From “cull” to “glean” to “gloss”—the cataloger’s commentary continues as a form of appreciation for the small press object, the quiet endeavoring that produces such print instances, and the authors and artists represented among these…
076-080
- Portable Leon. [Place of publication not identified] : Viking Press, [1969?]
- More pictures of Leon. [Bolinas, Calif.?] : Leon Press ; [Albany, Calif.] : [Distributed by Sand Dollar], 1970.
- Three kings / Wayne Padgett. New York : Adventures in Poetry, [1972]
- In February I think / Elio Schneeman. [New York City] : C Press Publications, [1978]
- Nuclear Neighborhood / Larry Fagin. [Bolinas, Ca] : Smithereens Press, ©1983.
Once upon a time, after a reading, I handed a side-stapled (standard American) letter-sized journal to a New York Poet of a certain generation: “Ah, something familiar,” she said. This knot of such examples above, all in white papers with black and white cover art (one stamped), span a decade or so and begin to draw a diagram, taking shape like a double-jointed star or asterisk. The catalog record for Portable Leon made by the University of Michigan Library attributes the poems to Ron Padgett and Larry Fagin, per a note enclosed to Anne Waldman, while the record for More Pictures of Leon contributed by Ball State University notes that “‘Leon’ is a pseudonym of the poet Ted Berrigan.” [Cuneiform’s website hosts a marvelous scan of Big Sky 7, “The World of Leon” issue]; Adventures in Poetry was edited by Larry Fagin, C Press by Ted Berrigan. Images by Joe Brainard, Ken Botto, and George Schneeman for the collection of his son’s poems, constellate the covers and proffer a further school of thought. (That poet was Alice Notley!)
081
Dark
horses and little turtles : [poems] / Richard Felger.
Guadalupita,
N.M. : Nail Press, 1974.
Tooth
of Time Review ; no. 1
Some instances—in this case, one of “200 copies printed”—become a locus for the study of: small presses + the American Southwest; a trajectory for Ethnopoetics + the transition toward ecopoetics; the dormancy of little magazines + digital circulation. This book of poems, by biologist Richard Stephen Felger, was the first issue of Tooth of Time Review, published as a monograph, reportedly printed by John Brandi on a “1903 Rotary Neostyle mimeograph, now in the archives of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library,” per the From a Secret Location website. Words intersperse with hand-drawn glyphs, as well as two leaves of flowchart-like “myths.” The volume is now reissued as Dark Horses and Little Turtles and Other Poems from the Anthropocene, a printable digital book from Polytropos Press.
082
Prague
poems / Valerie Kuehne.
Brooklyn,
N.Y. : Green Zone Editions, ©2007.
This isn’t the Valerie Kuehne who’s
written on intergenerational programs; this is the musician who is also a poet.
Cataloging requires a differentiation of name (by some distinguishing feature)
to trace separate identities… And what if that differentiation could be tone of
voice itself?—as with a quote from the poem “theory”—
Kuehne, Valerie. (“oh sorry / trying to avoid disjunction. / when she speaks it collapses, /the ideogram, / embodiment […]”)
083
Poetry city, U.S.A. : poem wrapped around the block by Dr. Alphabet ... / by Dave Morice. [Iowa City, IA] ] : Happy Press, c1977.
Title from first page…
Cover title: Dr. Alphabet's poetry city marathon and other sidewalk shows!
Portion title: Poem wrapped around the block by Dr. Alphabet
This is a record for that happening in Autumn, 1975, when a “poetry marathon written on paper [was] taped to the buildings bounded by Clinton St., Washington St., Dubuque St., and Iowa Ave., an entire block in downtown Iowa City.” The booklet—paged A-P—winningly “dedicated to the first 100 people who read it,” describes the communal performance, lists participants, and reproduces newspaper notices of the event, acting as both program and review.
084
The
Pierrot poets / Frank Medlar, Jacqui Acon [and] Tom Weigel.
Buffalo,
N.Y. : Pierrot Press, 1973.
I’ve no idea who the Pierrot Poets are, but don’t you want to know now?! (Me too.) From a great write-up by Joel Lewis on the Poetry Project’s website, I learn that Tom Weigel spent some portion of the early ’seventies in Buffalo, where apparently he began collating pages of poetry by friends he’d met along the way. The full blossoming of this would be his Andrea Doria Books imprint, including the Full Deck Anthology he edited in 1982. How great to see this earlier manifestation, illustrating the imperative to bring together, to connect, to share.
085
Die literarische Avantgarde der U.S.A. seit 1945 : mit porträts amerikanischer autoren / von Dirk Görtler.
Freiburg [im Breisgau] : Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut ; Waldkirch : Georg-Scholz-Haus Städtische Galerie, 1988.
This catalog from an exhibition (held October 20 to November 6, 1988) features portraits of American authors by illustrator and Chelsea Hotel co-editor Dirk Görtler. Writers depicted include Kathy Acker, Paul Bowles, Richard Brautigan, William S. Burroughs, Robert Creeley, William Gaddis, Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Robert Stone, paired with selected bibliographies as an introduction to German and Swiss readers. The catalog also includes excerpts from Raymond Federman (in German). When I check our catalog for “Dirk Görtler,” I find that three other items we hold are all call-numbered as Federman pieces, and so decide to also locate this under Federman’s unique call number, predicting that the researcher may well be drawn by the scent of association among.
086
Snip! /
Roger E. Erickson.
Brooklyn,
N.Y. : Folding Cigar Press, [1974]
Not an actual issue of Folding Cigar, this prototype for the periodical is made from material “selected from my storage files for collage elements,” the artist notes, with his own drawings added in “to vary its visual rhythms.” My first take was that this is an issue of Folding Cigar artists’-books serial; Brown University has contributed a beautiful record to OCLC, based on the issue they hold (the “Fourth”). Often the first issue of a serial-endeavor presents as a one-off: the impetus for the project preceding seriality. But catalogers’ judgment has me hesitate… other libraries’ catalogs and booksellers’ lists reveal the first issue of that serial was numbered the “First,” copyrighted 1978. This is a good example of how the collectivity of a journal can grow from the germinal idea of the individual—the “visual text” draws page-by-page from advertisements, instructions, statistical diagrams, graphic ornaments, handwriting scraps, lists, and stencils—all evened-out in a black-and-white palette, with endpapers lusciously printed in ROYGBIV.
087
Trees /
Lea Goldberg ; English translation by Sharon Kessler ; artwork by Noga Farchi.
Pardes
Hanna, Israel : Fish-Eye Press, [2008], copyright 2008
How to count illustrative content? Plates are accounted for by their own [un]numbering, recorded together with pagination—as in [3 of this] , [3 of that]. In this case, there are three unnumbered pages of plates, three unnumbered leaves of poems translated from the Hebrew. The plates are tipped in, facing the text; I add a clarifying note in the body of the record… Let the quandary (3 + 3 ≠ 6) not distract from but return emphasis to Goldberg’s poems.
The
needles toll: once upon a time—
I’ll
call the snowy distances my home,
the
pale green ice that traps the stream,
the
sound of poetry in a country not my own
Perhaps
only the migratory birds understand—
suspended between
earth and sky,
this
pain of having two homelands.
With
you, I was planted twice,
and
I have frown together with you, pines,
but
my roots in two different landscapes lie.
which surely appealed to translator Sharon Kessler, who grew up in New York State, but who now—by self-description—is “[o]perating alone in the Middle East.” The lovely botanical plates are by the translator’s daughter, artist Noga Farchi.
088
An
anthology. No. 2 / [edited by L.G.C. and E.H.C.?]
[Place
of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], [between 1935 and
1955?]
The cataloger must make judgements! What is this piece?—searches in OCLC by title, subject, and with various clusters of contributors’ names reveal nothing. The cataloger must assign parameters… One cannot guess where this was published, or by whom. A cluster of poems near the end of this 49-page anthology by the initialed “L.G.C.” and “E.H.C.” leads me to believe they are the editors. As for a range of years, simply stating “19uu” for any year in the 20th Century will drop the item in any date-cascading search to the year 1900… I go for a questionable range, based on the paper quality, the toning, and the lives of the contributors, as many of them seem to be contemporaries: Edwin Markham was editing anthologies in the ’30s; Ethel Romig Fuller lived from 1883 to 1965, Sara Henderson Hay from 1906 to 1987. Even with this bracketed span, I go to further lengths—listing all contributors, in hopes that a future researcher or colleague at-large with the same piece in-hand will discover this bibliographic record and improve upon the information I’ve gleaned.
089
A twist
of sun : some poems / by Gardner McFall.
[Florida?]
: [Gardner McFall?], [between 1972 and 1977?]
Some chapbooks seem so plainly happy! Sheets glued together into pages; covers hole-punched; bound with two loose leaf rings (2 cm in diameter), with lower ring now lost. The young poet records her travels and impressions, as well as that most companionably difficult thing to describe—friendship:
By sitting
opposite
on the train
We are denied
identical views of things
But still that
hope
of sharing
A common alpine
range
090
A book
of short and wholly random essays accompanied by drawings the two of which to
the untrained eye seemingly having nothing absolutely to do one with the other
in our time: a collection / Wayne Hogan.
Cookeville,
TN : little books press, [2008]
If a Zen monk offers you a large block of wood to sand down to nothing, don’t take it. This is the very sort of thing that rarely turns out the way it’s s’posed to.
I love those oppositely apostrophized esses abutting! This passage is emblematic of these humorous short prose paragraphs, arranged as chapters: “essays” that turn out not the way one might think. Allusive, oblique; the drawings (by the author) offer New York School-styled critique of advertising, some with a more heavily positive-negative conceit (closer to that of Djuna Barnes’s), where idealism and repugnance share a razor-sharp line.
091
The
52nd annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program presents: Susan Stewart, April 1
& 2, 2015.
[Storrs,
Connecticut]: The University of Connecticut English Department in the College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences; [Hartford, Connecticut]: Hartford Classical
Magnet School, 2015.
It’s the cataloger in me who longs to use that binary fixed field positively: (0, Not a festschrift; 1, Is a Festschrift). Alas, this too is not a festschrift… but it is an annual gathering to honor the former Hartford employee Wallace Stevens, sponsoring two readings—one at the campus of each publisher—“by a poet of national or international reputation.” The program features a poem by Stevens, a poem by 2015 honoree Susan Stewart, and poems by writing award winners from university and high school poets to watch for.
092
Up
front
Toronto,
Ontario: Huron Path Press, 1979-
This is the only known issue of Up Front, a little magazine out of Toronto, with editing attributed to Don Garner. The record is inaccurate, recording the issue only as “Vol. 1,” though the cover states: Vol. 1, No. 1 Sept/Oct 1979. I add in the numbering, trick out the specs to match current cataloging practices; though I can’t add Garner’s name as editor, as it’s modestly absent (though happily he’s also a contributor), so I’ll add it locally to our catalog, pointing again to the richness of in-house data. Sadly, I also update the name authority file for Don Garner to include a passing date: 1945-1989.
Every issue of a little magazine is a constellation guided by the planisphere of the editor… in this case, human relationships (self; societal; hetero/homo; sexual). Three such stars here are:
Angela Jackson (of Chicago; Nommo editor)—
Only
last spring i was a flower in the discotheques
an
anemone of travolta
prancing
to life, in peach and orchid pearl.
Kadoom!
A parkinglot in the alterland lazybalm air.;;
jwcurry (still publishing then as John Curry, founder of Curvd H&z press)—
H
E
E
A
L
V
L
E
N
walks with a limp
and Don Garner himself—
it’s
what happens to all of us
in
the common ongoing process
of
history to use us, now bestial and metric
in
its measurement of the gay heretic.
Also featuring work by Duncan Armstrong, Bob Lee, Anthony Missiou, Yves Saint-Pierre, and Andy Solomon.
093
The mail-interview
with Carol Stetser (USA) / [by Ruud Janssen].
Tilburg,
Netherlands: TAM-Publications, [1997]
Representative of the vast network of mail artists as well as the aesthetics of zines, this series of pamphlets (in this case, “TAM-970171”) presents individual participants in time-stamped conversations with publisher Ruud Janssen of Holland. We learn about the artist’s publishing habits (Padma Press), travel influences (Stetser’s comments travels to three South Pacific nations, where mass print was uncommon at the time, and the forms art takes there), and working processes (collage). Given the nature of mail art’s use of date stamps and postmarks, it’s notable that Stetser worked at a post office!
094
In
Attic blue / Vanessa Boff.
Boulder,
Colorado: Farfalla Press, 2001.
Cheers to Farfalla Press for these marvelous covers, “designed and pressed by artist/poet Heather Ackerberg at the Harry Smith Print Ship, Naropa University, Boulder Colorado”—I drop all this info into the record, to get at local affiliations. I take these covers to be that precise blue of Attica, with poems in the dialect of classical themes: in the summer sun, lakeside, camera obscura, eroticism of the now. The cover papers bear a straightedge splotch of dark blue-violet across the front, making the silvery print of the title come to the fore, the author’s name (against Attic blue) fading back. A clip from “August Slide” goes—
His
listless fingers
Satie
in 1920’s quiet
I am fine
She
is belly lifting
Snowflake
against navel
observe
his face leaning against window
his
mouth open to say goodbye
095
Rimbaud / by Ezra Pound.
Milano: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1957.
These translations, first published in the Little Review, then reprinted as a chapbook nearly 40 years after, include a Rimbaudesque preface stating that “no adequate translations have yet appeared.” With drawings to illustrate from Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani—it’s the pairing of portraits on wrapper front that draw me most: Rimbaud by Marcoussis, Pound by Gaudier Brzeska. It makes me think of Dennis Cooper’s Rimbaud issue of Little Caesar (number 5, April 1978); how Rimbaud manifests every decade or so in the literary world. By Cooper’s assessment: Delmore Schwartz (’43); James Dean (’55); Syd Barrett (’67); Chris Burden (’73); Johnny Rotten (’77). To append that earlier listing: Ezra Pound, circa 1918. [Patti Smith (’75)?]
096
Frieze / Judith Grossman.
Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, [1973]
To return to the topic of name authority control: maybe it’s the nature of time to collapse identities… in studios, guilds, and by region. But we hold back that slippage that comes by homonymy of name. See, for example: two authors named “Judith Grossman,” both writing fiction. I have before me this chapbook, assigned to Grossman, Judith, 1937- : short story writer (and wife of poet Allen Grossman). But these prose sections are highly abstracted, where narrative’s a cat’s cradle. I find a digitized John Hopkins degree conferral document [1971], naming Judith Ellen Grossman; and, in the Johns Hopkins library, a thesis of the same name under Grossman, Judith Ellen, 1946- . Without such remedy, the identity of Judith Grossman (1946-2011) who wrote these lines would remain obscured—
Those inside the room regard the girls
as carefully
tended
fixtures. Until the day arrives, they will always block
the
window, shifting color only, producing like intervals of
even
modulated tones.
[Note also the “modulated tones” of the cover by Keith Waldrop—with exquisite bar of typographic marks: f, fi, fl.]
097 & 098
Thunder-root : traditional and
contemporary Native American verse / by J. Ivaloo Volborth ; [artwork: Daniel
Owen Stolpe].
Los Angeles, California : American Indian
Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1978.
[&]
My horse and a jukebox / by Barney Bush ; .
[artwork: Richard Summers].
Los Angeles, California : American Indian
Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1979.
UCLA was publishing this series, starting in the late ’70s. I have here on my desk two such pamphlets. From Judith Volborth’s, the poem “First Song” defies critic—invokes sentience I would only have a word like hermeticism for:
Atop the Mesa,
beneath the drone of Sun
the air that burst
forth from my bird lungs
a silent song
that only the
heart’s eye could see;
that only the ears
of blue sand could hear. (45)
—or, this haiku, which takes title from first line: “Iron-Door-Woman, / behind downy plumed clouds. / Crows await your eyes”; further alchemy of idiom and form (49).
Barney Bush’s poems take a different approach, a-mix with consumerist- and place-name references of origin and import in lyric plain speech:
Squatted on the
floor
behind a can of
Coors
Grey streets, Gothic
structures, Great Lake
Milwaukee
came into my quietness (19)
099
Padre y hijo = Father and son : Chicano
thoughts / Leo and Marty Hernandez.
[N.M.] : San Marcos Press, 1974.
“Most of my poems are about the negative aspects of the farm worker’s life, because so much of it is negative and must be changed,” writes Leo Hernandez in the declaration that opens this chapbook of poems by these parent-and-child authors. “Yet that life has some positive aspects: a strong sense of togetherness and maintenance of Hispanic language and culture lost by other groups” (5). From experience, the father writes
a chicano child drops out
in kindergarten,
but waits until of legal age.
meanwhile lost in that foreign maze
listening to the so-called sage.
this is not a generality (13)
addressing disparities that fracture democratic notions of citizenship (crossing non-citizenship), from education access to equity before the law. Of his 15-year-old son’s poems, Leo writes: “Marty was born and raised in the middle class. As a boy, he never had to struggle like the farm workers, and he always had what he wanted. So it is not clear why he writes the kind of poetry he does,” perhaps speaking to types of inheritances—and gifts—so often otherwise invisible (6).
100
The wind in the pines : a Celtic
miscellany / [compiled by George F. Maine].
Edinburgh ; London ; Boston : T.N. Foulis,
Ltd., ©1922
The line between forward and backward glancing is so often a Janus-ing gaze; so it is with Modernism and Decadence, the latter embodied as The Celtic Twilight movement—Janus-ly also called the Celtic Revival. Twilight-Revival is that gaze, reinscribing ancient Celtic symbols with a modern (if not modernist) pen. This may be best viewed in the art nouveau illustrations that vivify this seam.
101
Celebrations : a new anthology of Black
American poetry / compiled and edited by Arnold Adoff ; introduced by Quincy
Troupe.
Chicago : Follett Pub. Co., ©1977.
Quincy Troupe’s introduction opens “A new anthology of African-American poetry is always a welcome addition to the whole of American literature” “in these most difficult of times” opens compiler Arnold Adoff’s preface—both posits valid. The vision of the compiler (and longtime spouse of the celebrated children’s author Virginia Hamilton) is contemporary, topical, and far-reaching. Beginning with Lucille Clifton’s “Africa,” the anthology divides (without chapters) into cross-themed clusters: The Idea of Ancestry; Lineage; The Southern Road; Where Is the Black Community?; Young Soul; True Love; Myself When I Am Real; Make Music with Your Life; For Malcom Who Walks in the Eyes of Our Children; A Poem for Heroes; Shade; and, For Each of You. Equally uncategorical, the choice of poets, like Clifton and (randomly selected as I thumb through) Russell Atkins, Mari Evans, Calvin Hernton, Bob Kaufman, Nate Mackey, Carolyn Rodgers, Ishmael Reed, Dudley Randall, Audre Lorde—from modernist favorites to those contemporary writers now historicized in anthology.
