of ‘being’—eyes open, perhaps screaming, but not leaping out of the present—and occasionally, they are of the past as renovated by those open eyes.” The work of Paul Blackburn, Ken Irby, and Clayton Eshleman was featured in the first small issue. Issue 2 (1967), from New York City, was a homage to the sculptor David Smith with contributions from Jerome Rothenberg, Joanne Kyger, Hannah Weiner, Douglas Blazek, Larry Eigner, and others. Issue 3 (1970), from Newberg, Pennsylvania, printed poems for John Coltrane. Issues 4–6 were devoted to Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Duncan, respectively, with works by and about the poets. Contributors include Hugh Kenner, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Guy Davenport, Theodore Enslin, Ronald Johnson, Ron Silliman, and many others. Maps ceased publication in 1974 with number 6.

Maps 1 [1966]. Cover: Herbert Bayer, “Graphic Fragment #2.”

Maps 1 [1966]. Cover is Herbert Bayer’s “Graphic Fragment #2.”

Maps 3 [1970]: Poems for John Coltrane. Cover by Roger Shimomura.

Maps 3 [1970]. Poems for John Coltrane. Cover by Roger Shimomura.


Measure

magazines & Presses

Measure

John Wieners
Boston and San Francisco

Nos. 1–3 (1957–62).

Measure 2 (1958).

measure-2-1958


The three simple, almost starkly working-class issues of Measure followed glorious and overlooked “underground” poet John Wieners from Black Mountain College home to Boston, across country to San Francisco (issue 2), and back to Boston again. In his years in San Francisco, from 1958 to 1960, Wieners attended (sometimes serving as host at his Scott Street apartment) the legendary Sunday afternoon poetry workshops of the charismatic poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer (editor of J). Also present at the workshops were poets George Stanley (editor of Open Space), Harold Dull, Robin Blaser (The Pacific Nation), and many others (including visitors such as Stephen Spender, teaching at Berkeley in 1959). These workshops were an outgrowth of the 1957 series sponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State and held in a public room at the San Francisco Public Library. Measure 3, published in Boston, included West Coast poets Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, and Jack Spicer, as well as Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and James Schuyler from the East Coast. Except for Adam and Gleason, all had also appeared in the first Boston issue.

Measure 3 (Summer 1962)

Measure 3 (Summer 1962)