Wallace Berman’s poster designed for the 2ND LOS ANGELES FILM MAKER’S FESTIVAL (Cinema Theatre, February 1963), offset printed from collage and manuscript.
The Silver Cesspool
The first of d.a. levy’s periodicals, five issues of The Silver Cesspool were published between 1963 and 1964. The short-lived periodical was letterpress printed by levy and featured block prints from Lester Czaban Jr., Charlene Levey, Russell Salamon, John Konyecsni, and levy. Contributors over the five issues included Kent Taylor, Russell Atkins, Adelaide Simon, Judson Crews, Kirby Congdon, Will Inman, Ted Berrigan, A. Greenshoot [pseud. Jim Lowell], and others.
The Floating Bear
The subtitle “A Newsletter” is the key to The Floating Bear’s chief contribution to literature of the 1960’s; it was a newsletter, a speedy line of communication between experimental poets. Diane di Prima, in the introduction to the reprint edition of Floating Bear, recalls Charles Olson’s tribute to the magazine: “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, in communication. We got manuscripts from him pretty regularly in the early days of the Bear, and we’d usually get them into the very next issue. That meant that 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.”
Adventures in Poetry
Published between 1968 and 1975, Adventures in Poetry was edited by poet Larry Fagin and printed and assembled at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.
C: A Journal of Poetry
C: A Journal of Poetry first appeared in May of 1963, edited by Ted Berrigan and published by Lorenz Gude. The format borrowed the production example of the recently published one-off magazine, The Censored Review, edited by Ron Padgett. It became an influential showcase for the work of New York School poets and artists — like Berrigan himself, along with Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Dick Gallup, David Shapiro, and others.
Once Series
An eclectic periodical, published coincident with Tom Clark’s Fulbright study and posting as Instructor in American Poetry at the University of Essex. The titles varied but each was denoted “A One Shot Magazine… No Copyright No Nothin.”
Lines
Yugen
Edited by Beat poet LeRoi Jones and Hettie Cohen, Yugen was devoted to “A New Consciousness in the Arts and Letters”. Bringing together the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and the New York School poets of the late 1950s, Yugen took its name from the Japanese aesthetic term meaning “a profound mysterious sense of the beauty of universe … and the sad beauty of human suffering.”
CALL IT BIG TABLE
“Big Table was launched in Spring 1959 following the suppression of the Winter 1958 issue of The Chicago Review. An exposé in the Chicago Daily News revealed editors Irving Rosenthal’s and Paul Carroll’s plans to publish work by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other Beat writers, and the administration quashed the magazine…”
The Spicer Circle’s J
Jack Spicer’s J ran for eight issues: Nos. 1–5 were edited by Spicer in North Beach where contributions were left in a box marked “J” in The Place, a bar on Grant Avenue in San Francisco; Nos. 6 and 7 (an Apparition of the late J) were edited by George Stanley in San Francisco and New York City respectively while no. 8 was edited by Harold Dull in Rome. Spicer believed that poetry was for poets and the magazine had a small circulation but cast a long shadow.