Feminine Marvelous and Tough by Bella Bennett

I think I was thinking when I was ahead Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be somewhere like Perry street erudite dazzling slim and badly-loved contemplating my new book of poetry to be printed in simple type on old brown paper feminine marvelous and tough

FOREWORD by Bella Bennett........................ 7 SCRATCHING THE SURFACE by Magdelyn Hammond Helwig.............. 11 PIRATING POUND by Chelsea Jennings..................... 27 SPOLETO ‘65 by Bill Berkson......................... 55 LETTER TO JAMES SCHUYLER by Ted Berrigan......................... 61 THE ART OF COLLABORATION by Vincent Katz......................... 65 JOE BRAINARD: ALL POSSIBLE COLORS by Nathan Kernan........................ 75 JOE BRAINARD’S GRID by Daniel Worden........................ 85 MIMEO ARGUMENT by Bernadette Mayer..................... 105 A NOTE ON WOMEN AND THE NEW YORK SCHOOL by Maggie Nelson........................ 109 ON THE SONNETS by Ron Padgett.......................... 121

Illustration by Ed Sanders.

Members of the first and second generations of the New York School readily embarked on collaborations exploring

FOREWORD

oetry is often characterized by a sense of immediacy. Poets of the New York School took to the mimeograph as it allowed them to self-publish quickly, economically, and abundantly. Formal considerations for these black-and-white saddle stitch booklets were necessarily inherited from their function. Maintaining a constant exchange of ideas with poets elsewhere was the foremost consideration, so crude reproductions or misprints could be overlooked in favor of expediency. Poets of this mindset were concerned with positioning their work in proximity to an ongoing dialogue. Mimeo culture was a precursor to the explosion of fanzines in DIY punk scenes across New York, Los Angeles, and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The New York Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s embrace of the indie press rewrites commercialized narratives of 1960s and 70s design.

an interplay between poetists within their inner cirry and visual art. Between cle—such was the case of the 1957 and 1959, Frank O’Hara cover designs and illustraand pop artist Larry Rivers tions Brainard created—creproduced a series of twelve ative direction was no longer lithographic prints entitled sequestered to an extrinsic Stones. The purity of the realm. Brainard’s editorial collaboration—in which both style contrasts with the cold men worked side-by-side, usdetachment of commercialized ing the same writing utensil attempts. An underlying auand responding to the same thor-illustrator relationship prompt—allowed O’Hara’s words enriches the publications, and Rivers’ drawings to coparticularly looking towards exist in harmony. O’Hara and work he created with the Rivers, who were lovers, of“soi-disant Tulsa School”— fer a collaborative model imcoined by Ashbery in referbued with intimacy which the ence to Brainard, Berrigan, next generation of New York Ron Padgett, and Dick Gallup, School poets chose to follow who originally met in Tulsa, in both platonic and romantic Oklahoma in 1960 and subworking relationships. sequently moved to New York together—and Kenward ElmsJoe Brainard lies at the lie, who was Brainard’s life heart of second generation partner. A letter from BerriNew York School collaboragan to Brainard about their tions. In an introduction publication C Comics, dated to the 2000 edition of Ted October 1969, makes explicit Berrigan’s The Sonnets, poet the symbiotic relationship Alice Notley recalls: “ . . between their mutual group . ‘Joe’s lettering is getting of friends and forthcoming really good,’ Andy Warhol work: once said admiringly to Ted, lettering being a prized “We can get together and I skill in the Pop Art sixcan see what you are doties” (viii). Brainard’s line ing, and have done, with work had the precision one others, and show you my new would expect of a cartoonpoems, and maybe we can ist or commercial artist. figure something out. Maybe His kitschy, sometimes crass something “about” all our hand-renderings formed a friends, maybe something distinctive visual language about Frank [O’Hara]. Or Edfor the New York School. When win [Denby]. Something about poets collaborated with artAnne Waldman.”

Foreword

The mimeograph dismantled traditional publishing house models and enabled a greater capacity for authorial control with the poet as publisher. The contemporary focus tends to land on a male-dominant New York School, but Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, and Anne Waldman made significant contributions to its tradition as poets and publishers. Notley’s foray into literary magazines began with CHICAGO, a legal-sized mimeo that ran for nine issues with cover illustrations by George Schneeman. Notley’s radical editorial vision for CHICAGO encouraged poets to contribute collections of poems rather than standalones and considered how pieces interacted with the large trim size. 0 to 9, published by Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci, was a highly experimental publication that unravels language and form. Though it ran for only six issues, Mayer and Acconci enabled obscure writings to be recontextualized for new audiences. Waldman’s press Angel Hair included a six-issue serialized run as well as a catalog of 72 titles from poets of the New York School. Mimeograph publications elicited a range of strong re-

actions in their time as an active form from those in the surrounding literary community. Ed Sanders, the editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts who vowed “I’ll print anything,” generated perhaps the most explosive reception and subsequent consequences. He founded Fuck You shortly after being released from jail for protesting nuclear submarine launches in 1960 and an antiauthoritarian vein runs from its title throughout each publication. The press’s place of publication is listed as “a secret location on the Lower East Side,” referring to Peace Eye Book Store which gathered books and people in equal measure. Peace Eye was raided by police in January of 1966 and Sanders was slapped with obscenity charges. The charges were later unanimously dismissed, with the help of the ACLU who came to his defense. Sanders continued to enrage when he acquired an unpublished manuscript of Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CXCXVI and quickly shipped it off to press. Pound sent the manuscript to an editor of The Paris Review, who then gave a copy to Tom Clark as he was working on an honors thesis on the Cantos. Clark, a friend of Sanders’, offered up the

poems when asked for anything he could “instantly freak into print.” Featuring a cover design by Joe Brainard depicting a disembodied male torso, mimeograph copies of Drafts & Fragments were circulating within a matter of days. James Laughlin, poet and founder of New Directions Publishing, slammed the unauthorized publication in a letter to Pound, writing “This all comes out of the dope culture of the Lower East Side. They are all high on one drug or another and don’t care what they do.” New Directions had been after Pound for years to publish another volume of his cantos, so his anger was in part directed towards Sanders getting to it first by a stroke of luck. However, Laughlin also objects to Brainard’s “hideous, semi-obscene cover” which marks a total disconnect between his generation of poets and the mimeograph revolution. A more nuanced debate on the mimeograph as a form occurred in the pages of the Poetry Project Newsletter, which was itself a mimeographed publication. In the March 1982 edition, Eileen Myles, a poet closely associated with the New York School, published the article “Opus Mimeo” reviewing two mimeograph titles

by Lenny Goldstein and Cliff Fyman. Myles opens with the declaration “I’ve never liked mimeo,” going on to remark how she has two mimeo books in print and poems published in mimeo journals but can only appreciate its function over form. She writes, “I like to see them breathe beyond my own typewriter though I’m much happier when their type-set.” Bernadette Mayer responded directly in a subsequent Newsletter and condemned Myles’ celebration of glossy covers over the modest mimeo wrappers. Whereas Myles viewed the mimeographs as obstructing fame and success as a poet, Mayer refutes any such notion of commercializing her work. She writes, “The cheaper and slightly more instantaneous reproduction of poetry for those who can use it is not a bourgeoisie value; the craving for a book with a binding is.” She relates her argument back to the form of the Newsletter—staple-bound, monospaced, and quickly able to spread information to a wide audience. Mayer sees her role as a poet “at an angle slightly askew to any desire for fame” which contradicts the impetus of books with a high production value. It is significant to observe opposing sides of the argument from two poets of the same school.

Foreword

In his elegy “For Ted,” Sanders recalls his first encounter with Berrigan while using the same mimeo machine at Phoenix Bookshop in 1963, Berrigan for C: A Journal of Poetry and Sanders for Fuck You. Sanders writes, “It was obvious / we were slaves / to the lyre and the bee”, underscoring how their roles as publisher stemmed from a mutual devotion to poetry and its surrounding community. He goes on to say, “We pranced around / our mimeo machines / like Bassarids / the benzene dripping / from our fingers.” His lyrical expansion on the process of mimeo-making constructs it as a ritualistic activity that venerates its source material. Since the mimeograph implies a process of rewriting through transcription of the original manuscript, the printer engaging in this analog activity penetrates the poet’s psyche.

in a way you can’t see them unless you actually sit down and type them, almost as though you were writing them yourself” (11). The slow art of the mimeograph pays each word its due respect.

In his note “On The Sonnets,” published in the 1991 Coffee House Press anthology Nice To See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett speaks of his experience editing the first edition of The Sonnets for Berrigan in 1964. He writes: I remember typing the mimeograph stencils and marveling at the poems and marveling at how I was seeing them

Frank O'Hara by Larry Rivers, 1967.

SCRATCHING THE SURFACE FRANK O'HARA & LARRY RIVERS'S INTEGRATED COLLABORATION ON STONES

ne consequence of the intense interest in the relationship between poetry and the visual arts during the Modern period is verbal-visual collaboration in which a poet and a visual artist work in cooperation. Because these collaborative texts refigure the historically oppositional relationship between the sister arts and are conceived and executed in the spirit of exchange, they are especially fertile ground for confronting the challenge of reading multimedia art forms. I posit “integrated reading” as a constructive critical approach

that privileges neither word nor image, while stressing relationships and asking questions about how verbal and visual elements interact and work together, and in this article I offer an integrated reading of Stones, a collaboration between poet Frank O’Hara and visual artist Larry Rivers.

Amid the numerous poets in the twentieth century who were engaged with the visual arts, O’ Hara is the most mythologized “poet among painters,” to use Marjorie Perloff’s phrase. While O’Hara worked on a variety of projects with visual artists, he called his work on Stones with Larry Rivers his only real collaboration (Interview 4). Stones is a portfolio of twelve lithographic prints, each containing a poem by O’Hara and drawings by Rivers, published in 1959 by Universal Limited Art Editions, a lithography studio established in 1957 by Tatyana Grosman. Rivers, a friend of the Grosmans, was the first

artist to produce a lithographic print at the new studio, and when Grosman decided she wanted to print “a book that would be a real fusion of poetry and art, a real collaboration, not just drawings to illustrate poems” (Tomkins 62), she drove to Rivers’s studio in Southampton to ask him if he wanted to do the book and if he knew a poet he could work with. Frank O’Hara happened to be visiting at the time, and the two decided to collaborate. From the beginning of the collaboration O’Hara and Rivers worked closely with the printer, Robert Blackburn, and Grosman herself, who was involved in the book at all levels, including having special paper made out of blue denim because both O’Hara and Rivers wore jeans when working on the lithographic stones (73). The twelve lithographic prints that constitute the heart of Stones measure approximately 19 inches by 23% inches and are gathered together in a slightly larger portfolio made of three pieces of thick illustration board bound with cloth tape and tied in front with raffia. On the top fold of the portfolio is hand printed in black, Stones, and on the bottom fold, in the same hand, is printed Rivers ’57–59 O’Hara. Also included in the portfolio are pages that distinguish Stones

from a random collection of prints in an artist’s portfolio. In addition to the twelve prints, called tabloscripts, Stones contains a frontispiece, title page, and colophon, all meant to mark the portfolio’s affinity to the traditional book. The frontispiece differs in each numbered portfolio— some were designed for specific recipients, such as the number one portfolio housed at the Museum of Modern Art or the number seven portfolio pictured on the Universal Limited Art Editions website, while others are generic, such as the number nineteen portfolio housed at Emory University—but each is an oil painting, on blue denim handmade paper, that identifies the number of the portfolio in addition to the names O’Hara and Rivers and the date, ’57-59, carried over from the portfolio cover. Below the frontispiece is the title page that announces the title, Stones, and the authors’ names in rough block print. Decorating the letters of the title and names are sketches that resemble different stone shapes. While the initial s of the title is circled, the other decorated letters allude to the shapes of tombstones, such as the half round arch sketched over the t and e of the title, the oval with shoulders over the n of the title and the i and second r of Rivers, the

Scratching the Surface

Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers. Title page, 1959.

deep ogee that travels down the right side of the last letters in both names, and the square tops that cover the o, h, a, and r of O’Hara and the initial r of Rivers. There is something both playful and sinister in the combination of the fanciful, imperfect shapes with the heavy black lines and monumental associations. The spontaneity with which O’ Hara and Rivers approached this collaboration, a point I return to below, is burdened by the weight of the process

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and materials of lithography. O’Hara and Rivers consistently seek to counteract the weight of permanence suggested by the tombstone shapes and by the literal lithographic stones through their dark humor and active, gestural strokes. The title page is at once permanent since it is literally etched in stone and ephemeral since its crudely decorated letters—the uneven, blocky letters and shapes look almost childlike— celebrate the imperfection of the momentary.

Rivers, left, facing O’Hara, right.

If the title page suggests a ability to recreate the art tension between permanence ad infinitum, or at least as and transience, the colophon long as the stones do not wear confirms it. The colophon out, providing for the kind defines the word tabloscript of enduring commercial potenas the material resulting tial and certain permanence “where the artist and poet writers experience when their inspired by the same theme, work is mechanically reprodraw and write on the same duced. O’Hara and Rivers err surface at the same time, on the side of the precious fusing both arts to an inart object, though, choosing separable unity” (O’Hara and to destroy the original so Rivers). Above this definition, that the thirty printed portsandwiched between the munfolios in existence become dane information about date the only originals. Their of printing and the name of decision to destroy the lithothe publisher, is the curious graphic stones after printing statement, “Stones destroyed speaks to their commitment after printing” (O’Hara and to emphasizing the physical Rivers). Part of the allure process of collaboration of lithography is the artist’s over the permanence of the

Scratching the Surface

product, rather than necesRivers were always in physical sarily making the portfolios proximity when working on “precious” (though they are, Stones, and O’Hara marks this of course, more economically kind of proximity as importvaluable). Both O’ Hara and ant when he announces that Rivers were interested in what he and Rivers “did physically art critic Harold Rosenberg collaborate” (Interview 4). For had dubbed “action painting,” O’Hara, the closeness of colwhat O’Hara defined as “the laboration had as much to do physical reality of the artist with corporeal closeness—“We and his activity in expressing worked on the stones together. it, united to the spiritual He did not work on the stone reality of the artist in a if I wasn’t there and I didn’t oneness which has no need for work on the stone if he wasn’t the mediation of metaphor or there to see what I was doing” symbol” (“Pollock” 35). Stones (4)—as with mental, emotional, is an experiment in action or artistic closeness, those book making, and in studying factors that are at the fore the processes of the physical in many other collaborative collaboration between O’Hara relationships, like the and Rivers, I hope to shed one between Ted Hughes and light on the material product. Leonard Baskin. Certainly, For as much as the content of O’Hara and Rivers were close the prints is entertaining, mentally, emotionally, and even delightful at times, the artistically, but physicality content is inseparable from is at the heart of all asthe process, so reading Stones pects of their relationship, is a process, too, of sifting so it is not surprising that through layers of literal it is at the heart of their prints, sifting through layers collaborative relationship. of allusions (many of which Though Wayne Koestenbaum’s are indecipherable without book Double Talk: The Erotics special knowledge of O’Hara of Male Literary Collaboration and Rivers’s relationship), focuses exclusively on writers, and sifting through the layhis overall premise, that ers of the integrated collabo- double authorship challenges rative process. “literary property” and “sexual propriety,” is instructive In many ways, Stones seems to here (9). Stones insistently represent the kind of ideal, challenges both by fusing the pure collaboration we imagine verbal and visual materially when thinking of two people and by blurring the signifyworking together. O’Hara and ing boundaries of each.

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The personal relationship between two men becomes the occasion, the technique, and the subject of Stones. O’Hara and Rivers met in 1950 at a party at John Ashbery’s apartment in New York. Both had been told by Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler that they would “hit it off,” and according to their accounts, they did (Rivers, What Did I Do 228). As O’Hara recalls, they did “like each other: “I thought he was crazy and he thought I was even crazier. I was very shy, which he thought was intelligence; he was garrulous, which I assumed was brilliance—and on such misinterpretations, thank

I THOUGHT HE WAS CRAZY AND HE THOUGHT I WAS EVEN CRAZIER. 19

heavens, many a friendship is based” (“Larry Rivers” 169). Rivers’s recollection is somewhat more detailed: “We shook hands and talked our heads off for two hours. Repairing to a quiet spot behind a window drape, we kissed ... I liked his Ivy League dirty white sneakers, he liked my hands full of paint” (Rivers, What Did I Do 228). From the time they met to O’Hara’s death in 1966, they remained friends, though that friendship was marked by periods of avoidance and silence, and by an uneven balance of emotions—O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch reports John Ashbery telling him that O’Hara had never really been in love with anybody until Rivers (227), while Rivers dodges the question, saying in his autobiography, “something happened that resembled a romantic fling in the realm that dares not speak its name” (Rivers, What Did I Do 227). Despite the turbulence of their sexual relationship, they sustained a deep reliance on each other aesthetically. As Rivers recalls, “From the earliest moments of our friendship we were enthusiastic about each other’s work. Frank O’Hara was a big influence on me, but I think I influenced him too” (230). Both were proponents of action painting, but neither was interested in the pure abstraction common

Scratching the Surface

to many first generation Abstract Expressionists. Both were drawn to Symbolist and Surrealist artists and writers, especially Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Pablo Picasso, in whose work they admired the immediacy and materiality. In his article “Life Among the Stones,” published in 1963, Rivers stresses the role physical presence and physical relations play in the making of Stones. As Rivers narrates the arrival of Tatyana Grosman— whom he calls “this Siberian lady Tanya” (92)—at his Southampton house and his and O’Hara’s decision to take on the collaboration she proposed, he alludes to the project as a baby born of their aesthetic relationship: “On the basis of what had been gestating in us for many years we agreed to do it. We entered, O holy, into a direct relationship with the past. We were grown up but we wanted to taste that special lollypop Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Apollinaire, Eluard and Aragon had tasted and find out what it was like” (92). One aspect, then, of physical relation expressed in Stones is between the aesthetic of action shared by O’Hara and Rivers and the aesthetic of

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their Symbolist, Dadaist, and Surrealist forebears. The frenzied, haphazard, overlapping forms of Stones recall earlier experiments in improvisation, spatial typography, and collage, while also questioning the limitations of abstraction and the inertia of style. The other prominent aspect of physical relation expressed in Stones is more personal. Rivers spends a good bit of time establishing the importance of shared experience with O’Hara and tries to show that their personal lives and personal aesthetics were inseparable. He recounts their knowledge of each other’s work, their use of each other in their art (Rivers painted, drew, and sculpted O’Hara, and O’Hara wrote to and about Rivers and his work), and their enmeshed work and social time. Even before they began the collaboration, O’Hara and Rivers knew one way in which their work would differ from the work of previous collaborators: “Frank O’Hara wasn’t going to write a poem that I would set a groovy little image to. Nor were we going to assume the world was waiting for his poetry and my drawing which is what the past ‘collaborations’ now seem to have been. Our self image, mind you, was no less grandiose than those old Parisians but

it was another time and we had The second-generation Abstract our own balls to take care of” Expressionists, including (93). The double entendre of Rivers, Grace Hartigan, and “balls” points both to the new Jane Freilicher, were increasaesthetic ground O’Hara and ingly rebelling, in critic Rivers wanted to break and to Brian Glavey’s words, “against the more self-conscious bothe hegemony of abstraction diliness they wanted to bring as well as the hypermasculine to their collaborative process artistic ethos that accompaand to the material collabonied it” (793), and O’Hara was ration. O’Hara and Rivers were at the fore in defending them. conscious of maintaining an In his 1954 essay “Nature active, evolving material proand the New Painting,” which cess as a central element in sparked a panel discussion their collaboration. They were with art critic Clement conscious, too, of making that Greenberg held at the Artists process into the subject itClub, O’Hara asserts: self. Rivers notes, “Each time we got together we decided Two years ago in a talk at to choose some very definite the Hansa Gallery, Clement subject and since there was Greenberg declared that nothing we had more access to abstraction was the major than ourselves the first stone mode of expression in our was going to be called ‘us.’ time, that any other mode Oh yes, the title always came was necessarily minor; this first. It was the only way was straight observation we could get started” (93-94). from the point of view of Each time they worked together, historical criticism. But a O’Hara and Rivers continued year later James Fitzsimmons, to draw on the “us” they knew writing in Arts and and to push forward with a new Architecture, remarked that kind of collaboration. Though some of the young painters on the surface the title of had lost heart and abandoned each stone dictated a difabstract-expressionism in ferent subject matter, the cowardly fashion to return process of the collaboration, to representational work. extended over two years and It is against just such broken sometimes by months an implied protocol that between work sessions (94), abstract-expressionism has allowed them to create a whole always taken up a strong driven by the continued composition, whether at the mitment to physical connection Metropolitan Museum or the and process. Artists Club.

Scratching the Surface

Written in the cool, academic embrace of visibility with tone of his public criticism, feminization, however, O’Hara O’Hara’s essay makes clear that created a homoerotic mascuhe thinks the hypermasculine linity endowed with the value critique of the second generand authority of modernist art” ation Abstract Expressionists (784). Stones is as much an as “cowardly” because of their effort to challenge protocols embrace of representation, of sexuality and media hegedeemed by Greenberg to fall mony as an effort to produce a under the rubric of literature “real collaboration.” rather than visual art, itself undermines the spirit with In an article of this length which the first generation I cannot possibly do justice Abstract Expressionists set to the full text, so a reading out to undo protocols. By of the first three tabloengaging in their physical scripts, “US,” “Springtemps,” collaboration, Rivers and and “Rimbaud & Verlaine,” will, O’Hara sought to counter a I hope, provide the flavor of renewed insistence on the Stones. When describing “US,” separation of the arts while Rivers provides a detailed at the same time attempting account of how he and O’Hara to subvert the accompanying negotiated their collaborative assumptions of macho mascurelationship. His description, linity. Instead of facing the in Perloff’s words, “stresses traditional gendering of words the improvisational character as masculine and images as of the collaboration, its stafeminine, O’Hara and Rivers tus as an event or happening faced a politicized art world rather than as a predetermined, dominated by practitioners and planned ‘work of art’” (101). As critics of visual art who, as important, Rivers stresses the dominant, could attempt to reway each art and artist fed gender word and image in what off the other while working: they saw as their favor and codify masculinity as machisI did something, whatever I mo. Glavey makes a critical could, which related in some point when he contends that way to the title of the stone O’Hara’s response to this atmoand he either commented on sphere was not to try reverswhat I had done or took it ing the genders again, which somewhere else in any way he would have confirmed rather felt like. If something in than disrupted tradition, but the drawing embarrassed him to challenge that machismo: he could alter the quality by “Rather than associate this the quality of his words or

MAGDELYN HAMMOND HELWIG

vice versa. Sometimes I would positioned at the center of designate an area that I was the image in order to argue sure I was going to leave that the theme of the stone empty. He might write there is “heroism and anti-heroism or if I did put something in various guises” (102). Read down I would direct him to together, Rivers’s visual imwrite whatever he wished ages and O’Hara’s verbal images but ask that it start at a display as much about the specific place and end up a variety and intimacy of their square or rectangular thin shared artistic and personal or fat shape of words over or lives at a particular time, around my image. With these the 1950s, and in a particular images vague or not vague place, the United States. “US” and his words we were at once displays the literal physical remarking about some subject dependence between O’Hara and and decorating the surface of Rivers in the use of the word the stone. (“Life Among the us; in private references like Stones” 94) “G” and “P” (probably Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso [103]), This kind of improvisation, in parties they attended, and which one act provokes another “Jane” (Jane Freilicher); in the in rapid succession, could mirror images on either side, not have happened without at the top, of O’Hara’s face physical proximity. In their turned to Rivers’s face, whose commitment to active exchange eyes swivel right or left to O’Hara and Rivers show their stare at O’Hara’s face; and in desire to distinguish their the image of O’Hara and Rivers collaboration from previous embracing on the bottom right. verbal-visual collaborations. The interplay of verbal and “US” is the busiest, most enervisual elements materializes getic of all the tabloscripts the intimacy by blurring the and as the first announces the boundaries between words and active collaborative process of images. Rivers admits not reStones. By beginning with the membering whether he or O’Hara word us as the title, Rivers wrote the title letters (“Life and O’Hara also announce the Among the Stones” 94), and in dependence on shared physical the center of the stone, words and emotional space between scroll onto paper that morphs collaborators while at the from a hand, itself hovering same time immediately politas if birthed from the belly icizing that interaction. In of a reclining, sensual O’Hara her analysis of “US,” Perloff (identifiable by the broken focuses on the verbal elements nose profile).

Scratching the Surface

Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers. US from Stones, 1957.

The ultimate expressions of personal and aesthetic intimacy are clustered on the right. At the top Rivers establishes a scene, his face in close proximity to O’Hara’s, O’Hara drinking from a roughly sketched cup, suggesting a familiar bar scene—both were well known for their attendance at the sometimes rowdy Cedar Tavern in New York—where aesthetic debate mingles with personal excess. Below this scene, O’Hara’s words provide an ironic dialogue: Poetry belongs to me, Larry, and Painting to you That’s what G said to P, and

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Look where it got them. Below these lines O’Hara and Rivers lie in an embrace that blends their two bodies, creating two heads but also only two arms, two legs, and two feet. Intruding from the center is a sign that reads A Hero of the ‘50s is arriving in Hollywood which is linked visually to the letter to Jane that is signed

“James Dean.” The intrusion of The sexual, artistic, and the sign sets up a contrast political challenge posed by between the supposed normative “US” is followed by the less masculine associations with frenetic “Springtemps,” which James Dean and the nonnormative features a chatty poem adhomosexual associations of a dressed to Rivers’s son Joseph physically integrated O’Hara and a crude drawing of an and Rivers. The relationship androgynous human bowing down between Stein and Picasso, a to flowers. The overt theme is poet and painter who were well reverence for the arrival of known for having influenced spring, with its attendant each other, and thus all poets promise of new life, and it and painters who mix and foris to that “pregnant moment,” get their proper domains, is to use G. E. Lessing’s term called out as supposedly abnorfor the still climax often mal in the same way. By mixcaptured in visual art, that ing these disparate words and O’Hara and Rivers pose the images, O’Hara and Rivers link challenge of their collabotheir challenges to aesthetic ration. While Perloff labels and sexual norms. Their in“Springtemps” as one of the less dictment of these two dominant interesting plates in Stones, norms in the 1950s America they arguing that “neither the knew is expressed as camp in picture nor the poem seems to most of the stone but is ingain much from [their] juxtapotensified by O’Hara’s words sition” (105), I see this second nestled between Rivers’s drawtabloscript as a more oblique ing of O’Hara in ecstasy, on expression of the same argument the left, and Rivers and O’Hara found in “US.” O’Hara’s poem clutched together, on the certainly has the appearance right: “A very soft rain, / we of being “self-contained,” as were sitting on the / stairs.” Perloff calls it, because it is Given the complexity of the popresented as a personal adlitical, aesthetic, and sexual dress, but the very referential relationships explored in “US,” nature of the poem points to the final line seems simple. the immediacy of his working Serving as a link between sex relationship with Rivers, which and love, and expressing a moO’Hara equates to “the hive,” ment of stasis amid chaos, the and the interconnected nature words speak to the profound of their personal and artistic comfort that O’ Hara and Rivers lives. Joseph has interrupted felt as friends and collaboratheir work to bring in “a new tors, men choosing to sit topair of flowers,” perhaps gether to watch the rain. to remind them of nature’s

Scratching the Surface

continual movement beyond the door of the workshop, and to share a drink of “May whiskey,” but despite this intrusion of life, “we go / on working, it’s more like / the hive that way.” The beehive, with all its internal cooperative work, cannot function independent of its surroundings—indeed, the work of the hive is prompted by the fluctuations of the environment just as the collaboration between O’Hara and Rivers is prompted by the interactions of more than just their artistic work. Rivers’s drawing insists on the simultaneity of material and aesthetic motives by accentuating the whole body, the head of which bows before

MAGDELYN HAMMOND HELWIG

Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers. Springtemps from Stones, 1958.

natural bounty and the rear of which offers itself up to accept more of that bounty. The androgyny of the human figure confirms O’Hara and Rivers’s challenge to sexual propriety by being both figurative and allusive—whether male or female, the sexually proffered buttocks literally cannot serve to bear offspring, but Rivers’s flowers and O’Hara’s claim that something will be born, even if it has not “been born yet,” undermine the heteronormative status quo while also boldly

contending that their work together will bear new life. The focus on inseparability is continued in the third tabloscript, “Rimbaud & Verlaine.” In what seems an impossible coincidence, hanging in the studio where O’Hara and Rivers worked on Stones was a photograph of the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul-Marie Verlaine whose aesthetics and troubled sexual relationship could be said to resemble that between O’Hara and Rivers. The photograph captured Rivers’s attention, and he started drawing the faces, which prompted him and O’Hara to recall yet another seemingly impossible coincidence: We then remembered a ballet night at the City Center. During an intermission we were making our way down the wide staircase from the cheap seats to the mezzanine when our mutual friend and my dealer John Myers thinking he was being funny screamed out for general use “there they are all covered with blood and semen.” This is a reference to something said about Rimbaud and Verlaine that Verlaine’s wife hounded him with for his whole life. After recalling this Frank decided to use it and in a delicate two-line series he began writing.

The set of coincidences linking the physical space of the workshop, the aesthetic affinities of O’Hara and Rivers to Symbolist poets, the personal relationship between O’Hara and Rivers, and the personal and professional jealousies they faced, leads to one of the most interesting and pronounced blurring of boundaries in Stones. Nowhere on the plate is the title “Rimbaud & Verlaine” written; instead, the title is verbalized by Rivers’s drawing of Rimbaud and Verlaine at the top of the plate.1 Word and image continue to “bleed” into each other with O’ Hara’s use of words as physical embodiments of material relationships. He condenses the complex sexual relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine to the exchange of blood (existence reduced to “a pint of blood on a / windowsill—”), itself a reference to Verlaine’s shooting of Rimbaud, and further reduces that exchange to literal bullets that “arrive as beats / of the corps de ballet.” Rivers’s failed drawing of a leg descending a staircase on the bottom right—as he reports, “I tried a staircase ... no 1 Other tabloscripts from Stones do not have obvious titles, either, but this is the only one where the originating subject/title is so overtly figured by the image.

Scratching the Surface

good”—evolves into “bullets that were also penises with legs” (94) that shoot out from the staircase back toward the gun from which, presumably, they originated. Like the trajectory of the bullets, the gun is backwards, turned upside down and facing the bullets to receive them back into its barrel. This insistent disruption of the natural order of things links back to O’Hara’s verbalized connection between literal bullets and language. What Perloff calls “Myers’s snide remark” (104) is figured by O’Hara as physical insults hurled by the synchronized, staged dancing of the corps de ballet. The programmatic beating of their feet correlates to the aesthetic and personal jealousies that O’Hara and Rivers challenge in “US” and “Springtemps” and that motivated Myers’s comment. Rivers’s bullets/penises confirm the inseparability of attacks on homosexuality and attacks on collaborative art. Though fraught with this political commentary, the leggy penises also make “Rimbaud & Verlaine” playful. Rivers saw his drawing as “Simple Simon’s response to what Frank had written about the corps de ballet. If there is ‘art? somewhere in this lithograph its presence remains a mystery” (“Life Among the Stones” 94). I would argue that this

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mysterious art is a product of being in the moment—though on the surface Rivers’s images may indeed seem a simple response to O’Hara’s words, both are responding to a complex of real and symbolic relations expressed through a fundamentally destabilized boundary between word and image. Together these first three tabloscripts of Stones establish a varying pattern of emphasis on the mingling of personal and aesthetic space, embodied in the blurring of media boundaries, that is explored, more and less successfully, in the journey enacted in the remaining nine plates. The movement forward, the process of discovery, and the action of creating—these are the forces that drive Stones. By insisting that the journey is communal, O’ Hara and Rivers thumbed their noses at propriety, and by making the process of collaboration inseparable from the material product of collaboration, they broke new artistic ground. The completeness with which O’Hara and Rivers integrated their personalities and their art results in a collaboration that does indeed fuse poetry and art. The beauty of the collaboration is that it is not always possible, nor even desirable, to know whose hand wrote US.

“On October 28 [1967] Pound’s longtime companion, Olga Rudge, told Ginsberg during lunch in Venice that Pound now had enough new poems for a fresh book of the ‘Cantos.’ Little did they know that I was on that very day hard at work on an edition of them!” Ed Sanders, Fug You

PIRATING

POUND

DRAFTS & FRAGMENTS IN 1960S MIMEO CULTURE

nfinished in any conventional sense, Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CXCXVI stands as a functional conclusion to Ezra Pound’s multi-volume, multi-decade Cantos. When Pound began work on these poems in 1958, he was by all accounts in a slump: his health was failing and his writing laborious. In 1960, Donald Hall arranged to interview Pound for the Paris Review, and the magazine hoped to print some of the poet’s new work alongside the interview. After much encouragement, Pound sent Hall a collection of canto drafts to type out into a cleaner copy.

This set of poems was sent in April; by May, Hall received— to his surprise—an extensively revised second version of the poems. Hall made two carbons of each poetry manuscript and soon after lent his carbon of the second version to Tom Clark to aid Clark in writing an honors thesis on the Cantos. In 1967, Clark ran into Ed Sanders —poet, musician, mimeograph publisher, and the proprietor of New York City’s Peace Eye Bookstore who had recently been acquitted of obscenity charges. When Sanders asked Clark if he had any manuscripts they could “instantly freak into print,” Clark handed over the Cantos typescript. Within days a mimeographed piracy was circulating. Pound’s longtime publisher at New Directions, James Laughlin, had been attempting

for several years to persuade Pound to publish a volume of new cantos, but to no avail. After seeing the piracy, Laughlin stepped up his campaign, eventually convincing a reluctant Pound to authorize a New Directions trade edition, as well as a fine press edition by K.K. Merker’s Stone Wall Press, on the grounds that they must act quickly to secure copyright for the final cantos (Stoicheff 51–60).

This essay proposes instead that the first three editions of the final Cantos—the Fuck You Press piracy, the hand-printed Stone Wall Press version, and the commercial New Directions edition—merit attention at the level of bibliographic code. I argue that these versions of the text offer alternate ways of imagining Drafts & Fragments and register competing ideas about literary value at both aesthetic These extraordinary circumand economic levels. The stances make for a vexing printing technologies used— ending to a work whose poetic mimeograph, letterpress, and and political difficulties offset—correspond to distinct are well known. In addressing distribution and reception the Drafts & Fragments poems, contexts at the same time textual critics have focused that each technology places on the monumental project of Pound and the Cantos in a excavating the volume’s compodifferent literary-historical sition and publication history, trajectory. Bibliographic attempting to organize autocode is especially crucial graph manuscripts, typescripts, to understanding the piracy, published versions, and corwhich uses material features respondence into a narrative to signal participation in that might shed light on what the mimeograph revolution of Pound wrote when and under the 1960s. When read in these what conditions.1 In these terms, the piracy, rather accounts, the pirated edition than lacking authority, in has been treated as a historfact challenges the terms by ical fact, significant only in which textual and literary terms of its consequences, and authority are typically conthe Stone Wall Press edition structed, offering a savvy has largely been ignored. reading of the Cantos’ place in mid-century American po1 For the most thorough accounts etry that in some ways does see Peter Stoicheff’s The Hall of more justice to the volume Mirrors and Ronald Bush’s “Unstill, than the authorized editions Ever Turning.” could.

Pirating Pound

The Cantos has proved a rich corrected for an anthology site for textual scholarship, publication, Pound replied, not least of all because, as “Repeat in 13 sanctioned by Jerome McGann puts it, “the time and the author, or rather bibliographical problems of first by the author, who nevthe Cantos are simultaneouser objects to the typesetter ly hermeneutical. They go to making improvements” (26). the very heart of the work’s meaning” (“Pound’s Cantos” Editors seeking to reconstruct 33). Dense with allusions and a more authoritative text quotations spanning centuries, of the Cantos must therecontinents, and languages, the fore tread carefully. A 1989 Cantos is—among other things— statement from New Directions an idiosyncratic network of insists that “Ezra Pound source material. As Pound inhimself would not have wantcorporated a multitude of other ed a quote-unquote corrected texts into his, he faithfully, text to be established for his and at times knowingly, reCantos,” because “the intrinpeated their errors; he also sic character of the work added his own by misrememis constituted by the very bering, mistranslating, misthings—the so-called mistakes transcribing, and misspelling. and inconsistencies—that a Typesetters introduced still scholarly editing of the text more errors. Pound was aware would alter” (Glassgold 275). of the capacity for errors Whether or not this is a fair to signal textual genealoassessment of scholarly edgies—“the stream wherethru and iting as currently practiced, whereby our legend came” (qtd. the New Directions statement in Froula 136)—and he took speaks to the special diffian unsystematic approach to culties the Cantos presents the errors in his text: some for such a project. he studiously emended, some he let stand, some he simply Although textual scholars, ignored. Hugh Kenner reports acknowledging the special case that a typesetter at the Hours of the Cantos, have lately apPress repeated the lines “A day proached the work with a more when historians left blanks capacious social-text framein their writings, / But that work, Sanders’s edition has time seems to be passing” in remained disqualified from a 1930 printing of canto 13, serious critical attention. In and several decades later when his letter relaying news of Kenner asked Pound whether the Cantos piracy to Pound, he would like the repetition James Laughlin said:

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I have not sent you a copy of privilege Pound’s reading of the pirate’s stuff, because The Cantos, and this practice it is so obscene. Not only necessarily recapitulates the full of errors, but a hidstructure of poetic authority eous, semi-obscene cover, and The Cantos denies” (426). Young words which I cannot dictate wonders what it would entail to the nice young lady who to understand the Cantos as a types my letters on the “provisional product . . . not title page. This all comes governed by [Pound’s] authorial out of the dope culture of intentions” (426). the Lower East Side. They are all high on one drug or In taking up this question, another and don’t care what though, Ed Sanders beat us they do. (Qtd. in Barnhisel to the punch. Sanders’s work 193–94) is squarely situated in the mimeograph revolution of the The tenor of Laughlin’s de1960s, when access to inexpenscriptions of the piracy has sive reproduction technolopersisted. Peter Stoicheff gies—including the mimeograph, describes the first authorized letterpress machines discarded edition of Drafts & Fragments by modernizing publishing as “the necessary counterathouses, and the small Multitack on a 1967 pirated edition Lith offset machine—led to of poems (crudely printed by an explosion of small-press a disdainful Fuck You Press) printing in the United States. whose preemption of Pound’s With these technologies, writcontrol over the place and ers could bypass traditional character of publication publishing venues and distribeffectively prevents us from ute work quickly and cheaply, knowing whether he would often in the context of local otherwise have made his last artistic communities. The pubcantos public as a volume, lications produced during the and in what specific form” mimeograph revolution range (34). Although Stoicheff asfrom professional-quality serts that Drafts & Fragments offset-printed, perfect-bound is “as much the product of books to blurry copies with readers’ and editors’ wishes sloppy hand-lettering and and necessary interventions staple bindings. Printers like as of Pound’s,” he does not Sanders who opted for the allow Sanders any standing quick-and-dirty end of the as reader or editor (34). John spectrum embraced the ephemerYoung notes that “critics, ality of their texts under the including Stoicheff, still aegis of immediacy, and low

Pirating Pound

production quality affirmed their do-it-yourself ethos. I propose that Sanders’s piracy did not precipitate publication of the “real” Drafts & Fragments. Rather, by positioning the final cantos in the mimeograph revolution’s alternate framework for understanding authorship, textuality, and transmission, the piracy contributes to an understanding of the Cantos that moves beyond the metric of Pound’s intentions for the poem and begins to account for the Cantos as an evolving project whose reach extends into the next generation of American poetry.

“Dee Looks Edtn” and the “StockSized Volume of Commerce

Bibliographic code mattered to the Cantos from the start. Pound published the three earliest incarnations of the Cantos in fine press editions that call attention to their material production: the 1925 Draft of XVI. Cantos and 1928 Draft of the Cantos 17–27 with William Bird’s Three Mountains Press, and the 1930 Draft of XXX Cantos with Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press. Pound expressed enthusiasm for the design of the Three Mountains edition of the first Cantos installment in a 1923 letter to Kate Buss: The Three Mts. is following this prose series by a

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dee looks edtn of my Cantos (about 16 of ’em, I think) of UNRIVALLED magnificence. Price 25 dollars per copy, and 50 and 100 bones for Vellum and illuminateds.

capitals, “mediates between the self-consciously antiquated physicalness of the 1925/1928 texts and the more transparent trade edition texts of 1933 and thereafter”.

It is to be one of the real bits of printing; modern book to be jacked up to somewhere near level of mediaeval mss. No Kelmscott mess of illegibility. (Qtd. in Hickman 174)

McGann does not speculate as to why Pound would opt to publish the rest of the Cantos in what he called “the stock-sized volume of commerce” (qtd. in Barnhisel 23), but Miranda Hickman identifies several factors that compelled Pound to turn away from deluxe editions—namely, “their limited quantity, their ornamentation, and their shrinking capacity for cultural work” (176). In Hickman’s view, the trade publication of the Cantos was not a tragic winnowing away of bibliographic significance, but rather a deliberate decision by Pound to capitalize on different textual possibilities. As Pound in the 1930s came to view even the Cantos “primarily as a means of conveying crucial economic and political information to the public” (Hickman 185), he felt an increased sense of urgency about distributing his work, and deluxe editions simply could not reach the audience he desired.

Jerome McGann reads the bibliographic code of this volume, particularly its typography, as contributing to the meaning-making system of the Cantos. He focuses in particular on the elaborate ornamental capitals designed by Henry Strater, which feature the canto number spelled out in an uncial-inspired typeface with a small illustration. McGann views “the physique of Pound’s 1925/1928 edition . . . not simply [as] an allusion to Morris, PreRaphaelitism, and the recent history of decorative printing” but “equally an allusion, through them, to the renaissance revolution in printing initiated around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” (Textual Condition 140). In McGann’s reading, the 1930 Hours Press edition, for which Dorothy Pound designed abstract Vorticist style

Perhaps most importantly, Hickman argues that Pound abandoned the deluxe edition

Pirating Pound

because it had been co-opted emphasizes the deluxe ediby larger publishing firms tion’s initial affiliation and lost much of its “countwith independent publishing er-hegemonic power” (184). and its potential to proDuring the 1920s craze for vide an alternative to the deluxe editions, commercial sales-oriented commercial presses (most notably Random house. House) began printing expensive deluxe editions by clasTaken at face value, Pound’s sic authors. “Increasingly, statement to Crosby pits deluxe books were no longer creative expression against primarily associated with “what cd SELL,” but Pound did new modern writers seeking not shy away from certain to defy the mainstream,” and forms of literary marketing such editions, instead of unand promotion. As Gregory dermining commercial publishBarnhisel notes, in addition ing, became their quintesto “advis[ing] his smallsential product (Hickman 184). press publishers on how to Pound put the matter thus most effectively market his in a 1931 letter to Caresse books” (12), Pound “avidly Crosby of Black Sun Press: pursued the larger markets available through the trade The de luxe book was (has publishers when those pubbeen) useful in breaking lishers (Liveright, Knopf, the strangle hold that the Heubsch) began to show s. o. b. had on ALL publiinterest in modernist writcation. But the minute the ing” (24). Pound’s choice to luxe was made into a trust break off his relationship (Random Louse etc.) and with Farrar and Reinhart and forced into trade channels publish with New Directions it ceased pretty much to happened in part because be useful // e.g. you found Farrar and Reinhart did such yourself tied by what cd a dismal job selling his SELL. (Qtd. in Hickman 183) books. Barnhisel points out that while “commercial is the Although in describing his term against which almost all satisfaction with the Three of the actors of the story Mountains edition, Pound of Pound’s reputation . . . focused on the capacity for define themselves,” “almost fine printing to “jack up” every figure in modernism a modern book’s aesthetics engaged, often happily, in to the realm of the mediecommercial activities” (12; val manuscript, here Pound emphasis in original).

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The majority of Pound’s readers in the late 1960s United States would have encountered Drafts & Fragments in the commercial New Directions edition, which gives no indication of the volume’s anomalous path to publication. The front flap of the dust jacket offers an assurance of authorial agency: “Ezra Pound has now released for publication in book form those parts of Cantos 110–117 on which he has been working in recent years.” While technically accurate, this statement does little justice to the cajoling required for the “release” of these poems. Although the title Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVI (which was provided by Laughlin) suggests that the volume is incomplete or provisional, it also recalls the first three volumes of the Cantos: A Draft of XVI. Cantos, A Draft of Cantos 17–27, and A Draft of XXX Cantos. The dust jacket’s cover image, a drawing of Ezra Pound’s profile by the French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, similarly refers to earlier volumes, since the sketch had served as the “brand” for the Cantos since the 1948 Pisan Cantos. The visual scheme initiated by the Pisan Cantos is an odd choice compared with jackets for the firm’s other modernist authors produced

around the same time, many of which were designed in an emphatically contemporary style by Alvin Lustig. The firm’s New Classics Series, which reprinted recent works that had gone out of print, featured Lustig’s designs on jackets for numerous modernist authors, including Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, Henry James, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel West, and William Carlos Williams. Pound’s Selected Poems (1949) and ABC of Reading (1949) appeared in Lustig jackets as well. Lustig’s eye-catching, abstract, and thoroughly modern jackets stand in stark contrast to the one used for Drafts & Fragments. In fact, the jacket for the earliest New Directions Cantos volume, Cantos LII-LXXI, may fall short of the standard set by Lustig, but it has a more modern-looking design than the later jackets. With the bottom two-thirds printed in bright red and a sans-serif font, the Cantos LII-LXXI jacket at least gestures toward a contemporary aesthetic. By contrast, the design formula initiated with the Pisan Cantos, which uses a serif font and sparse single-color printing on neutral-colored matte paper, resembles jackets typical of the 1910s more so than the 1940s.

Pirating Pound

BLAST Manifesto, July 1914.

When New Directions began usAs such, this dust jacket ing the Gaudier-Brzeska sketch, corresponds to the narrative the image already pointed constructed by Barnhisel, who back to the days of Vorticism, tracks Laughlin’s considerable when Gaudier-Brzeska’s work influence on Pound’s career appeared alongside Pound’s from the 1930s, when Laughlin in the journal Blast. This “decried the commodification of sketch affiliates Pound with art” and pitched Pound’s texts the early-twentieth-century to an upper-class audience avant-garde, invoking a veron the argument that “Pound’s sion of Pound that pre-dates works promoted healthy values— his cockeyed political and economic justice and cultureconomic theories, treasonous al renewal” (Barnhisel 5). radio broadcasts, and confineLaughlin was forced to change ment in St. Elizabeths psychi- tack after Pound’s treason triatric hospital. al, when the sale of his works

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ground to a halt. In the 1950s a volume of correspondence and 1960s, Laughlin worked hard between Pound and James Joyce. to convince readers to “ignore “Pound did not discover Joyce,” [Pound’s] political activities, it reads, “but he recognized biography, and beliefs and to his genius in the first storead the poetry for its interries and then unselfishly nal qualities alone” (Barnhisel dedicated himself to Joyce’s 3). To that end, Laughlin rewelfare” (Drafts & Fragments printed critical texts by Pound [New Directions] jacket copy). from the early years of his The description also promiscareer, but refused to print es that the volume contains new political and economic Pound’s “spontaneous reactions” material or to reprint Pound’s to works of Joyce’s, including older work on such subjects. Dubliners and Ulysses. Taken This strategy prevented Pound, as a whole, the dust jacket of who was still eager to engage this edition deploys Pound’s in cultural and social critrole in the literary culture of icism, from interfering with the early twentieth century as his own success under the a marketing strategy. formalist rubric endorsed by Laughlin. As Barnhisel notes, The Stone Wall Press Drafts & Laughlin’s rhetorical stance Fragments likewise conjures against the commercialization up an early-twentieth-century of literature was, like Pound’s Pound by referring back to the own, coupled with a commitment earliest Cantos volumes at the to selling Pound’s work, and same time as it casts an eye New Directions participated in further backward to the handmany of the same promotional press period. Twelve inches strategies of more commercialtall, hand-printed in two ly-oriented publishing houses. colors, hand-bound, and sold exclusively by word of mouth The dust jacket for Drafts at $100 a copy, the Stone Wall & Fragments exemplifies Drafts & Fragments immediately Laughlin’s postwar “remaking” announces its distance from of Pound, focusing as it does the mechanized commercial book on the poet’s past achieveindustry and an affiliation ments. The jacket’s back cover with the fine press tradiis devoted to a priced list tion. When fine press printing of Pound’s poetry, prose, and crossed the Atlantic, it lost translations available from much of the political force New Directions. The back flap that was central to Kelmscott gives special attention to the Press. But these printing most expensive of these books, practices retained an aura

Pirating Pound

of dignity, permanence, and distance from the exigencies of the marketplace: fine press books are not readily available in bookstores, and do not address themselves to a general readership—if they are intended to be “read,” in a traditional sense, at all. Unlike many fine presses, however, Stone Wall primarily published new work in affordable editions. K.K. Merker was a publisher, not just a printer, and an early supporter of such poets as Mark Strand, Donald Justice, and Philip Levine. His primary motivation for publishing a handful of established authors (beginning with Theodore Roethke) was to “lend credibility to the rest of the list and give a seriousness to the young poets [he] was printing” (Berger 17). Stone Wall, then, was a fitting publisher for the Cantos, as the press aimed to reinvigorate the independent taste-making function that Pound initially admired in ventures such as Three Mountains and the Hours Press. Typical Stone Wall Press books were modest in proportion and price. The same year that Merker printed the Cantos, he also published James Tate’s Notes of Woe in an eight-inch volume with two-color printing that sold for a mere $5.75.

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However, in the case of Drafts & Fragments, Merker was hired as a printer by New Directions, and Laughlin had the final word on the book’s format. Merker claims that Drafts & Fragments was “designed to be small, not large”; however, after looking at the proofs, Laughlin complained that at such a small size “he couldn’t sell it for what he wanted to sell it for” (Berger 30). Even if Laughlin’s motivations for dramatically increasing the price were economic, the high cost of the Stone Wall Drafts & Fragments had the effect of transforming the volume’s purchasers into patrons—a role memorialized in earlier cantos through Pound’s cherished figure of Sigismondo Malatesta. In increasing the size at Laughlin’s behest, Merker created a book of magisterial proportions. Merker writes, On this size page I should have used a 16-point type. The width of the lines doesn’t call in any way for such a large format. But I was just increasing the size of the page to make [James Laughlin] happy. I like the way it came out, but in this book you see the thin man trying to get out of the fat man. The body is a little bulkier than the bone structure is. (Berger 30)

Drafts & Fragments may not align perfectly with the overall Stone Wall Press aesthetic and it may not exhibit an ideal type-to-page ratio, but Merker’s description makes clear the effect Laughlin aimed for in this fine press edition. The volume is stately, calling attention to the circumstances of its production and emphatically participating in a craft tradition of printing that can be traced back to Gutenberg. By invoking this tradition, the Stone Wall edition situates Drafts and Fragments in a lineage of enduring cultural products whose literary value is understood to be intrinsic rather than determined by markets. The colophon of the Stone Wall Drafts & Fragments reads, “This edition of Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII was printed on the hand-press by K.K. Merker, The Stone Wall Press, Iowa City, in Romanee type on Umbria paper. The edition consists of 310 copies: Numbers 1 to 200 for New Directions, New York; Numbers 201–300 for Faber and Faber Ltd, London; Numbers 301–310 for the Stone Wall Press. // All copies are signed by the author.” Including a colophon is standard practice in fine press

printing; however, read as a response to the piracy, this particular colophon also becomes a promise of controlled transmission. Printed using specific materials, with each copy numbered and signed, this edition cannot be copied, only forged. Pound’s signature bestows his blessing and suggests more authorial involvement than was the case. Overall, the effect of the Stone Wall Drafts & Fragments is to situate the Cantos in a long historical trajectory leading back to the advent of print, and to affirm the work’s authenticity as a product of Pound’s intention. In spite of the major differences between the New Directions and Stone Wall Drafts & Fragments, both editions locate their authority in having been sanctioned by Pound, even though he initially withheld authorization for these volumes. Each edition orients itself toward a distinct stratum of the literary marketplace, but each is nevertheless legitimated through its affiliation with recognized channels for the sale of literary works. Taken together, these editions work to wrest control over the final cantos away from the Fuck You Press piracy by restoring the text to more conventional forms.

Pirating Pound

“Total Assault on Culture”

Sanders evidently relished the paratextual prerogatives of the publisher: the title pages, colophons, and other editorial apparatuses he produced for his Fuck You Press are often colorful and seldom brief. Sanders’s enthusiasm for paratext reaches its zenith in the 1964 Valorium Edition of the Entire Extant Works of Thales!. “Valorium” crossbreeds the variorum edition with Valium, putting a 1960s countercultural spin on the work of scholarly editing. The first opening of the Valorium Edition is given over to a simple title page; the following opening offers an introduction by Aristotle, written in Greek; and the final opening is blank. The edition’s punch line, then, is that no written work by Thales survives (if it ever existed) and Thales is known entirely through secondary sources, including Aristotle. Directly engaging the complexities of transmission and the power of context to frame a text, the

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edition takes to extremes Gérard Genette’s claim that “the paratext is what enables a text to become a book” by demonstrating that paratexts can even make a book out of textual absence (1–2). By comparison to other Fuck You Press productions, Pound’s Cantos 110–116—the Fuck You Press title for what would later be Drafts & Fragments— has minimal paratextual flourishes. Mimeographed on single-sided letter-sized paper and staple-bound, the edition makes no attempt to disguise its swift, low-budget production. The cover collage of a male torso and diamonds by Joe Brainard, while classy in comparison to other Fuck You Press productions, does not bear any apparent relationship to the Drafts & Fragments poems. The title page, although it features Sanders’s usual decorative motif of disembodied male genitalia and a drawing of “Gash Cow,” restrains its textual components to title, author, press, and place of publication. The place of publication is given as “a secret location in the lower east side,” an announcement at once practical—acknowledging as it does the legal consequences of violating copyright and obscenity laws—and provocative. The edition quietly omits copyright.

The final page of Cantos 110–116 includes a simple colophon declaring an edition of 300 copies and recording the present volume’s number. While this colophon participates in the strategy of increasing value for an edition by insisting on scarcity, and promises a select audience much in the manner of fine press colophons, it also acknowledges the ephemerality of the medium: mimeograph stencils wear out after several hundred

Cover design by Joe Brainard for the Fuck You Press Cantos 110—116 (1967).

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copies, becoming increasingly blurry and eventually tearing, so larger print runs are impractical. The cachet of this edition is not located in its enduring value or rarefied materials but rather in its novelty, as the piracy off ered an opportunity to read these new cantos before they were published in an authorized form.2 The mimeograph revolution was defined by this kind of immediacy, and poets publishing in this context reveled in the possibility of getting their work into print as soon as possible. Ron Loewinsohn writes of mimeograph magazines: More important than the quality of their contents was the fact of abundance and speed. Having them, we could see what we were doing, as it came, hot off the griddle. We could get instant response to what we’d written last week, & we could respond instantly to what the guy across town or across the country had written last week. (Qtd. in Clay and Phillips 14) 2 Between 1960 and 1967, portions of all of the cantos from 110–116 appeared in periodicals, but it would have taken a dedicated reader to track down all of these publications.

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As Loewinsohn indicates, a sense of real-time dialogue became as important as what was being said. In this context that privileged rapid circulation, the value of copyright was not a given. Some writers rejected copyright altogether and recorded this stance in their texts. Richard Brautigan’s 1968 Please Plant this Book reads “THIS BOOK IS FREE. // Permission is granted to reprint this book by anyone as long as it is not sold.” Diane Di Prima’s 1971 Revolutionary Letters includes the following proclamation in the front matter: “The Revolutionary Letters are free poetry and may be reprinted anywhere by anyone . . . Power to the people’s mimeo machines!” Spurning copyright allowed poets to encourage faster and wider circulation of their work, but it also represented an intervention into property-based constructions of individual authorship. Copyright only became an author’s right in the eighteenth century, having initially consisted of a manuscript owner’s “right to grant permission to copy” a text and, with the advent of print, a publisher’s exclusive right to print a work (so as to ensure that rival editions did not render the initial

investment profitless). Martha Woodmansee traces “the ‘author’ in the modern sense” to “the emergence in the eighteenth century of writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writings to the new and rapidly expanding reading public” (36). In light of the link between copyright and the literary market, Mark Rose maintains that “the distinguishing characteristic of the modern author . . . is proprietorship; the author is conceived as the originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the work” (1). By renouncing copyright in the front matter of their books, authors such as Brautigan and Di Prima reframed authorship in terms of creation and circulation rather than sale. This approach encouraged an understanding of a book of poems as a social interaction rather than a work of isolated genius. Certainly a difference exists between relinquishing copyright to one’s own work and pirating someone else’s, but both scenarios confront deeply entrenched ideas of authorship, readership, and property. Pound, who seldom missed an opportunity to weigh in on what he took as his era’s most pressing problems, expressed his own views on copyright and textual circulation in a

1918 article in the New Age. In “Copyright and Tariff,” Pound laments protectionist US copyright laws that effectively legalized piracy of texts by international authors. These laws, Pound argues, made editions by foreign authors cheaper than those by Americans, hindering American authors in their own nation’s book market. He goes on to critique copyright expiration on similar grounds: the public domain “permits dead authors to compete on unjust terms with living authors,” and “unscrupulous, but well-meaning publishers . . . print dead authors more cheaply than living ones BECAUSE they do not have to pay royalties” (“Copyright”; emphasis in original). Pound considers this to be “to the disadvantage of contemporary literature, to the disadvantage of literary production” Instead, he proposes a copyright statute that would give authors, American or otherwise, perpetual copyright for their work. He quickly qualifies this individualist, property-centered approach to copyright by adding: BUT the heirs of an author should be powerless to prevent the publication of his works or to extract any excessive royalties. If

Pirating Pound

the heirs neglect to keep a man’s work in print and at a price not greater than the price of his books during his life, then unauthorized publishers should be at liberty to reprint said works, paying to heirs a royalty not more than 20 per cent. and not less that 10 per cent. (“Copyright” 363) In a legal analysis of Pound’s proposed statute, Robert Spoo observes that “what Pound initially characterizes as perpetual protection for authors’ intellectual labor is essentially a scheme for maximizing the availability of works and translations” (1797). The author’s rights remain absolute only so long as the author (or heir) responsibly executes the public function of publication. Pound further limits the author’s rights once a work has “sold a certain number of copies, let us say 100,000,” at which point “there should be no means of indefinitely preventing a very cheap reissue of his work. Let us say a shilling a volume” with royalties again payable at twenty percent. This “compulsory license for cheap editions”—by Spoo’s estimate the most radical provision of Pound’s proposed statute—creates a tipping point at which copyright, having run its course as an incentive for

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authorship, becomes foremost a matter of serving the public good. Such a copyright statute, which ultimately privileges circulation over individual ownership, resonates with the poet’s famous injunctions against usury, particularly as expressed in Guide to Kulchur: “Usury endows no printing press. Usurers do not desire circulation of knowledge” (62). What Spoo describes as Pound’s “attempts to promote unimpeded communication among living writers of all nations” begins to sound oddly similar to the perspective on copyright embraced by many mimeograph poets and printers, not to mention Sanders’s professed motivations for pirating the Cantos. Sanders narrated the Cantos piracy thus in a 1998 interview: “We had heard Dorothy [Pound] was holding up the publication of [these cantos]. At that time even more than now I had an almost microscopic knowledge of all the Cantos, and I decided that they were by Pound. . . . So I did what I did” (qtd. in Kane 70). The notion that the poems were being suppressed by Dorothy Pound may now seem slightly absurd in light of Pound’s demonstrated reluctance to authorize a volume of these poems even after the piracy. However, it’s worth recalling that the typescript

that served as the basis for authors would still be remuthe piracy was seven years old nerated after losing control by the time Sanders acquired a of copyright protection. copy, and prior to the piracy, an edition of these Cantos was Sanders’s willingness to profit nowhere in sight. In Pound’s from the piracy was no doubt proposed statute, provisions impacted by his disappointment for cheap editions would kick and disgust regarding Pound’s in once the author or heirs anti-Semitism. In his autohad failed to keep a text in biography, Sanders recounts circulation. With versions a 1963 trip to the Library of of some of the final cantos Congress to listen to realready appearing in periodcordings of Pound’s wartime icals, Sanders could reasonbroadcasts in an attempt to ably understand the text of address “the Lb Q” (short for the Drafts & Fragments poems “the Pound Question”): “how to to be in a state of impeded deal with his Anti-Semitism circulation. against the background of his undeniable talents as a poet” Money was certainly among (Fug You 47). Sanders adds that, Sanders’s motivations for “To poets in the Beat, Black printing Cantos 110—116 as Mountain, Objectivist, or well, and although Sanders Deep Image tradition, it was reports giving away 100 copies a serious issue” (Fug You 47). to friends, he also sold 100 Although Sanders never says copies to the Gotham Book Mart so explicitly, his descripfor $6.00 apiece, a high price tions of the piracy suggest by comparison to the hardthat lost respect for Pound cover New Directions volume, contributed to his willingwhich retailed for $3.95. The ness to print the work without sale netted Sanders and Tom permission. Clark $491. The handwritten “accounting statement” for Still, to understand the the publication reprinted piracy simply as a malevolent in Sanders’s autobiography money-making scheme oversimhas a line for “10% Pound,” plifies the meaning that this but Sanders doesn’t mention publication would have had to whether this $60 ever reached Sanders and to readers purthe author (Fug You 286). Had chasing his publications from Sanders sent Pound his cut, “under the counter of [their] he would have come close to favorite bookstore” (Fuck You complying with the spirit issue 4, n.p.). Sanders’s editoof Pound’s statute, in which rial projects were unabashedly

Pirating Pound

political, particularly in the case of the fourteen issues of Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, which he released at irregular intervals between 1962 and 1965. As Daniel Kane puts it, “the magazine was encyclopedic in its embrace of all movements and publishing practices that threatened conventional morality” (72). The first issue, for instance, is dedicated to “pacifism, unilateral disarmament, national defense through nonviolent resistance, multilateral indiscriminate apertural conjugation, anarchism, world federalism, civil disobedience, obstructers and submarine boarders, and all those groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of Congress” (Fuck You issue 1, n.p.). As this relatively tame example suggests, the magazine’s numerous editorial paratexts parodied the rhetoric of even those positions it espoused.

contributors intertwine assertions of literary genius and sexual prowess; and Sanders’s stated editorial policy—“I’ll print anything”—coincides with the magazine’s rhetoric of promiscuity. In light of the larger project of the Fuck You Press, Cantos 110—116 registers a strong statement about literary ownership and freedom of the press: texts should circulate, and if the author won’t circulate the text, someone else ought to.

Given the forcefulness of Sanders’s political agenda, it can be easy to forget that Fuck You Press was also an artistic endeavor aimed at upsetting the aesthetic norms represented by the mainstream publishing industry and critical establishment. Fuck You Press’s opposition to the legal parameters of copyright and obscenity was constitutive of an avant-garde positioning itself outside the literMost often, the magazine’s asary conventions of the time. sault on convention was accomSanders’s “cri de mimeo” of plished by treating sexuality “I’ll print anything” promised with an over-the-top hilarity writers a venue in which their that was unsurprisingly lost work could reach an audience on the censors. With rollickwithout being vetted according excess, the magazine uses ing to a pre-existing poetic the language of radical sexual standard (Fug You 29). With politics to construct a radipoetics taken into account, cal politics of print: Fuck You the choice to make a statement is regularly described as “pub- about copyright using the lished, printed, edited & ejacCantos is neither arbitrary ulated by Ed Sanders”; notes on nor exclusively opportunistic.

CHELSEA JENNINGS

Sanders’s claim to an “almost microscopic knowledge of all the Cantos” points to an explicit investment in Pound’s work that pre-dates the Drafts & Fragments poems.

‘dynasty of extraordinary gifts and powers’; nor was it exactly that all modernist assumptions about poetry had run dry”; instead, writers had to contend with the fact that a “particular phase of Such sentiments were shared modernism — that identified by many poets who came of age with Eliot and with the New after World War II and turned Criticism in America — had toward Pound, and away from achieved a powerful hegemony T.S. Eliot, as a model. In which successfully domestithe introduction to his landcated modernism” (12). Rather mark 1960 anthology The New than repudiating modernism American Poetry, Donald Allen per se, post-war American claims that the included poets poets repudiated the ossified, are “following the practice orthodox vision of modernism and precepts of Ezra Pound and that was slowly entrenching William Carlos Williams” but itself in the academy. They have “built on their achieveinstead declared their allements and gone on to evolve giance to writers, especially new conceptions of the poem Pound and (to a lesser extent) . . . They are our avant-garde, Williams, who represented an the true continuers of the experimental tradition and modern movement in American outsider version of modernism poetry” (1). James Breslin (Breslin 13). hastens to point out the contradiction in describing However, the cues that Sanders an avant-garde as the continand other writers of the mimuation of an earlier moveeograph revolution took from ment, viewing this tension as Pound were not limited to podefining the post-war moment etic form. Considering Pound’s in American poetry. Breslin influence in “social, historirecounts the sense of historical, political, institutional, cal misfortune that many writ- and interpersonal contexts,” ers felt in the 1950’s, coming Christopher Beach argues that on the heels of modernism when the defining feature of the many of modernism’s major figPound tradition is its apures were still alive and pub- proach to tradition itself as lishing. However, “the problem “a vortex of diverse poetic and for a young poet in the early artistic practices that can or mid-fifties was not simply be rediscovered and resynthethe looming presence of that sized in new directions by new

Pirating Pound

writers and that are constantly leading toward a new sense of ‘culture’—‘a living paideuma and not a dead one’” (4). Such an understanding of tradition does much to account for how Pound, in spite of his anti-Semitism and support of Italian fascism, would be embraced by the next generation’s most politically engaged writers even as they rejected his prejudices and politics. In a 1962 letter to Pound, George Oppen succinctly explained, I suppose if we should take to talking politics to each other I would disagree even more actively than all those others who have disagreed, but there has been no one living during my life time who has been as generous or as pure as you toward literature and toward writers. Nor anyone less generously thanked. I know of no one who does not owe you a debt. (71–72) Given how many writers have echoed this sentiment, Beach argues that, counter to Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” model, Pound’s mode involved fore-grounding rather than repressing a relationship to one’s influences. In borrowing source material freely and overtly in the Cantos, Pound gave poets permission to

CHELSEA JENNINGS

borrow just as freely from his own work and a model for how to do so. Sanders writes in his autobiography, “If eyes were sandpaper, I would have long ago erased the texts in Pound’s collected earlier poems, Personae. His relentless scholarship, his mixture of tough and tender lyrics, and his love of Greek and Latin helped me become a poet” (Fug You 47). The ambivalence of Sanders’s metaphor is telling: he portrays reading and re-reading Pound’s work as an act of reverence but also of erasure. Sanders’s edition of the Cantos strikes a similar balance; as we have seen, it is at once an homage to Pound— an affirmation of his continued relevance not just to history but to the present—and a defiant appropriation of his poetry and legacy. There is no denying that the mimeograph edition of the Drafts & Fragments poems violates Pound’s intention, especially since the manuscript used as its basis was an earlier version than the one Pound sanctioned for New Directions to print. However, Sanders’s edition does Pound the favor of affiliating him with an active experimental poetic community. Although the text of Cantos 110–116 was by

no means “hot off the griddle” in terms of composition, its publication in mimeograph gave it an up-to-the-minute quality that sharply contrasts with the New Directions and Stone Wall Press editions. While the New Directions edition of Drafts & Fragments presents Pound as a relic of a bygone era of innovation and the Stone Wall Press edition abstracts the Cantos from the present through its participation in a longstanding tradition of hand-printing, the piracy creates a framework for reading the final cantos that emphasizes—and enacts— the poem’s ongoing impact on American poetry.

“And As To Who Will Copy This Pampliset?”

That the piracy’s bibliographic code inflects the poems it contains is particularly significant for Drafts & Fragments because the volume appraises, often ambivalently, the Cantos project as a whole. In these final cantos, Pound’s poetic method again resembles that of the earliest cantos: sharp, condensed images follow one another, neatly capturing political or historical ideas rather than expounding on them. Many of Pound’s readers met the volume with relief that he had returned to a more accessible and personal mode, softening, or at least sidestepping, his prior political and economic stances and exhibiting some degree of contrition about views that had made him unpopular in the 1940s and 1950s.

Pirating Pound

Reading the bibliographic code of the first three editions of the Drafts & Fragments poems into the linguistic code is complicated by the substantial differences between the Sanders and New Directions texts. For instance, the New Directions text of canto 116 reads, “To confess wrong without losing rightness: / Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it flow thru” (27). In Sanders’s Cantos 110– 116, the line “To confess wrong without losing rightness?” concludes with a question mark, and a recalcitrant Pound says, “Charity is what I’ve got—damn it” (n.p.). In one of the most frequently cited passages of the final cantos, the New Directions text reads: I have brought the great ball of crystal; who can lift it? Can you enter the great acorn of light? But the beauty is not the madness Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me And I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere. In the Fuck You Press Cantos 110–116, the final line of this passage—“I cannot make it cohere”—appears as “the damn stuff will not cohere?”. Phrased as a question without the personal responsibility of “I cannot,” this moment casts Pound as a poet trying to wrangle his material with mixed results, rather than a humble master reflecting wistfully on his life’s work.

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The question of coherence correspondence is intended, we plagued the Cantos from the think of the Thrones of Dante’s beginning, and detractors Paradiso.” The following secwho accused the poem of not tion—the volume that preceded cohering meant that critique Drafts & Fragments—was titled to be damning. When Pound Thrones 96–109 de los cantares, embarked on the project, he and the front flap of this 1959 proposed Dante’s Commedia as volume begins, “critics have model for his poem, suggestlong recognized a structuring an overarching structure al parallel between Pound’s that could resolve the poem Cantos and The Divine Comedy. into unity. Despite the conThis relationship becomes tortions required, as Reed Way more explicit with the publiDasenbrock observes, critics cation of these fourteen new have followed Pound’s lead in cantos, which Pound, following using the Commedia to underDante’s Paradiso, has entitled stand the structure of the ‘Thrones.’” Cantos (81–83), helped along by a string of New Directions In light of these promises promotional materials encourof an epic modeled on the aging their comparison. In a Commedia, the famous pro1940 pamphlet pasted into the nouncement of canto 116, “I first 500 copies of Cantos LII– cannot make it cohere,” reads LXXI, Laughlin (writing under as a weighty admission of the initials “H.H.”) reports failure in the New Directions that “certain of Pound’s reveedition (26). However, when lations to his publisher about situated within mimeograph the work in progress seem to culture, which worked to indicate a more than casual undermine the “well-wrought influence of the structure of urn” ideal of the recent New the Commedia. A recent letCriticism, Pound’s investter stated that two thirds of ment in coherence is almost the poem were completed and anachronistic. Many poets that he (Pound) was ready to affiliated with the mimeograph plunge into the Empyrean.” The revolution had already capipublisher’s description on talized on the possibilities the front flap of Pound’s 1956 of creative juxtaposition Section: Rock-Drill 85–95 de los presented by the Cantos, freed cantares claims that the “major from the obligation of formal theme as the Cantos move into unity. Whether Pound’s poem their third and final phase” had failed to cohere or given is the “domination of benevup trying hardly mattered; the olence. And though no exact postwar poetic culture had, at

Pirating Pound

least in its more experimental enclaves, already moved on to a valuation of the fragmented or unresolvable. In one of the reflective passages of the final cantos, the text calls attention to its own future, asking “And as to who will copy this palimpsest?” (Drafts & Fragments [New Directions] 27). In the Stone Wall Press edition, surrounded by immense medieval-style margins, this line recalls the errors and losses of textual transmission catalogued in earlier cantos. Because the edition’s hand-printing casts the act of copying as a laborious enterprise, the question “And as to who will copy this palimpsest?” takes on a wistful tone. Pound’s question necessarily becomes figurative in the New Directions edition, which includes in the front matter a legal clause explicitly forbidding reproduction “in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording . . . without permission in writing from the Publisher.” By contrast, the mimeograph machine opens the possibility that readers could literally and figuratively copy the Cantos’ “palimpsest,” and in the piracy the line’s question becomes an imperative to keep the text alive through circulation.

CHELSEA JENNINGS

Colophon for the Fuck You Press Cantos 110—116 (1967).

The piracy, then, perceptively attends to the poem’s investment in textuality as a historical and material phenomenon and its querying of the grounds of epic authority. To dismiss the piracy as illegitimate is to miss the point of the edition, which aspires to a version of legitimacy based in street-level production and circulation. The Fuck You Press edition of Cantos 110–116 presents possibilities for understanding the work in ways that are not overdetermined by an emphasis on Pound’s intention, instead foregrounding the text’s role in and significance for the culture of the time.

faulty shift key underscores the perils of even the most well-meaning attempts to enact or preserve authorial intention in the final cantos. Conclusion: Shift Key

The limits of understanding the final cantos in terms of intention are perhaps best summarized by an anecdote regarding the printing of the Stone Wall Drafts & Fragments. Merker claims to have asked Laughlin if he could line up Pound’s erratic indentations so that text would fall at consistent distances from the left margin, but Laughlin insisted that the printing must reflect the manuscript exactly. Merker preserved the manuscript spacing as best he could, although it turned out that Pound hadn’t been the one to type the manuscript and the irregular indentations were caused by a mechanical problem with the shift key on the portable typewriter that had been used (Berger 31). In the catalogue of printing errors in the Cantos, this is a minor entry, and Laughlin’s desire to preserve Pound’s spacing is commendable; he well deserved his role as publisher of the Cantos. Nevertheless, the

I have argued that Pound’s intention need not be the sole, or even the primary, consideration when approaching the Cantos, and that the bibliographic code of the Sanders piracy opens up readings of the Cantos that are based in the poem’s own confrontation with the complexities of authorship and textuality. Such an approach is not an editorial theory, and it doesn’t help a publisher decide whether to line up the indentations or memorialize the faulty typewriter key. Still, it suggests that even the most audacious interpretations and redeployments of literary texts can be read for the bibliographic meaning they contain rather than the authority they lack. From this perspective, it becomes clear that bibliographic code is itself an interpretive gesture. While editions that cleave to intention may have the most to say about the author’s vision for the work, editions that depart as radically from authorial intention as Cantos 110–116 offer complex and concrete information about the culture in which the work was distributed and received.

Pirating Pound

Each of the three initial editions of the Drafts & Fragments poems not only enacts a battle at the level of bibliographic code over the meaning of the final cantos, but also serves as synecdoche for a mode of printing important to 1960s American poetry. Reading the poetry of the era through the interaction between commercial, fine press, and mimeograph printing points to wider significance for the bibliographic code of individual volumes, even those volumes that initially appear bibliographically transparent. Drafts & Fragmentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; near-simultaneous appearance in mimeograph, fine press, and commercial editions is atypical, but exemplary, allowing a direct comparison across printing modes that throws into relief the effects of these modes at the level of textual authority as well as poetic meaning.

CHELSEA JENNINGS

Ezra Pound, Buckminster Fuller, and Isamu Noguchi

SPOLETO ‘65

rank O’Hara was asked by Gian Carlo Menotti to select the American poets for Settimana della Poesia at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, June 26 through July 2, 1965. He chose Barbara Guest, Tony Towle, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, John Wieners, me, and, I think, Kenneth Koch and Frank Lima, as well. Menotti refused to invite Ginsberg and Corso because of the scandal they’d caused at the festival a year or two before. (This was during Allen’s phase of taking off his clothes in public every chance he got.) Lowell declined. Tony couldn’t go for lack of travel money. Menotti and company added Allen Tate and Ezra Pound. Then Frank himself couldn’t go because

of his curatorial obligations at the Museum of Modern Art (which may also have been why he was absent from the Berkeley Poetry Conference later that same summer). Nonetheless, Frank was there in spirit, having organized a tidy MoMA show of recent landscape painting that featured Alex Katz, Allan d’Arcangelo, Roy Lichtenstein, Jane Freilicher, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Dash, Christopher Lane, Jane Wilson, and Aristodemos Kaldis. Among the European and Latin American poets, some of them selected by Stephen Spender, were André Frénaud, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ted Hughes, Miroslav Holub, Pablo Neruda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salvatore Quasimodo, Lino Curci, Rafael Alberti, Johannes Edfelt, Ingeborg Bachmann, José Hierro, Murilo Mendes, and Desmond O’Grady. Spender acted as master of ceremonies for most of the week, with John Ashbery succeeding him on one occasion.

Leroi Jones’s ritual drama Dutchman, which had opened at the Cherry Lane in New York the year before, was performed during the festival with the original cast of Jennifer West and Robert Hooks. (“Tremendous,” said Pound to Olson when the latter asked what he thought.) Other people who weren’t directly involved but showed up during this Poetry Week were: Joe Brainard, Kenward Elmslie, Maxine Groffsky, Lewis MacAdams, D.D. Ryan, Waldo Rasmussen (representing MoMA), George Schneeman, and Peter Schjeldahl. I read later that Pound’s group included Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, but no one seems to have been aware of them being there at the time. “That’s no epiphany, it’s a wet dream!” said Maxine, as we saw from a slight rise above the Teatro Caio Melisso parking lot the young poet marking with eyes riveted, arms spread wide, in a posture of near-genuflection, the arrival of Charles Olson. Moments later, I joined the throng. John Wieners, also there to greet Olson, brought me over to introduce me, and Olson gave me a surprise bear hug. Olson’s display of instant affection puzzled me until John explained that the woman with whom he and I once shared an

afternoon at the Cedar Bar was Charles’s wife Betty who since had died—I hadn’t caught her name—and John had told Charles about how she and I happily clicked in that one casual meeting. Inside the theater that afternoon, the first reader was Barbara Guest. By way of a pointedly undiplomatic curtain raiser, Stephen Spender rose to introduce the proceedings, and for the edification of the international audience, singled out Barbara as “a member of the New York School of poets, whose main distinction would seem to be that they all write about painting.” Thus, Settimana was off and running. Yevtushenko read at length, one arm raised to the heavens, the other keeping time behind (“the Discus Thrower from Smolensk,” Ferlinghetti called him). Allen Tate read what must have been the entirety of his “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Neruda also read for a long time—all of his Heights of Macchu Picchu cantos—but thrillingly. In the order of things, Ezra Pound’s reading was scheduled for the morning of the next to last day, July 1, with John Ashbery, John Wieners, and Johannes Edfelt from Sweden before him; then in the afternoon the roster

Spoleto '65

was Olson, Pasolini, me, and the Brazilian Murilo Mendes, with John Ashbery introducing. Ezra, nearing eighty, in a loose-fitting linen suit, read from the royal box, deep in the rear of the theater. Even with a microphone, he was almost inaudible and read not his own work but Marianne Moore’s poem-translation of La Fontaine’s fable, “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” Lowell’s Dante “imitations,” Pound’s translations with Noel Stock of ancient Egyptian love poems and solo renderings of the Confucian Odes and the little-known Italian modern poet Saturno Montanari. All of us in the orchestra below stood up, turned and strained to hear him. The advance word had gone out that he was frail and silent, and that was pretty much the case. Olson wanted to engage him in some big-time earthshaking confab, but no soap, Pound wasn’t up for confabbing in those days. About Pound Joe Brainard wrote in his diary: Ezra Pound arrived two days ago in Spoleto. I heard him read. I could not understand a single word he said. When you meet him he does not say a word: he rolls his eyeballs around and does not look real. He looks like he belongs on a coin.

BILL BERKSON

In the afternoon, Olson read with great heaves “The Song of Ullikummi,” his “fucking the mountain” poem. Pasolini addressed his Italian poems to a great claque of boys in pastel-toned, fuzzy Angora sweaters filling the front two rows. When Pasolini had finished, John went to the podium and began, “Next is a young American poet ...”— meaning me, at which utterance the two “Pasolini” rows emptied out: Pier Paolo’s boys had gotten up en masse and darted up the center aisle with great commotion. Once John managed to complete his brief introduction, I approached the podium totally shaken. Somehow, though, I managed to direct my opening poem upward to where Pound and his entourage were sitting, again in their box, and because the poem I read was clearly in line with some of Pound’s early writings—I had, in fact, at about that time, fallen all over again for his authoritative manner—I saw that he was clapping and others had followed. That initial applause steadied me somewhat, and I was able to go on. (Renée Neu, Frank’s assistant at MoMA, had done the translations of my poems into Italian for the bilingual audience handout sheets.)

Afterwards at the Tric-Trac, Pound sat with Olga Rudge and Caresse Crosby, more or less “guarded” by the relentless Desmond O’Grady. John Wieners and I went up to Pound with copies we had each just bought of a slim, red-bound Italian edition of his poems, which Pound inscribed (mistaking my last name as “Bergson”), followed by a greeting, “Salut,” and his signature.

GULP: I HAD ACCIDENALLY SAT MYSELF DOWN ABOUT TWO PACES TO ONE SIDE OF EZRA POUND.

The next morning I returned to the Tric-Trac and, wanting a rest from the folde“I imagine you’d enjoy seerol, decided to have breakfast ing this,” I said to Pound alone in the café’s backroom. as I shoved the magazine But the backroom wasn’t empty. (Connaissance des Arts, I No sooner had I settled at a think it was) under his chin. little table just inside than He took it, I went back to my I saw that there was a large seat; minutes passed while company at the long table behe looked long and hard at side me, with Pound and Olga the text and pictures, then Rudge at the near end and a looked back at me and offilm crew at the other. Gulp: fered to return the magazine. I had accidently sat myself “You keep it,” I said, and down about two paces to one he nodded. Silence. By then side of Ezra Pound. Trying my my breakfast had arrived. I best to be invisible, I picked picked up a newspaper and, up a glossy magazine from the thinking to resume my modsmall table next to me, and icum of anonymity, began no sooner had I begun flipto concentrate on the day’s ping through it than I saw news when suddenly the room it contained an article on was full of the fullness of Pound’s old friend, the sculpPound’s voice, “And then went tor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. No down to the ships / set keel escape. I got up, approached to breakers, forth on the the table and showed the maggodly sea ...” He read through azine spread to Olga Rudge, all of “Canto I” and a couple who, gesturing to E.P., said of others, all frailty, for “Well, show it to him!” the moment, gone away.

Spoleto '65

One other event involving Pound was Max Neuhaus’s account on another day of Morton Feldman’s percussion piece “The King of Denmark.” As required, Max performed this extremely sotto voce Feldman composition in the theater lobby with a small group of listeners standing in semicircle around him and his elaborate setup of bells, gongs, pipes, triangles, cymbals and so on. Pound, the only one sitting, placed himself a little forward from the rest and watched intently every one of Max’s moves, taking in the delicate and widely spaced sounds for the duration of the work, about seven minutes all told.

BILL BERKSON

August, tasting of ripe grapes and afternoon sleep, sharpening, like the smell of boxwood, the grass blades that yellow an uncut hill a heavier green while the trees lean in folds and the rose of Sharon blooms and blooms at each twig and branch tip like a toy tree, setting a sleepy cat on an after-lunch table among uncleared plates, white-and-black like the coolness of the oilcloth in warm shade: withhold from these days the rain that made the succulence of which you reek in haze that hides the furthest view and seems like smoke seeking, before it is time, the ripening leaves bronze in your pollen-dusty air that films the sky and, as the light fades, burns blue, that the hot moon may, bathing its light in water, find its white coolness.

James Schuyler, Sonnet. From C Press No. 7, February 1964.

LETTER TO JAMES SCHUYLER

ust a note. I hope you’ve gotten the latest “C” by now. We are sending them out a few at a time for lack of stamp money. But if it hasn’t arrived it should soon. I’m putting together “C” number 7 now, and hope to get it out in three weeks. I’m tremendously impressed with it so far, and “The Home Book” is the prize piece among poems by Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, your and Kenward’s play, John Ashbery’s note on Andy Warhol, a poem by John Weiners, and some things by Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup and myself. I’ve tentatively decided to use two poems by you besides “The Home Book,” the sonnet beginning “August, smelling of ripe grapes and afternoon sleep,” and the one beginning, “In the cafe I sat and watched the rain.”

I want to use the others I have by you in future issues, and I’m waiting eagerly for the other poems you spoke about in your letter. What a good writer you are! Ron and I found two copies of Alfred and Guinevere in a used book store the other day, and immediately bought them, and I’ve been rereading them, as well as a copy of your poem “December.” I’m just dazzled by the graceful quality of your writing! Frank O’Hara said that I should be sure to ask you about a story you have, whose name he couldn’t recall, that he said was about two homosexuals named Clyde and Henry... do you know the one he means? He said it was a marvelous story and that he knew I’d love it. Also (it seems that your manuscripts circulate just like Elizabethan court sonnets) John Buttons says he has a play by you called, I think, February which may not

have been published. It’s so interesting and great that on the few occasions when I see people like John and Frank and Kenward and some others, whenever your name comes up everyone has lots of things of yours in mind that they think are great and should be published immediately! Your work makes up an “underground movement” all by itself! Anyway, I hope you can send some more poems soon, or prose or plays or anything. And I hope we can meet. I don’t know if I can ever get out of Southhampton, although I want to get out to Keene’s bookstore sometime to get a copy of Meditations in an Emergency which can’t be gotten here, but if I get a chance to do that I’d like to call you first and see if you’re going to be free.

Letter to James Schuyler

From Bean Spasms by Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett. Art by Joe Brainard.

THE ART OF COLLABORATION

isual artists and writers tend to be solitary people, but it is their desire to play, I believe, that can draw them into creative contact with one another. Here they may find excitement, but also peril, for a true collaboration requires relinquishing some degree of control over the final project. This is especially true in the case of a collaboration in which the artist and writer are working together, at the same time, on the same surface, so that the individual contributions are completely merged in the final result. Such was the case with Stones, a portfolio of 12 lithographs by Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers published in 1960 by Tatyana and Maurice Grosman's newly founded Universal Limited Art

Editions. This is a seminal work in the history of artist/ writer collaborationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and a seminal work for me, as a poet thinking about how poetry can function in relation to other arts.

O'Hara and Rivers called their lithographs "tabloscripts," in which, as they described it, "the artist and the poet, inspired by the same theme, draw and write on the same surface at the same time, fusing both arts to an inseparable unity" Looking at these sheets, one is immediately aware of the inclusiveness and the mode of acceptance out of which the work grew. Word and image collide, neither taking precedence. The poetry is legible and makes sense as language, even as it functions as an integral visual element. Early on, O'Hara and Rivers decided to ink the stones' edges, a unifying factor that gave each image an irregular frame, like panels in a storyboard for a film. Over a two-year period,

when they got together to work on Stones, they would pass the crayon back and forth, each adding to what the other had just done. One has the impression of eavesdropping on the witty repartee of two intellectuals—an impression suggested by O'Hara's poetry in general. In the sheet entitled Us, the text reads, in part, "They call US/the Farters of our Country/poetry was declining/Painting advancing/we were complaining/it was '50/Poetry/ belongs to ME, Larry, and/ Painting to you/ THAT'S what G said to 0 and/look/where/ it/ got/them." These lines are insinuated among drawings of heads (two portraits of O'Hara), other figures (self-portraits of Rivers?), and various markings, crossings-out, line drawings, and blocked-out areas. While the artists generally kept the text on one axis, they glibly shifted that of the drawings. In the 1960s, experimental collaboration was embraced by the second generation of New York School poets, led by Ted Berrigan. His "C" Press published several editions of "C" Comics—comic books drawn by Joe Brainard with texts by John Ashbery, Berrigan, O'Hara, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, and others. Brainard was famous for his eroticized versions of

the "Nancy" comic strip, but "C" Comics also brilliantly combined prosaic images, such as flowers or ashtrays, with apparently unrelated lines of poetry. In 1967-68, Berrigan collaborated with artist George Schneeman on a one-of-a-kind book called In the Nam What Can Happen?, working in pen and ink, white acrylic paint, and collage. With its constant layering of word and image and the cumulative impact of overlapping and colliding forms, collage is essential to this work. All sheets make use of it, and there is often a playful, old-fashioned tone to the pastiched elements—an equestrian magazine from the 1930s, for instance, is followed up by colorful, outdated print advertisements or bits of gift wrapping. On one sheet, white paint partially obscures the words "Stop the War in Vietnam," a phrase repeated in block capital letters directly above the white paint. The words derive their impetus from the visual ground; they are at once part of and a commentary on their situation in this visual-verbal complex. An opening of space on the last two pages alleviates the tempestuous congestion of previous pages. On the final page: "Ripeness is all. The end." Then a black arrow points to a huge "NO"

The Art of Collaboration

C Comics No. 2. by Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, et. al. 1964.

in block capitals. (The book was reproduced in 1997 in a facsimile edition of 70 copies by Granary Books in letterpress on Rives paper. Multiple plates were used to approximate the layering and texture of the original.) Berrigan, perhaps more than O'Haraâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;who as a critic and curator may have been more respectful of the boundaries between artist and poetâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;felt capable of any type of artistic expression and would make drawings as easily as poems. Like O'Hara and Rivers, though, Berrigan and Schneeman were good friends who worked together with an air of complete complicity.

VINCENT KATZ

Some artists and writers, on the other hand, prefer to stake out new ground by collaborating with someone they've never met. Gervais Jassaud, who founded the small press Collectif Generation in 1969, began by publishing artists in the Supports/ Surfaces group and moved into the international sphere in the late 70s. Every book is unique, with artists and writers always working directly on the pages, sometimes in each other's presence, sometimes

not. Collectif Generation has, over the years, published collaborative works by Archie Rand and Clark Coolidge (Two or Three Things), Judith Shea and John Ashbery (Haibun), and Toni Grand and John Yau (Dragon's Blood), to name just a few. A recent Collectif Generation collaboration (they often take years to complete), involved poet and critic Barry Schwabsky and artist Jessica Stockholder, who were strangers before they began working on Hidden Figure in 1990 but became friends over the course of its production. The book, which was completed last year in an edition of 18, was arrived at as follows: Schwabsky composed a text for the folding-book format, then Stockholder taped in a photograph; Schwabsky then inserted another text, and Stockholder added painted and drawn elements. All the artwork was done by hand, making each book a unique object. Schwabsky wanted to work with an artist he did not know, he says, in order to approach the project “objectively,” but he admits to being puzzled at first by Stockholder’s photographs. “They created a greater challenge to come up with a second layer of text,” he says. “Her art is grounded in the ordinary, whereas the poetry omits the ordinary event to which its atmosphere is

anchored.” As in Stockholder’s individual work, the book is an installation with no front or back, no primary sequence. Images lead you in an endless circuit. Jassaud’s alliances occasionally take root and develop lives of their own. French book artist Bertrand Dorny, for instance, met American poet Ron Padgett through Jassaud, and the pair have gone on to make ten books together. Dorny has devised intricate books in small, self-published editions, with elaborate collage elements. Having fabricated a book, for example, he gave it to Padgett, who added text by hand or re-presented the text to Dorny, who then rubber-stamped the text into the book. (Padgett, a contemporary of Berrigan, has also collaborated with Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, and, extensively, with Schneeman.) One of Padgett and Dorny’s collaborations is the charming Alphonse Goes to the Pharmacy (edition of five, 1993, self-published by Dorny), which has parallel texts—one rubber-stamped in by Dorny, the other handwritten by Padgett—about a diminutive Chihuahua. “Bertrand said he wanted to make a little book and asked me for a text,” says Padgett. “I sent him a prose

The Art of Collaboration

poem. He said he liked it, but he asked if I could write a little coda or commentary on my own text. I accepted his challenge, but actually the commentary doesn’t explain anything either.” Padgett’s commentary begins as follows: “What this vignette does not tell you is that Alphonse’s sombrero is stuffed with discount coupons that he has clipped from newspapers and magazines, partly because he cannot resist a bargain and partly because the coupons help maintain the shape of his hat.” Dorny created the book using imagery based on the commentary—for example, a collage of layered bits of brightly colored papers and scraps from cookie packages, sometimes with the advertising slogans intact. The commentary is printed in the book in blue ink by Dorny’s rubber-stamp kit. Padgett’s original text is handwritten. Dorny has also collaborated with Kenneth Koch: their work One, for example, was published by Dorny in an edition of 12 in 1995 in an unusual 12x2-in. format. The poem is stamped between collages made of Day-Glo green, spray-painted paper cut out and sewn back together with red thread. The complete poem, which has one word per line, is as follows:

VINCENT KATZ

One/Old/Coconut/Remains/On/ This/Tree/On/A/Nuclearly/ Devastated/Tropical/Island/ And/Anyone/Who/Eats/It/Will/ Be/A/Dead/Monkey Not all artists approach the idea of collaboration so openly. Archie Rand, for one, says he “always thought collaborations defaced the poetry. They tended to use text as a visual element or didn’t allow it enough space. The artist has a home-court advantage, and the poet often becomes mere intellectual decoration.” Inspired by commercial posters, Rand first started pitting one to three words against an image in a series of watercolors with poet and critic John Yau in 1985. “What O’Hara did got eaten up,” Rand says, referring to Stones. “Poetry should be allowed to exert force. Paul Colin, a poster designer from the 20s to the 50s, would use one recognizable, stark image with maybe just the name of a company. My whole format changed after I saw his work.” Rand and Yau have produced several series together, all self-published, using the principles Rand picked up from Colin. Among their most successful collaborations is a series of 26 paintings on gold lame, titled The Alphabet (1987-92). In a typical panel from The Alphabet, one sees, for the

letter Z, an image of two men embracing under an archway surmounted by a clock. The entire text for the piece reads, “PICASSO/SEES MAX JACOB OFF/AT THE TRAIN STATION.” The finality of the image corresponds to the final letter of the alphabet. The effect, though more emotional, is not unlike a Colin ad in its graphic simplicity. Today, one can see a tendency to move away from the noholds-barred collaborations of the 1950s and 60s, in which certain artists—O’Hara and Berrigan, for example—embraced the idea that they could completely abandon the separation of visual and poetic art and create work that meshed the two. In many of today’s artist-poet collaborations—such as the Schwabsky/Stockholder piece, and even Dorny’s work with Padgett and Koch—one finds evidence of a more controlled approach. The poet Robert Creeley is another example of this latter tendency. Creeley has made collaborations with visual artists a central aspect of his life in the arts, and these projects are the subject of a traveling exhibition that opened this spring at the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara University. (On view at the New York Public Library from September 13 to January 15, 2000, it

travels to the Weatherspoon Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the Contemporary Art Museum and Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida/ Tampa, and the Green Library at Stanford University.) The show includes Creeley’s collaborations with, among others, Georg Baselitz, John Chamberlain, Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Elsa Dorfman, Alex Katz, R. B. Kitaj, Marisol, and Susan Rothenberg. Creeley does not generally mesh his poetry with visual art on the same page. Rather, he seems to prefer some physical distance, from which he can look at the visual art, just as the viewer of the collaboration ultimately will. Creeley is both participant and observer, both within and outside the collaboration, often commenting on the art within the poetry. “My favorite way of working,” he says, “is with the least restriction, i.e., where what I do is what goes—‛Freely to write what one chooses,’ as Pound quotes de Gourmont,’ is the only pleasure of the artist.” That permission comes most when working with someone one knows well and feels easy with—or else, paradoxically, someone whom one doesn’t know at all.”

The Art of Collaboration

Signs by Robert Creeley and Georg Baselitz, 1999.

The latter was the case with the poems Creeley wrote for Donald Sultan’s massive new collection, Visual Poetics (1999, MFA Contemporary Atelier, edition of 395); each poem appears on vellum interleaved before one of six signed screen-prints. The two did not know each other before Creeley was asked by the publisher to write the poems; in fact they have yet to meet. Creeley had known Alex Katz, on the other hand, for over a decade when he composed one long, 13-stanza poem to go with an unusual series of 13 etchings Katz had made, which were based on felt-tip pen drawings (Edges, Peter Blum

VINCENT KATZ

Edition, 1997). Katz had to experiment for several months, with the help of his printer, Doris Simmelink, to find the right pen and water-soluble ink that would replicate the thick, freely drawn lines of his original drawings botanicals and rural landscapes created in Maine, where Katz and Creeley both spend their summers. In these sparse images—a lily, four daisies, an outline of treetops, all of which relate to series of paintings—there is no shading or background, just the outline of the image on the white paper. Creeley wrote the poem in response to the images, without commenting on them

specifically, and stanzas and images are printed separately, on facing pages (the poem appears in its entirety in a double spread at the end of the book). This spring, Peter Blum Edition reissued Edges in an offset trade edition with reproductions of the original etchings and an essay by Merlin James.

artists working together. I am reminded here of the recording Jack Kerouac made with jazzmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. After they had finished recording a set, the producer said, “OK, let’s get ready for the second take.” Kerouac looked at him incredulously. “That was the only take,” he said, and left the studio.

Unlike collaborations in which the participants want to blur the boundaries between one another’s work, Creeley clearly prefers to maintain his independence. In this sense, his approach is not as risky, perhaps, as the all-out collaborations referred to earlier, but his projects with artists are pleasurable and interesting in a different way. I began this essay by referring to Stones as a seminal work, a testament to the boundless desire of two personalities to merge in a work of art. However, just as Jackson Pollock may be said to represent the ideal of a certain type of art that must necessarily yield in time to other aesthetics and other philosophies, so the aesthetic that informed Stones has given way to different approaches to collaboration. Such projects are expressions of the constantly shifting tastes of different epochs. In the end, of course, collaborations depend on the temperaments and goals of the

The Art of Collaboration

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Working on a new construction that I am a bit suspicious of: it is practically floating together. (As though I am not really needed.) I do love it though: each object is crystal clear, but equally so, so they all seem to belong together very much ... Sometimes what I do is to purify objects. That is what I have done in this construction.â&#x20AC;? Letter from Joe Brainard to James Schuyler, July 1965

JOE BRAINARD: ALL POSSIBLE COLORS

f in 1977 the poet Tim Dlugos could suggest that Joe Brainard was “probably the most successful young artist in the country,”'1 how odd he should be so little known today. Brainard’s work was on the cover of Art News twice (April 1967; September 1972). He had his first one-man New York gallery show in 1965, when he was 23. In 1975, after a mind-boggling exhibition of at least 1,500 small collages at the Fischbach Gallery, Joe—an avid reader of what he called cheap magazines—was the

subject of a profile in People: a fittingly pop tribute, in a way, for one who had written, “One reason I’m a painter is because I am not a movie star.”2 Perhaps his very success has had something to do with his relative lack of recognition now, in that most of his work quickly entered private collections, where they stay, unphotographed and rarely coming into the secondary market—apparently, no one who owns a Brainard ever wants to sell it. Also, Joe made a quietly determined exit from the art world more than a decade before his death from AIDS in 1994. His last solo New York City exhibition was the 1975 collage show, and 2 “Why I Am a Painter,” from “Self

1 Tim Dlugos, “The Joe Brainard In-

Portrait: 1971,” New Work, Los Ange-

terview,” Little Caesar, 10, 1980.

les, Black Sparrow Press, 1973.

though that was followed by shows outside the city, including exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art (1980) and the University of California at San Diego (1987), a current retrospective at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (March 20–April 19) is his first New York City exhibition in 22 years. Joe Brainard was born in Arkansas on March 11, 1942 and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Something of a prodigy, he won every school and local art prize. While still in high school Joe worked as an illustrator for a Tulsa department store and his drawings appeared regularly in newspaper ads. He was also contributing covers and illustrations to The White Dove Review, the literary magazine that his fellow high school student and lifelong friend Ron Padgett had started, along with Dick Gallup, with Joe as art editor. Padgett and Gallup were poets and they all soon became friends with the charismatic Ted Berrigan who was in graduate school in Tulsa. After graduating from high school in 1960, Joe and Ron Padgett came to New York, Ron to study at Columbia, Joe to hang out for a while before going to the Dayton (Ohio)

Art Institute. As it turned out he only spent a month or so in Dayton before coming back to New York to live. He soon became close friends with Kenward Elmslie, Joe LeSueur, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, by whom Berrigan, Brainard, Gallup, and Padgett were dubbed the “soi-disant Tulsa School.” During the early 60s, Joe was making elaborate constructions and collages; a 1963 letter to Berrigan gives an idea of these obsessive, humorous, yet almost scary works: The upper half, the larger, is a 1/2 circular alcove with a plaster cast of Mary with dead full-grown Jesus in lap with a little plastic red cardinal on his head, and a wonderland spreads out at their feet of red roses, giant purple orchids, lilies, etc. etc. with lots of birds and butterflies, and behind all this is a blue blue sky with clouds and mean black birds. And surrounding all this is a stained glass window of all possible colors including two pieces of pear [sic] inlay, with two angels singing to a centered LUCKY STRIKE big circle; at the edge rosaries are draped and a yellow bird flys on the top right hand corner. And

Joe Brainard: All Possible Colors

Mixed media collage, 1964; (left) and Untitled, 1966 (right)

below this is a secret door which is an orange to yellow with pink sunset, with a black monster of a bird carrying a human baby of long ago in its beak; and there’s also a black wooden cross, and part of the words “Season’s Greetings” in fluorescent orange-red. This door opens up to a purple-lined box containing 12 bride-and-grooms.3

Although best known for collages, assemblages, drawings, and gouaches, Joe always called himself a painter: for him the word was synonymous with “artist.” Joe invested the act of painting in oils with a heroic significance which perhaps inhibited his own beautiful but intermittent work in the medium. “There is something that I lack as a painter that de Kooning and Alex Katz have,” he wrote. “I wish I had that. I’d tell you what it was except that I don’t know.”4 In fact, in his frequent use of collage and assemblage Brainard seems

3 Letter published in C, no. 2,

4 Aug. 29, 1967,” Selected Writings,

June 1963.

New York, Kulchur Foundation, 1971.

NATHAN KERNAN

to be very much an artist of “I don’t have a definite comtoday, when collage, in one modity . . . People want to buy sense or another, is a kind of a Warhol or a person instead of lingua franca shared by such a work. My work’s never become disparate figures as Louise ‘a Brainard.’” More than an Bourgeois, Lari Pittman, David accident of the marketplace, Salle, Jessica Stockholder, and this fact is crucial to Joe’s many others. aesthetic. Executed in a multiplicity of styles and media, Brainard’s is a Pop Art, or Joe’s works seem designed to perhaps post-Pop sensibildelight and seduce the viewer ity, though he came to it with no assumption that he or independently. He told Tim she—or the artist—has seen Dlugos. “I was doing a series one before. “I like to start of paintings of 7-Up bottle with nothing and just surprise labels . . . I’d never really myself.” When art becomes a seen any Pop Art, then I looked commodity it can’t afford to be in Time Magazine and there was generous; “his generosity” is an Oldenburg 7-Up . . . and a what Joe most admired in the Warhol soup can, and I was kind work of his favorite paintr, de of shocked.” Soon Warhol became Kooning.6 Joe’s own generosity a friend, as well as an artist was legendary, in life as in he much admired. His Gertrude art. His collages and gouaches, Stein-like prose poem, “Andy given away as often as sold, Warhol: Andy Do It,” includes can be so packed with imagery the words “I like Andy Warhol” as to be almost dizzying, as if repeated 15 times as well as he were never able to satisfy perceptive comments on Warhol’s his needs to give the viewer contradictions: more, more, more. Andy Warhol perhaps paints ideas, but if so, I sure do like the way his ideas look. Andy Warhol’s ideas look great! Andy Warhol paints Andy Warhols.5 They had much in common, including an interest in serial imagery, but Joe was almost sort of “anti-Warhol.” He said,

In June 1964 a special issue of Ted Berrigan’s mimeographed C magazine, C Comics, appeared with comic strips drawn by Brainard for texts by Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Dash, Kenward Elmslie, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Tony Towle, and other 6 “Sunday March 29th [1969],” Se-

5 C, December/January 1963 — 64.

lected Writings.

Joe Brainard: All Possible Colors

poets. C Comics No. 2 followed I remember the kick I used in 1965. Joe’s drawings in C to get going through my Comics are funny. Their wit parents’ drawers looking for and formal invention hold up rubbers. (Peacock) to and play off that of the writing, as involved with subI remember when polio was verting—liberating—the comic the worst thing in the world. strip genre as celebrating it. (The recent work of Raymond I remember pink dress shirts. Pettibon and Jim Shaw, though And bola ties.7 darker in mood, has much in common with Brainard’s C Comics More than its specific memof the 60s.) Joe was also busy ories, I Remember explores a illustrating books by many of process of thought, the mind the same poets, and by the end intent upon trying to forget of the 1970s he had provided itself in order to capture covers and/or illustrations something it already knows. for over 100 books and period“I have a terrible memory,” icals. Joe also made his own Joe said. “I can’t remember one-of-a-kind books, sequences anything. But then I began of drawings. or collages, which to realize that beyond that he presented to friends. point there is another level of knowledge that could be Brainard’s first published triggered off . . . It isn’t book, though, was I Remember, a nostalgic at all, because I'm book of writing. In fact, Joe not nostalgic.” was not just a visual artist who wrote, but one whose Similar to I Remember are writings were. in their way, Joe’s diary entries and short as essential to his art as pieces that probe the present Jenny Holzer’s are to hers. I as ingenuously as I Remember Remember is a collection of does memory. They show him hundreds of short entries, fascinated with the idea of each a random memory beginning, an unattainable “now” that is “I remember”: always sliding away from him even as he writes it, and with I remember the first time I the equally elusive and somegot a letter that said “After how related possibility (or Five Days Return To” on the impossibility) of being comenvelope, and I thought that pletely “open” or honest: after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed 7 Joe Brainard, I Remember, New to return it to the sender. York, 1994.

NATHAN KERNAN

better at it. Getting closer and closer to a point (a place) in my head I call the truth. But now I’m beginning to doubt that very point. (That very place) I mean, what I’ve been working towards just isn’t there anymore. (Zap)9

Living With Chris by Ted Berrigan, New York: Boke Press, 1968.

Already I am thinking of this as a “piece of writing.” and wondering if I can get by without really saying anything. And if so, how will I end it. Ron just came back out with a can of Macadamia nuts. He says “Do you want some?” I say “No, how do you spell it?” He says “M-A-C-A-D-A-M-I-A.” So I wrote it down up there where I had said “Ron just came back out with a can of ... ”8

There is a connection between Joe’s writings and the sequences of drawings in his albums and collaborative books, notably Living With Chris with Ted Berrigan; The Champ with Kenward Elmslie; and The Vermont Notebook with John Ashbery, where the drawings’ very disparate subjects and styles, and seemingly random sequencing, suggest the artist’s eye lighting on one thing after another and seeing each in a mini-epiphany, as if for the first time. The diversity of subjects rebounds to become part of the content of each individual drawing; each “cancels out” the other, as Joe said.10 9 Joe Brainard, Bolinas Journal, Bolinas, Big Sky Books, 1971.

This “trying to be honest” kind of writing. For several years now I’ve been doing it, and getting better and

10 Joe was speaking of his drawings for the cover of An Anthology of New York Poets, ed. Ron Padgett & David Shapiro, New York, 1970. “May 9th

8 “Aug. 29, 1967,” Selected Writings

[1969],” Selected Writings.

Joe Brainard: All Possible Colors

Many of Joe’s drawings represent other images: photographs, cartoons, illustrations, diagrams, symbols. Even drawings that seem to be straightforward records of observed reality seem also, in the context of these representations of representations, to be about the artist setting out to make “art-like” art: a barn, a still life, a nude. They feel like pictures of pictures, but at the same time are directly felt and observed. As John Ashbery has written, “[Brainard’s] works are about themselves—their subjects—and the distance between him and them is also a subject, whose nature is self-narration.”11 With a modesty that is also a kind of omniscience, Joe gives the same weight to his own subjective perceptions as to ... a cocktail napkin. Among Joe’s most beautiful works are two “Gardens” in gouache done in 1967, each an apparently uncomposed riot of as many different kinds and sizes of flowers of “all possible colors” as could 11 John Ashbery, “Brainard-Freeman Notebooks,” Gegenschein Quarterly, 1975; reprinted in Joe Brainard: Selections from the Butts Collection at UCSD, Mandeville Gallery, University of California at San Diego, 1987.

NATHAN KERNAN

be crammed onto one sheet of drawing paper: morning glories, pansies, honeysuckle, forget-me-nots, petunias, daisies, poppies, freesias, daffodils, violas, nasturtiums, and more. Anything but reductive (like Warhol’s flowers), Brainard’s gardens are in their way as optically bewildering as a painting by Lari Pittman: so full of subtle changes of scale that the eye can never rest or quite take everything in. A “gestalt” effect often makes the largest flowers disappear into the “background”—there is no background—only to be perceived individually after being stared at a long while. The surprised recognition is like something one repeatedly experiences reading I Remember. Brainard’s 1975 Fischbach exhibition of 1,500 small collages was a high point for him and for those who saw it, but at heavy cost to the artist, who was taking speed and working night and day while his loft became one huge collage, filled with stacks of paper scraps carefully arranged by color. Shortly afterwards Joe gave up pills, but he was changed. The poet and librettist Kenward Elinslie, who shared Joe’s life for some 30 years, described Joe’s retreat from

Untitled (Guest Check), 1978. Mixed media collage.

art-making: “Back together in stopped. Vermont./ He tries to make “Love is such a dumb word,” art./ Lays out his brushes he once said, but for Joe, a upon arrival./ Settles for stutterer, extremely shy, the reading, nonstop reading.../ word “dumb” had a welcome secTiptoes away/ From the casiond meaning. His work is rich no paradise/ Art Biz gulag./ with mute stand-ins for “Love”: Closes shop.”12 In 1988, after hearts, flowers, buttera long hiatus, Joe painted flies, religious images, brand a series of wash drawings names, movie stars, cartoon for a collaborative book characters, naked boys. pets, with Elmslie, Sung Sex. The friends, cigarettes, skies, drawings did not come easiand, finally, silence itself. ly—though they look “easy” and casually elegant—and he seemed dissatisfied with them. Like Duchamp, Duparc, Garbo, and Rimbaud, Joe Brainard simply 12 Kenward Elmslie, Bare Bones, Michigan, Bamberger Books, 1995.

Joe Brainard: All Possible Colors

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I remember trying to save money, for a day or two, and quickly losing interest.â&#x20AC;? Joe Brainard, I Remember

JOE BRAINARD’S

GRID B OR, THE MATTER OF COMICS

est known for his autobiographical text I Remember, published between 1970 and 1975, the artist and writer Joe Brainard has recently undergone something of a recovery project.1 Following a 2001 retrospective exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and an accompanying exhibition catalogue, the 2008 volume The Nancy Book collected Brainard’s renditions of the comic strip character Nancy, and in 2012, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard was

published by the Library of America.2 A still underappreciated figure, Joe Brainard was born in 1942 and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He moved to New York City in 1960, where he would become associated with the “second generation” of the New York School, collaborating with his long-time partner Kenward Elmslie, as well as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, among others. Brainard’s output was vast, yet much of Brainard’s work is difficult to categorize—small, mimeographed chapbooks that are mostly illustrations and collages, two issues of a comics anthology, book and 2 See Constance Lewallen, Joe

1 Joe Brainard’s I Remember was

Brainard: A Retrospective (Berkeley:

first published in 1970, and it was

University of California, Berkeley

followed by I Remember More in 1972

Art Museum, 2001); Joe Brainard, The

as well as More I Remember More and

Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio P,

I Remember Christmas in 1973. In

2008); and, Joe Brainard, The Col-

1975, a final version of I Remember

lected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed.

was published that synthesized the

Ron Padgett (New York: Library of

four earlier publications.

America, 2012).

magazine covers, and prose poems.3 Even his visual art is seemingly minor in scale—the largest artwork in The Nancy Book, the drawing Untitled (If Nancy Was a Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci) (1972) measures 10 ¼” x 14”, and Brainard would draw on materials as small as postage stamps. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard makes much of Brainard’s prose and chapbook work available, yet the volume cannot do justice to all that Brainard created, much of which doesn’t collect easily within the pages of a single-author text. The terms of the recent Joe Brainard recovery project, steeped in the personal reminiscence of Brainard’s collaborators and friends, have turned on the intimacy, warmth, 3 In the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University, one can find a rare version of W.H. Auden’s The Platonic Blow published by

and everydayness of Brainard’s prose, often marveling at his own disinterest in the literary and the artistic marketplaces. Following Brainard’s death, at only 52 years of age, from AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994, Edmund White’s remembrance, originally published in 1997 in Art in America, is a good example of the terms and approach commonly used to discuss Brainard: Joe was the only person I’ve ever known that I’d try to talk and act like when I was with him. My imitations were embarrassing and never successful, but the urge to delete all phoniness and really look at the surrounding world with a fresh eye and to shower everyone with generosity was so compelling that by the end of an evening with Joe I was even unconsciously imitating his stutter. Joe’s personal style was certainly hypnotic.4

the Fuck You Press in 1965, which contains a hand-drawn illustration by Brainard; a Joe Brainard illustrated cover on the 1969 music score Four Dialogues for Two Voices and Two Pianos by Ned Rorem and Frank O’Hara; and the proofs for Joe Brainard’s cover for Ted Berrigan’s 1971 long poem Train Ride, along

Brainard’s authenticity, generosity, and ease are motifs that one can find in almost any account of the artist and writer’s work, and today, in a moment when “personal style” can be said to dominate both the memoir-saturated literary

with nearly all of Brainard’s chapbook publications, his magazine C

4 Edmund White, “Joe Brainard,”

Comics, and the various editions of

Arts and Letters (San Francisco:

I Remember.

Cleis P, 2004), 241.

Joe Brainard's Grid

marketplace and the artistas-brand fine art world, it is no surprise that Brainard has been the subject of renewed interest. Moreover, Brainard has been the focus of a recent monograph that aims to situate him within 20th-century poetics, Andy Fitch’s Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard. In Pop Poetics, Fitch approaches Brainard as a poet whose “pop poetics . . . adopts the oft-dismissed lyric subject as site for adventurous explorations of poetic space.”5 By recognizing the ways in which Brainard’s text I Remember functions as an “algorithmic artifice” that is also “a banalized, chatty proselike form,” Fitch argues for Brainard’s status as a unique mediator between confessional and Language poetry, as well as between Pop Art, abstract expressionism, and minimalism. Fitch’s account is a valuable contextualization of Brainard that questions some of the boundaries, period designations, and formal categories in literary studies and art history, and Fitch ultimately finds in Brainard a new lyrical subject articulated through “serial-identity.” Building upon Fitch’s contextualization but moving beyond his focus on the 5 Andy Fitch, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard (Champaign: Dalkey Archive P, 2012), 48.

DANIEL WORDEN

lyric subject, I will argue that Brainard’s work is less about the lyric subject than it is about economic structures that facilitate and mediate the subject in late capitalism. Indeed, in this essay, I will think of and approach Brainard as a writer and artist, or, really, as a comics poet, who engages in anti-capitalist imagining, a negation of value that preserves aesthetics while bypassing the monetized categories of fine art and literature. As Marjorie Perloff noted in a review of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard and The Nancy Book, the recent collections of Brainard’s work continue in the same vein as Edmund White’s personalized reminiscence above: To accompany the volume, moreover, the Library of America has put together a special website where you can hear leading writers from Edmund White to Frank Bidart and Ann Lauterbach providing fond reminiscences of Joe. The reverential tone of these video commentaries reminds one of the ardent response in 1966 to the tragic death of Frank O’Hara, struck by a beach buggy on Fire Island at the age of forty. Like the charismatic older poet—in a 1969 diary, Brainard quipped

“If I have a hero (I do) it is Frank O’Hara”—Brainard seems to have been adored by all who knew him; they can’t say enough about his charm, wit, brilliance, generosity, kindness, modesty, and just plain loveable nature.6 Perloff goes on to note that she is decidedly less adoring of Brainard’s work, and that perhaps Brainard’s intimacy was, in fact, a limitation rather than an invitation, because it limited Brainard’s appeal and relevance to those involved in or interested in the coterie of the New York School. As Perloff remarks about the writings collected by the Library of America, “however charming, funny, and disarmingly frank this narrator could be, there is something missing here: perhaps the larger world beyond the little in-group where feeling is all.” Perloff’s critique can be loosely mapped onto the division that has served as a template for 20th-century poetic history. Oren Izenberg has described this as the “two kinds” approach to poetic history, in which poetry in the twentieth century is divided into a “traditionalist lineage” and

a “paradoxical ‘avant-garde’ tradition.”7 Brainard’s work is, then, perhaps experimental enough in form but lacking in meaning-making to qualify as properly “avant garde,” and its warm, personal content seems to disqualify it almost immediately from consideration as a contribution to late modernism. Like Izenberg, I wish here to argue not for the value of one side over another, or even to claim that Brainard has been a misunderstood modernist or an underappreciated avant-gardist, but instead to read Brainard as representative of a third way of thinking of not just poetry but also aesthetics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Christopher Nealon’s account of poetry’s relations to capital—that poetry can aim to be “fleet and circulatory, like money, or defiantly valueless, money’s opposite”8 —I view Brainard’s work as aiming for the latter option, as using mundane materials—comics, everyday life, casual remembrance—not to elevate them but to defy the 7 Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011), 5-6. 8 Christopher Nealon, The Matter

6 Marjorie Perloff, “I Remember

of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the

Vanilla Pudding,” Times Literary

American Century (Cambridge: Harvard

Supplement (3 August 2011), 10.

UP, 2011), 30.

Joe Brainard's Grid

Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself. New York: Siamese Banana P, 1971.

expectation that art aspires to be valuable. Brainard’s work stands in contrast to the texts and authors analyzed in Michael W. Clune’s American Literature and the Free Market, which imagine a kind of utopian free market, unhinged from material constraints. Instead, and because so much of his work was in the comics medium, Brainard differs from his collaborator Frank O’Hara, for whom “the aesthetic frees economic choice, economic interest, economic agency.”9 Brainard’s work, and especially his work as a comics artist, dwells on valuelessness and materiality, the ephemeral matter that can be thought of as art but that eludes value.

For example, in a stapled, mimeographed book titled Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself, Brainard draws exactly what the title of the book purports: a series of handwritten notes, written on torn, sometimes lined notebook paper. One drawing of a torn piece of lined notebook paper lists “Shine Shoes / Quarters In Bottle / Genet / Cut Out”.10 While the mundane content might seem to give the viewer a glimpse into Brainard’s everyday life, the note is so vague that it tells us nothing, really, about the person who compiled it. The act of drawing the note—from the lines on the notebook paper to the spiral holes and tears at the top and bottom— is careful and precise, yet the drawing, even as a drawing, seems to have no meaning. It is merely a drawing of a note, again revealing nothing about the notetaker. Is “Genet” a reminder to read something? Does “Cut Out” refer to Brainard’s collage 10 Joe Brainard, Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (New York: Si-

9 Michael W. Clune, American Liter-

amese Banana P, 1971). This small

ature and the Free Market, 1945-2000

book is collected in The Collected

(New York: Cambridge UP, 2010), 74.

Writings of Joe Brainard, 255-262.

DANIEL WORDEN

work, or something else entirely? There is no way to even begin to answer these questions given the material in the 8-page chapbook. The seeming transparency or disclosure of the artist’s self, then, runs aground. The note neither captures a moment of everyday life for lyrical reflection, nor does it function as an expressive device. When approached as an artifact, it raises more questions than it answers about everyday life or the note’s author. As a drawing, its precision is in the service of nothing— verisimilitude accomplishes the transcription of a scrap. A line from Brainard’s I Remember encapsulates the lack of content here: “I remember searching for something you know is there, but it isn’t.”11 What Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself makes clear is how Brainard’s work is less a record of Brainard’s own kindness and authenticity, as so much of the current recovery project serves to insist, than it is an abstract mediation of subjectivity itself by aesthetic forms, a mediation that Brainard would often enact in the comics medium. The warmth, kindness, and authenticity so often described as

integral to Brainard’s writing emanates, then, not as what Perloff describes as a surplus of coterie and insider feeling, but instead as a feeling of individual dissolution and valuelessness, a sensibility that I will characterize as stemming from an anti-capitalist aesthetic. The major venue in which Brainard published comics was his short-lived C Comics magazine, which ran only 2 issues, one in 1964, the second in 1965.12 The fact that C Comics only appeared twice is part of a larger trend in Brainard’s life, one that is linked to what I am calling his anti-capitalist aesthetic. Despite a long record of publications and gallery exhibitions, Brainard would stop exhibiting his work and mostly stop making art or writing from 1980 until his untimely death in 1994. This reluctance or even refusal to continue to work is reflected in Brainard’s early work, 12 C Comics was edited and drawn by Joe Brainard, and it was an offshoot of C: A Journal of Poetry, edited by Ted Berrigan. While C Comics ran for only 2 issues in 1964 and 1965, C: A Journal of Poetry ran for 13 issues, from 1963 to 1966, with Andy Warhol contributing a silkscreen cover for issue 4, and Brainard contributing

11 Brainard, I Remember, 125.

covers for 9 issues of the journal.

Joe Brainard's Grid

too, which resists the terms C Comics featured collaboraand modes of valuation in tive comic strips drawn by both literary culture and the Brainard and authored by a art world. As Ann Lauterbach number of the New York School notes, “By the time Joe poets in his circle, including Brainard and I had become John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, good friends, he had virtually Ted Berrigan, Kenward Elmslie, ceased making art. Once, after Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, a day of Christmas shopping, Frank Lima, Frank O’Hara, and we stopped for a drink, and others. Outside of C Comics, I had the temerity to ask Brainard would collaborate on him why. He said, ‘I am not more comics, many of which good enough,’ and then, in a appeared in stapled chapvariant, ‘I don’t have enough books in the 1970s, and some ambition,’ or, maybe, ‘the of which would appear in right kind of ambition.”13 The books like Kenward Elmslie’s slippage here, from talent to Album (1969), Ted Berrigan ambition to the “right kind and Ron Padgett’s Bean Spasms of ambition,” is a glimpse (1967), and Anne Waldman’s No of what I will argue makes Hassles (1971). In terms of Brainard’s work anti-capitalcomics, Brainard is perhaps ist and also what makes his best known for his drawings work seem “minor” when apand paintings of the comic proached from traditional arstrip character Nancy, works tistic or literary standards. that both mock high art conBrainard’s engagement with the ventions, as in If Nancy was mundane, the comic, the sea Painting by De Kooning (1975) rial, the repetitive, and the and If Nancy was Art Nouveau meaningless amounts to art (1972), and engage in a queer that aspires to have no valaesthetic, playing on the word ue, and for Brainard by 1980, “nancy,” as in If Nancy was a could have no value in the Boy (1972) and If Nancy was a context of a neoliberal art Sailor’s Basket (1972).14 These world where “collectors, curadrawings and paintings are tors, and dealers were playing akin to Roy Lichtenstein’s for high stakes in the quixlarge-scale paintings of comotic markets of finance, real ics panels, though Brainard estate, fashion, and fame.” plays with the content of the comic strip rather than 13 Ann Lauterbach, “Joe Brainard & Nancy,” in Joe Brainard, The Nancy

14 These drawings and paintings

Book (Los Angeles: Siglio P, 2008),

are all reproduced in Brainard, The

23.

Nancy Book.

DANIEL WORDEN

If Nancy Was Art Nouveau and If Nancy Was An Ashtray, 1972.

magnify the mechanical, benday dot production of comics. What makes Brainard radically different than Lichtenstein, though, is less Brainard’s humorous play with Nancy than his engagement with comics as an aesthetic form, rather than a form to be appropriated and molded into the format of fine art painting. Indeed, most of Brainard’s Nancy artworks are 9” x 12” in size, conforming to the approximate size of the comic book page rather than blowing up a comics image into a larger format. Unlike Lichtenstein, Brainard is a comics artist, not a painter who uses comics as raw material. C Comics, then, stands out as Brainard’s most concentrated contribution to comics. Moreover, it is a contribution that is not included in the Library of America’s Collected Writings

of Joe Brainard and that is absent from the growing scholarship in comics studies. Indeed, while some of Brainard’s comics have been reprinted in The Nancy Book alongside his drawings and paintings, and while some original copies of C Comics can be purchased for hundreds and even thousands of dollars from rare book dealers, the only way now for a scholar to read C Comics in its entirety is to read it in a collection like the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. What C Comics makes visible is the way in which comics have been integral to twentieth-century aesthetics, though our aesthetic categories in both art history and literary studies have made comics invisible as a determining aesthetic force throughout the twentieth century.

Joe Brainard's Grid

To chart the aesthetics of photography and legitimation comics, it is useful to draw of comics. While photography from another history of aesat once questioned the role thetic legitimation. One of of the artist and the status the major accomplishments of of the original, and also postmodernism has been the ultimately reinforced those legitimation of photography as ideologies in the museum, an aesthetic medium. A process comics have entered the art that began during the early world and literary studies as twentieth century, photograa medium of artistic expresphy’s full incorporation into sivity. Rather than being part the art museum occurred not of the postmodern simulacra, through modernist experimenthe comics and the comics tation but, instead, through artists most celebrated in the the postmodern critique of art museum and in literature the work of art. One way to anthologies today—artists like mark the success of photograArt Spiegelman who write in phy’s incorporation into the the memoir form and whose art art museum is Michael Fried’s bears traces of the artist’s revisionist history of phohand through hand-drawn grids tographic aesthetics, which and expressive lines—reinforce identifies a painterly aesthe importance of the indithetic of absorption in some vidual as the ultimate arbiter contemporary photographers—an of meaning. This legitimation approach to photography that of single-artist, memoiristic is only available after its comics reflects and contribincorporation into the museum. utes to the broader neoliberAs Douglas Crimp noted in 1980, al culture in which we still the art museum as an instilive, where the entrepreneurtution responded to postmodial individual is the ideal ernism by backwards-looking subject. attempts to “recuperate the auratic. These attempts are The reception and legitimizamanifest in two, contradictory tion of comics has progressed pheonomena: the resurgence unevenly over the past two and of expressionist painting a half decades. As Bart Beaty and the triumph of photograhas argued in his analysis of phy-as-art.”15 What matters for MoMA’s 1990 High & Low: Modern our purposes is the difference Art and Popular Culture exhibetween the legitimation of bition, even Pop Art’s use of comics came to connote not an 15 Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic openness to comics as a viActivity of Postmodernism,” (1980). sual arts tradition suitable

DANIEL WORDEN

for the museum, but instead a “low” art nor single-authored, form that could be approprilong-form work, Brainard’s comated by artists: “According ics draw attention not to how to the logic of High and Low, comics can be molded into an the vast bulk of comics hisalready established discourse— tory can only inspire art as not, in other words, because a sort of mutely passive muse; they can be read as novels or it is not art itself.”16 Later approached like paintings—but in the 1990s and 2000s, in to how comics bear their own literary studies, an emphaaesthetic ideology. sis on single-author “graphic novels” has allowed comics Contrary to the focus on the to enter, for example, the virtuosic artist in contemNorton Anthology of American porary comics discourse, part Literature and the pages of of the promise of photography PMLA. Many comics artists during postmodernism was the who produce single-authored, elision of the artist, the long-form works, such as incoherence of originality and Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Art authenticity, and the trouSpiegelman, and Chris Ware bling of the fine art musehave been the subject of um’s curatorial practices. As recent museum exhibitions, Walter Benjamin noted in his shoring up the distinction oft-cited “The Work of Art in between the kinds of comics the Age of its Technological that count as art or literReproducibility,” photography ature, and the reservoir of undoes “aura” and “authencomics that undergirds, a kind ticity” only to present an of raw material for artisillusion of an unmediated tic appropriation. Brainard’s view of the world, “the Blue comics work, published in his Flower in the land of techC Comics or in other literary nology.”17 This curious ontoland artistic venues, poses an ogy is described by Crimp as interesting counter to both shifting in postmodernism, of these modes of addressing into “an aura, only now it is comics. Neither mass-produced 17 Walter Benjamin, The Work of 16 Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art

Art in the Age of its Technological

(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012), 58.

Reproducibility and Other Writings

See also the exhibition catalog,

on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings,

Kirk Varnedde and Adam Gopnik, High

Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin,

& Low: Modern Art and Popular Cul-

trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry

ture (New York: Museum of Modern

Zohn (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008),

Art, 1990).

35.

Joe Brainard's Grid

a function not of presence but of absence, severed from an origin, from an originator, from authenticity.”18 The aura of postmodern photography, then, both confirms and offers an alternative to our mediated relation to experience under postmodernism. If the postmodern promise of the photograph has been its production of presence without the artist and without originality, then comics pose an interesting inversion. Comics have been legitimated in both the art world and literary studies through the most conventional appeals to authorship, authenticity, and the unified work, which has privileged a certain brand of comics art’s emphasis on the hand-drawn, the hand-lettered, and the autobiographical. As I have already begun to suggest, comics that have been incorporated into literary, cultural, and visual studies most robustly—Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan and Building Stories—are bound to each artist’s individual style and even life histories. Postmodernism’s obliteration of narrow modernist categories has been undone, ironically, by the incorporation of a

mass cultural medium into the museum and the literary canon. In the now-established field of comics studies, scholars have begun to question the field’s focus on single-author “graphic novels,” such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus.19 The emphasis on the above texts in comics studies has entailed the misreading of comics as chiefly concerned with representing personal experience and family relations as traumatic, while the medium is clearly not limited to those subjects. To develop a way to analyze Brainard’s comics, and to further develop an account of the matter and medium of comics, I will now turn to a classic essay on modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, an essay that has an important bearing on how comics might be conceptualized as and against the category of art. In “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” Rosalind Krauss demonstrates how modernist painting is premised on a mythological origin point, the grid. The grid’s artificiality 19 See Beaty, Comics Versus Art and Andrew Lowman, “‘That Mouse’s Shadow’: The Canonization of Spiegelman’s Maus.” The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, eds. Paul Williams and

18 Crimp, “The Photographic Activi-

James Lyons (Jackson: UP of Missis-

ty of Postmodernism,” 100.

sippi, 2010), 210-34.

DANIEL WORDEN

and primal structure bears the promise, for the heroic modernist painter, that painting is autonomous and original, not copied from nature but instead the product of the painter’s hand and mind. Yet, of course, as Krauss argues, the opposite applies to the grid, too—the grid is not, can’t be, original, and the grid frustrates imagination: the grid is . . . highly inflexible. Thus just as no one could claim to have invented it, so once one is involved in deploying it the grid is extremely difficult to use in the service of invention. And thus when we examine the careers of those artists who have been most committed to the grid, we could say that from the time they submit themselves to this structure their work virtually ceases to develop and becomes involved, instead, in repetition.20 The grid, then, is both the structure of avant-garde painting and its repressed unoriginality, a structure that is critiqued and liquidated by postmodernism, which, in its embrace of repetition

as/and originality, renders clear modernism’s “fictitious condition.”21 Building on Krauss’s explication of the grid as a mythological origin point for abstract painting, I would like to dwell on the presence of the grid through the twentieth century in the form of the comics page. The “first comic book,” Famous Funnies, was published in 1933 and reprinted newspaper comic strips, and it would be quickly followed by comic books that contained original material, most famously Action Comics #1 in 1938, which featured the first Superman story. The comic books were preceded by a number of comic strips that made use of a large grid, such as George Herriman’s Krazy and Ignatz and Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. These comics often call attention to the grid as a material surface, a kind of medium-specific limitation on which to experiment. The grid connotes not only abstraction or blankness, but also the comics page, conventionally divided into nine or twelve panels of equal size. 21 Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” 66. For a deep history of the grid that traces its function

20 Rosalind Krauss, “The Originali-

as an architectural, textual, and

ty of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern-

visual structure back to 9000 BCE,

ist Repetition,” October 18 (1981),

see Hannah B. Higgins, The Grid Book

56.

(Cambridge: MIT P, 2009).

Joe Brainard's Grid

For Krauss, photography and an inherently mass-produced its reproducibility constitute medium, one that seems to the “repressed” of modernist function along the same logaesthetics, the repetitive ics as film and photography. structure of the purportedly But, despite its mechanical original grid, only to rise reproducibility, the artistic to prominence and be given engagement with the grid and their due in postmodernism. the importance of the line The continuation of this on the comics page bears the dialectical logic can be seen, trace of the artist and artisfor example, in recent work tic intention in the way that by Crimp, Jonathan Flatley, a photograph or a film can and Catherine Zuromskis, who only do through the frame. go even further by shifting attention from the artist While a history of the lonAndy Warhol’s silkscreens to ger intermingling of comics his collaborative factory’s and fine art remains to be production of film and phowritten, my focus here on Joe tographs, moving from the Brainard’s work is meant to individual to the collective.22 seize upon a key moment, both What I wish to demonstrate in terms of aesthetics as such with Brainard is how the grid and in terms of how aesthetas the comics page functions ics function in relation to as a key element and someeconomics. This intersection what paradoxical repository of aesthetics and economics is of personhood in the late encapsulated in a passage from twentieth century: personone of Brainard’s prose pieces hood not as a referent in the about Nancy: “Nancy wanted to representation—its subject— be ‘that’ kind of girl. I at but as a source of intention ‘that’ age didn’t know what I that denies the value of that wanted to be. But I certainsubject. That is, comics allow ly didn’t want to be ‘that.’ for the trace of the artist Nancy did.”23 Brainard engages and author, even as it is a subject/object dichotomy here (“I” versus “that”), one 22 See Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind that on the surface seems to of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol be about conformity and gender. (Cambridge: MIT P, 2012); Jonathan While that valence is certainFlatley, Like: Collecting and Colly present—Brainard doesn’t lectivity, October 132 (2010): 71-98; want to be a “nancy,” and and Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images

23 Joe Brainard, “Nancy,” in The

(Cambridge: MIT P, 2013).

Nancy Book, 67-69.

DANIEL WORDEN

100

growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma can’t be named or seen—and in in the 1950s and early 1960s, the art world of the 1960s and Brainard quite possibly lacked 1970s, comics have no value in other models for homosexual and of themselves. Brainard manhood—the “Nancy” here is seizes upon an aesthetic that also a commodity, a well-known is aesthetic precisely because comics character whose eponyit can’t be pinned down to mous comic strip began in 1938 “that,” to an object. A comic and is still running today. that merely uses Nancy, rather Brainard’s resistance to genthan a painting that approder norms is also a resistance priates Nancy, does not seek to the commodity form—the to elevate its subject matter. confusion of personhood with Instead, as is so often the objecthood, of “I” with “that.” case with Brainard’s Nancy The rejection of type and drawings and paintings, the object, the refusal to inhabit point is to devalue painting, a category recognizable as an to turn painting into a valueeconomic category, resonates less form, by folding painting as a rejection of rational sub- into comics. jectivity itself, which, in the 1960s, is beginning the proBrainard’s comics negate value cess of becoming inextricably by acknowledging the repressed connected to the free market. structure of fine art, thus In Foucault’s lectures on biodemonstrating how art can be politics, he notes that under art without being valuable. neoliberalism, “economic beThis is, ultimately, the work havior is the grid of intelliof Brainard—not the proliferagibility one will adopt on the tion of meaning but the denibehavior of a new individual.”24 al of meaning, the negation Brainard’s resistence to “that” of value. For someone like is precisely a resistance to an Brainard, who uses popular intelligibility that Foucault culture materials (importantly, argues produces the “new indihe does not appropriate them vidual” of “homo œconomicus.” as content but as a medium), Brainard seeks out an unspecithe function of art is less to fied role, a way of being that critique than to stand apart, can’t have value because it to posit a formal existence that cannot be monetized in 24 Michel Foucault, The Birth of either the art or the literary Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège world. This project is even de France, 1978-1979, ed. Michel more crucial today than it was Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell in the 20th century, as fine (New York: Picador, 2008), 252. art has increasingly become,

101

Joe Brainard's Grid

in David Joselit’s phrase, an “international currency” in and of itself.25

Brainard’s signature, adopted character, a striking page features Nancy falling through a comics grid, with a struckTo see the denial of value through word, the not-complete enacted by Brainard’s comword “Pride,” in her word ics, one can look at “Poem,” a balloon, “Of Crazy Pride that collaboration from C Comics Goeth Before a Fall”. Susan Number 2 with poet Frank Lima. Sontag, in her seminal essay A three-page comic, “Poem” does “Against Interpretation,” renot use a grid, but it does marks that film is an importuse thought balloons, a conant art in the late twentieth ventional formal element of century because of its visible comics. The comics’ first page mistakes: “Perhaps the way one is a title page, with a small tells how alive a particular arrow pointing to the title art form is, is by the lati“POEM,” and a large, black ink tude it gives for making misblot. While the arrow lends takes in it, and still being the page a kind of intimate good.”26 In keeping with this, urgency—as if this page had one could argue that comics been annotated by someone who also share this quality, and wished you to notice the text— even a shared geneaology with the ink blot connotes error film.27 The visibility of the and mistake. Though clearly artist’s presence on the page carefully drawn, with smooth through his mistakes is also edges and a uniform interior the visibility of his intentexture, the inkblot is intion. Creeping in through the tentional yet accidental, an mistake, this intentionalierror that makes the artist’s ty presents a vision of the hand visible on the page. artist that is not rigidly structured by self-interest These kinds of “errors” perand monetization, that eschews sist throughout Brainard’s virtuosity and value. comics, which routinely feature crossed-through words 26 Susan Sontag, “Against Interand scribbled out illustrapretation,” Against Interpretation tions. For example, in a page and Other Essays (New York: Picador, from Joe Brainard and Ron 1990), 12. Padgett’s “The Nancy Book,” a long, abstract comic featuring 27 See Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twen25 David Joselit, After Art (Princ-

ty-First-Century Storytelling (Stan-

eton: Princeton UP, 2013), 1.

ford: Stanford UP, 2012).

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The next page of “Poem” features two desk objects, an inkwell and a tape dispenser, both with thought balloons containing the word “Iron” (Figure 4). It is hard to posit any meaning to the thought balloons or the objects. Indeed, it seems as if the tape dispenser and inkwell’s “Iron” thoughts gesture to the impermanence of comics and the comics artist. Iron is more durable than ink and tape, and the tools of the comics artist, the matter of an ephemeral medium, can only dream of permanence. This self-awareness is made coherent in the comic’s final page, which depicts Nancy saying “I have burned down the sky”. The apocalyptic image here, delivered by a silhouetted Nancy, is at once impossible—the sky cannot be “burned down” in any literal way—and also terrifying, the sign of a true apocalypse wherein air becomes solid and all is aflame. Objects becoming conscious, then, leads to the sky burning down. It is both terrifying and impossible, invoking an emotional response yet also complete nonsense. As in his “Poem” with Lima, Brainard’s comics are emblems of negation. “I have burned down the sky.” And, burning

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“Poem” from C Comics No. 2 by Joe Brainard and Frank Lima, 1964.

down the sky, positing something incoherent and impossible, is one way to imagine an art that isn’t a mere critique of capitalism, but an art that stands apart from capitalism. By making a comic about comics’ ephemerality and impossibility as art, Brainard’s comics collaboration with Lima and his work more generally, take comics seriously as an aesthetic medium and, in so doing, find in comics no value that can be monetized, commodified, or even really

Joe Brainard's Grid

translated into either the fine art world or literary culture.

of cowboy fashion and culture in the 1960s and 1970s. But, these elements should not be viewed as tropes that One two-page comic from C Brainard is appropriating or Comics Number 1, “Red Rydler somehow elevating from mass and Dog,” by Frank O’Hara and culture. Instead, like in Joe Brainard is an example Andy Warhol’s film Lonesome of what the grid as comics Cowboys (1968), the Western is, page brings into relief, and indeed, just a Western. When how Brainard’s comics engage “Rex Rydler and Dog” is viewed personhood, sexuality, and as a comic, rather than an genre to foreground economic artistic appropriation of relations. The cowboy protagocomics, three things rise to nist of the comic, Red Rydler, prominence: the overt sexuhas two companions, a dog ality of the narrative, the and a young Native American imposition of the grid as a boy referred to as the “Runt device of interruption, and Indian.” In the comic, Red the dog’s scratched-out face. gets in a confrontation with All three of these elements another cowboy because Red serve to make us aware of the has taken the cowboy’s pants. abstraction at the center of The other cowboy accuses the comics form—the story of Red of having a “pants feRed Rydler the pants fetishtish,” and the two get into ist may be bizarre, but it a brief gunfight, only to be nonetheless can conform to interrupted by Red’s dog and the conventional comics grid. the “Runt Indian.” Remarking The dog’s scratched out face that his dog’s “puss is peserves almost as an element culiar” (the dog’s face has of horror in the strip, the been scrawled out in black intrusion of the artist’s hand ink throughout the two-page onto the codes of the comics comic), Red proposes that he page. And, the interruption take his pet and the Indian of text as it is written in boy to Vegas. On the one hand, panels—sentences continue this comic clearly uses common without any notice from one genre tropes and elements—the panel to the next, providing a iconic mid-century American jarring reading experience for western, the trope of the those accustomed to the comhomosocial bond between the ics page, where sentences are Western hero and his Native usually completed in one word American companion, and balloon—serves to emphasize even the queer connotations the gutters, the space between

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“Red Rydler and Dog” from C Comics No. 1 by Joe Brainard and Frank O’Hara, 1964.

panels that are usually silent indicators of the passage and juxtaposition of different temporal moments. Not only do Brainard and O’Hara produce a comic about comics, they also produce a comic that is a bad comic according to the medium’s conventions of representation and narrative coherence. This essay’s epigraph is taken from Brainard’s best known work, I Remember. Like many comics, I Remember is a serial work—a book-length collection of sentences that all begin with the phrase “I remember.” As the epigraph makes clear, savings is not

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something Brainard was interested in, nor did his efforts result in the accumulation of interest—“I remember trying to save money, for a day or two, and quickly losing interest.”28 This line from I Remember plays on the relation between interest as attention and interest as return on investment. Today, as Thomas Piketty has demonstrated with such success, interest and accumulating returns on investment have given rise to a class of oligarchs and a much larger class of people who have little chance of accumulating 28 Brainard, I Remember, 93.

Joe Brainard's Grid

much of anything.29 Those with the most capital can achieve high returns on investment, while those with little capital receive small, and sometimes even negative, returns on investment. What Brainard’s work enacts is the eschewal of value, and in valuelessness we must find not the possibility to monetize that which is outside of the market or hope for a renewed “interest” on our human capital, but the possibility of there being a space outside of the market that can be inhabited, that can be a home to us all.

29 See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014), esp. 430-67.

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Bernadette Mayer, Poems from 0 to 9.

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MIMEO ARGUMENT

’ve always liked mimeo. If I had the time and money to do it, I’d publish my complete works and the complete works of other poets in plain, finite mimeographed editions for distribution to probably no more than 400 people. Nor would this be a bad thing to do; in fact it would be pretty cool. I don’t like the preciousness of poems on a page—better to blend them in a long series or a longer work, better to superimpose them, better to keep them forever in your back pocket! Although everyone takes pleasure in a beautiful object, even a stone, the accident of what poetry is good is what consequent wrappings (the complete works of Bernadette Mayer $3,000 coffee stains on wrappers) seems both unaccountable and fascinating. I hate the precious-book-buying-business except in the ways that it can help to support poets. To prefer glossiness to modesty, for its own sake, is a step in

the direction of condemning plagiarism, and its friends, obscenity and political freedom. With the proliferation (maybe now easing) of books produced through government grants comes direction from the government that they will/ will not “fund” mimeographed things. Apparently, as far as you can see, the governments prefer the glossy and the bound. (And bookstores seem to deteriorate as rapidly as the remaining mimeographed things in them). Nowadays it’s not strange for small press publishers to accept a poet’s manuscript and take four years to produce it. (Even a magazine will occasionally do that; the forthcoming issue of “Cold Spring Journal’s” been forthcoming for 7 years). The cheaper and slightly more instantaneous reproduction of poetry for those who can use it is not a bourgeoisie value; the craving for a book with a binding is. The people who “actually understand poetry” are, at the very least, the ones who are served by the darling mimeograph, if the mimeographers have the energy. Lasting precious books are one thing—that’s for the jobbers; disseminating po-

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etry in a particular decade is pretty ephemeral. Nor do I mean to agree with Eileen [Myles] that a poet won’t put her best works in mimeograph form, because the very freedom from restrictions and forms of abuse of the author permits a more limitless devotion. I like books in all forms but I think it is strictly NewGrub-Street to advocate the theory in relation to poetry that “money makes money.” There ain’t any real money there, there never was, my dear fame. Without a doubt the better-looking book will rightfully aggrandize the poet but the fancy book never done nothing for the blank poem. (The Newsletter isn’t ratty in its present form but suits the need to write to a large audience about events that aren’t planned a year & a half in advance & you wouldn’t like it if they were). As luck will have it, America and fashion tout binding and lamination right now; mimeograph has a traditional reputation for being for beatniks and desperate Russian writers. But this momentary and urgent dissemination of poetry, which is also full of pleasure, is not the marketplace but a kind of cupbearing for the knowledge and pleasure of poetry. I believe that since the Industrial Revolution western questions of value are sardon-

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ic, if not sarcastic, and that my only resource as a poet in 1982 is to put myself on the side of things which exists at an angle slightly askew to any desire for fame, or even value for the “works”, forget about value as it’s perceived, and take as much pleasure in my life as a poet as desire can construe and hurry to change the world in small performance as others like John Cage have done, since you can’t stop fucking writing anyway.

Mimeo Argument

Bernadette Mayer recording a reading by Elio Schneeman and Rebecca Wright, January 1981.

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A NOTE ON WOMEN AND THE NEW YORK SCHOOL

henever anyone asks what I’m working on these days, I usually say: a book about women and the so-called New York School of poets (and, tangentially, painters). Assuming the person has heard of the New York School, the next comment is usually: great! but who were (or are) they? And thus we arrive at the difficulty—a difficulty that has fueled my interest in the topic ever since I had the chance to work as a research assistant on David Lehman’s book, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, many years ago. Certainly one could

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start with a list of associated figures—a list that would include painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, and Joan Mitchell; the poet Barbara Guest; the poet and playwright V. R. (Bunny) Lang (though she lived most of her short life in Boston); and, perhaps most importantly, “second-generation” writers such as Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Maureen Owen, and many, many others.1 But in the end, my project follows a slightly different path, for I very much want certain 1 As far as the painting goes, some work has been done in recent years to complicate the canon of abstract expressionism—see Ann Eden Gibson’s Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), in which Gibson considers the work of many lesser-known gay and lesbian painters and painters of color who worked in an abstract idiom at mid-century.

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Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan, 1957

questions—questions about the critical urge to consolidate a school (even, or especially, an “avant-garde,” as the New York School is commonly deemed), questions about if and how writing by women can ever be effortlessly slotted into such structures, and so forth—to remain unsettled, and perhaps unsettling. (Hence the and in “women and the New York School” the women are there, but not simply of or in.) Many have noted how, at mid-century, the New York School poets often played the role of “junior and jester” to the macho “monumental severity” of the abstract

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expressionist painters,2 and how this role cannot really be understood without a discussion of the poets’ queerness and camp. But how did women negotiate or figure in this situation? Despite earnest and accurate assessments of abstract expressionism as inhospitable (to put it mildly) to female artists, I worry that the observation (here made by Michael Leja in his recent book Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in 2 I’m paraphrasing Geoff Ward’s Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (New York: Palgrave, 1993, 2001), p. 137.

A Note on Women and the New York School

the 1940s) that “Elaine [de Kooning] and other female Abstract Expressionists were structurally excluded, from the construction of subjectivity embedded in the full experience and production of Abstract Expressionist art”3 can unintentionally serve as an excuse to overlook what the female painters did do, whether they were “structurally excluded” from the terms of the movement or not. Leja rightly observes that “[a] dame with an Abstract Expressionist brush is no less a misfit than a noir heroine with a rod,” but it’s important to note that for female artists, such a predicament marked the beginning of a journey, not the end of one. The first half of my study takes up these issues—the first chapter considers the problem of women and abstraction, via Joan Mitchell’s extraordinary painting career and the deeply abstract poetry of Barbara Guest; the second takes up the flip side, so to speak the investment in detail, contingency, chatter, and dailiness that characterizes much of the writing of New York School men. Together, 3 See Michael Leja, Reframing Ab-

these two chapters call attention to an intriguing inversion that developed in this art scene at mid-century—an inversion that upends the misogynistic equation that figures women as matter and men as form (“matter” indeed derives from the Latin mater, i.e., mother); women as detail and men as generality; women as incapable of abstract art and thought and men as their natural practitioners. In the end, however, the inversion isn’t the point— for, as the literary critic Naomi Schor has pointed out (in her excellent and pertinent book Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, in which she considers the history of the feminization of the detail), “By reversing the terms of the oppositions and the values of hierarchies, we remain, of course, only just barely able to dream a universe where the categories of general and particular, mass and detail, and masculine and feminine would no longer order our thinking and our seeing.4 I agree, and thus try to take Schor’s cue in asking for more than such reversals— in looking for more than just a glimmer of other ways of thinking and seeing.

stract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New

4 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail:

Haven: Yale University Press, 1997),

Aesthetics and the Feminine (New

p. 266.

York: Metheun, 1987), pp. 4-5.

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Though Schor’s book deals with a distinct field of inquiry i.e., French fiction, psychoanalysis, Hegel, Barthes, and so on—her study articulates something that had been unconsciously bothering me for years about the critical veneration of “detail” in New York School writing. When considering the recent theoretical privileging of the detail by Jacques Derrida (and, one might add, by Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, de Man, Habermas, and so on), Schor asks: “Does the triumph of the detail signify a triumph of the feminine with which it has long been linked? Or has the detail achieved new prestige by being taken over by the masculine, triumphing at the very moment when it ceases to be associated with the feminine?”5 Such questions add a new dimension to the critical exaltation of localized detail in O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems, or in Schuyler’s “Things to Do” laundry-list poems. They also bring up all kinds of thorny questions about the relationship between (male) homosexuality and identification with the so-called feminine—a stereotypical and potentially homophobic connection, to be sure, but perhaps one made more so if you buy into the idea that effeminacy 5 Schor, ibid, p. 7.

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is a threat to greatness. (Clearly, I do not.) I don’t think one need be scared off by the question of the nature of the relationship between effeminate signifiers (i.e., use of feminized tropes, queen taste, drag, camp names, etc.) and actual women (as fellow artists and writers, collaborators, muses, predecessors, romantic interests, mothers, protegees, and so on) though such a question may be, in the end, essentially a rhetorical one. By extension, Schor’s questions also remind us that female poets have a historically vexed—indeed over-determined relationship not only to the detail, but also to the personal, the local, and the quotidian. Thus, if many of the revelations and pleasures of New York School writing derive from these spheres, it is also the case that women writing in a New York Schoolinfluenced tradition (whatever that might mean) necessarily have a different set of issues to contend with. In short, the poetry has different pressures on it, and it mutates accordingly. These issues constitute the subject of the second half of my study. As Alice Notley, a writer who has been consistently associated with the so-called “second generation” of the New York School, has

A Note on Women and the New York School

said, “I tried to be [a writer of the personal quotidian] when I was younger, but I’ve been freaked out of my mind since my early twenties so the forms, which seem to require serenity, have never suited me.”6 Eileen Myles, who has been called “the last of the New York School poets,” has expressed a related sentiment: “You just cannot underestimate the massive difference in writing out of female anonymity. It blows all the styles out of the water.”7 So, how did I come to be interested in this topic? When I was growing up in northern California, New York City and its various art scenes really had no place on my radar screen. Any image of my artistic future I had probably involved living in a shack in Bolinas, painting watercolors in a wide-brimmed hat while listening to Joni Mitchell and the gulls. (And who knows? this may still be my future.) But I was always too stressed out, manic, and chatty for the California coast, so I suppose I was unconsciously drawn eastward ... I ended up at college in 6 Email correspondence with the author, 5 February 2002. 7 Myles in Narrativity, Issue 2.

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Connecticut, where, during my senior year, I had the luck to be asked by Lehman to do some research for his book-inprogress in the archives at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. I had never heard of the majority of the people I was investigating, but I immediately found the beautiful (and often hilarious) collages, postcards, letters, and poems exchanged by Bill Berkson, Donald Allen, Kenneth Koch, and many others totally exciting and inspiring. They painted a portrait of a scene that felt oddly familiar to me, one I wanted to know more about. At the same time, I was writing an undergraduate thesis on Plath and Sexton—a feminist reconsideration of the notion of “confessional poetry.” My equal (if not superficially opposite) affinity with the insouciance of a poet like O’Hara and the drama and stringency of a poet like Plath momentarily confused me, but in the years since, I’ve come to accept this combination as natural to my ear and spirit. But my living, off-the-page introduction to the New York School came before that, via Eileen Myles. I saw Myles read in the early Nineties (when she was running her “openly female, write-in campaign” for President); from the moment she

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opened her mouth and started reciting her “I am a Kennedy” monologue that opens the book Not Me (1991), I was sold. Here was a way in, a voice I truly recognized its rhythm, more than anything else—not to mention a living example of how one could be a brilliant and omnivorous performer, writer, feminist, lesbian, activist, aesthetic visionary, and teacher, all at once. My good friend and fellow poet (and fellow Californian-in-exile) Cynthia Nelson had already moved to the East Village and was participating in Myles’s informal poetry workshops, and I soon followed suit. These workshops—taught out of various apartments and lofts around the city—were amazing, especially in their loose construction of a community of people (mostly women, but not all) who were fiercely combining experimental writing practices with personal and political convictions. Myles’s workshops were not populated solely by “poets,” but rather by artists of all kinds. Idiosyncratic genius abounded—and here I’m thinking of the funny and brilliant work of dancer Annie Iobst (of the great downtown duo Dancenoise), screenwriter/ playwright/prose writer Laurie Weeks, video artist Cecilia Dougherty, and artist/boxer

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Nancy Brooks Brody, as well as many, many others. The classes were a constant reminder of the possibility and power of artistic communities that exist apart from any institution—an increasingly rare phenomenon, or so it seems (probably because I went back to school). Those workshops constituted my own personal “New York School,” and I am deeply grateful for them—for the company, and for the example of Eileen’s embodied poetic knowledge (which is by no means limited to the New York School, though she had much to teach in that arena) and of her tireless and fearless spirit. I always liked Alice Notley’s poems whenever I came across them—I liked those nasty little postcard pieces (e.g., “Dear Fuckface”); I was deeply impressed by her long poem “The Prophet”; I loved the speech-music of Margaret and Dusty (1985); and so on. But I’ve been most captivated by the trio of epics that have appeared over the last decade: The Descent of Alette (1996), Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), and the recent Disobedience (2001). Notley has lived in Paris for several years, and her experiments with the “feminine epic” have engaged her in different conversations (not just with

A Note on Women and the New York School

Memory, Bernadette Mayer. 1972.

the well-known epics of Homer and Dante, but also the lesser-known feminine epics she cites as influences: Christine de Pizan’s The City of Ladies, the Sumerian story “The Descent of Inanna,” etc.), so it may not make a lot of sense to keep tethering her work to the New York School per se. At the same time, however, I’m interested in how she combines her epic vision with various New York School traits—most notably, a commitment to humor, and to charting patterns of speech, especially logorrheic speech. Like Myles, Notley has seriously expanded the New York School tradition with which she has been associated.

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Bernadette Mayer has accomplished something similar throughout her career. Mayer has repeatedly dilated dailiness into performative epic, starting with her early multimedia works Memory (1972) and Studying Hunger (1975)—works that evidence her particular rage for inclusivity. As much as I admire Mayer’s shorter lyric works, such as her 1989 collection Sonnets, I remain most compelled by her timebased experiments, such as Midwinter Day—a book-length poem written as a piece on December 22, 1978—and The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters—an epistolary binge composed over a nine-month period in 1979-1980 (i.e., the length of her pregnancy with her son, Max). I love how these two projects situate themselves right on the cusp between literature and performance. Further, the unmanageability and subject matter of a work like The Desires of Mothers insist that we consider the question of “overproduction” so often associated with New York School writing in relation to gender, and specifically to childbirth that we understand how a phobia of “going too far”—of

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writing too much, of wanting too much, of transgressing the proprieties of economic, literary, and/or sexual structures we’ve infused with a particular morality—is often tied up with a paranoia about the voracious desires and the vexing capacities of the female body. Mayer and Notley also differ from their New York School predecessors in that each has worked avidly and persistently from her dreams, perhaps reflecting the fact that both are unwilling to accept or venerate the most obvious plane of reality in front of us as the “real” world. In this sense, their work folds the visionary/imaginative capacities of poetry in with the unpretentious, life-affirming notation of the present moment—its details, its desires, and the sound of whatever social or interior speech happens to be at hand—that continues to make the work of, say, O’Hara and Schuyler so buoyant and seductive. In picking out poems to accompany this essay, I decided to send three pieces from my most recent book, The Latest Winter, and one from my first book, Shiner, in which I feel the New York School influence to be audible, if not somewhat complicated. (In addition to signaling a concern about

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global warming, the title The Latest Winter is meant as a nod to O’Hara, whose first book was titled A City Winter.) Given that I’ve been thinking about the New York School so much as of late, it is probably inevitable that I’ve become a little annoyed by its presence in my work. I think it was Myles who said that much latter-day New York School poetry is decadent beyond belief—or, as she put it in Narrativity, “New York School mimed is worse than academic, it’s like my dad being a mailman coming home with the Ivy League clothes from the Harvard dorms where he had his route.”8 (This comment also introduces the necessary and profound topic of the role played by class differences/class aspirations in literary lineage.) Indeed, some of the persistent tics in New York School-influenced writing—a clubby use of proper names, unquestioned self-mythologizing, a latent tinge of jingoism about NYC and its importance, Ashbery-esque ellipticisms that supposedly signify a subtle, ironized intelligence, but often belie mental laziness—have come to irritate me, both in my own writing and in the work of others. They’re not totally bankrupt devices (“Train 8 Myles, ibid.

A Note on Women and the New York School

to Coney Island,” a sonnet I wrote on the F train and which I have included here, employs many of them), it’s just that you can’t rest on them alone—you can’t stop making and taking your own risks. Obviously everyone’s got to find his or her own way of “going for broke,” as Robert Creeley has put it—of figuring out where one has the most at stake, and working at that point. “Report from the Field” started as a letter to my mother, who was traveling outside the United States on September 11; I was trying to explain to her what had happened. The omnipresent awfulness of the air quality of those days— months, really—kept bringing a line from O’Hara’s great poem “Song” into my head: “you don’t refuse to breathe do you.” Though O’Hara’s context was not quite as dire, his line became a helpful mantra to me, and eventually found its way into my “report.” Though they’re from different books, I see the poem “Subway in March, 5:45 p.m.” in conversation with “Dailies.” “Subway in March” (also written on the train!) happily paraphrases something Mayer once said in a 1988 lecture at the Poetry Project (in a symposium called “The Poetry of Everyday Life”): “I love you and daily

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life, what life isn’t daily? ... what poetry isn’t everyday?” The poem “Dailies,” on the other hand, reflects my current engagement with such issues via the lens of Notley. On the back of Notley’s Disobedience, the blurb says that her book sets out to explore “the despised daily.” I was immediately struck by the stark challenge that this phrase presents, not only to the New York School fetish of the “daily,” but also to the Buddhist-influenced aesthetics of, say, the composer John Cage or the choreographer Deborah Hay. (Hay’s compositions, for example, often stem from meditations on questions such as: “what if where I am is what I need? ... what if now is here is harmony?”9) When I asked Notley about the phrase, she confirmed, “I myself wrote the phrase, despised daily, because . . . I do utterly despise dailiness as it stands. I can’t abide what the world has become, the frozenness of our product this evil thing that we kiss the ass of every hour. I want a dailiness that is free and beautiful.”10 9 See Deborah Hay’s book My Body, the Buddhist (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), p. 104. 10 Email correspondence with the author, 4 February 2002.

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I found (and find) this sentiment provocative, understandable, and troubling. In a sense, then, “Dailies” records that troubling, which also happened to coincide with the disquieting months of fear and grief after 9/11. (The fear and grief persist, of course, though they continue to shapeshift—it didn’t take long for them to get railroaded and/or supplanted by other emotions, such as outrage, but that’s the subject of a different essay.) Lately I’ve come to think of these two attitudes toward “dailiness” not as choices, but as moods—moods which, as Emerson put it, may not believe in each other. Whatever conflict there may be between them interests me, as it points toward a larger question—i.e., how to locate the beauty, freedom, and harmony of one’s present circumstance—how to like what you have, as Gertrude Stein had it while simultaneously working to change conditions and/or structures that one finds deadening, unjust, or despicable (be they internal or external, or both). I have come to see this negotiation as central to a feminist conversation about the New York School, as well as a timeless social challenge.

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It is an aesthetic challenge, too, as much as a personal and political one. At any rate, in closing, I want to thank all those I’ve mentioned above— David Lehman, for introducing me to the topic several years ago, and all the women whose lives and work I’ve learned so much from since. Not only have these women consistently enlarged the notion of what New York School-related art is or can do, but their pivotal, often defiant presence on the scene continues to throw a wrench into the mythmaking procedures of literary and/ or art history, in which the exclusion or simple neglect of women writers and artists remains commonplace.

A Note on Women and the New York School

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Cover for The Sonnets by Joe Brainard, 1964.

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ON THE SONNETS or years now, since the early sixties at least, Ted Berrigan has kept a journal where he probably made notes about the writing of The Sonnets. My memory of those details is hazy. Apparently the first sonnets were written in the winter and spring of 1963.

of coffee and yakking all night and into the next day; hopping in a car, driving to New Orleans, marrying a girl he’d just met, spiriting her away from the Florida mental institution, where her horrified parents had her incarcerated for such an impulsive marriage to such a dubious character, and going on the lam with her to Denver; and finally returning to the City, to a rented room on 113th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam.

Ted was twenty-nine. The previous several years had seen him take up amphetamine; move to New York; become involved with several young women; write his Master’s thesis on George Bernard Shaw; return his M.A. certificate with the note, “Keep this, I am the master of no art”; live on the down and out, mostly by writing papers for students at Columbia, by bumming money from his friends, and by stealing, reading, and reselling the books he could not buy —an incredible number of those; striding at top speed from one movie theater, art gallery, and museum to another; drinking gallons

In this room, with his young wife, his books, his records, his manuscripts, and his pills, he began the sonnets, the first four or five in one night, as I recall; then a chunk of three or four more, then more; and Ted, I believe, had to hold his breath: he was on to something. It was like a dream in which you find a suitcase that is filled with money, each bill a hundred, no! a thousand dollars. You can’t believe your luck and the feeling sweeping over you! Ted seems to have sustained that magic moment throughout the writing of The Sonnets, which took only a few months.

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Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, circa 1963. Photograph by Lorenz Gude.

In a sense, some of The Sonnets had already been written. Many of the lines he used were from previous poems of his, or from translations or mistranslations he’d done. Some were entire poems he had written as far back as the fall of 1961—“Personal Poem #2” became Sonnet LXXVI. Some lines were “lifted” out of poems by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, or from Ted’s immediate friends, such as Dick Gallup, Joe Brainard, and me. It was of course not a

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question of plagiarization—a term that sent us into spasms of laughter—it was a matter of using “found” lines to create an entirely different work, and the intentions were, if I may use such a word here, noble. Ted had a license to operate in this no-holds-barred manner, a license granted by Duchamp, Tzara, Arp, and Ernst (and later, Burroughs); particularly Duchamp, who was like a god to us. The heroic example of Abstract Expressionism

On "The Sonnets"

(especially de Kooning, Pollock, and Hans Hofmann) was constantly before us, with each day big and exciting and “all-over.” And—to help tie it all together —hadn’t Frank O’Hara written a book on Pollock?

had been a few years before. We had become living anthologies of literature, striding, excited and harmlessly obnoxious, through the streets of New York rejoicing!

This does not explain, though, why The Sonnets were writAnyway at that time we didn’t ten —or rather built—when they speak English, we spoke Poetry. were. My guess is that you can Our conversation was studded expand only so far without bewith quotations from the poeting blown to pieces, and that ry we idolized. If a supermarit was time for Ted to consolket were closing, we’d point idate. It is easy to point out and laugh and say, “The acadthe variousness of tones and emy of the hamburger is closinfluences in this work, less ing its doors” (a variation on easy to describe the craftsa John Ashbery line), or we’d manship involved. I say “built” say hello with something such rather than “written” because, as “I see you are wearing your as Ted himself has said severpink Francis Picabia diapers al hundred times, he was usutoday!” (a travesty of Kenneth ing words as though they were Koch). Such psuedo-quotations bricks he placed side by side, ran from these contemporarone course after another, tapies back to Stevens, Pound, ping them into place with his Williams, Rimbaud, Conrad, old typewriter that required Aiken, and others (Shakespeare, a firm wham of the fingers. Homer, Virgil, and Dante). Ray Scissors and Elmer’s glue were Charles, Miguel Aceves Mejia, also essential tools. Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Big Bill Not a single poem in The Broonzy, Eric Darling, our Sonnets conforms to the clasCaedmon records of modern posical definition of the sonetry—especially Stevens’ “Idea net, either Shakespearean or of Order at Key West,”—with Italian, and yet the sense of its sibilance and stateliness the sonnet, the feel of the and mysterious “sacred portals well-crafted “little song,” dimly starred”—and our Oscar hovers behind them all. Ted Williams anthologies, these had written imitations of were literally worn out in a Shakespeare’s sonnets a couple period of several years, as of years before. The changKerouac’s and Ginsberg’s books es he rung on the traditional

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sonnet form, with a good dose of the hypnotic repetition of the lines in pantoum form, are particularly interesting. The line enjambments, the twisting of syntax, the “push-pull” of meaning, the abrupt changes of tone, the dislocation of punctuation, the fading in and out of prosody, the intentional misuse of parts of speech, the aesthetic decisions as to when to accept the results of a chance operation or to discard them —these should not be overlooked in favor of colorful subject matter.

you actually sit down and type them, almost as though you were writing them yourself. A few years later Donald Allen at Grove Press published a new edition of The Sonnets which went through two printings (6,000 copies) and is now out of print. Temporarily, I am sure. Because unlike so many poems Ted and I wrote in the early sixties, and despite moments of sentimentality and self-importance, The Sonnets have held up, because the art is good. They are feminine, they are marvelous, they are tough.

For personal reasons I wasn’t seeing very much of Ted while he was writing The Sonnets, though I lived nearby and had the same friends. But by late spring, when he started “C” Magazine, I was feeling friendlier and by the spring of 1964 he had started publishing “C” books. He edited my first collection and I edited the first edition of The Sonnets, four hundred copies with a beautiful cover by Joe Brainard, to whom the book is dedicated. Actually there was very little editing as such on either side. He produced what I wanted in my book and I produced what he wanted in his. I remember typing the mimeograph stencils and marvelling at the poems and marvelling at how I was seeing them in a way you can’t see them unless

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On "The Sonnets"