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The new issue of Eco-Poetics journal, nos. 4/5, has a glowing review of my Zephyrus Image bibliography:
Jonathan Skinner reviews Zephyrus Image: A Bibliography by Alastair Johnston. 243 pp. Poltroon Press, 2003
This capstone volume to Alastair Johnston's trilogy of bibliographies covering San Francisco book arts constitutes another handbook. It is worthy alone as a remarkably good read, and a history, largely through first-hand accounts, of the other 1970s Bay Area poetry scene -- one constellated around the figures of Ed Dorn and Tom Raworth, as well as the likes of Joanne Kyger or Jaime Robles, adjuncts all to the shenanigans of Zephyrus Image press, the remarkable, twelve-year collaboration of Holbrook Teter and Michael Myers. But Johnston's documentation (70 pages of the book are the bibliography, the rest of it a narrative of the press and its collaborators) offers an invaluable catalogue raisonnée of situationist tactics, guerilla publishing keyed to politically turbulent times.
Johnston makes the case for the consistent, and consistently playful, political response-abilities of Zephyrus Image, extending far beyond their capacity for fine press work that easily rivaled some of the best productions of Auerhahn or White Rabbit press. Rather, Zephyrus Image put much of its wind into the sails of "stuff that wasn't literature but had to do with a response to an immediate situation" (in Holbrook Teter's words): bumper stickers, posters, merchandise (Gary Snyder Brand Pine-Nuts, Ranch-Raised Gourmet Earwigs), comic books (Dorn's Recollections of Gran Apacheria), survey forms on Presidential outrages, Dick & Pat fly swatters and fans, leaflets, cootie catcher Fortune Tellers protesting the Warm Springs Dam, flipbooks, press passes, Guggenheim Foundation letterhead, postcards, maps, a newspaper (Dorn's Bean News), paper airplanes, IRS tax coupons, Patty Hearst Identi-Kits, a Fireside Book of Gurus . . .
Teter and Myers recycled everyday, found materials: "They sought out junk lots of newspaper cuts, crude 65-line halftone images used to illustrate news items or clearance sales then discarded." Many jobs were done on newsprint or bible papers; Myers's preferred form was the linocut, rapidly etching his line art into linoleum with an X-acto knife. With imagery taken from the junkyard (sparkplugs, radiators, tire wrenches, hubcaps), and the Blakean human form, he assembled Aubrey Beardsley symmetries: "Poster[s] for an urban environment." As Johnston emphasizes, "Their publications were, by design, ephemeral and are now close to being forgotten." What justifies Johnston's painstaking bibliography is the critical and aesthetic brilliance that runs through all these projects, with not a little wit. (Johnston notes that, had Myers, a student of Walter Hamady, chosen a more "permanent" medium, and a more conventional career, "[a]s a technical artist, he might have been compared to M.C. Escher.") Frances Butler points out that a lot of this work essentially "was material criticism or visual criticism which however made a point that crossed over all the ways of knowing: reading and seeing and moving through political structures, as well as simply the literary way of knowing." It was criticism that cut both ways, into the status quo of the right wing as much as that of the hippie counter culture.
This attention to the life (and death) of materials, opens on the border-crossing work of ecopoetics -- with the same kind of dialectical intelligence seen in, say, the work of Robert Smithson or Ian Hamilton Finlay. (Or in the ongoing writing of Tom Raworth; see, also, Thomas Evans's Tolling Elves.)
"Mechanical machines were a great interest," Holbrook noted, "and Michael created many devices, some with a specific use, others with none. Nature, animals, insects, and especially birds were studied, observed, and reproduced." It can feel like a lost world of things, from the standpoint of digital do-it-yourselfdom. Myers was a devotee of Edward Abbey and, with Teter, relentlessly engaged with environmental politics. (His accidental death at the age of 34 is a great loss.) Their first major work, Totem Protectorates (1972), an instigation of attorney Zack R. Stewart, published the assignments of specific endangered plants and animals to each U.S. Senator (called out at Grace Cathedral by Keith Lampe, Mahina Drees, Gary Snyder and Betsy Flack): "The Junior Senator from Indiana, the honorable Birch Bayh, totem protector for the INDIANA BAT." One copy was mailed to each U.S. Senator.
Thanks to Johnston, we have access to this beautiful, smart (if not at times a little smart-alecky) work, not to fetishize the singularity of it, or to engage in hero worship (there are enough cautionary notes built into the account, especially around Teter and Myers's failed experiment at communal living with the Dorns in Healdsburg) but to inspire a similar joining of play with criticism, in our own troubled times. Zephyrus Image: A Bibliography is a catalog of ideas for activating the expanded field of poetics. While the people have changed -- happily, much more exciting publishing is being done by women nowadays -- and while the technology has changed -- radically altering the scope and means of guerilla publishing -- the times, sadly, have changed but little, or perhaps for the worse. (Where would a militant broadside like Myers's "Detonate Sutro Tower" land the renegade printer nowadays?) We are more than ever in need of the kind of application of critical intelligence to fearless, open-field engagement that Zephyrus Image so playfully manifests.
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Update 10 January 2010
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They say let sleeping dogs lie. However I was never known as a cautious or prudent individual. Though 30 years have passed, many of us in the Bay Area poetry scene remember the attack of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets that factionalized the scene in the 1980s. What had been a cozy little circuit of parties and readings suddenly became a political inferno with the wretched Stalinist bullying of self-appointed pundits whose names ended in "-an" --Silliman, Watten, Perelman, Harryman, Hejinian, &c. (The Suffix School) who became a Junior High Clique of Poetics deciding who was "in" and who was decidedly "out." They attacked the academy until they became the academy. While they are currently part of the establishment in American poetics they didn't get there without a fight, and the voice of the counter-insurgency was a mimeo magazine called LIFE OF CRIME, edited by Steve Lavoie & Pat Nolan. Throughout the 1980s LIFE OF CRIME kept up a running commentary on the shenanigans of the poetry world, including the Language Gang's Attempted Assassination of Ted Berrigan, and other scandals. Many people were quick to add their voices to the uproar, including me, and I have to admit it, I am not proud of some of the things I said. A lot of nasty stuff was said in the heat of the moment. Soon the magazine had actual subscribers & letters poured in from all quarters. Contributors included Andrei Codrescu, Tom Clark, Dave Morice, David Benedetti, Keith Abbot, Steve Abbott, Lewis MacAdams, Nanos Valaoritis, and many others. Now Poltroon Press has reprinted the entire text of LIFE OF CRIME. When I had the idea of a facsimile edition, Steve Lavoie objected. He felt that since it had destroyed his own literary reputation why would he want to see it come back again? I persuaded him that he has no friends anyway so what does it matter. Nolan lives far away so no one is going to try to track him down and drop a blazing cross on his front lawn. And me, well, I just can't leave it alone...
After the invective died down the magazine evolved into a decent literary sort of journal with special issues on Ezra Pound and French Surrealist Poetry. And because it happened on the spur of the moment and was mailed out to an ever-changing list, no one, not even the editors, has a complete run, so I felt it was important to preserve it as a piece of literary history. In addition LIFE OF CRIME put on one of the major poetry events of the decade, the On Broadway Benefit show, with readings by Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, Alan Bernheimer, Darrell Gray, Andrei Codrescu (by telephone) & others, and my band Girl Scout Herring performed. In conjunction with the publication, i am going to upload some of these performances to YouTube.
I dropped off copies at Moe's yesterday and already today, local poet Owen Hill has written on facebook: "reading Life of Crime from Poltroon Press--mean tough and funny-- and am wondering if, somewhere in the poetry world, something interesting is happening now. Probably so--I'm just missing it."
Joanne Kyger writes: "What a service to the community to reprint Life of Crime and produce all that communal fuss on blog Silliman and Pajama. I love It! The pictures are some of the best arrows back to the past. I don't think people remember the effrontery showed by the language 'school' with their intellectual self righteousness and humorlessness."
Her reference is to the silliblog, if you have time to wade through all the verbiage. J.J. Phillips (genius author of Mojo Hand) wrote: "Perhaps because you're intimately familiar with the material it seems 'less nasty' to you, but not to me. However, my quibble would be with your use of the word nasty because that implies it's just catty, unwarranted, knee-jerk, sour grapes, whatever; when in truth it is trenchant vitriol, and is, in my estimation, legitimate criticism. Relegating any and all strong, inventive, witty criticism to being nothing but nasty digs, impolite, rude, boorish and so forth is another societal tool of repression! I deplore gratuitous vitriol, 'mean-spirited' 'nasty' digs, when there is no legitimate reason or context. There is both reason and context for what's in Life of Crime." Best of all was discovering the cartoon RON IS RON, which I had not seen before, this is a delight!
Update: 4 February 2010
A couple of interesting posts by John Latta on his blog, about Life of Crime and one that goes off into the meaning of Actualism.
LIFE OF CRIME is 144 pages, a perfectbound paperback, and costs $19.95. There are 30 photos by Maureen Hurley and David Highsmith, plus a preface by Lavoie, and introductory matter by me and Nolan. Available post-free in the US from Poltroon, P.O. Box 5476, Berkeley, CA 94705-0476, and note we do accept PAYPAL for overseas orders. |
