The modest role of the cataloging librarian is to make things discoverable. How point to items—by author and title, publisher and dimension—thoroughly enough to ensure future researchers discover them in the course of their as-yet unknown quests?
Since mid-March, together with my cataloging colleagues, I’ve been tasked with sorting through our backlog. There is truly no way to collect all Anglophone poetry, from 1900 forward, exhaustively, without the generosity of gifts, as many presses are so small and so far-flung, so many networks ebullient and distant.
Here are notes on (and further appreciations of some) 41 such instances in print, gifted to the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo, now culled within the archive, awaiting discovery.
001
Charles Alexander
miniature broadside.
“Letterpress printed in red and black on green
handmade paper” reads the tender note from a cataloger at the University of
Washington Libraries, entered into the main record for this micro-broadside,
the only other library (until now) to hold this item: And Sometimes (for Michael Tarachow), issued by Black Mesa Press. Comments
on letterpress items are not uncommon in such bibliographic records, though
it’s still soothing to find, to read, to realize the thing at hand is the same
(or perhaps different) than the thing in that other anonymous hand. The poem in
its entirety is only six lines, all printed in black except one, matching title,
in majuscule.
002
Naropa Institute Summer 1977 [course bulletin].
The covers are coming off, so thin the papers… Course
offerings center around disciplines—practices?—of meditation, dance, theatre,
Buddhist studies, and philosophy and the practice of martial arts. In 1977,
faculty included (among the writers) John Ashbery, Michael Brownstein, William
S. Burroughs, Clark Coolidge, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Ed Dorn, Larry
Fagin, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Ed Sanders, and Anne Waldman. Also: dancer
Meredith Monk; Buddhist priest Jakusho Kwong (a disciple of zen master Suzuki
Roshi); and Letitia Bartlett, who “studied pantomime with Samuel Avital and
mime and Balinese mask with Leonard Pitt in Berkeley,” and who was “an original
member of the Boulder Mime Theater” (41).
003
The Beard by Michael McClure.
This bibliographic record is from so far back—probably
transcribed from card to electronic—it bears no descriptive cataloging code, as
well as this older-styled description of extent: 6 plates, 9-82 pages, 5 leaves
[;] 20.4 cm [.] The stitches of the signatures are exposed on end; the author
has inscribed the front cover; the interior pages remain uncut… Is this one of
the 40 copies, specially bound and signed? Unknown [from home, unable to check
against other copies in the archive]—the local notes which once described the
other two copies held by the library have been lost over years of migrating electronic
systems.
004
Braman, Sandra, A true story.
Ten other libraries hold this, none in New York State.
Much is gleaned from updating a record:
- I can confirm that this is the same author who wrote Geretschky and Spokesheards and trace that to this record.
- Zelot-Tansy Press books were distributed in both Burton, Ohio by the The Asphodel Book Shop and in East Haven, Ct. by the Inland Book Company.
- I expand the contents note: [Albuquerque -- New York -- Petaluma -- Eugene -- Black Mountain] to: [Albuquerque -- New York -- New York -- Petaluma -- Petaluma -- Eugene -- Black Mountain]—
- And add a clarifying note: “Each of the two sections titled 'New York' and the two sections titled 'Petaluma' begin the same but have divergent endings” with a local tag, in case only our copy reflects this; though I doubt it, as the unnumbered pagination is the same.
005/006
To Max Douglas / Ken Irby [the unenlarged edition]
It turns out there were two editions issued, as two different numbers in the same series, from the same press with iteratively differing names:
1. To Max Douglas / ǂc Ken Irby.
[Lawrence, Kan.] : ǂb A Tansy 4 / Peg Leg Press Publication, ǂc [1971]
34 unnumbered pages ; ǂc 26 cm
[Tansy] ; ǂv [no. 3]
Received as no. 3 of Tansy.
2. To Max Douglas / |c Kenneth Irby ; [with an introd. by Edward Dorn].
[Lawrence, Kan.] : |b [Tansy-Pegleg Press], |c ©1974.
[65] pages ; |c 21 cm
[Tansy] ; ǂv [no. 8]
Ed. statement and publisher from publisher slip inserted.
007 & 008
Two chapbooks by
Mary Fabilli—
Winter Poems (Berkeley,
CA.: Inverno Press, ©1983)
Simple Pleasures
(Berkeley, California: Ferron Press, ©1987)
The first with “decorations [line drawings] by the
author.” Stapled in ivory papers with black line-drawing cover illustrations by
the author; these in and of themselves circulating small press reading culture
in Berkeley.
009
Works on paper / Shin Yu Pai. Lake Worth, Florida: Convivio Bookworks, 2007.
This beautifully made edition—designed, printed, and bound by John Curtone and Seth Thompson—is limited to 125 copies. A cataloging predecessor has caringly described it as: “Bound in brown paper over boards; accordion binding; blue endpapers; handsewn; some olive green, brick red, and dark yellow pages”; and olive again—the signatures are demarcated by these colors, as truly the volume is four fascicles stitched into accordion hinges of blue paper. I’m taken with the section “Yes Yoko Ono,” these poems being Pai’s homages to Ono’s instructional [conceptual] works:
SHEEP
PIECE
Borrow
yourself a herd of sheep,
one
hundred in number or more
spray
paint their fleece
with
your favorite words.
Watch
from a distance as the sheep
arrange
themselves into poems.
010
Silo 8 / Fall 1965
It’s atypical for an archive like the Poetry Collection to collect those publications classified as “college verse”; it would simply overwhelm to collect so deeply, and considered beyond our collecting parameters, as most institutions collect their own student publications. This issue, however—a Bennington College student magazine—is from when student Anne Waldman was editor. While typically a library would use a general record for the entire serial publication, noting the particular number held, I find that a peer institution has created a monographic record for this issue alone; I link that record to our catalog, for its deeper descriptive info. The issue also features Robert Kelly, Lewis Warsh, Charles Stein, Gerard Malanga, and opens with a poem by Jonathan Cott called “What is Going on Inside His Head” that begins with this line:
Angel Hair sleeps with a boy in my head.
011-021
LRL e-editions, in
print.
In the continual incongruity between digital and
print, sometimes you get the best of both worlds. This is the case with these
chapbooks from little red leaves press, which were e-editions that could also
be purchased in print (via a print-on-demand service). The editions are of simple
design, not quite perfect bound, as they’re stapled in covers not quite matte,
giving off a certain sheen of light. Crossing another divide, it’s like that
chapbook that doesn’t get lost when stood on your bookshelf.
- Technique of Bandaging and Splinting / Harold Abramowitz [2009]
- Everything We Could Ask For / Sarah Campbell [2010]
- Any Time Soon / Gloria Frym [2010]
- L&O / Pattie McCarthy [2011]
- Remembrance of Things Plastic / Eléna Rivera [2010]
& some perfect bound monographs too:
- Prosthesis : : Caesarea / Susan Gevirtz [1993, 2009]
- Three American Letters / Brian Mornar [2010]
- Sound Noise / by Mathew Timmons [2010]
- Painting is Finite / Hugo García Manríquez [2011]
- On Michael Cross's Haecceities: A Group Review & Sourcebook / David Brazil, Thom Donovan, Brenda Iijima, C.J. Martin, Kyle Schlesinger, Jamie Townsend, Michael Cross, and Taylor Brady.
- The First Three Books / Beverly Dahlen [2012]
little red leaves ephemera edition: TRESK by Lauren Levin
This press is probably most widely known for its brilliantly catalogic textile series, publishing scads of authors in limited edition chaps stitched in (remnant?) cloth covers. Here’s another chapbook, likewise marvelously designed by Dawn Pendergast, stitching together three folded leaves with black thread in red mylar papers. What’s further exciting than these fantastic poems is the designer’s modernist attention to form, with each line “knocked out” in white against black or red; the lines of color creating heavy bars of text; some connective to one others, though most not. And this doesn’t take away from the text—it’s an evenhanded heaviness of print that lets words, in tiny format, shout!
023
Lorine Niedecker: an original biography by Jane Shaw Knox. (Fort Atkinson, Wis.:
Dwight Foster Public Library, [1987?])
Written just after Niedecker’s death but published
sixteen years later, this densely-illustrated pamphlet contains a biographical
sketch with remembrances by Wisconsin friends, excerpts from poems, a
chronology, a bibliography, excerpts from letters (including two to Zukofsky), and
a remembrance by Cid Corman; it also revealed [to this reader] that Kristine
Thatcher, “an actress with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater,” had written and
put on a play about the last years of the poet’s life.
024
Z"L: for the family of CJ Martin
& Julia Drescher.
([Texas]: Ash Smith, [Summer] 2013)
The beauty of community is everywhere manifest in this
volume, produced as fundraiser for the family of poet-publishers C.J. Martin
and Julia Drescher after the tornado outbreak of May 15-17, 2013 in Texas,
Oklahoma, and elsewhere. Gathering together poems from over 50 contributors,
the volume is both scrappy and lush, with poems quickly and tenderly arranged
and photocopied by Ash Smith, bound in minimalist if opulent letterpress papers
by Michael Cross. The overall effect is one of doing whatever one can do when
feeling there is so little one can do. In sum, with love.
025
The Jargon Idea by Millicent Bell (Providence, Rhode
Island: Brown University, 1963).
Fascinating document, reprinted from Books at Brown, Volume XIX, May, 1963…was
this publication an internal document? Or an advertisement for researchers?
Citing correspondence (specifically, William Carlos Williams to Jonathan
Williams), Bell gives an overview the Jargon project (similar to a finding aid)
as an example of noncommercial publishing more generally, with excerpts from
and acute commentaries on Duncan, Layton, Levertov, and Creeley, together with
a Jargon Checklist.
026
The Venice poem / Robert Duncan ([Place of publication
not identified]: Bibliophasia Reprint Service, 1993).
From the same publishing outfit that brought you The Little Golden Book of Lesser New York
School Poets ([1988?])—which I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing—comes
this bootleg-esque “edition” of Duncan’s poem, “composed in 1948 and first
published in Poems 1948-49 (Berkeley
Miscellany Editions)," per the title page verso. In the circulatory life
of a poem, sometimes the sort-of authorized
is produced as a way of releasing the poem to wherever it needs to go… This fresh
iteration of “The Venice Poem” is the third [known] stand-alone edition, the
first being from Prism (Sydney, 1975), and the second from Poets’ Mimeo (Burlington,
Vt., [1978]) in an edition of only 48. (The Picaron (Amsterdam, 1986) is its
own thing, being extracts from.)
027
ABC of poetics: a defense of poetry in language by Billious P. Jackson (Buffalo, NY: Meow Press Ephemera Series #16, [between 1996 and 1998]).
“A young person's guide to the Poetics Program,” per the cover. This seven-leaved, side-stapled pamphlet (with creasing) says it is the introduction to a lengthier work to be published in installments. Polemical, in that it both defends the notion of poetics in a critique of poetics, qua a school or similar [academic] institution, “it is really vague and indeterminate as well as grounded and particular.”
028
WIP (works-in-progress), volume 1, issue 5, fall [1975]—Special
“Printer’s Devil” Poetry Issue.
Handsomely letterpressed, “No. five” in orange stiff
papers. Non-cynically speaking, this kind of little magazine (“a brown
university little magazine,” appearing quarterly) shows the interlaced networks
of mentors, cohorts, student-editors—
- staff: Ray Ragosta
- with contributors, beside the students, including: Denise Levertov, William Bronk, John Martone, Michael Gizzi, Rosmarie Waldrop, Kenneth Irby, David Rivard, Keith Waldrop, Ray Ragosta, with artwork by Ippy Gizzi [Patterson].
029
Reduction in force / Daniel Borzutzky
Was this printed in Chicago?—by the author?—around
2010? I like a cataloging mystery, and this fine, folded broadsheet lends such,
with its columnar stanzas, one per each unnumbered panel, hewn into shapes
convex, concave, and slanted, one to the other; each stanza fitting together,
panel to panel. On the reverse, a drawing (by the author?) reminiscent of the work
of the late Buffalo artist Mark Freeland: a figure a-sea in boxy labyrinth. This
kind of hand- and post-circulated edition—published by virtue of being—is the
stuff readers’ desk drawers are crammed with; let us count ourselves lucky at
least one copy fell into an archive. Collected Works go uncollected without it.
030
Notes, N° 3 - Juin
1990 (Malakoff [Paris]: Raquel Levy, 1986-1996).
This third issue (apparently of 6) consists of
“Charles Bernstein on Charles Reznikoff,” a transcription of a lecture by
Bernstein in English with Pierre Alféri translating into French (plus a commentary
by Emmanuel Hocquard, also in French). Not only an outline of Reznikoff’s life,
Bernstein offers a context for the poet in American modernist writing, and
within the “nexus” of the Objectivist poets. Partly a transcript to an audio
recording, we also hear [in print] Oppen introducing Reznikoff, and Reznikoff
beginning to read. Bernstein draws out several qualities of the poet’s work,
including Jewish themes and the blessedness of the everyday, the collage of
found materials, and connections to Ginsberg, Jabés, Rakosi. Take this
comparison between Testimony and
other long works like “The Waste Land” and the “Cantos”:
By surface/depth, I think Reznikoff was not interested in a certain kind of realist or mimetic depth that would occur if you thematically linked all of these different items, and I think one of the reasons that his work could not be understood so easily […] is that by constantly intercutting and jump-cutting between the materials, the status of the detail and the particular gains primacy as opposed to some level of rhetorical depth and narrative closure […]
031
Serious Iron (Port Moody, B.C.: Iron, [1971]).
The archive collected the little magazine Iron (English Department, Simon Fraser
University), but this one is “[a]pparently an unnumbered issue,” edited by
Linda Parker (Oct. 1971, Bagdad, Massachusetts), which thankfully Brown
University has cataloged with a monographic record, giving fuller access to an
otherwise slippery volume which was somehow missed by subscription. Readers and
researchers might find of interest: “Notes made after visiting Charles Olson on
Saturday 6 June 1969” by Ralph Maud; Jeremy Prynne on Maximus IV, V & VI,
as transcribed by Tom McGauley; “An alternative for opposites” by Robert
Creeley; and poems by Maud, Gladys Hindmarch, Derryll [Derryl] White, Brian
Fawcett, Victoria Walker Margesson, Brett Enemark, and prose by Tom McGauley;
with translations from Rilke by Karl Siegler.
032
Wisconsin Academy Review, volume 32, number 3, June 1986 (Madison:
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters).
Is there ever compensation for the neglect of a compelling
writer’s work? Likely not. Though I always find it heartening to watch the slow
growth of “recovery” as a writer receives their due. In this issue, “Getting to
Know Lorine Niedecker” by Gail Roub; also, “One By Herself: the Achievements of
Lorine Niedecker” by Karl Gartung.
033 [& 034]
[Poems by Jack Collum, Jenny Henry, and
Gloria Frym] ([Texas?]: [little red leaves], [about 2011]).
These four leaves—issued as two sheets, adhered, within
folio (31 x 23 cm)—are printed on reused pages from various magazines featuring
commercial illustrations advertisements (some in color). [So, is this the same
press that published Shin Yu Pai’s four
poems on animals, printed in similar fonts over reused signatures from The Old Print Shop (New York, N.Y.)
catalogs, pagination inconsistent throughout, with maps and pictures of wildlife?]
Two works by Collom, the other two coauthored with either collaborator, the
folio functions as an icon to network or artistic community but also as small
press publishing possibility, and an intentional (re)use of the means on hand.
035
Sand Dollar Books,
Catalog One: Modern & Postmodern Literature (Berkeley, Ca., [about 1974?]).
Secondhand sales catalogues are often an invaluable
source for research, revealing all they do about publications, locating and
tracing authors and presses, descriptions, and what they reveal about the
bookseller. Here’s a sample from this one, an early publication from the
magnificent Sand Dollar Books (run by Jack Shoemaker, who, later, with Peter Howard
of Serendipity Books, forged Small Press Distribution):
Gertrude Stein, A Bibliography. Compiled by Robert A. Wilson. NY: The Phoenix Bookshop, 1974.
Stooge. Num[b]ers 1-11 plus Ice Cream Stooge. San Diego/Santa Barbara/Hong Kong/Albuquerque/Oconomowoc Lake, 1967-1974. Edited by Geoff Young and Allen Schiller.
Taggard (Genevieve) Long View. [SF]: Book Club of California, 1947.
Taggart (John) To Construct a Clock. New Rochelle: The Elizabeth Press, (1971).
The list goes on…
036
The Literary World of San Francisco &
its Environs / by
Don Herron; edited by Nancy J. Peters. San Francisco: City Lights Books,
[1985].
This fascinating guide, formatted like the MIT
architectural Baedekers, moves neighborhood by neighborhood through the
literary history and happenings of the city like a massively illustrated
whodunit—
MARKET STREET: the Hearst building; home to the Heart Examiner; featuring the first American newspaper column, the “Town Crier” by Ambrose Bierce.
RUSSIAN HILL: Where Jack Kerouac stayed with Neal and Carolyn Cassady and their family, 1952.
NORTH BEACH: City Lights Pocket Book Shop!
MISSION: Where did Emma Goldman live in 1916?
HAIGHT-ASHBURY-FILLMORE: The Zen Center of San Francisco, where Philip Whalen lived for years—down the street from Diane di Prima’s—around the corner from Jack Keroauc’s digs in 1968.
POINTS NORTH: Napa, where Jessamyn West lived, and where Robert Louis Stevenson spent time (recuperating) in 1880.
Certain authors are a neighborhood unto themselves, such as Jack London, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Dashiell Hammett—thanks to whom, the plaque on Burritt Street reads: “On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.”
037
Doughboy Doggerel: Verse of the American
Expeditionary Force, 1918-1919
/ Alfred E. Cornebise, ed. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, [1985].
You won’t find Owen or Sassoon in these pages, warns
the jacket flap. These Army poets were first published on the pages of The Stars and Stripes, a weekly
newspaper of the American Expeditionary Forces. Chaptered thematically
(patriotism; overseas; soldiering; fallen heroes; coming home; romance; “Allies
and Enemies”; humor; plus a miscellany), the anthology offers a rank-and-file
of verse, to complement, or complicate, or make non-complacent, our canon of
poetry from World War I.
038
Ocean Hiway: 8 Poets in San Diego. San Diego, CA: Wild Mustard, 1982.
Contributors: Melanie Neilson -- Peter Dragin -- David
Sternbach -- Don Eulert -- Steven Roberts -- Shelley White -- Ted Burke -- Paul
Dresman.
Collaboratively edited, per the collective statement; I first came across Shelley White’s writing some years ago, by way of her chapbook A February Activity (La Jolla, CA: Parentheses Writing Series, 1990), and immediately sent a hello, by way of Pasquale Verdicchio. Consider the many layers that reveal themselves—dried silver dollars—in “Knowledge of the Sphere”:
Page 9, Oceans
Pacifique et Indien –
cerulean shallows
lie warm over the top
of the albatross
cordillera
which can describe
the flight, the pattern
of those birds who
cannot pass
the doldrums, but
knew perhaps
these submerged
peaks at colder times than ours. (72)
Even better to find White’s poems in a local context of choir, voices familiar and not. (Were all of these friends, I wonder, students of Fanny Howe’s?)
039
Soundings: Ives, Ruggles, Varèse / [edited by Peter Garland, with cover by
Alison Knowles]. West Bath (Maine): Soundings Magazine, 1974.
The title for this issue comes from the opening essay
by Lou Harrison—and has ever an issue presented so much as a full-on
monograph?! Densely composed of musical notation, diagrams, painting, and by way
of critical apparatus, the measure in its multifariousness presents a radical
mode of sentential breath.
040
The Gulf of Maine [A Blackberry Reader] / collected
and edited by Gary Lawless. Brunswick, Me.: Blackberry, 1977.
Cross-disciplinarity is foregrounded here by the
regional. Poems, music, and “maritime matters” coalesce around a notion of
locale, also featuring illustrations and color plates (see: “Lobster, Homarus americanus, at 40 feet, Cobscook
Bay Maine” by Jon Witman). Consider that
one such anthology [originally intended to be a magazine, though I find no
record of an Issue 2] can include—and not as found, or source, or sampled
text—a chart from the Gulf of Maine Whale Sighting Network.
041
Fluxus: Selections
from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection / Clive Phillpot and Jon
Hendricks. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988.
With fastening flap folded from inside front reaching around
to buckle into back cover, this catalog makes the effort to enact a Fluxus gesture;
for the editors are trying to catalog art that took aim at classification and
disciplinary containers: to read, the reader must unbuckle! Performance may
present the epitome of Fluxus, where fixity of the work is most unloosed from
closure/container. The concept of “the work” exhibited herein challenges
categories like book, text, visuality, sound, utterance, and hierarchies among.
For more on hierarchies, consider the flat, linear subject headings from the Library
of Congress that may speak to what slips between…
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
– History – 20th century – Exhibitions.
Art – Private
collections – Michigan – Detroit – Exhibitions.
