ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

I am going to post eight reviews written a number of years ago and published in now difficult to come by volumes. This post will also form a hubpost to access the other seven when they are all posted.

 Here's the first anyway: 

Mimeo Mimeo 4, Winter 2010, eds. Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger. ISSN 2152-9841.

[This review was the shortest, I think. and was published as ‘Mimeo Memes’ (Mimeo Mimeo), Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 4 (1), March 2012.]

The fourth edition of Mimeo Mimeo – a magazine with an associated blog at 

www.mimeomimeo.blogspot.com [still there, 2026] 

 – celebrates the little magazines and small presses of the British Poetry Revival. Brief editorial matter puts this ‘movement’ in the past tense and one contributor, Ken Edwards, wonders at the temporal limits of this term. It was propagated (though not originated) by Eric Mottram, and he was quite clear: it ended in 1975. (What happened during the last twenty years of his life?) We are subjected to three of Mottram’s letters and one postcard to Jeff Nuttall from mid-period BPR (1966) which Mottram uses to record his experiences of American culture on an exchange year: he is exposed to everything from Sun Ra to youth culture (‘Dylan, Bob not Thomas’, he explains slyly, alluding to Nuttall’s respect for the poetic 1940s). He meets Rothenberg and Blackburn, and others. But his main ire is vented against Ambit magazine back home for its editorial meddling in the publication of Nuttall’s poems.

            Editorial independence is the raison d’etre of small presses, by contrast, and veteran publisher Ken Edwards offers a succinct overview of British poet-led activity such as Gael Turnbull’s Migrant or Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum, presses which took chances and generally didn’t meddle. The nostalgic whiff of browned paper and faint ink, the tear of rusty staples on the palms, is evoked by such bibliographic openheartedness (for those who were around), and the democratic device of the list presents publishers and poets on a level playing field for once. Edwards updates us into an era in which his own Reality Street has lost ‘Editions’ from its title but has gained Print On Demand and the internet (two major printing technologies not otherwise examined here).

            In a generous interview Tom Raworth skips around Outburst, Matrix, Goliard, Cape Goliard and other publishing enterprises he was involved with, reminding us that poets, in order to get publishing to happen, would have to learn to typeset, collect type, etc. The spirit of cooperation between poets and between publishers (often the same people of course) was essential: Piero Heliczer and Asa Benveniste are both mentioned in this respect, along with Raworth’s associate Barry Hall who carried on longer than Raworth running a small press (Goliard) in association with a larger one (Cape) until he could stand the compromise no longer. Hall walked out (literally) on the print room and never returned.

            In another interview, Trevor Winkfield is dragged through the past by the insistent Miles Champion (a discoverer of many a dark corner of our lost publishing legacies), from his early interest in Schwitters (he buys the Stefan Themerson book with pocket money although Gaberbocchus, Themerson’s press, is not commented on further), through to discovering Ashbery and Mathews in London and editing his own magazine Juillard. His off-hand account of giving copies away and his sense that a magazine has a limited life span – it’s over once you’ve published everybody who interests you, the magazine a personal anthology – is a sober reminder of the sheer non-commercial and eclectic nature of some editing.

            The third interview, with poet-publisher (and much more) David Meltzer, opens: ‘What do you want to know?’ It’s a good question. We pass through interesting territory, about listening to recordings of poetry (another story really, Dylan, not Bob, this time). There’s a pitch for Kenneth Patchen’s reputation. There’s one curious comment about small press publishing that sounds as though it ought to be true: ‘There’s always this inverse ratio between a really beautiful book and generally crappy poetry.’ Drop into the archive, as Richard Price does in his piece, and you’ll find that there are very few absolutes like this. Price worries over definitions (and therefore bibliographic exclusions) that he and David Miller devised for an authoritative survey of little magazines, concerning periodicity and the extent of commerciality. Encounter with its CIA funding makes an alarming case study. Despite these concerns there is much wisdom in the piece in reminding us that there is a real history of 1940s and 1960s poetry in magazine archives, and that magazines often achieve posthumous success (and fame) outweighing their contemporary failure. How many of us, while regularly acknowledging the importance of them, have seen a copy of Migrant or early copies of AND (Bob Cobbing’s magazine that managed 11 issues during his long life-time, and one or two posthumous ones, which again raises problems for the inventors of inventories and taxonomies)? Price also reminds us of how editing plays a strong role in subsequent careers, Raworth’s not least of all. Bill Griffiths, more than most, integrated writing and publishing, and Alan Halsey writes of the way some of Griffiths’ works transmogrify between ‘editions’. (I have two copies of his Spook Book with completely different contents!) This kind of playful processual necessity makes for a bibliographic nightmare which Halsey had to live through, co-editing the Reality Street Early Collected Poems, and his account here re-dresses the balance of the loss of the sheer physical trace of Griffiths on the original low-tech booklets and fascicles, in favour of uniform type, in that otherwise wonderful volume.

            Another poet-publisher who appears throughout several accounts is Asa Benveniste of Trigram Press. Indeed, the issue opens with his Kabbalistic poetics essay ‘Language: Enemy, Pursuit,’ (1980) which feels out of place until you realise that ‘the black fire on white Fire’ of letter-press printing is part of his poesis, as he faces the bareness of word, the metaphysics of type, watching all that language falling to pieces, then thrown back together as a page of a book. I returned to Benveniste’s excellent selected poems Throw Out the Life Line Lay Out the Corse (1983) and wondered whether the impaction of the sequence ‘Dense Lens’ derived not just from a reading of Zukofsky but from the experience of typesetting sections of A for Trigram.

            Mimeo Mimeo 4 traces not just a fashionable materiality but (something that could survive the e-book revolution) the extraordinary author-designer-publisher-printer relationship (even if conducted within one person), the means by which books (and occasionally the poems in them) come into being. This extended poesis of the physical medium ultimately leads outwards into communities of readers (elites and wide networks alike) and in doing so makes innovative contemporary poetries signal their very contemporaneity.

Robert Sheppard