A Bolinas View of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery

Over the summer I had the privilege to contribute a series of short essays on James Schuyler and Joanne Kyger to the Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution series curated by Poets House, a project that selects chapbooks from the Poets House poetry library to digitize, “preserving essential, fragile, out-of-print literary work” for new readers. Along with access to the digitized chapbooks, the series provides essays on the chapbook itself, the poet’s biography, and the chapbook press that accompany each selection, as well as a set of selected video and audio recordings related to the poems. Chapbooks by Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Kathleen Fraser, Jerome Rothenberg, and James Schuyler have appeared in the series so far. I was fortunate to contribute the essays on Schuyler’s The Fireproof Floors of Witley Court (1976) and on his biography. Along with the Independent Voices digital archive of small and alternative press magazines, the Poets House series is an excellent example of a curatorial digital humanities project that could be scaled into undergraduate research projects.

The latest installment in the Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution series—just released today—is on Joanne Kyger’s Trip Out & Fall Back published in 1974 by Berkeley-based Arif Press, for which I contributed the main essay on the chapbook. It’s a beautifully designed chapbook with covers and drawings by American artist Gordon Baldwin. As I note in the essay, the poems track Kyger’s trip from her west coast home in Bolinas, California, to New York City and back:

An expansive sense of space and questioning pervade the chapbook. She writes, “I have large dreams of beautiful patterns. // Clouds over Indiana / And we are under them.” Swerving between dreams, loft parties, and spiritual self-reflection, the title Trip Out & Fall Back puns on the geographical notion of trip—inverting the trope of the westward American road trip, as well as referencing other kinds of journeys, such as experiments with psychedelics and spiritual explorations: “So peyote made me very careful of the religious moment, and I knew these times to be timeless.”

As I was writing about Trip Out & Fall Back I became increasingly interested in Gordon Baldwin’s intricate, fantastic architectural drawings—both the two on the covers and the two interior illustrations. Not to be confused with the well-known English studio potter Gordon Baldwin, I immediately recognized the name from Joe Brainard’s Bolinas Journal, another early 1970s poetry-centric travelogue published by yet another California-based small press, Bill Berkson’s Big Sky books. Brainard actually stays in Gordon Baldwin’s Bolinas home in Bolinas Journal, often describing the house and drawing things in it, including a drawing of “Gordon’s Kitchen” and this memorable drawing of the “Nasturiums on Gordon’s Table.” Brainard even includes Baldwin’s phone number in the book, which he writes down in a collage since it’s “unlisted,” noting that’s strange in a small town like Bolinas. Kyger is also a central presence in Bolinas Journal, and Brainard narrates crushes he develops on both Kyger and Baldwin. While Brainard doesn’t appear in Trip Out & Fall Back, Kyger does pay particular attention to Baldwin, describing his charming idiosyncrasies and magnetic character: “Once when he walked into a party / half the room sighed Oh Gordon, like a breeze, oh / wonderful. The other half wanted to be introduced / immediately.” Kyger’s poem certainly dispels any questions about why Brainard finds himself with such a crush on Baldwin in Bolinas Journal, a book that acts as a fitting aesthetic and social companion piece to Trip Out & Fall Back. In a sense, the two books reverse one another’s trajectories, with Brainard leaving New York City for a trip to Bolinas and Kyger leaving Bolinas for a visit to New York City, a setting that is both energetic and uneven for Kyger in Trip Out & Fall Back.

A Bolinas view of the Lower East Side: St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery on the left and Washington Square Park in the center.

While Kyger’s poems don’t include the same kind of journal-like details of what she did during her east coast visit that Brainard catalogs in Bolinas Journal, Baldwin’s drawings of New York City and Boston show an architectural-literary landscape of the cities that give us some sense of Kyger’s (and Baldwin’s) attention to these art- and artist-infused places. For example, Gordon’s drawing on the right below transforms Boston and Cambridge into a three-tiered book shelf with volumes attributed to Massachusetts-based writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, “R. Lowell,” and John Wieners (spelled incorrectly as “Weiners”). The drawing on the left shows a fantastic, almost sci-fi cross-section of the Manhattan landscape complete with a futuristic underground subway elevator that leads commuters directly to the front of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery—the tiered church on the lower left—and tree-lined bridges spanning between skyscrapers above. It’s as if Gordon has magically cut into the island of Manhattan to create The inclusion of St. Mark’s Church, the site of The Poetry Project, and the reference to Wieners, speak to Bolinas’s—and Kyger’s—flexible aesthetic position between the afterlives of New American Poetry, particularly Beat, New York School, Black Mountain, and the San Francisco Renaissance.

Gordon Baldwin’s work desk in his Bolinas home, 1972. Courtesy of “Dreaming As One: Poetry, Poets and Community in Bolinas, California
1967 - 1980” by Kevin Opstedal.

Though Baldwin holds a strong place in the work of Bolinas poets as a friend, crush, and fellow artist, it’s difficult to find information about him and I’m not aware of any other poetry books or chapbooks that include Baldwin’s artwork. It seems that Baldwin won the Rome Prize in 1977-78 from the American Academy in Rome for his architectural drawings and worked as a curator in the department of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from 1984 to 2005. Later bio notes state that Baldwin curated ten photography exhibitions at the Getty Museum, including “Grave Testimony: Photographs of the Civil War” (1992) and “Nadar/Warhol; Paris/New York” (1999). In 2009, he curated a show of portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe that traveled to two museums. Baldwin has also published widely on photography, including the books Looking at Photographs, A Guide to Technical Terms (1991); Roger Fenton: Pasha and Bayadère (1996); In Focus: Eugène Atget (2000); and Gustave Le Gray, 1820–1884 (2002). His latest book, Architecture in Photographs, was published in 2013 by the Getty Museum. Yet another bio on the Fine Art Dealers Association website notes that Baldwin “has also been an actor in a few films, notably appearing in Himself as Herself (1967) directed by Gregory Markopoulos; additionally, he was a member of the Warhol Factory in the 1960s.” The latter fact dramatically hangs there without any further detail. Here is a short video of Baldwin discussing his curation of the Mapplethorpe exhibit in 2011. One only wants to know more about Baldwin and his work, and perhaps how his aesthetic interests branched out from his intimate affiliations with the poets and artists of the New York School. His desk in Bolinas, shown here in 1972, is certainly enviable, to say the least. If you’d like get in touch with him, try the phone number for Baldwin that Brainard lists in Bolinas Journal.

Independent Voices: The Digital Archive that Makes Mimeo (and More) Open Access

The Independent Voices open access digital archive is an indispensable scholarly and pedagogical resource for scholars of 20th century American poetry. Available since May 2018, the digital archive collects 15,401 issues of alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals—amounting to over 465,000 pages—including an astounding litany of poetry magazines associated with the New American Poetry and its many afterlives. Magazines linked to the New York School include Milk Quarterly, Mag City, United Artists, Fire Exit, Un Poco Loco, Harris Review, Talisman, Mother, Strange Faeces, Blue Suede Shoes, Bombay Gin, Clown War, Personal Injury, Telephone, Unnatural Acts, 0-9, the entire run of The World from The Poetry Project, and the incredible East Village Other counter-culture newspaper of the Lower East Side. Though I’ve encountered most of these magazines—many of them mimeographed—in the holdings of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, these digitized versions—often in complete runs—offers a new kind of accessibility to these rare mimeo materials and places them in the larger context of 20th century radical print culture. Paired with encyclopedic mimeo resources like A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 edited by Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips (and the accompanying website) and rogue digital collections like the Fuck You Press Archive at Reality Studio, Independent Voices opens the door to innovative digital humanities scholarship and pedagogy that have always seemed ideal for these complex and ephemeral visual-textual documents.

Of course it’s meaningful to have so many of these rare magazines digitized—but what exactly can we do with them in our scholarship and teaching? One thing that the digitized collection facilitates is the creation of tables of contents for full runs of the publications. For example, building a comprehensive contributor list to a magazine like The World, which was published in 58 issues from 1967 to 2002 and acts as an aesthetic and social history of the culture of The Poetry Project, gives us the ability to see short- and long-term trends, editorial shifts, frequency of contributions, and to analyze the overlaps and outliers in social and literary networks. As a Berrigan scholar, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited the “Index to the Contents of C: A Journal of Poetry” site at Reality Studio. Scholarship on the New American Poetries is often full of references to important magazines like Berrigan’s C or Sanders’s Fuck You, but it is immensely challenging to know who and what was actually published in these magazines. It would take an entire day in a special collections library to index even a brief run of a mimeo magazine—and that’s without reading the actual content, and if you have access to a library with the magazine and if the library has the full run—meaning that even basic information about these publications from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s is still mostly inaccessible. Independent Voices offers an opportunity to change this situation through its advanced search function and the ease of navigation through the digitized copies. When I created Alice Notley’s Magazines: A Digital Publishing Project, compiling a complete index of contributors was the most important step next to facilitating actual access to the magazine. Now that Independent Voices has done the hard (and financially challenging) work of digitizing and applying basic metadata to the archival primary sources, scholars and students can begin to organize and analyze this wealth of material.

This is exactly what some of my Georgia Tech students did in my Spring 2019 ENGL 1102 course “Poetry, Painting, and Film in New York City: 1960-Present.” Inspired by the “Networking the New American Poetry” Digital Danowski project at Emory, first-year mathematics student Alvin Chiu used the Independent Voices complete run of The World to compile a spreadsheet of all the contributors, artists, and editors who appear in the magazine—there are 2,281 separate contributions over 58 issues (!!!)—to create this stunning data visualization of the complete contributor network for The World. As Alvin describes, “The blue nodes are issues, while the yellow nodes are people. There is an edge between them if a person contributed to that specific issue. Note that the larger the node, the more contributors it had (if it is an issue) or the more issues it contributed to (if it is a person). The largest yellow nodes are Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, which is expected considering how much they oversaw the production of The World. The singly-connected nodes are the people that only contributed to one issue, so we see that there is a rather decent amount of regular contributors in comparison.” The visualization is interactive so that a user can click on and drag nodes to more easily identify various smaller networks within the larger history of the magazine.

Using this data, Alvin was able to note that there was a steady decline in regular contributors to The World (regular contributors being writers who were published twice or more being “regular”) over the course of the magazine’s history, suggesting an increasingly larger and more diverse network of publication and distribution across the magazine’s history. At the same time, however, Alvin found that the most frequent contributors to The World were Anne Waldman (in issues 1-20), Alice Notley (in issues 21-30 and 41-50), Bernadette Mayer (in issues 31-40), and Anselm Berrigan (in issues 51-58), revealing the female-led core and closely knit social and familial network of the Second Generation New York School that acts as a consistent aesthetic foundation for the magazine. These observations only just begin to scratch the surface of how to utilize this data. One could do a more in-depth analysis looking at the distribution of gender, race, and sexual orientation among contributors, or add additional layers of information to the data—like whether contributions are poetry, prose, translations, or other genres—to begin to see broad aesthetic and genre-based trends. Any new approach to the data is an important re-animation of the magazine and an opportunity to newly describe the legacies of the mimeograph revolution in American poetry. Needless to say, Alvin’s made a good start on this research. One can imagine an entire class of students working on similar projects, each compiling never-before-accessible contributor lists for all sorts of literary and counter-culture publications. Energized by Alvin’s work, I’m looking forward to building my own set of visualizations for contributors to Berrigan’s C and Notley’s magazines that can accompany the digitized content here on this site.

To encourage further use of Independent Voices, I’ve excerpted some interesting and surprising pages from the magazines I’ve interacted with in the archive so far—both literary magazines and alternative press publications. All of these examples are content I found for the first time using Independent Voices, like the Atlanta-based New Left newspaper The Great Speckled Bird that would be an incredible primary source collection to utilize in an ENGL 1101 or 1102 course. You can learn more about Independent Voices by following @RevealDigital on Twitter.

"The East Village Other Map" from issue 2 of The East Village Other newspaper (Nov. 1965), a geographic litany of Lower East Side aesthetic hotspots for the New York School poets: Peace Eye Bookstore, Gem Spa, Five Spot, Cedar Bar, 8th St. Bookstore, & more

These sets of photographs of the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference by Magdalene Arndt (later Leni Sinclair, the activist and counter-culture photographer) appear in the Detroit-based mimeo magazine WORK, edited by John Sinclair, issue 2 Fall 1965.

Cover of UK-based mimeograph magazine Strange Faeces issue 10, 1972, guest-edited by Andrei Codrescu.

From the alternative Atlanta newspaper The Great Speckled Bird, Vol. 1 No. 5 (May 10-23, 1968) about an April 27 anti-Vietnam “Peace Parade.”