The Quick and the Quiet

September 19, 2013, 5:47 pm

The poets that peeked in the windows of the Berkeley Poetry Conference, circled together around Synapse and proclaimed their poetry from the streets gave a series of readings at Wobbly Hall on Minna Street from March to September 1965. Seven readings over seven months.

I find it interesting that these poets who felt that the real power of their poetry could only be appreciated in its actual performance either on the street, in the coffeehouse or in the Hall produced so much paper. The Le Metro scene set in amber by Dan Saxon demonstrates the same paradox. As I mentioned earlier it is as if the poems did not really exist unless they were published. Thus with Poems Read in the Spirit of Peace and Gladness it was essential to issue an anthology to immortalize a reading series. Just having a reading is never enough. Unless the tree in the forest was turned into a book, nobody would know it fell. Or something like that. How does all this paper comment on a group of poets influenced by Gary Snyder and his ecological consciousness?

From this cache of ephemera that documents the scene around the IWW reading series, I think the handbill announcing the reading for April captures the spirit of the times the best. I would guess this was printed on a spirit duplicator given the color and the fading. The handbill is almost illegible now. Like the actual performance of the readings themselves, it leaves only the slightest trace. A faint echo. In addition like the street poetry, the handbill is one of the primary example of street literature, which in this case has been recycled by Facino/Palmer in order to write a note to set the context for his chapbook The Quick and the Quiet. Yet once again a word of thanks or introduction would not suffice. It must be written. Similarly with the publication itself the mimeograph (the quick) is necessary to preserve that which threatens to be silenced.

BTW my scanner has shit the bed. For the time being I will have to use my phone for images. As they say on my commuter train nearly every day, we regret any inconvenience.

JB

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The Smoking Gun

September 23, 2013, 5:14 pm

≫ Next: Recommended Reading

≪ Previous: The Quick and the Quiet

This letter from Bob Wilson of The Phoenix Bookshop to Dan Saxon, publisher of Poets of Deux Megots and Le Metro, urgently asking Saxon to print more copies of 1, 2, 3, 6, and 20, probably comes from the who gives a fuck department for most people, but for me it is a smoking gun. It is a no brainer that independent bookshops asked mimeographers to print on demand whenever a bookseller scared up a new sucker. No shit Sherlock you might say. Stating the obvious aside, it is cool that this letter proves what we all long suspected.

The postmark is from late December 1966, almost a full year after the last issue of Deux Megots/Le Metro was published. I would suspect Wilson needed the named issues in order to complete a run for an institution or private collector. Saxon ultimately declined Wilson's offer, deciding it was too much of a hassle to fulfill such a specific request. For all the talk about the speed of mimeo, it was really a big pain in the ass, especially if the demand was for a single issue. If Saxon refused in this case, no doubt others did not. Ted Berrigan immediately comes to mind as one who would print on demand, which would explain all the unnumbered copies of The Sonnets that turn up out of series. At one point Berrigan printed issues of C using The Phoenix Bookshop mimeograph, so it makes sense he would return Wilson's favor by zipping out some made to order copies for Phoenix Bookshop clients. Plus Berrigan always liked to turn a buck.

All in all a cool little letter of some slight bibliographic import. In any case, I love The Phoenix Bookshop letterhead and envelope, which makes me wonder just how much of the business correspondence of the Mimeo Revolution was actually preserved or if business in the mimeo world was conducted in such a formal manner. One of the many questions that will be answered as scholars turn from the Modernist magazine and stake a claim in the unexplored territory of the next generation of little mags.

JB

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Wobbly Tested, Wobbly Approved

September 28, 2013, 10:51 am

≫ Next: Smells Like The Real Deal

≪ Previous: Recommended Reading

There are all kinds of interesting tidbits in Alessandro Ludovico's Post-Digital Print. For example in the section on the mimeograph, he writes, "After a slow start, this revolutionary technology was appropriated in the 1930s by left-wing radical groups (not without some ideological controversy, as this effectively meant replacing unionized print workers with a cheap, lightweight machine.). Significantly, the radical trade unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) embraced the mimeo stencil, declaring it to be the IWW's unionized printing facility. So even more than artists, it was political activists and dissidents (such as the exiled Trotsky, who printed his political 'zine' Byulleten Oppositzii, in this way) who found in the mimeograph the ideal medium for fostering freedom of expression and ideas, particularly during the years before and immediately after the Second World War."

In light of this observation, the handbill for the Wobbly Hall Readings I posted earlier becomes even more interesting and substantial. The handbill and its manner of production represent the banding together of the aims and practices of the worker and the artist, which was precisely what the Minna Street readings and their venue attempted to put into play. This seemingly insignificant piece of ephemera opens up an entire line of inquiry relating to the Mimeograph Revolution in terms of production and labor that might be most fully and fruitfully explored by turning away from the highspots of the Secret Location, such as C, Fuck You, Floating Bear, or J, and delving into lesser documented scenes, such as that emanating from the Berkeley streets or that of the Meat School surrounding publications like Douglas Blazek's Ole. In examining mimeography in this manner, there is clearly plenty of work to be done.

JB

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Smells Like The Real Deal

October 5, 2013, 1:13 pm

≫ Next: Notable For Its Absence

≪ Previous: Wobbly Tested, Wobbly Approved

For obsessives of the Mimeo Revolution, Dan Saxon is something of a god. Maybe it is just me, but Poems Collected at Les Deux Megot and Poets at Le Metro are some of the coolest publications of the entire era.  This is in large part because Saxon used a rexograph and, really, who the fuck did that beside your fifth grade teacher.  Saxon used a spirit duplicator not a stencil duplicator.  What that basically means is that Saxon's publications had a distinct smell.  In short they are completely authentic. If you remember mimeo from your youth based on smell, what you remember is not mimeo (stencil duplicators) but spirit duplicators. In short, the publications of Dan Saxon are all about memory and nostalgia. They completely capture a certain time and space, which Daniel Kane breaks down in the essential All Poets Welcome.

Except for the fact that Kane does not mention that Saxon published a chapbook series on top of his legendary magazines. Clay and Phillips do not mention these publications either.  I am fascinated by mimeos mags which make the leap to mimeo presses and I always assumed Saxon was a pure magazine editor. This ties in with the myth of authencity. Pure magazine publications seem to me to be purely in the moment. They are all about immediate communication and speed. That is why Floating Bear never expanded into a full blown press.  Le Metro seems purely in the moment. There did not seem to be the impulse to preserve a larger statement or scene. Well, I was wrong.  Besides his magazines, Saxon printed a Poets of Le Metro Series of which Nancy Ellison's Come Late was the first issued.

The purple ink is a give away that this is rexograph (thanks for the confirmation Daniel Lauffer), and for mimeo fetishists this is like blue cocaine a la Spalding Gray. Nobody but nobody used a rexograph but sci-fi fanzines and church ladies announcing a baked bean supper. This is beyond cool. Not to mention my fascination with Nancy Ellison (along with Carol Berge).  I have a soft spot for all the women who drank at Stanley's Bar and published in Fuck You. It is all black tights and turtle necks. Talk about a fetish.

JB

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Notable For Its Absence

October 6, 2013, 10:20 am

≫ Next: Absolutely Enchanting

≪ Previous: Smells Like The Real Deal

Here is Dan Saxon's self published Absence, Number Two in the Poets of Le Metro chapbook series. This is absent from Clay and Phillips. To be honest, it is an easy publication to overlook. Nothing elaborate, the very definition of simplicity of design and production. Maybe 100 were printed and those, I suspect, largely went to friends.

149 Second Avenue was the address of Café Le Metro. For an interesting write up of the history of that address with some great photos, click here. For that matter, check out the entire Off the Grid blog for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, click here. It is a wonderful blog.

JB

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Absolutely Enchanting

October 6, 2013, 12:12 pm

≫ Next: Fragile Do Not Touch

≪ Previous: Notable For Its Absence

Chapbook Number 3 of the Poets of Le Metro Series is Ten Thousand Reflections by Spencer Holst. I knew nothing about Holst before spending a few minutes with his work in my sun filled bedroom on an unseasonable warm October afternoon. In those few moments, time stopped and I was completely enchanted by what strikes me as a perfect gem of a book. Holst was a legendary storyteller famous in New York City for his spellbinding renditions of his short, short stories, described as a cross between Kafka and Hans Christian Andersen. He must have read at Le Metro at some point and Saxon asked him to preserve one of his stories for his chapbook series. Unlike the first two chapbooks, which used a typewriter, here the text is in Holst's handwriting. Daniel Kane in All Poets Welcome discusses Saxon's magazines in terms of the various effects conveyed by poets handwriting the poems for publication. For example, a sound in a word can be emphasized by making an "O" larger than the rest of a word. These effects mean a lot if you are trying to preserve a poetry reading in print. I did not notice anything of that nature in Ten Thousand Reflections but the experience of reading the story in Holst's own handwriting was intensely personal and intimate. It was like he was reading directly to you. Apparently, Holst did some work with calligraphy so presenting this story via handwriting seems right to me on that score as well. The story has to be under 500 words, and the chapbook ends with a pasted in drawing by Beate Wheeler, Holst's wife, who he met in the Village in 1959. Again a nice touch by Saxon. A wonderful surprise on an otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon.

JB

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Fragile Do Not Touch

October 6, 2013, 12:39 pm

≫ Next: La Petit Mort of Print

≪ Previous: Absolutely Enchanting

Although the cover states this Number 3 in the Le Metro Series, In the Shower and Out of it by Dan Saxon is, in fact, Number 4 and from what I can gather the last in the series. Saxon printed it in 1966 a full years after the magazine ended and two years after Ten Thousand Reflections by Spencer Holst. I cannot lie. I have not read this chapbook. When I opened it the first time, I was greeted with a loud crack as the glue on the binding gave way. It looks like Saxon may have used rubber cement or a like adhesive to perfect bind this together. It was definitely not made to last and it was the furthest thing from Saxon's mind that dorks like me would, decades later, get all excited about this stuff.

JB

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La Petit Mort of Print

October 12, 2013, 6:18 pm

≫ Next: The Source of My Discontent

≪ Previous: Fragile Do Not Touch

So you are sitting on the couch with you cold Natty Boh watching the Tigers/Red Sox and without fail your manhood comes into question. You have seen it before: the silver fox throwing the football and missing the hanging tire or the Ford F-150 getting stuck in the mud. Yes it is erectile dysfunction time.

Well, the latest Viagra commercial really hit home. Click Here. With the death of print, I guess printers cannot get it going between the sheets.

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The Source of My Discontent

November 2, 2013, 5:32 pm

≫ Next: Wantling is Wanting

≪ Previous: La Petit Mort of Print

This post was going to be about William Wantling and The Source, but my mind wandered as I was reading through that chapbook, and I started obsessing about The Source’s publisher, Len Fulton of Dustbooks. I am sure Len was a wonderful guy, all the obituaries say so; he was truly dedicated to the small press, and he devoted his life to furthering it. Good for him, but in my opinion, not good for the Mimeo Revolution. It is a cliché that the revolution will not be televised, or maybe it has become a cliché that it will, but there is a lesser known maxim that the revolution will not be bureaucratized. Unfortunately, Fulton did just that, and, in my mind, he is a major reason for the Revolution’s decline. Hugh Fox and Fulton started the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP) in 1968. In addition, Fulton through Dustbooks became the major supplier of directories related to the small press, such as the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Press. Another boondoggle of bureaucratic bullshit. This should not be surprising as Fulton was a bureaucrat in real life, acting as the Fifth District Supervisor in Chico, California. Fulton was obsessed with low level politics, and he introduced inane bickering and time wasting committees to the Mimeo Revolution. Fulton, quite simply, is a menace. He turned a literary community based on communicating through the mail into a bureaucracy arguing at conventions. According to Clay and Phillips, Ronald Reagan is the major villain in the decline of the Mimeo Revolution; I nominate Len Fulton. He got mimeo publishers hooked on competing for government money in the first place.

To be honest, I do not consider Fulton, Hugh Fox, Curt Johnson of December, or Carol Berge members of the Mimeo Revolution at all. In fact almost everybody in the recent anthology on the little magazine, Paper Dreams. They are “Small Magazine Editors and Publishers,” which means they are a minor leagues to the major publishers. They are sleeping with the enemy. The Mimeo Revolution was a league of its own, and mimeographers did not attempt to play by the same rules. They were playing with and amongst themselves. The Mimeo Revolution is play; the small press of Fulton is politics. Fulton fucked up the scene by trying to make a neighborhood pick-up game an organized sport. He deserved to be in the Mimeo Hall of Shame.

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Wantling is Wanting

November 2, 2013, 7:58 pm

≫ Next: Petite Country Concrete Suite

≪ Previous: The Source of My Discontent

Douglas Blazek flirted with COSMEP, but I am not going to hold it against him. The Blaz is Mimeo Revolution through and through. And at first glance so is William Wantling’s Down, Off & Out, published by Blazek’s Mimeo Press in 1965. This is a chapbook version of OLE for the most part, same look and feel. Cover illustration by da levy. It is like Wantling blew this out himself on the San Quentin mimeography. This is outlaw literature to be sure, but on a close reading Wantling never lets you forget that he really wanted to be an academic poet. After serving time, he took the required courses and set off for the campus. It is just another institution really. In terms of walking the walk in their personal lives, I think Bukowski and Wantling are equals, but I think Buk talks the talk better in his poems. The Buk of the 60s doesn’t give a fuck; he is banging the typer because his life and sanity depend on it. Buk’s voice in his poems sounds like him singing in the shower, while trying to sober up. Wantling is playing a role a bit, he is aware of an audience. He assumes the pose of poet, as viewed by academics. That is why Wantling dabbled with the sonnet and Bukowski never did as far as I know. This is all a way of saying that Wantling’s Down, Off & Out looks tougher than it reads. The poor printing, the weird size, and the handmade errata all tell you this is a mimeo publication, tell you it is a Blazek production. But Wantling’s use of interjections gives him away. That is pure posturing. He wants to be institutionalized. Not in San Quentin but in the academy. Buk does not rely on exclamations or abstractions. Buk devilish nature is in the details.

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Petite Country Concrete Suite

November 3, 2013, 5:40 pm

≫ Next: Heroin Haikus

≪ Previous: Wantling is Wanting

Here is Jonathan Williams' Petite Country Concrete Suite published by Doug Casement's Fenian Head Press and tucked like a little stocking stuffer in the back pouch of The Spero #1.

JB

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Heroin Haikus

November 3, 2013, 5:55 pm

≫ Next: LOU TUBE

≪ Previous: Petite Country Concrete Suite

From The Spero #2, here is William Wantling's Heroin Haikus, like the Williams, tucked into a back pouch.

JB

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LOU TUBE

November 10, 2013, 2:11 pm

≫ Next: Dan Saxon Checklist

≪ Previous: Heroin Haikus

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Dan Saxon Checklist

November 11, 2013, 5:27 am

≫ Next: Erik Kiviat, William Wantling and the Ecosystem of the Mimeo Revolution

≪ Previous: LOU TUBE

I think the following Dan Saxon checklist has all that he printed or published present and accounted for.

Checklist of Publications Printed or Published by Dan Saxon

Poems Collected at Les Deux Megots Issues 1(Dec. 1962) & 2 (Jan. 1963)

Poets at Le Métro Issues 3 to 20 – Continues Poems Collected at Les Deux Megots Series

Vol. 3 (Feb. 1963)

Vol. 4 (March 1963)

Vol. 5 (June 1963)

Vol. 6 (July 1963)

Vol. 7 (Oct. 1963)

Vol. 8 (Nov. 1963)

Vol. 9 (Dec. 1963)

Vol. 10 (Jan. 1964)

Vol. 11 (Feb. 1964)

Vol. 12 (Mar. 1964)

Vol. 13 (Apr. 1964)

Vol. 14 (May 1964)

Vol. 15 (July 1964)

Vol. 16 (August 1964)

Vol. 17 (Oct. 1964)

Vol. 18 (Nov. 1964)

Vol. 19 (Dec. 1964)

Vol. 20 (Jan. 1965)

Ellison, Nancy. Come Late. [New York]: Poets of Le Metro, 1963. Poets of Le Metro Series One.

Saxon, Dan. Absence. New York: Poets of Le Metro, 1963. Poets of Le Metro Series Two

Holst, Spencer. Ten Thousand Reflections. New York: Poets of Le Metro, July 1964. Poets of Le Metro Series 3.

Saxon, Dan. In the shower and Out of It. [New York]: Poets of Le Metro, 1966. Poets of Le Metro Series [4].

Saxon, Dan. Atman. (1964).

Published but not Printed by Dan Saxon

Saxon, Dan. Another Flight: Poems (1976).

Saxon, Dan. Linked (1998).

Saxon, Dan. Robins (2003)

Saxon, Dan. Linked/ Robins. Xlibris 2008.

JB

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Erik Kiviat, William Wantling and the Ecosystem of the Mimeo Revolution

November 11, 2013, 1:07 pm

≫ Next: Hope You Enjoyed the Show. You're the Mimeo Capital of the World, Buffalo!! Good Night!!

≪ Previous: Dan Saxon Checklist

In a lot of William Wantling publications I bought at PBA Galleries, a seemingly non-descript mimeograph publication, Head First, actually stood out. Head First is the first in a series of six publications issued by Erik Kiviat. I often see Head described as a periodical, but I view it as a mimeo chapbook series. Each issue featured one author and an illustrator, which in some cases were one and the same. Head First featured the poetry of Wantling and the drawings of Ben Tibbs; Head Second the poetry of Judson Crews and the drawings of da levy; Head Third the poems and illustrations of Kiviat; Head Fourth the poems and illustrations of Madeline Landau; Head Fifth the poems and illustrations of Nancy Ellison; and Head Sixth the poems of Lisa Galt and the drawings of Michael McClanathan.

For about two years, Kiviat churned out a flood of mimeo publications: Yowl and Blue Beat (with George Montgomery), Cold Mountain Review (with Richard Schmidt) and Museum of Memnon. The Head series flowed out of Staatsburg, New York, which is near Bard College, where Kiviat was an undergraduate.

An example of bare bones mimeo, Head First struck me as presenting Wantling in his natural habitat; for Wantling, like Blazek and Bukowski, is the epitome of a Mimeo Revolution poet. Yet strangely, none of Kiviat’s mags are featured in Secret Location. Neither is Blazek’s Ole nor Bukowski’s Laugh Literary. See a pattern here? It is high time to build on and tear down the foundations of Clay and Phillips’ classic text. Documenting Midwest and blue collar mimeo would be a good start. A couple of posts down the line will complicate Wantling’s image as a mimeo outlaw a little bit, but the Mimeo Revolution is all about myth and perception, so I think it is safe to say here that Wantling is most commonly viewed as an outlaw poet, who made his home in the land of the Gestetner.

Kiviat knows all about natural habitats. After graduating from Bard, he received his MA from SUNY New Paltz and his Ph.D at Union Institute with an expertise in Environmental and Urban Studies specializing in field biology and ecology. He went on to found Hudsonia Ltd., a non-profit which seeks to preserve and protect the ecology of the Hudson Valley. If you go on to OCLC and search his name, you will see listed more scholarly publications, like Vertebrate Use of Muskrat Lodges and Burrows or maybe Mills and Minnows: A Walk Down the Saw Kill, than you will reference to Head or Blue Beat.

Kiviat would know better than anybody that the Mimeo Revolution was a literary ecosystem sustained by independent bookstores, the postal system, cheap and available technology and a population of ambitious and frustrated writers. I would bet that Kiviat’s foray into mimeo publication fed right into his interest in urban studies. In order to preserve and present a fuller history of the Mimeo Revolution, the publications of Kiviat will have to be placed into the conversation. Yowl, Blue Beat, and Head are the Muskrat Lodges and Burrows of mimeo, i.e., mimeo in the wild. These publications are not of the art gallery or artist’s studio, which seem to be getting all the scholarly attention lately. Yes, Kiviat’s publications are humble structures, but they might be a truer representation of what the natural habitat of the Mimeo Revolution actually was than the institutionalized C or Fuck You. This is of course open for debate, but it seems true that within the pages of Head First, Wantling’s work seems right at home.

JB

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Hope You Enjoyed the Show. You're the Mimeo Capital of the World, Buffalo!! Good Night!!

November 14, 2013, 12:35 pm

≫ Next: Poems and Pictures in Le Metro

≪ Previous: Erik Kiviat, William Wantling and the Ecosystem of the Mimeo Revolution

On Wednesday, I gave a presentation on The Mimeo Revolution for Steve McCaffery's History of the Book seminar. Thanks for the invite and the hospitality, Steve. Here is a pic of the set up. You might recognize a few old favorites here. Mike Basinski, Jim Maynard and the folks in Special Collections showed me a great time. By that I mean, they pulled some wonderful Mimeo Revolution classics for me.

On the table above were: Floating Bear, The Outsider, J, Beatitude, C: A Journal of Poetry, Fuck You, a magazine of the arts, X War Elegies (the mimeo'd first and the letterpress second editions), Dan Saxon's Le Metro and Deux Megot, Semina, Chicago, Origin, Chicago Review, Black Mountain Review, Big Table, My Own Mag, Umbra, Roosevelt After Inauguration, levy's Great Train Robbery by Ganglia, The San Francisco Scene by Evergreen Review, Kulchur, two of Robert Kelly's stencils, Minutes to Go, an Ed Sanders Catalogue, Open Space, Josephine Miles' Saving the Bay, Blaser's translation of Nerval, APO-33, OLE, Rhinozeros, Klactoveedsedsteen, and Center.

Everyone of these magazines was on my wish list as I was preparing for the discussion and Buffalo's Special Collection came through on every single one. My only two regrets were that the Floating Bears did not have mailing labels and the fact that they could not deliver on Lorenzo Thomas' Dracula. But this was more than made up for by the fact that some of the magazines and publications they did provide had the added bonus of an inscription that blew my mind. For example the mimeo edition of X War Elegies, printed by Untide Press - in fact the first book published by that press - was mint and inscribed by William Everson as Brother Antoninus in 1965. The good Brother was shocked as well. The inscription states that it is the best copy he had ever seen. The book proved that the printers of Waldport were masters of mimeography just as much as they were legends of the letterpress.

It is no exaggeration to say that, for me, the UB Special Collection Room is one of the special places on earth. For someone obsessed with the Mimeo Revolution, it is overwhelming. When they rolled out all that glorious mimeo and I laid it out on the table, I was like Tony Montana buried deep in the snows of Kilimanjaro. Complete excess and total intoxication. Let's face it, I am just a local access-type guy broadcasting his rants on mimeo from the basement of his house or, maybe I should say, in the alley. But Steve, Mike and Jim let me put on an exhibition on the fly with complete freedom. I am not worthy!!

Sitting in The Pink afterwards, I thought does mimeo really smell like this; no, it must be the booze.

JB

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Poems and Pictures in Le Metro

November 14, 2013, 3:07 pm

≫ Next: Ted Berrigan Arrives . . . at the Daisy Chain

≪ Previous: Hope You Enjoyed the Show. You're the Mimeo Capital of the World, Buffalo!! Good Night!!

Little mags printed on a spirit duplicator are few and far between. Dan Saxon's Le Metro and Deux Megot are classics of this little appreciated and known printing technique. UB Special Collections has the first sixteen issues. I spent a good hour flipping through the issues and was amazed at the visuals. I was aware that the magazine had loads of poems in holograph but there are also several examples of stenciled graphics that really steal the show. Here are three examples involving members of the Tulsa School: Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett.

This is the spirit duplicator as high art. Increasingly, there is interest in spirit duplicators used in churches, communities, schools, and fanzines as a form of folk art or as documentation of everyday life and culture. For example, I recently saw a DIY community newsletter/gossip sheet by a teenage girl for a small town during WWII up for sale. If this tickles your fancy, keep on the look out in rare book catalogs in the coming year. I suspect this is a growing market. Or better yet hit dusty boxes in garages, used bookstores, attics and basements.

JB

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Ted Berrigan Arrives . . . at the Daisy Chain

November 15, 2013, 6:48 pm

≫ Next: Moberg on Mother in Miscellany

≪ Previous: Poems and Pictures in Le Metro

Care of our friends at UB Special Collections, here is a collaboration from late in the night at Le Metro. Invitation only to be sure.

JB

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Moberg on Mother in Miscellany

November 16, 2013, 12:05 pm

≫ Next: The Third Choice of the Little Magazine

≪ Previous: Ted Berrigan Arrives . . . at the Daisy Chain

Recently, I purchased a copy of The Carleton Miscellany from the Spring of 1966. Seemingly not very Mimeo Revolution of me, but this issue contained a symposium on The Little Magazine that featured over 20 different editors. I am a sucker for this type of stuff: contemporary accounts, analysis and assessments relating to little magazine culture. For the most part the Carleton Symposium featured small/little magazine editors but not editors associated with the Mimeo Revolution. There is a difference. Little magazine culture includes the likes of C, Fuck You and Floating Bear, but also killjoys like Modern Fiction Studies, Kenyon Review, December, and, well, The Carleton Miscellany. So this symposium was a precursor to Paper Dreams, which came out this summer, and not surprisingly much of the commentary on the little magazine today (beside the digital implications) has not changed in over four decades. Still I love this stuff. You have to know your enemies in order to better understand your friends, and in some cases, you get surprised by having one of your friends show up. In the Carleton Symposium, that friend was David Moberg, editor of the under-appreciated Mother. As I have mentioned before, Mother was not featured in Secret Location, probably in large part because it was a New York School mag that was not centered in New York City. It was started in Northfield, Minnesota at Carleton College, which has to be the only possible reason Moberg was asked to participate. Robert Bly of The Sixties does not fit either but again his is from Minnesota.

Moberg’s contribution to the symposium responds indirectly to the Carleton questionnaire by focusing on Mother and why it existed. It is interesting reading on a pretty darn good little mag that was touched on in Secret Location, but lacked the zip code for a fuller treatment.

David Moberg

One-time editor, MOTHER

When Locus Solus (a beautiful, fat magazine edited by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews and James Schuyler) stopped in 1962, Ted Berrigan (Tulsan émigré poet in New York) decided to continue, to some extent, publication of the same young poets and writers, giving special attention at first to the band of Tulsans-in-New-York. Peter Schjeldahl saw Berrigan’s legal-sized, mimeographed C magazine when he was in New York in 1963 and carried back the idea of the magazine to Carleton, where in the spring of 1964 he and Jeff Giles published two issues of MOTHER.

At the time their offset-printed magazine (of 50 pages or less) printed almost exclusively the work of or translations by Carleton people, Peter decided to go to Paris. The next year Jeff and I edited the magazine.

I was interested in making the magazine national, in contributions and distribution, and larger, if possible, and started working to collect material in the summer of 1964, with generous initial help from Berrigan. However, we continued the emphasis of our own band of MOTHERpeople: Schjeldahl, Giles, Louie Nasper, Larry Swingle and me. I played a large role in editing numbers 3 through 5. Now with No. 6 the magazine is back in the hands of Schjeldahl.

The reasons the editors of the several magazines mentioned above got involved with a “little magazine” vary widely. It’s safe to rule out financial motivation. Obviously all shared one goal: they wanted to see published the (type of) material they published. Also, I imagine most of them shared to some extent the feeling of concrete accomplishment in actually pulling together a magazine. Whether the accomplishment was great is relatively unimportant; the editor usually feels good, even if he is disgusted with the result and determined to do better with the next issue. I found also that the experience of selecting what material I liked for the magazine was very influential in the development of my own interests in writing. By number 5 my idea of what I liked to write was reflected in (and partially molded by) a greater clarity of editorial purpose. And that was a big reason, for me, for the existence of MOTHER.

There were three other reasons for MOTHER’s existence: (1) we wanted to give little-published writers and poets a place to be see, (2) both Jeff and I were interested in dredging out of the U.S. west of the Hudson poets and writers in the vein we liked, since most of the writers outside our Carleton group were from New York; and (3) I was particularly interested in providing a magazine which would not only be a place for poets-writers-etc. to publish but would also entice the curious non-writer to read. Spread the gospel, you know.

But, as I said before, the primary reason for the magazine’s existence was the desire to publish new and “experimental” works of poetry, prose, art and what’s left. At its best, MOTHER had a dada irreverence, but perhaps a sneakier, more insidious and more subtle sort of literary obnoxiousness than did the 1920’s Dada.

Most of the poets and writers in MOTHER considered themselves in rebellion against the poetry and prose produced or glorified in academic circles. Their arsenal of literary devices included (among others) irony, parody, plagiarism, cut-up, fold-in, time-jumble, “il”logic, nuttiness, abstraction, distortion, outrageousness, humor, pornography, lying, scatology, hallucination, frivolity, gibberish, and confusion.

It was all – almost all, anyway – very “literary.” This was good (bad). Most of the techniques mentioned above are concerned with writing itself, rather than, say, the problem of the social conscience of the writer, the depiction of normal reality, or the truth of what was written. I’m sure those and other issues are relevant to much of what was in MOTHERbut the main interest we had in editing it (and one of the main interests of most of the writers) was what can be done with words and arrangement of words. This paralleled to some extent one of the concerns of many modern painters in asking what can be done, given brush, paint and canvas and working with those limitations. You might call this a formalistic interest.

Most of the writing MOTHERsmiled upon was concerned with subject matter in an indirect way (as implicit) and did not serve as a symbolic or didactic adjunct to psychology, philosophy or political science. There may have been something to be learned from the writings in MOTHER (as if anyone cared about learning) but it would have been like learning from the world, for the works were (at their best) immediate and concrete, not discursive and universialized. Giles always thought that was what a poet did: created a world, a new world.

It is perhaps in this sense that MOTHER-writings shared some of the effects of surrealism. They were not surrealistic – like back in the days of manifestoes – but some influence had filtered through. Partly it was in those “formal” matters, but it was also in the idea that the reality of interest to artists, poets and writers did not necessarily correspond to the everyday world. The everyday world was a utilitarian construction (which in the west divided the world into me and it, subjectivity and objectivity, mind and matter) from an immediate perceptual world which was “really” quite different. The immediate perceptual world – either actually seen in any of the waking, sleeping or distorted states or created-seen by the artist – was frequently found in the writings of MOTHER.

Many of the writings published by MOTHER and similar magazines have a fresh innocence of wonder about them. Child-like slight oddities of syntax and apparently completely honest presentation are really quite artful, artless techniques. This innocence gives the object of the poem or the prose passage a new look. In this new world, some of the old feelings can be shown concretely and vividly without the self-conscious limitation of the old abstractions.

This is no exhaustive description of what MOTHER was intended to present, nor is it a definition of the interests of some new “school” of writers. It is an account of my interests, and helps explain why one little magazine called MOTHERexisted for the year I worked on it. In a way many of these attitudes are shared by others (since most have been stolen from other people). In the end, though, they belong to MOTHER.

JB

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