United Artists

magazines & Presses

United Artists

Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer
Lenox, Massachusetts, and New York

Nos. 1–18 (November 1977–December 1983)

Covers by Louise Hamlin (16), Yvonne Jacquette (17), and Rosemary Mayer (18).

United Artists 8 (October 1979).

united-artists-no-8-oct-1979


Bernadette Mayer and I cofounded United Artists magazine in 1977. We were living in relative isolation in Lenox, Massachusetts, and editing a magazine put us in touch with poets and friends we had left behind in New York. We managed to buy an inexpensive mimeo machine in Pittsfield and we produced the magazine in the living room of our large apartment on the main street of Lenox. The beauty of mimeographing is that we could control every aspect of production ourselves, that I could stay up all night and produce a new issue by morning if I wanted. The first issue reflects our geographical shift and contains work by ourselves and our immediate neighbors, Clark Coolidge and Paul Metcalf. Our idea was, whenever possible, to publish large amounts of a few poets’ work in each issue, as opposed to one or two poems by a lot of people. Among the regular contributors to subsequent issues were Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Diane Ward, and Bill Berkson. United Artists was probably the last of the great mimeo magazines, since by the mid-eighties everyone had computers and all the magazines became perfect-bound with glossy covers so the bookstores would distribute them. We published eighteen issues, from 1977 to 1983, and during this time we returned to New York City and began publishing United Artists Books, which I continue editing into the present.

Lewis Warsh, Brooklyn, New York, September 1997

United Artists books (complete)

Altmann, Ruth. Across the Big Map. 2004. Cover by Carol Altmann Pinsky.

Berrigan, Ted. The Sonnets. 1982. Cover by Louise Hamlin. Frontispiece portrait by Joe Brainard.

Berrigan, Ted, and Harris Schiff. Yo-Yo’s with Money. 1979. Front cover by Rosina Kuhn. Photographs by Rochelle Kraut.

Brodey, Jim. Judyism. 1980. Cover by Martha Diamond.

Bye, Reed. Join the Planets. 2005. Cover by Donna Dennis.

Carey, Steve. The California Papers. 1981. Cover by Peter Kanter.

Carter, Charlotte. Personal Effects. 1991. Cover by Angela Fremont.

Collom, Jack. The Fox. 1981. Covers by Annie Hayes and William Kough.

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