All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s

3. The Aesthetics of the Little

3 The Aesthetics of the Little A little magazine’s only rationale is its editor’s belief that the writers he prints must be presented as a group. Anything else is just a collation of pages. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS “Just the Extension of the Personal(s)”: Magazines in the Lower East Side Poetic Community On the Lower East Side throughout the 1960s, much of the poetry that was read at places including Les Deux Mégots, Le Metro, and the Poetry Project could best be disseminated through the mimeograph magazine and the smallcirculation , low-cost bound magazine. The mimeograph in particular allowed for speedy, cheap reproduction. That speediness lent mimeographed materials an urgency allusive of newspaper “extras.” Mimeos contained breaking news of the poetry world, serving as carriers of fresh and vital information. Diane di Prima recalls that “the last time I saw Charles Olson in Gloucester, one of the things he talked about was how valuable the Bear had been to him in its early years because of the fact that he could get new work out that fast. He was very involved in speed . . . his work, his thoughts, would be in the hands of a few hundred writers within two or three weeks. It was like writing a letter to a bunch of friends.”1 Hettie Jones, Amiri Baraka’s wife at the time, recalls that “Roi and Diane—mostly Diane, who owned the mimeograph— were mailing a sheet called The Floating Bear, its purpose to publish new work faster than the quarterly Yugen. Its frequent appearances were ideal for messages .”2 References to the mimeo’s speed, sociability, and even its political significations are found throughout the correspondence of the poets associ57 ated with the Lower East Side poetic community.3 Exhibiting the growing politicization of many of the poets in response to the Vietnam War, di Prima in 1971 published a note inside the back cover of her militant anarchist poem sequence Revolutionary Letters that read, “This is a free book. These are free poems and may be reprinted anywhere by anyone. . . . Power to the people’s mimeo machines!”4 Poets living on the Lower East Side would take advantage of the mimeo throughout the 1960s, culminating in the Poetry Project’s purchase of a ninehole Gestetner mimeograph machine in 1967. This machine was used by dozens of poet-editors to publish a number of magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s, up to the publication of the mimeo The 11th Street Ruse.5 The Ruse, which began in 1987, is still (theoretically) alive, though as of 2002 the Lower East Side has not seen a copy of this publication, probably owing to the fact that the machine broke down in September 1997.6 Even beyond Dan Saxon’s Poets at Le Metro series, mimeographed magazines (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the more “professional”-looking smallcirculation magazines published in or sympathetic to the Lower East Side community ) were closely tied to the reading scenes. In his manuscript “What’s New?: An Interior Report on the Socio-literary Uses of the Mimeograph Machine ,” Paul Blackburn positioned various magazines as centered at Le Metro: Aside from the Bear, the richness and variation of the current New York scene might be indicated by the fact that F/U (now announcing its Quaker issue , F/Thee), C, Intrepid, Yowl, and Blue Beat, all of differing shades, ranges, and intention, work roughly side-by-side out of the same lower East Side coffee -house, Le Metro, which has had so much trouble recently with the City Fathers. Of the five, C, a journal of poetry edited by Ted Berrigan, is the first mimeo outlet for “The New York School” (Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch, Denby, Elmslie, Schuyler), plus the young people who started it and their friends.7 Such publications served as a kind of metaphorical extended meeting ground for the larger social groupings meeting at Le Metro. Many of the mimeos included community gossip, statements on poetics, “books received” announcements, and announcements of new mimeo publications, as well as poems and correspondence from writers living in other parts of the country. The editors of these publications often commented on the intricate social circumstances of the poets, which tended to emphasize and underscore the very performativity of the poems themselves.8 One might, for example, read a poem in a publication that included other “nonliterary” texts such as reports of a fight at a reading or reflections on a loft...