age of mimeo

Intro to The Age of Mimeo

[a catalog intro, Spring 1996]

The age of the mimeo book in New York City lasted approximately from the mid-1960s until the xerox machine became widely available in the early 1980s. Weekly readings and workshops brought poets together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church at 10th Street and 2nd Avenue. Some made use of the Project's Gestetner mimeo machine to produce 8-1/2x11" and 8-1/2x14" stapled books, in editions most often ranging from 150-350 copies.
    Larry Fagin ran off his Adventures in Poetry books throughout the 1970s. In 1978-79 he produced the journal Un Poco Loco. Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman produced dozens of Angel Hair books and magazines from 1966 through 1978. Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer began issuing United Artists magazine in 1977 and saw it through seventeen issues to 1983. Warsh continues issuing United Artists books. In the mid-70s a younger generation coalesced around Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley's workshops at The Poetry Project. These poets were represented in small presses like Bob Rosenthal and Rochelle Kraut's Frontward Books, Tom Weigel's Andrea Doria press and Tangerine magazine, Steve Levine and Barbara Barg's Remember I Did This For You/A Power Mad Book, and Greg Masters' Crony Books. Mimeo magazines — like Simon Schuchat's 432 Review (mid-70s), Tom Savage's Gandhabba (mid-80s), and Gary Lenhart, Greg Masters, and Michael Scholnick's Mag City (14 issues from 1976 through 1983) — provided the poetry community centered at the Poetry Project with a focus. The Poetry Project's own Newsletter and World magazine regularly issued from the mimeo. A community was bound together by the need to help in production. Collating parties were a social opportunity as well as a production necessity.
    Heeding Allen Ginsberg's warning in "Howl" to not succumb to the spiritual piracy of mass consumerism, most of these poets made a conscious choice to move away from the fetishistic material excess of post-WWII America. The East Village of Manhattan had been a neighborhood of immigrants and working-class peoples for a hundred years. In the 60s and 70s, rents were low. Artists, musicians, dancers, and poets who were willing to sacrifice middle-class comforts got in exchange the freedom from wage labor this neighborhood provided. The storefront markets — where you'd hear Polish, Ukrainian, and Italian — provided an exotic old world charm, a humane scale that was comfortable. Part-time jobs were sufficient to pay bills. Work a few months, take off a few months. We didn't think about owning cars or homes or accumulating possessions. To live the life of a poet meant experiencing life to its fullest extremes and having as much fun as possible. Rather than save, the priority was to squander for the moment's sensation. It was essential to be out in bars every night. To be doing drugs: speed, LSD, mushrooms, diet pills, cocaine. And of course alcohol.
    Our work was to write poems, give readings, perform in each other's plays. And read voraciously so we'd know how to write better poems and stories. We were on fire with desire: Desire for each other's bodies and for what each of us could tell. Desire to be satiated with sensation and knowledge. Desire to find an identity as an artist. Desire to feed on the essence of a moment's peculiarities, whether gathered drinking coffee and beer listening to a ballgame on the radio or being pounded with rock and roll late at night amidst the twinkling lights or reading Keats solitary. We were clear in our desire to avoid the regularity of a modified life.
    It wasn't just the proliferation of the Xerox copier that ended the age of mimeo. By the mid-80s, the cost of living had risen considerably in New York City. The East Village, which had been an enclave ignored by real estate developers, suddenly found itself a mecca for art galleries. Owing to the Koch administration's refusal to set limits for increases in commercial rents, once the art market bottomed out and the galleries shifted to more conventional neighborhoods or died off, the East Village was left ravaged by greedy developers who had discovered a new exploitable neighborhood. It became harder for young artists to move here. The poets who'd nurtured each other through the preceeding decades, were now older and working full-time to sustain themselves. Many had families and/or had relocated. Some had died and some had burnt out.
    These mimeo books are, for the most part, evidence of a specific poetic community. There's often a casualness in these small books, as if the authors couldn't anticipate an audience larger than the hundred or so they'd hand copies to. Often, the work seems written to entertain and amuse poet friends close at hand. Some of the work is meager in ambition. But most contains at least a modicum of delight, a bemusement with life that comes through in even the quickest, least crafted, most spontaneous language. The poets, moved with a bravura learned from the abstract expressionist painters, threw down words like de Kooning and Pollock flung paint.
    That the work is often tinged with humor and lightheartedness doesn't make it any less serious. Obviously, the poets were making a deliberate break from the dry, academic poetry we'd all been force fed in school. The casual, the conversational, the confessional, the whacky and cartoony, became methods to bring a more direct impression to the reader, to make the poems more accessible, more digestible, more friendly, and more fun. The poems offer an option to the ordinary.