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LOST & FO U N D 2 01 5 C ATALO G
Kathy Acker
Amiri Baraka
William S. Burroughs
Robert Creeley
Nancy Cunard
Diane di Prima
Edward Dorn
Robert Duncan
Vincent Ferrini
Langston Hughes
Helene Johnson
Pauline Kael
Kenneth Koch
Joanne Kyger
Daphne Marlatt
Lorine Niedecker
Frank O’Hara
Charles Olson
Margaret Randall
Adrienne Rich
Muriel Rukeyser
Michael Rumaker
Jean Sénac
Jack Spicer
Louise Thompson
Philip Whalen
John Wieners
About Lost & Found
Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes original texts
by figures central to and associated with New American Poetry. Poised at the
intersection of scholarly investigation, innovative publishing, and cultural
preservation, each Lost & Found chapbook emphasizes the importance of
collaborative and archival research.
Lost & Found is characterized by its careful attention to the interplay of
poetry, poetics, friendship, and politics. Working in personal and institutional
archives located throughout the country and abroad, Lost & Found editors
illuminate understudied aspects of literary, cultural, and political history.
The research at the heart of Lost & Found is conducted by students and fellows
under the guidance of an extended scholarly community, and supported
by private donors, foundations, and the Center for the Humanities. Lost
& Found is funded in part through the generous support of the National
Endowment for the Arts, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund,
and The Leslie Scalapino – O Books Fund.
About the Center for the Humanities
The Center for the Humanities encourages collaborative and creative work in the humanities
at CUNY and across the city through seminars, conferences, publications and exhibitions.
Free and open to the public, our programs and exhibitions aim to inspire sustained, engaged
conversation and to forge an open and diverse intellectual community.
About the Gradate Center
Each year, these efforts result in the production of a new Lost & Found series
that includes extra-poetic material such as correspondence, journals, and
transcriptions of lectures. Working alongside living writers and their heirs,
the imprint also organizes public programs that promote new, cooperative
models of textual scholarship and publication. In addition, Lost & Found
has joined with select publishers for book length projects emerging from our
research, appearing under the general title Lost & Found Elsewhere.
Lost & Found is available through Small Press Distribution and through our
website at: lostandfoundbooks.org.
The Graduate Center is the principal doctorate-granting institution of The City University of
New York. Offering more than thirty doctoral degrees from Anthropology to Urban Education,
and fostering globally significant research in a wide variety of centers and institutes, the GC
provides rigorous academic training in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Through
its extensive public programs — lectures, conferences, performances, and exhibitions—the
Graduate Center contributes to the intellectual and cultural life of New York City and affirms
its commitment to the premise that knowledge is a public good.
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Lost & Found S eries I
Fall, 2010. 246 pp.
The inaugural Series I maps out seminal
poetic conversations of the 50s-70s, drawing
on correspondence, journals, and essays from
the era. Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara trade
transatlantic confidences even as they create a
poetic lexicon for the emerging New York School
of poetry; Ed Dorn and Amiri Baraka discuss
poetry as political action, while Philip Whalen’s
journals explore his writing and Zen Buddhist
practices, California hikes, and love of jazz. The
set also includes a heretofore unpublished essay
on Darwin by Muriel Rukeyser, who invaluably
articulates a juncture of the scientific and literary
imaginations. It also includes records of the
legendary 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference:
Robert Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry and in-mediasres notes by Daphne Marlatt.
Accompanied by detailed annotations,
introductions, and notes on methodology, this
vivid cross-section of voices and genres starts the
research team of Lost & Found on a journey to
defining, contextualizing, and revitalizing the
poetic tendencies of “New American Poetry.”
Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn:
Selections from the Collected Letters 1959-1960
ed. Claudia Moreno Pisano
34 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters, 1950-1960 presents
the friendship that Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn fostered primarily through
correspondence. Having seen several of Dorn’s poems in various small literary magazines,
Baraka began writing to him with praise and a request for poems for the magazine Yugen,
edited by himself and Hettie Jones. Bonding around their commitment to new and
radical forms of poetry and culture, Baraka and Dorn created an interracial friendship
at precisely the moment when the Civil Rights Movement was becoming a powerful
force in national politics. The major premise of the Dorn-Jones friendship as developed
through their letters was artistic, but the range of subjects in the correspondence shows
an incredible intersection between the personal and the public, providing a schematic
map of what was so vital in postwar American culture to those living through it.
A m i r i Baraka (b. 1934-2014) was a poet, writer, dramatist, and activist born in
Newark, New Jersey. After receiving a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force (the
Error Farce, in his own words), Baraka ventured to Greenwich Village, where he became
active in the bohemian poetry, theater, and music scenes. In 1965, after the death of
Malcolm X, Baraka moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre,
a key part of the Black Arts Movement. He returned to Newark where he continued to
work as a writer and activist until his death in 2014.
E dward D or n (1929-1999) was born in rural Illinois on the verge of the Great
Depression. He studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain in the 1950s. In 1961, then
LeRoi Jones published Dorn’s first book, The Newly Fallen. Over the next four decades,
Dorn taught at universities across the US , and in England and France. He died in Denver,
Colorado, having published over twenty books of poetry and short prose, one novel, and
an anthropological account of the Shoshone Indians.
Claudia Moreno Pisano earned her PhD in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY
where she studied radical American poetics with Ammiel Alcalay. She is an Associate
Professor at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY .
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN
• Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
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Darwin & The Writers: Muriel Rukeyser
ed. Stefania Heim
34 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Darwin and the Writers is an unpublished essay written by Muriel Rukeyser in 1959. An
exercise in the discovery, collection, and exposition of “meeting-places” between scientific
and literary imaginations, it extends the intellectual work Rukeyser started inWillard
Gibbs and The Life of Poetry. An intricate web uncovering passionate influence across
disciplines, Darwin and the Writers is an exemplary instance of her method, in which she
does more than locate debts owed, but excavates linked structures, the building blocks
of innovative thinking pitched on relationships, feeling, and chance.
M U R IE L R U KE YS E R (1913-1980) was the author of 15 collections of poetry beginning
with the Yale Younger Poets prize-winning Theory of Flight (1935). Her wide-ranging
body of work also includes biographies of American physical chemist Willard Gibbs and
English Renaissance explorer and astronomer Thomas Hariot, a musical about Harry
Houdini, a personal exploration of the pagan goat festival Puck Fair, a collection of
lectures about the uses and possibilities of poetry, translations (of Octavio Paz and Gunnar
Ekelöf ), children’s books, film scripts, and criticism.
Stefania Heim completed her PhD at The Graduate Center, C U N Y, writing a
dissertation entitled Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, and the Scholar’s Art.
Author of the poetry collection A Table that Goes on for Miles (Switchback, 2014), her
scholarship and criticism have appeared in The Boston Review, Jacket2, and The Journal of
Narrative Theory. She is a Lecturing Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke
University and a Poetry Editor at The Boston Review.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature,
New York Public Library, New York, N Y
Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections 1957-1977
(Parts I and II)
ed. Brian Unger
Part I: 32 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Part II: 34 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections (Parts I & II) are comprised of entries from Whalen’s
journals from two key periods in his life: the mid to late 1950s following the public
recognition of the Beats, and the early 1970s after his return from Japan and decision to
live in a Zen monastery.
PH ILI P WHA L E N (1923-2002) was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up between
there and The Dalles. He roomed with poets Gary Snyder and Lew Welch at Reed
College. Whalen’s primary goal in his early years as a writer was to become a successful
novelist. He eventually published two novels, but neither brought him the acclaim he had
hoped for, yet he continued writing poetry, journals, lectures, and essays. The complex
and dramatic structuring of his lyric poems earned him respect and reverence in the main
avant-garde poetry communities in the US. His Collected Poems came out posthumously
in 2007. Like Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac and others of his
generation, buddhism was both religious and political praxis for Whalen. He studied art,
literature, buddhism, and classical East Asian culture in Japan for several years in the late
1960s, and was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk in San Francisco in 1973, where he served
as abbot of a small Zen temple during the 1990s. He died on June 26, 2002 surrounded
by poets, friends, and members of the Bay Area buddhist community.
Brian Unger completed his PhD at The Graduate Center, C U N Y , creating an
edition of Philip Whalen’s journals. He studied Zen Buddhism in San Francisco with
Richard Baker, Blanche Hartman, and the poet Norman Fischer. Editor of the journal
Zen Monster, he is Assitant Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico,
Mayagüez.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
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The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference
Robert Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry with selections
from Daphne Marlatt’s Journal Entries
ed. Ammiel Alcalay
40 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Two years prior to the legendary Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, North American
poets gathered in Vancouver, to participate in a three-week summer course organized
by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley through the University of British Columbia.
This landmark event was portrayed in Canadian filmmaker Robert McTavish’s 2013
documentary The Line Has Shattered. Participants included Charles Olson, Margaret
Avison, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg; students
included George Bowering, Clark Coolidge, Fred Wah and poet/novelist Daphne Marlatt,
whose extraordinary class notes are excerpted here with Creeley’s long unavailable talk.
After extensive descriptions of particular writing habits—from paper size to writing
implements—Creeley questions, in this prescient talk, the very notion of how a poem
might be defined in a world where, as he says, ‘all the terms of consciousness have
changed.’ Complemented by editor Ammiel Alcalay’s afterword, this project puts texts
back into conversation with each other.
RO B E RT C R E E L E Y (1926-2005) was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, grew up in
Acton and often wrote of the particular qualities of life there. In 1943, he left Harvard for
duty in Burma and India with the American Field Service. In Creeley’s work—poetry,
prose, criticism, and correspondence—we find as dense a history of American literature
in the second half of the 20th century as in almost any other source one can think of.
DA PH N E M A R L ATT was born in Australia in 1942 after which her family moved to
Malaysia before settling in British Columbia when she was nine years old. Educated both
in Canada and the United States, the poet, novelist, essayist and editor was profoundly
affected by her encounters at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference.
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar, whose recent books include
a little history and the second edition of from the warring factions. Initiator and General
Editor of Lost & Found, he teaches in various fields at Queens College and The Graduate
Center, C U N Y.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• PennSound, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
• Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
• Personal Archives (Ammiel Alcalay, Margaret Randall)
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Daphne Marlatt’s journal entries from the 1963 Vancouver, Poetry Conference
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The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank
O’Hara 1955-1956 (Parts I and II)
ed. Josh Schneiderman
Part I: 38 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Part II: 34 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
These two chapbooks contain the first published edition of a selection of correspondence
between Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara. Written over an eighteen-month period
from 1955 to 1956, these letters provide an account of Koch and O’Hara’s important,
if often overlooked, friendship. Full of poems, literary gossip, and nods to artistic
influences, Koch and O’Hara’s correspondence also chronicles a key moment in what
would come to be known as the New York School of poets: O’Hara’s humorous, deadly
serious skirmish with the critic Harry Roskolenko in the pages of Poetry magazine
and the eventual publication of Koch’s “Fresh Air” in the dissident literary journal
i.e. The Cambridge Review.
K E NN E TH KO C H (1925-2002) earned a PhD from Columbia University in 1959 and
taught English and creative writing there for over forty years, influencing a generation
of poets. He published more than a dozen books of poetry and plays in his lifetime and
achieved fame in the 1970s for Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That
Red?, books on teaching children to write poetry. Koch won the Bollingen Prize in 1995,
and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996.
F R A N K O ’ H A R A (1926-1966) was one of the most influential figures of postwar
American literature. He published two major books in his lifetime, Meditations in an
Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems (1964). His legendary gregariousness and personal
warmth led to relationships with some of the most important American artists of the
1950s, including Willem de Kooning, Mike Goldberg, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and
Joan Mitchell. In the 1950s, O’Hara began working at the front desk of the Museum of
Modern Art and was eventually promoted to assistant curator of painting and sculpture.
His life was tragically cut short.
Lost & Found Series II
Spring, 2011. 322 pp.
Guided by Lost & Found ’s unwritten rule to “follow
the person,” Series I I ’s auspicious journey centers
around the visionary poet Diane di Prima. The two
collectively edited di Prima lectures, The Mysteries of
Vision: Some Notes on H.D. and R.D.’S H.D., are the
heart of Series I I and map out a unique methodological
approach to poetics, offering an overview of lineages
that defined a generation. The transcription of Robert
Duncan’s seminal Olson Memorial Lecture is a tour de
force interpretation of Charles Olson’s “M A X I M U S
F ROM DOGTOWN I ,” and gives a startling view
into the workings of Duncan’s torrential mind. The
immediate political and cultural complexities found in
both poetry communities and the nation as a whole
is explored in the concerns of Muriel Rukeyser’s
writings about the Spanish Civil War. Jack Spicer’s
previously unpublished translation of Beowulf pursues
questions of language and examines the uneasy
balance between the lyric, the elegiac, and the epic.
The unearthed selections from Margaret Randall’s
cutting-edge bilingual Mexico City based quarterly
El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn provide
an important and historical document in the world of
letters by revisiting radical and innovative cross-cultural
ideas that are as relevant today as they were then.
Josh Schneiderman is a PhD candidate in the English program at The Graduate Center,
CUNY . He is writing a dissertation on the poetics of ephemerality in post-1945 American
poetry and art, and has contributed archival material for a 50th anniversary edition of
Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature,
New York Public Library, New York, N Y
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“Barce lona , 1936” & Selections from
Mu ri el Rukeyser’s Spani sh Civil War A rchive
ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
32 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
“Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive combines a few of the
many works the American poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser wrote about her
experience during the first days of the Spanish Civil War, a subject she would write
about for over forty years. These early works—a first-hand account written for Life and
Letters Today that documents the fascist coup in Catalonia and the disruption of the
People’s Olympics that Rukeyser was originally sent to report on, and an unpublished
poem—along with ephemera from her trip, illuminate Rukeyser’s political and artistic
foundations, as well as giving us new narratives of women’s participation in the artistic
and political networks of the era.
Di a ne d i P r i ma : R.D.’s H.D.
ed. Ammiel Alcalay
42 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Originally delivered in 1989 as part of a series of events commemorating the life and work
of Robert Duncan, R.D.’s H.D., published here for the first time, is an extraordinarily
moving homage to a dear friend and deep influence, as well as an illustration of di
Prima’s unique methodological approach to poetics. In publishing di Prima’s lectures,
Lost & Found makes available essential work that has been inaccessible but forms a
bedrock component of that unique combination of research and poetics characterizing
the thought of North American poetry in the 20th, and now 21st centuries. Diane di
Prima’s position in this realm is almost unique—as heir and participant to what has
been most important and vibrant in our culture during the period following the Second
World War, she has insisted on living with her work as record, document, and palimpsest,
without rushing to either institutionalize or codify it.
M U R IE L R U K E YS E R (1913-1980) was a prolific American poet whose work engaged
and influenced the political and literary movements of the 20th century. She published
more than a dozen volumes of poetry, winning the major awards in her field, as well as
works of biography, fiction, theory and journalism, including the critical masterpiece The
Life of Poetry and the newly recovered Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast.
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is the editor of Muriel Rukeyser’s novel Savage Coast, a Lost
& Found Elsewhere book published by the Feminist Press. Her scholarship and writing
have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, The Journal of Narrative Theory, The Paris
Review Daily and Harper’s blog, among others. She received her PhD in English from
The Graduate Center, CUNY, and is Lecturer in English (Gender and Women’s Writing)
at the University of Bristol, UK .
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D C
D I A N E D I P R I M A is one of a handful of poets left whose work, experiences, and
friendships span the full range of what has been most vital in post Second World War
North American literature, yet her place in our literary and cultural history has barely
begun to be delineated. She is the author of more than 40 books, including This Kind
of Bird Flies Backwards, Loba, Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems, Dinners and Nightmares,
Memoirs of a Beatnik, and Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. Cofounder of The Floating Bear, Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre, she was one of
the core faculty in the Poetics Program at New College. She has been Poet Laureate of
San Francisco and continues to live there.
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar, whose recent books include a
little history and the second edition of from the warring factions. Initiator and General
Editor of Lost & Found, he teaches in various fields at Queens College and The Graduate
Center, CUNY .
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Personal Archives (Diane di Prima, Duncan McNaughton, Aaron Shurin)
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Diane di Prima: The Mysteries of Vision:
Some Notes on H.D.
From El Corno Emplumado/ The Plumed Horn:
Selections
ed. Ana Božičević
44 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
ed. Margaret Randall
46 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Diane di Prima wrote The Mysteries of Vision: Some Notes on H. D. in response to a
colleague’s request that she speak on H. D. and Hermetic Definition to students, mostly
poets, in the New College Poetics Program in San Francisco. She charts H.D.’s poetic/
personal mythology, and the influence of the poet’s visionary work on the tropes and
structures of her poetry, in this precious and direct address of one great seer to another.
The lecture is available here for the first time, fully annotated by Ana Boˇziˇcevi´c in
collaboration with the author.
From January, 1962, through July, 1969, El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn was on
the cutting edge of independent publishing. Based in Mexico City, the bilingual quarterly,
which ran from 100 to almost 300 pages per issue, published some of the best new work to
come out of Latin and North America—with occasional sections from Canada, Finland,
France, and other countries. Its 3,000 copies were distributed worldwide. The journal
was founded and co-edited by Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon. In its last year
Robert Cohen replaced Mondragon on the masthead. Because it took a stand in defense
of Mexico’s 1968 Student Movement, in mid-1969 the journal was forced to close. It had
published 31 issues and a dozen books. This volume offers a unique selection of work
from the legendary journal.
D I A N E D I P R I M A is one of a handful of poets left whose work, experiences, and
friendships span the full range of what has been most vital in post Second World War
North American literature, yet her place in our literary and cultural history has barely
begun to be delineated. She is the author of more than 40 books, including This Kind
of Bird Flies Backwards, Loba, Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems, Dinners and Nightmares,
Memoirs of a Beatnik, and Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.
Co-founder of The Floating Bear, Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre, she was one
of the core faculty in the Poetics Program at New College. She has been Poet Laureate of
San Francisco and continues to live there.
Ana Božičević is a poet, translator, new media artist, and the author of poetry books Stars
of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009) and Rise in the Fall (Birds L LC , 2013),
winner of a 2014 Lambda Award. She studies English at The Graduate Center, CUNY ,
where her research is in poetics, medievalism and psychoanalysis.
M argare t Randa ll (b. 1936) is a poet, essayist, photographer and social activist
born in New York. Long an expatriate, she lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua before
eventually returning to the US following a long legal battle to reinstate her citizenship.
Subject of a documentary film and winner of many awards, Randall’s writing spans a
broad range. In addition to poetry, essays, and memoirs, she has written extensively on
women’s issues. Her books include Cuban Women Now; Sandino’s Daughters, and When I
Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror and Resistance. She lives in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Fales Library, New York University, New York, NY
• Personal Archive (Margaret Randall)
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Personal Archives (Diane di Prima)
EL CORNO 11, JULY 1964
El Corno #11 appeared in July of 1964 with a large selection of new poetry from
Venezuela. Other contributors included Barbara Moraff, Robert Creeley, Louis
Zukofsky, and Rochelle Owens. By now there is a long list of representatives
in several dozen countries; the journal has found its way around the world and
we were receiving at least 100 submissions weekly. In this issue we also featured
poems by César Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet who has been so difficult to
translate successfully into English but has had such a lasting influence on Spanish
language poetry.
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Jack Spicer’s Translation of Beowulf:
Selections, Part I and II
eds. David Hadbawnik and Sean Reynolds
Part 1: 48 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Part 2: 46 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
In the final years of his graduate studies at UC Berkeley (1948-1950), Jack Spicer
apprenticed in Old English and Germanic linguistics under the renowned scholar Arthur
Brodeur. Prompted by his professor, Spicer, along with fellow Berkeley Renaissance poet
Robin Blaser, set to translating the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. Recently discovered in
a handwritten, interlinear version amongst the poet’s notebooks, Spicer’s translation is
now available for the first time in substantial selections comprising two volumes. Spicer’s
Beowulf offers insight into the textual and scholarly origins of his lifelong interest in
Apocrypha and seriality as well as his later insistence upon receiving poetic dictations
from “spooks.” These two volumes tell us the story not only of monsters and a Geat, but
also of the line-by-line struggles of a modern American poet learning the “low ghosts”
of the English language.
JAC K S P I C E R (1925-1965) was born in Los Angeles into a Calvinist home with
Midwestern parents. While attending UC Berkeley in 1946 he met fellow students
and poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, with whom he would form the “Berkeley
Renaissance.” Though he was a leading figure within the San Francisco poetry scene in
the 50s and early 60s, Spicer’s restriction of the circulation of his work guaranteed that
he would remain a largely obscure poet up until his death at the age of 40.
David Hadbawnik is a poet and performer currently living with his wife in Buffalo,
New York. Recent publications include Translations From Creeley, Ovid in Exile, and SF
Spleen. Editor and publisher of Habenicht Press and the journal kadar koli, he began
studying towards his PhD at SUNY Buffalo in 2008, where he is involved in the Poetics
Program, with an emphasis on medieval studies, and directs the Buffalo Poets Theater.
C har l es Ol so n M emor i a l Lec tu re : Robert Dun ca n
eds. erica kaufman, Meira Levinson, Bradley Lubin, Megan Paslawski, Kyle Waugh,
Rachael Wilson, and Ammiel Alcalay
64 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
In the late 1970s, Robert Creeley, then holder of the Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters
at the State University of New York, Buffalo, established the Charles Olson Memorial
Lectures. The first person invited to deliver a series of three lectures, accompanied by a
reading of their work, was poet Robert Duncan who, along with Creeley and Olson,
formed a crucial nexus of poetics, thought, and pedagogy at Black Mountain College
in the 1950s. Duncan’s bravura performance is captured in a literal transcript, scored in
the margin at each two-minute mark so readers can follow the audio source, available
on Penn Sound. This unique presentation, along with extensive notes and a collective
introduction by Lost & Found members, presents Duncan as close to live and in action
as possible, complementing Lisa Jarnot’s biography, Christopher Wagstaff ’s Collected
Interviews, Michael Rumaker’s memoir of Duncan, and the Collected Works under the
general editorship of Peter Quartermain.
ROB E RT DUN CA N (1919-1988) was a major 20th c. poet whose influence was deep
and pervasive. The web of associations—familial and cultural—that he was born into and
chose to pursue, cannot be recounted simply. His landmark 1944 essay, “The Homosexual
in Society,” and life-long relationship to painter Jess Collins, presented a new model for
living, while his interpretation of modernism through women writers and association
with major figures like Olson, Creeley, Spicer, and di Prima, remain topics yet to be
fully explored.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• PennSound, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
• The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo Libraries Special Collection, University
at Buffalo, S UNY , Buffalo, NY
Sean Reynolds is a doctoral candidate in English (poetics) at SUNY Buffalo. With
Robert Dewhurst, he co-edits the annual critical journal Wild Orchids.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Jack Spicer Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
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Lost & Found S eries III
Edward Dorn: The Olson Memorial Lectures
Spring, 2012. 515 pp.
ed. Lindsey M. Freer
59 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Series I I I of Lost & Found authenticates Edward
Dahlberg’s claim that “There is more political energy
in friendship than in ideology.” Working in zones of
astonishing connectedness, charged by each other’s
energy, and changed by encounters with converging
sociopolitical and artistic movements, the writers in
this series include: Langston Hughes and Nancy
Cunard, who cement their personal relationship by
penning notes across the ocean throughout the Spanish
Civil War, and John Wieners and Charles Olson,
who, after meeting at Black Mountain, remain in close
correspondence until months before Olson’s death.
In “Old Father, Old Artificer,” part lecture and part
evocation of Charles Olson, Diane di Prima helps to
establish how key figures in “New American Poetry”
were processing their own past, while the breathless
Olson lecture by Ed Dorn erodes the fictive dualism
that pits poetic theory against practical action. In his
letters, Michael Rumaker invites you to share his life,
its radiant pursuit of love, “dirty realism,” literature,
and lasting community, and Joanne Kyger booms
“communication is essential” in her Letters to & from.
Lastly, in Homemade Poems, a gift-book mailed to a
friend in 1964, Lorine Niedecker clearly insists that
the handmade chapbook is the material continuation of
the poems so carefully nestled in its pages. Breaking up
the monolith of the historical lens, Series III continues
to track individuals as they tell their stories, cast their
lifelines, and position themselves in relation to the
times they lived in—and the times we live in—through
intimate journals, letters, lectures, and friendships.
The Charles Olson Memorial Lectures, a feature of life at S U N Y Buffalo in the 1980s,
were given each year by a single distinguished poet, who came to the university to share
his or her thoughts on poetics, Olsonian and otherwise, with an engaged audience. This
pamphlet transcribes and presents two of Edward Dorn’s three Olson Memorial Lectures,
given in the early spring of 1981. Over the course of these wide-ranging talks, Dorn takes
on his own relationship to Olson’s poetic practice, as well as the shift toward conservatism
in American culture in the early years of
the decade. Drawing upon Olson’s final
lectures, letters and field reports from
friends, and his own recent writings, Dorn
uses these talks to synthesize a new set of
interpretive tools for poets working within
the scope of the totalizing gaze of Reagan’s
America.
E dward D or n (1929-1999) was born
in rural Illinois on the verge of the Great
Depression. He studied with Charles
Olson at Black Mountain in the 1950s. In
1961, then LeRoi Jones published Dorn’s
first book, The Newly Fallen. Over the next
four decades, Dorn taught at universities
across the US , and in England and France.
He died in Denver, Colorado, having published over twenty books of poetry and short
prose, one novel, and an anthropological account of the Shoshone Indians.
Lindsey M. Freer is a PhD candidate in English at The Graduate Center,
C U N Y . She has taught American literature and history at the Fashion Institute of
Technology, been a senior fellow in instructional technology at C U N Y ’s Macaulay
Honors College, and is now Program Manager, Academic Extension, at the University
of Oregon, Eugene.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• PennSound, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
• Edward Dorn Papers, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut,
Storrs, CT


Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson:
Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War
ed. Anne Donlon
58 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
This volume collects Langston Hughes’ correspondence with Nancy Cunard and Louise
Thompson during the Spanish Civil War. Cunard, a British poet, journalist, editor,
and activist, was in Spain within a month of Franco’s coup, reporting on the war and
organizing poetry collections. The African American organizer Louise Thompson
also traveled to Spain during the war. Returning to the US , she undertook a speaking
tour to raise funds for Spain, and finalize the publication of Hughes’ collection A New
Song. Cunard’s and Thompson’s letters with Hughes demonstrate the relationships
and international networks that facilitated political action and the life of poetry
during the war. The collection also features unpublished and uncollected poems by
Hughes, including “A Note from Spain,” a poem from the series of epistolary “Johnny”
poems, and “Mother and Child,” an undated poem by Hughes that narrates an
aerial bombing.
La n gsto n H u ghes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in
Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. In the 1920s, he gained a reputation as a poet, becoming
a leading figure in what he called in his first autobiography “the black renaissance.” A
prolific poet, prose-writer, and playwright, he served as an example to several generations
of African American writers, always lending his support to younger people and new
movements in the arts. From 1932-1933, Hughes traveled in the Soviet Union, spending
much of his time in Central Asia and returning to the US with several notebooks,
hundreds of photographs, and clippings of poems from the Central Asian writers he met
there. This trip, along with his work in Spain on behalf of the Republic, formed major
episodes in Hughes’ public political engagement. While popular and known throughout
the world, Hughes faced backlash at home. A major 20th c. cultural figure, he passed
away in Harlem on May 22, 1967.
Na n cy C u n ard (1896-1965) was a British poet, journalist, editor, and activist
involved in European modernism and surrealism who became committed to African
diasporic culture and emancipatory politics. Author of many different works, her
anthology Negro (1934) compiled a wide range of writing on the art and politics of Africa,
the Caribbean, and the Americas.
Louise Thompson Patterson (1909-1999) was born in Chicago and grew up
Langston Hughes and Nancy Cunard, Paris 1938, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library
Hughes in 1938; she helped found the Civil Rights Congress, and formed the black
women’s organization Sojourners for Truth and Justice in the 1950s.
Anne Donlon is a PhD candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, with a
certificate in American Studies. Her dissertation, Archives of Transnational Modernism:
Tracing Networks of Writing and Activism, 1919-1945, recovers histories of collaborations
that brought African-American authors and British women into contact. She is a CLIR
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Manuscript and Rare Book Library, Emory Center for Digital
Scholarship, Emory University.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT
• Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Austin, T X
• Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, G A
in California where she graduated summa cum laude from Berkeley in 1923. A prominent
figure on the American Left, she co-founded the Harlem Suitcase Theater with Langston


Mi chae l Ru maker :
Selected Letters
“Old Father, Old Artificer”
ed. Megan Paslawski
67 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
56 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
This selection of letters from Michael Rumaker
to such friends as Don Allen, Joanne Kyger,
and Robert Duncan provides a window into
the remarkable life that he devoted to writing
and human liberation, aspirations that his
words prove to be symbiotic. These letters detail
Rumaker’s education at Black Mountain
College under Charles Olson, his struggle with
the depressive and repressive forces of the 1950s,
and a life-giving engagement with gay activism
that continues to this day. Michael Rumaker’s letters add nuance to our understanding
of marginalized history, depth to a contemporary understanding of social progress, and
further examples of the prose that makes his books such as Gringos and Other Stories, The
Butterfly, and A Day and A Night at the Baths so significant to stylists.
M I C H A E L R U M A K E R was born in Philadelphia and educated at Black Mountain
College and Columbia University. He taught writing at The New School and City
College, C U N Y . Pagan Days, a veiled account of his life, is one of his many books that
provides a more interesting biography than any blurb could, while Gringos and Other
Stories remains a classic of New American Prose. Black Mountain Days, To Kill a Cardinal,
My First Satyrnalia, and A Day and A Night at the Baths, have all been reprinted by
Spuyten Duyvil Press.
Megan Paslawski is a doctoral candidate in the English program at The Graduate
Center, C U N Y . Like Michael Rumaker, she was born in Philadelphia and also holds
a graduate degree in creative writing, though hers is from Trinity College, Dublin. In
addition to editing this collection of letters, she and Ammiel Alcalay co-edited Rumaker’s
Robert Duncan in San Francisco, a Lost & Found Elsewhere book published by City Lights.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

eds. Ana Božičević & Ammiel Alcalay
In March of 1985, Diane di Prima traveled to Buffalo, New York, to give the Charles Olson
Memorial Lectures, a series instituted by Robert Creeley in 1979. This volume presents the
first of three lectures, edited by di Prima with reference to journals and notebooks of the
period. An evocation of and a conversation with Charles Olson and his theoretical and
poetic legacy, Old Father, Old Artificer chronicles the poets’ friendship; the books they
shared; their shifting geographies—on trajectories from New York to Gloucester and the
West Coast; encounters with John Wieners, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, and other
friends in life and art; as well as views on poetry, history, and mythology. This animated,
haunting timeline clears the ground for di Prima’s second lecture, a structural analysis
of Olson’s Maximus, and the third, which offers an even broader view of this seminal
thinker’s poetics and vision.
D I A N E D I P R I M A is one of a handful of poets left whose work, experiences, and
friendships span the full range of what has been most vital in post Second World War
North American literature, yet her place in our literary and cultural history has barely
begun to be delineated. She is the author of more than 40 books, including This Kind
of Bird Flies Backwards, Loba, Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems, Dinners and Nightmares,
Memoirs of a Beatnik, and Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. Cofounder of The Floating Bear, Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre, she was one of
the core faculty in the Poetics Program at New College. She has been Poet Laureate of
San Francisco and continues to live there.
Ana Božičević is a poet, translator, new media artist, and the author of poetry books
Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009) and Rise in the Fall (Birds LLC ,
2013), winner of a 2014 Lambda Award. She studies English at The Graduate Center,
CUNY where her research is in poetics, medievalism and psychoanalysis.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Personal Archives (Diane di Prima)
• The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo Libraries Special Collection, University
at Buffalo, S UNY , Buffalo, NY

Joanne Kyger:
Letters To & From
John Wieners & Charles Olson:
Selected Correspondence, Parts I and II
eds. Ammiel Alcalay & Joanne Kyger
ed. Michael Seth Stewart
Part 1 : 63 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Part 2: 61 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
66 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
“All these letters reveal a ‘cast of characters’ that
‘appear and disappear,’ exchanging news of their
lives and loves from their Black Mountain days of
1955 onward, through San Francisco, New York
City, Boston, Buffalo…”—Joanne Kyger
In this project, editor and author embark upon a
journey of discovery, back into a formative time,
the late 1950s and early 60s, when Kyger forged
John Wieners and Joanne Kyger, photograph deep friendships with her contemporaries, all
by Jerome Mallmann.
engaged in similar struggles to come to their own
forms of expression. In this juxtaposition of letters
to and between Joanne Kyger and her friends novelist Michael Rumaker, and poets John
Wieners and George Stanley, we are given rare insight into the formation of an artistic
community. Amidst literary gossip, there is striking tenderness woven into their letters, a
sense of common cause, and an unswerving allegiance to the work of writing and what it
might yield in a world largely gone mad and detached from sources of its own sustenance.
Along with other projects in Series I I I , these letters create a prism of personal, poetic,
and political documentary, charting an intimate and intricate history that remains largely
unwritten outside the very materials presented.
JOA NN E KYG E R (b. 1934) was born in California. In 1957, she settled in North Beach
to pursue an apprenticeship in poetry with the circle around Jack Spicer. Author of more
than twenty books, Kyger has taught frequently at the now defunct Poetics Program at
New College in San Francisco and at Naropa University. She continues to live in Bolinas,
California, where she is a resource and inspiration to poets of many generations.
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar, whose recent books include
a little history and the second edition of from the warring factions. Initiator and General
Editor of Lost & Found, he teaches in various fields at Queens College and The Graduate
Center, C U N Y .
In 1955, the 21-year-old “would-be poet” John Wieners wrote to the struggling Black
Mountain College, asking to be admitted so that he could study with the great Charles
Olson. He received a telegram right away offering him a loan to cover tuition, room,
and board, beginning a powerful relationship that would last until Olson’s death fifteen
years later. This two-volume set of their correspondence, “the sea under the house,” allows
us to follow this relationship from its mentor/student origins through the vicissitudes
of their friendship, one that shaped both men irrevocably. “Art is more than a matter of
natural idiosyncrasy,” Wieners wrote in one elegy for his friend, in 1972. “You were the
goddamnest biggest meteor to crash across these skies.”
J OH N W I E N E RS (1934-2002) was an American poet born to blue-collar parents in
Boston. After his two terms at Black Mountain, Wieners moved to San Francisco, where
he wrote his breakthrough book, The Hotel Wentley Poems. After stints in New York and
Buffalo, where he studied again under Olson, he lived the rest of his life in Boston, at
44 Joy Street.
C HAR L E S O LSO N (1910-1970) was an American poet, scholar, and teacher who did
pioneering research on Melville before working in the Office of War Information under
F D R . He left government service before Roosevelt’s death and Truman’s ascent to power
in protest of policy changes. Olson served as rector of Black Mountain College in its
last years, from 1951 through 1956, and then moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where
we wrote his monumental Maximus Poems. He died just after his fifty-ninth birthday,
in January of 1970.
Michael Seth Stewart (b. 1975) is a mendicant scholar who completed his PhD, “For
the Voices”: The Letters of John Wieners, at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the editor
of Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners, a Lost & Found Elsewhere book
from City Lights. A native Southerner, he lives in Astoria, New York, with a terrier
named Frank.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego, CA
• Thomas J. Dodd Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
• Personal Archives (Ammiel Alcalay, Joanne Kyger, Jerome Mallmann)

• Wieners Papers, John J Burns Library, Boston College, Boston, MA
• Olson Papers, Thomas J. Dodd Center, University of Connecticut, Storr, CT

Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems
Lost & Found Series IV
ed. John Harkey
73 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched; 11 pp, insert, saddle-stitched
Fall, 2013. 545 pp.
In October of 1964, having no other book prospects on the near horizon, Lorine Neidecker
took action and assembled her own—a book of thirty poems written into the pages of
a dime-store sketch pad, whose front and back she covered in wrapping paper. She
carefully handwrote the small poems in blue-inked cursive, placing each one on its own
unnumbered sheet of paper. She then sent the book, with the wry title Homemade Poems
inscribed on the cover, to her friend, the poet and editor Cid Corman, who was living
in Japan at the time. This Lost & Found chapbook presents a simple facsimile edition of
Homemade Poems that is congruent to the original book in all fundamental ways. Thus
readers now have a chance to read Niedecker’s handwriting and move through and around
the book according to the same chief physical features, spaces, and tempos she originally
built into it. The chapbook also includes an afterword, “Usable Dimensions,” which is
included as a pamphlet insert.
LORINE NIEDECKER was born in 1903 in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, and she chose to
spend most of her life in nearby Black Hawk Island, a narrow, marshy, austere peninsula
along the Rock River. Through the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, Niedecker explored
conjunctions between plain, often vernacular language and experimental techniques
such as disjunction, wordplay, and radical condensation. Her poetry has been particularly
celebrated for its rigorous but subtle attention to the sounds and semantic densities of
words and for its deft, unsentimental weaving together of the personal and the political,
the daily and the epochal, flora and fauna, feeling and fact. She died in 1970.
John Harkey received his PhD from The Graduate Center, CUNY, writing on “small
poetry” in twentieth-century writing, a dissertation devoted principally to Lorine
Niedecker, George Oppen, Susan Howe, and the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce.
He lives in Columbus, Georgia, where he is a high school English teacher.
Framed by the lives of Harlem Renaissance poet
Helene Johnson (1906-1995) and celebrated
contemporary poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), Lost
& Found Series I V recalibrates our connections to
literary and cultural history in fresh and unexpected
ways. From a never before seen manuscript of Johnson’s
poems to the public and private memos, course syllabi,
and passionately devised writing assignments in Rich’s
treasure trove of teaching materials at City College, this
volume overturns all expectations. In celebration of the
100th birthday of Gloucester poet and former union
organizer Vincent Ferrini (1913-2007), Lost & Found
editors excavated rare early texts, including the 1936
Onions & Bread, written while working for the WPA ,
and a facsimile reproduction of Tidal Wave: Poems of
the Great Strikes, depicting labor upheavals following
the New Deal. While Robert Duncan (1919-1988)
and Pauline Kael (1919-2001) both have dedicated
audiences, few are aware of their formative and intense
friendship, presented here through correspondence
from 1945-46 in which they support each other’s work
and survey the post-war political scene with clarity
and prescience. A perennial Lost & Found subject, poet
Edward Dorn (1929-1999) is represented here by the
long rumored Abilene! Abilene!, a screenplay meant
to be filmed by iconic experimentalist Stan Brakhage,
and laid out here in a meticulous variorum edition,
with notes and storyboards. Building cultural history
from the ground up, Series IV provides a completely
different vantage point from which to further explore
this rich era.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature,
The New York Public Library, New York, N Y


Vincent Ferrini: Before Gloucester
(with facsimile of Tidal Wave)
eds. Ammiel Alcalay & Kate Tarlow Morgan
66 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched; 12 pp, facsimile insert, saddle-stitched
Immigrant radicalism bumps head-on into the Cold War in these evocative materials
out of the life of poet and union organizer Vincent Ferrini. Like Charles Olson, Ferrini
came to symbolize a poet’s relationship to the local politics of Gloucester, MA — a
working city. A selection of poems, some never published and others exceedingly rare,
correspondence from Ferrini’s close friend Myer “Mike” Hecht, and accompanying essays
provide historical context to this key moment in U S history.
VIN C E NT F ERR INI (1913-2007) was raised in Lynn, Massachusetts, by parents who
emigrated from Southern Italy to work in the shoe factories. Ferrini’s rebellion began
early as he struggled against the constraints of poverty and circumstance. Self-educated,
Ferrini worked for the WPA in 1935-36, finishing his first manuscript and also rebelling
against the Administration itself by organizing the workers. Active in the radical United
Electrical Union, Ferrini also taught at the Samuel Adams School in Boston, both targets
of HUAC hearings.
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar, whose recent books include
a little history and the second edition of from the warring factions. Initiator and General
Editor of Lost & Found, he teaches in various fields at Queens College and The Graduate
Center, C U N Y .
Kate Tarlow Morgan is a choreographer, Editor-in-Chief of Currents: Journal of
Somatics, and Lost & Found ’s Consulting Editor. Sole archivist of the Rhythms Technique
(harking back to pioneers of the physical culture movement), Morgan’s performances
include Bluesuit, Fishglove, and Invisible Stories, with Sarah Slifer Swift. She is the author
of Circles & Boundaries (Factory School, 2011).
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Vincent Ferrini Letters and Papers, The Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA
• Vincent Ferrini Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Center,
University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
• The Gloucester Writers Center, Gloucester, MA

E dward D or n: A b il e n e !
Abilene!: Varior um
Editio n w ith Appen dices
& Commentary (Parts I &
II, wit h essay insert)
ed. Kyle Waugh
Part 1: 54 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Part 2: 58 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched;
51 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
A cross between The Seventh Seal and Blazing
Saddles, Abilene! Abilene! is the unfinished
screenplay poet Ed Dorn drafted for a
collaboration with filmmaker Stan Brakhage
in the late 1960s. Though Brakhage once
Ed Dorn, c. 1969. Photo by John Friedman.
claimed their film “was to be America’s
answer to The Blood of a Poet,” the project was twice abandoned for lack of funding—first
in 1969, leaving the script half-finished, then again in 1976, when San Francisco-based
Zephyrus Image Press canceled plans to publish its first (and only) section. Four decades
later, Abilene! Abilene! ’s incompleteness and colorful bibliographic history make it a
remarkably reflective text: altogether its many versions afford a privileged glimpse into
Dorn’s editorial process, and its multistage, prismatic failure offers a narrative index of
the waning autonomy of countercultural production and experimentation over the course
of the latter half of the 1970s. A peculiar result of cross-media affinities among the postwar American “avant-garde,” Abilene! Abilene! is an idiosyncratic artifact of “Sicksties”
(Dorn’s spelling) zeitgeist, and makes an instructive and entertaining component to
Dorn’s mock-epic Gunslinger.
E dward D or n (1929-1999) was born in rural Illinois on the verge of the Great
Depression. He studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain in the 1950s. In 1961, then
LeRoi Jones published Dorn’s first book, The Newly Fallen. Over the next four decades,
Dorn taught at universities across the US , and in England and France. He died in Denver,
Colorado, having published over twenty books of poetry and short prose, one novel, and
an anthropological account of the Shoshone Indians.
Kyle Waugh is from Kansas City and holds an American Studies MA from the University
of Kansas. Currently pursuing an English PhD at the Graduate Center, CUNY , he is
co-editor of Dorn’s Derelict Air: From Collected Out (Enitharmon, 2015), The Collected
Poems of Edward Dorn (Carcanet, 2012), and Kenneth Irby’s The Intent On: Collected
Poems, 1962–2006 (North Atlantic, 2009).

Adrienne Rich: “What we are a part of”:
Teaching at CUNY 1968-1974 (Parts I & II )
eds. Iemanjá Brown, Stefania Heim, erica kaufman, Kristin Moriah, Conor Tomás Reed,
Talia Shalev & Wendy Tronrud
Part I: 54 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Part II: 78 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Storyboards by Stan Brakhage for The Twenty Dollar Sun (Fall, 1968)
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Edward Dorn Papers, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut,
Storrs, C T
• Zephyrus Image Archives, Special Collections at the University of Delaware Libraries,
Newark, D E
• James Stanley Brakhage Papers, at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries,
Boulder, C O
• Black Sparrow Press Records, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries,
University of New Mexico, N M
• Private Archives (Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Granary Books, Tom Raworth, Rob Rusk,
John Friedman)
• Donald C. & Elizabeth M. Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western
Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, O K

In this collective effort, a team of Lost &
Found editors explore Adrienne Rich’s
teaching materials from her formative
years during the turbulent and exhilarating
student strike for Open Admissions in the
late 1960s at the City University of New
York. Drawing on memos, notes, course
syllabi, and class exercises, this collection
provides insight into Rich’s dedication,
passion, and empathy as a teacher
completely dedicated to her students as they
take a leading role in reshaping access to public higher education. Rich’s characteristic
public generosity and courage can be seen, for the first time, in an institutional setting
through these materials. Accompanied by essays that contextualize both the pedagogy
and the politics, this collection truly breaks new ground in presenting lesser-known
aspects of a major poet’s work.
ADR I E NN E R ICH (1929-2012) was one of the most celebrated poets of her time. She
began teaching at City College in 1968, at the height of the nationwide social protest
movements. While her stature as a poet and prominent feminist are well established, her
absolute dedication to the teaching of Basic Writing has not been fully explored. Her
firm belief in the power of writing pedagogy as a political tool was a conviction developed
and honed during her years at City College, and something she remained committed
to throughout her life.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Adrienne Rich Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA
• City College of New York, Archives and Special Collections Division, City College
Libraries, New York, NY
• Personal Archives (David Henderson)

Pauline Kael & Robert Duncan: Selected Letters
1945-1946 (Parts I & II)
HELENE JOHNSON:
AFTER THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Bradley Lubin, Editor
Part 1: 52 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Part 2: 50 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
ed. Emily Claman
70 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Pauline Kael and Robert Duncan met in the 1930s as students at the University of
California, Berkeley. After both dropped out, they maintained a six year correspondence
recording the trials, excitements, and discoveries of life after Berkeley. The Selected Letters,
1945-46 captures their singular friendship and the mutual interests and sensibilities
that united them. Highlights include a dialogue on reading Herman Melville’s Pierre;
reflections by Duncan on farm-life in Northern California; notes on preparation of
his manuscript The Years as Catches and Kael’s work on a play; and from New York,
Kael’s reportage on art-shows, films, music, and discussion meetings tied to Dwight
Macdonald’s journal Politics.
PAULINE K A E L (1919-2001) was the lead film critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to
1991 and one of the reigning voices in American film criticism. Books by Kael include
the bestseller I Lost it at the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), the National Book
Award Winner Deeper into Movies (1974), and The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of
Pauline Kael (2011), edited by Sanford Schwartz for the Library of America.
RO B E RT D UN C A N (1919-1988) was an American poet and key presence in post-
War arts and letters. His works of poetry include The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots
and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968), and Ground Work: Before the War/In the
Dark (2006). The Collected Works of Robert Duncan are published by the University of
California Press, edited by Peter Quartermain.
Bradley Lubin is a doctoral student in the English Program at The Graduate Center,
CUNY , working on an expanded edition of the Pauline Kael and Robert Duncan Letters
for New York Review Books.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Lilly Library, The University of Indiana-Bloomington, Bloomington, IN
• The Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley Berkeley, CA

Recognized as an important young voice during
the Harlem Renaissance, poet Helene Johnson was
thought to have stopped writing some time after
1935 when she no longer published regularly in little
magazines and periodicals. With this chapbook, an
original manuscript of never-before-seen poems
comes to light. Titled The Boat is Tethered to the
Helene Johnson, 1931, signed to Dorothy
Floor, the manuscript was evidently prepared for
West. Photo by James Latimer Allen.
publication by Johnson herself. Written after her
move downtown in the 1960s, these poems evoke themes of desire, friendship and aging,
and provide an entirely new perspective on the literature of the era.
H E L E N E J O H N S O N (1906-1995) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. After early
success as a poet, she moved to Manhattan in 1927 to live with her cousin, Dorothy West.
From 1925 to 1935, Johnson published in the periodicals Messenger, Opportunity, Fire!!,
Challenge, Palms, Vanity Fair, Saturday Evening Quill, and Harlem. She was also included
in the anthologies The Book of American Negro Poetry (1931), The New Negro (1925), and
Caroling Dusk (1927). Largely forgotten, her early work was revived by Verner D. Mitchell
in This Waiting For Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (2000).
Emily Rosamond Claman is a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY . She
earned her MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, studying under Carl
Phillips and Mary Jo Bang. However, she began her poetry education in earnest working
with Bob Rosenthal at the Allen Ginsberg Estate in her native Manhattan.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• The Allen Ginsberg Estate, New York, NY
• Personal Archive (Abigail McGrath)
• The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library,
New York, NY

Lost & Found S eries V
William S. Burroughs: The Travel Agency is on Fire
Spring, 2015. XXX pp.
Alex Wermer-Colan, Editor
XX pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Lost & Found Series V features Kathy Acker, William
S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac:
four major writers responding to sweeping sociopolitical shifts around the globe. To what extent they
resist, ride, and provoke these shifts is written into their
prose, poetry, manifestos, travel notes, diaries, letters,
and friendships. While working at a strip club in Times
Square in 1972, Kathy Acker writes Homage to Leroi
Jones and other “exercises,” as part of an effort to map
her “total present consciousness.” In The Travel Agency
is on Fire, William S. Burroughs, performs cut-ups
on authors related to his personal cannon and ranging
from William Shakespeare to Anthony Burgess.
Across the ocean, Algerian poet Jean Sénac writes
Le soleil sous les armes [The Sun Under the Weapons], a
revolutionary manifesto urging nothing short of total
cultural transformation, sexual liberation, and political
independence. Traveling from Moscow to Tashkent in
1932, Langston Hughes befriends, photographs, and
translates the works of young poets writing in Uzbek
in his travelogues, excerpted here as part of Langston
Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan.
Through the publication of these varied texts, Lost
& Found Series V connects the liberatory politics and
radical writing practices of New York in the 1970s,
France and Algiers in the 1960s, and the Soviet Union
and Turkestan in the 1930s.
The Travel Agency is on Fire is a selection of “cut-up” experiments by William S. Burroughs
on texts by a range of canonical writers, from William Shakespeare and Arthur Rimbaud
to William Wordsworth and James Joyce. Burroughs selected the source texts, cut them
up, and juxtaposed the fragments to select random word combinations and create new
compositions. Only made available in the archives since 2010, The Travel Agency is on
Fire will fascinate scholars and Burroughs fans alike, as they illuminate the experimental
processes that underlie Burroughs’ work.
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W i ll i am S eward Bu rro u ghs II (1914-1997), an American writer and artist,
has often been called the “Godfather” of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac named him
the “greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift” and Norman Mailer declared him
“the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius.” Burroughs
wrote eighteen novels and novellas (most famously his controversial Naked Lunch),
six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays. He also collaborated on
recordings with a variety of musicians and performers, and appeared in numerous films.
Alex Wermer-Colan is a doctoral student in the PhD Program in English at the Graduate
Center, CUNY , and organized the William S. Burroughs Centennial Conference held
there on April 25th, 2014. His essay, “Implicating the Confessor: The Autobiographical
Ploy in William S. Burroughs’ Early Works,” was published in the Winter 2010 issue of
Twentieth Century Literature.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
•
•
•
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature,
The New York Public Library, New York, NY
Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Hayden Library Special Collections, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
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Kathy Acker: Homage to Leroi Jones & Other Early Works
Gabrielle Kappes, Editor
XX pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
Homage to Leroi Jones & Other Early Works presents the unpublished “exercises,”
correspondence, and diary excerpts from underground feminist writer Kathy Acker. From
her archived papers, spanning the years 1971-1974, are four collections of “exercises” or
prose-poem-word-plays, drawn from dream journals that trace Acker’s political, aesthetic,
and methodological lineage to Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The selected correspondence
from Acker to poet and theorist Alan Sondheim documents their emergent personal
and professional relationship and the creative birth of their video art project Blue Tapes.
It is is accompanied by one Acker’s earliest extant pieces: a 1971 diary from the time she
worked at a Times Square strip club. These early experiments are what Acker calls her
“attempt to map at that time my total present consciousness.” The selection provides a
raw, explicit, and intimate gaze into Acker’s creative process.
Jean Sénac: The Sun Under the
Weapons, Correspondence & Notes
from Algeria (Parts I & II)
Kai Krienke, Editor
Part 1: pp.: #, soft-bound, saddle-stitched.
Part 2: pp.: #, soft-bound, saddle-stitched.
Gabrielle Kappes is a doctoral candidate in the PhD Program in English at the Graduate
Center, CUNY. With academic training in British Romanticism, she has researched and
written extensively on Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel narratives and is currently working
on a project that explores experimental and organic form in both Romantic and 20th
century American poetics. A poet and long-distance runner, Kappes lives in the Bronx
and teaches writing at Lehman College and Fordham University.
The work and life of Algerian revolutionary and poet Jean
Sénac has yet to be recognized in the Anglophone world.
This chapbook presents three distinct periods in Sénac’s life,
tracing three representative moments in Algerian history
through a collection of archival documents. The first part
of the book is a translated selection from Sénac’s 1957 manifesto The Sun Under the
Weapons [Le soleil sous les armes], written in Paris at the height of the war. Addressed to
both Algerian and French audiences, as well as his former friend Albert Camus (from
whom he was estranged by political differences over the war), The Sun Under the Weapons
is a poetic response to the violence tearing both societies apart. The second document is
a series of unpublished letters Sénac exchanged with Algerian novelist Mohammed Dib
from before the war (1951-1953), centered on the launch of a literary journal. Under the
shadow of the encroaching war of liberation that would erupt in 1954, Sénac gathered
younger and more established writers in a visionary attempt to forge a new and inclusive
Algerian culture. The third document is comprised of notes Sénac took at a meeting
of New Algerian poets in 1972, ten years after Algeria’s independence. Here the poet as
activist focuses all his powers on a common national project at a time when revolutionary
ideas had reached an impasse. Though clearly situated in Algeria, Sénac was a citizen of
the world and took his poetic models from Whitman, Rimbaud, Mayakovsky, Lorca,
the Beats, and the Black Arts movement. These unique documents represent distinct
genres and modes of intervention, from personal correspondence, political address, to
the public mediation of poets, bringing attention to a major but largely unknown 20th
century cultural figure.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
J ea n Sé n ac was born in 1926 in Béni Saf, Algeria, a small mining town near Oran,
K at h y Acker was born in New York City in 1947. Hailed as an underground
punk queen and coveted cult icon, she was a novelist, essayist, and performance artist.
Influenced by the avant-garde and conceptualist art movements, Acker’s post-modern
and experimental works include I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1974),
Blood and Guts in High School (1984), Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986), Empire of
the Senseless (1988), In Memoriam to Identity (1990), and My Mother: Demonology (1994).
Acker died in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997.
• Duke M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University,
Durham, NC
the illegitimate son of a working-class Spanish mother. Aside from his many poetry
collections and critical essays, he directed several radio programs on poetry at Radio
Alger, spearheaded three literary reviews (M, Soleil and Terrasses), and founded Galerie
54 dedicated to Algerian art. Sénac strove throughout his life to create bridges between
cultures that were being torn apart by increasing hatred and violence and the legacies
of colonialism. Openly homosexual after his return to Algeria in 1962 and dedicated to
promoting New Algerian poetry, Sénac was seen as an increasing liability to an Algerian
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leadership that had abandoned their revolutionary ideals. He was assassinated the night
of August 29, 1973.
Kai Krienke is a member of the English Faculty at Bard High School Early College in
Queens, New York. He received his PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2014,
writing his dissertation on the Algerian poet Jean Sénac. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
• Jean Sénac Archives, National Library of Algiers (Bibliothèque Nationale d’Alger),
Algeria
• Jean Sénac Archives, Mediterranean Literary Archives of the Alcazar Library of
Marseille (Fonds Littéraires Méditerranéens de la Bibliothèque de l’Alcazar,
Marseille), France
• Personal Archives (Hamid Nacer-Khodja, Denis Martinez)
Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks
from Turkestan
Zohra Saed, Editor
XX pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
In 1932, along with a group of African American activists and writers including novelist
Dorothy West, Langston Hughes journeyed to the Soviet Union. Veering off from the
“official” trip, Hughes met Arthur Koestler before venturing on to an extended journey
through the newly formed republics of Central Asia. While Hughes’ readers may be familiar
with his A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, this chapbook makes available previously
unpublished material drawn from Hughes’ notebooks, photographs, and collaborative
translation projects with Uzbek poets. Just as his own work is being translated into
Uzbek, Hughes — ever the participant — collaborates with his peer poets in the region
to produce texts published in this collection for the first time. Finally, Hughes’ acuity of
vision extends to his photographs, scenes of workers in the cotton fields of Central Asia
that stand in stark contrast to official depictions of the time. Complementing The Selected
Letters of Langston Hughes (2015) and a reprint of the 1926 edition of The Weary Blues,
Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan reveals yet another aspect of
the ever-expanding universe of one of the greatest American writers.
La n gsto n H u ghes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in
Photo of Jean Sénac taken by Denis Martinez near Algiers in the summer of 1973.
Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. In the 1920s, he gained a reputation as a poet, becoming
a leading figure in what he called in his first autobiography “the black renaissance.” A
prolific poet, prose-writer, and playwright, he served as an example to several generations
of African American writers, always lending his support to younger people and new
movements in the arts. From 1932-1933, Hughes traveled in the Soviet Union, spending
much of his time in Central Asia and returning to the US with several notebooks,
hundreds of photographs, and clippings of poems from the Central Asian writers he met
there. This trip, along with his work in Spain on behalf of the Republic (featured in Lost &
Found Series III ), formed major episodes in Hughes’ public political engagement. While
popular and known throughout the world, Hughes faced backlash at home. Despite his
wishes to see work from this period gathered, these writings and photographs from his
trip to the Soviet Union were never published in book form. A major 20th c. cultural
figure, he passed away in Harlem on May 22, 1967.
Zohra Saed is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan
American Literature (University of Arkansas Press). Her essays on the Central Asian
diaspora and their food history have appeared in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies
Reader (NYU Press), and in The Asian American Literary Review. Misspelled Cities/Falsch
geschriebene Stadte: Sahar Muradi and Zohra Saed, a bilingual English/German chapbook,
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was published for documenta13. She is the co-founder and editor of Brooklyn-based
UpSet Press.
S e l ec t ed arch iv es
•
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT
•
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library,
New York, NY
Lost & Found Elsewhere
Lost & Found Elsewhere is a unique series of booklength projects emerging from the research of Lost &
Found editors. Working in partnership with select
publishers, these books bring to light unpublished or
long unavailable materials that have emerged alongside
or as part of Lost & Found initiatives in archives across
the country.
Mezhrabpom’s Film Crew aboard S.S. Europa, June 17, 1932.
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Savage Coast
by Muri e l Ruke yser
Robert Duncan in San Francisco
by michael rumaker
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editor
The Feminist Press
Ammiel Alcalay & Megan Paslawski, editors
City Lights Books
As a young reporter in 1936, Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Barcelona during the first days of
the Spanish Civil War. She turned this experience into an autobiographical novel, providing
one of the few first-hand accounts of the war written by a foreign woman, despite the
enormous number who reported from Spain. This lyrical work, at once avant-garde and
documentary, was rejected by
Rukeyser’s publisher in 1937 for
its radical politics and hybrid
aesthetic and is published
here for the first time by The
Feminist Press. The novel is
a modernist investigation
of violence, activism, and
desire, mapping her political
and sexual awakening
onto the larger narrative
provided by the popular
front resistance to the
fascist coup. The text is an
A map Rukeyser drew of Moncada, Spain.
important and absorbing
testimony to those who fought and died for freedom and justice during the first major
battle against European fascism.
A newly expanded edition of an enduring classic, Robert Duncan in San Francisco is
both a portrait of the premier poet of the S F Renaissance and a fascinating account of
gay life in late 1950s America. Following his graduation from Black Mountain College,
Michael Rumaker made his way to the post-Howl, pre-Stonewall gay literary milieu of
San Francisco, where he entered the circle of Robert Duncan. His account of that time
gives an unvarnished look at Duncan’s magnetic personality and occasional failings, while
delivering vivid snapshots of other significant poets like Jack Spicer, John Wieners, and
Joanne Kyger, against the backdrop of legendary North Beach haunts like The Place,
Vesuvio, and City Lights Books. Contrasting Duncan’s daringly frank homosexuality
with his own then-closeted life, Rumaker conjures up with harrowing detail an era of
police persecution of a largely clandestine gay community struggling to survive in the
otherwise “open city” of San Francisco. First published in 1996, this expanded edition
includes a selection of previously unpublished letters between Rumaker and Duncan, and
an interview conducted for this edition, in which Rumaker provides further reflections
on the poet and the period. As Russell Banks writes of the book: “Much more than
memoir; it’s history.”
M U R IE L R U K E YS E R (1913-1980) was a prolific American poet whose work engaged
and influenced the political and literary movements of the 20th century. She published
more than a dozen volumes of poetry, winning the major awards in her field, as well as
works of biography, fiction, theory and journalism, including her critical masterpiece The
Life of Poetry and the newly recovered Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast.
M I C H A E L R U M A K E R was born in Philadelphia and educated at Black Mountain
College and Columbia University. He taught writing at The New School and City
College, C U N Y . Pagan Days, a veiled account of his life, is one of his many books
that provides a more interesting biography than any blurb could, while Gringos and
Other Stories remains a classic of New American Prose. Black Mountain Days, To Kill a
Cardinal, My First Satyrnalia, and A Day and A Night at the Baths, have all been reprinted
by Spuyten Duyvil Press.
Megan Paslawski is a doctoral candidate in the English program at The Graduate
Center, CUNY . Like Michael Rumaker, she was born in Philadelphia and also holds a
graduate degree in creative writing, though hers is from Trinity College, Dublin.
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein received her PhD from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and
is Lecturer in English (Gender and Women’s Writing) at the University of Bristol, UK .
Her scholarship and writing have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, The Journal of
Narrative Theory, The Paris Review Daily and Harper’s blog, among others.
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A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester
by peter Anastas
Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters
By Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn
Lost & Found Elsewhere and Back Shore Press
Claudia Moreno Pisano, editor
University of New Mexico Press
Winner of the 2014 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award
Lost & Found Elsewhere teamed up with Back Shore Press to produce A Walker in the
City: Elegy for Gloucester by Peter Anastas, with a forward by the author’s son, novelist
and essayist Benjamin Anastas, and an afterward by Ammiel Alcalay. A Walker in the City
presents selected newspaper columns Peter Anastas published as part of “This Side of the
Cut” in the Gloucester Daily Times between 1978 and 1990. Anastas writes about growing
up in Gloucester in the 1940s, about the rich social and cultural life of a multiethnic
community, and the city’s abundant wildlife, vital fishing industry, and endangered
natural environment, all set within the wider historical implications of rapid change
and local politics. As one reviewer wrote: “In his urgency to capture the essence of his
childhood and its symbiotic link to Gloucester, he manages to present a multi-sensory
re-creation of what we thought we’d lost—our youth. At the same time, he chronicles a
community’s struggle for the survival of self.” Scholar David Rich puts it: “Like Olson,
Anastas reads like an exile from a future time. Nothing in this collection is vintage, all
is live goods.”
P e t er A n astas was born in Gloucester in 1937; he attended Bowdoin College and
lived for some time in Italy but returned to Gloucester where he still resides. Previous
books include Glooskap’s Children: Encounters with the Penobscot Indians of Maine;
Landscape with Boy, a novella; At the Cut, a memoir, and the novels Broken Trip, No
Fortunes, and Decline of Fishes.
Benjamin Anastas was born in Gloucester in 1969; he is the author of the novels An
Underachiever’s Diary and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, as well as a
memoir, Too Good To Be True. He teaches at Bennington College where he is on the core
faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
From the end of the 1950s through the middle of the 1960s, Amiri Baraka (1934–2014)
and Edward Dorn (1929–99), two self-consciously avant-garde poets, fostered an intense
friendship primarily through correspondence, as seen in this University of New Mexico
Press edition. The early 1960s found both poets just beginning to publish and becoming
public figures. Bonding around their commitment to new and radical forms of poetry
and culture, Dorn and Baraka created an interracial friendship at precisely the moment
when the Civil Rights Movement was becoming a powerful force in national politics.
The major premise of the Dorn-Jones friendship as developed through their letters was
artistic, but the range of subjects in the correspondence shows an incredible intersection
between the personal and the public, providing a schematic map of what was so vital in
postwar American culture to those living through it.
Their letters offer a vivid picture of American lives connecting around poetry during a
tumultuous time of change and immense creativity. Reading through these letters allows
access into personal biographies, and through these biographies, profound moments in
American cultural history open themselves to us in a way not easily found in official
channels of historical narrative and memory.
A m i r i Baraka (b. 1934-2014) was a poet, writer, dramatist, and activist born in
Newark, New Jersey. After receiving a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force (the
Error Farce, in his own words), Baraka ventured to Greenwich Village, where he became
active in the bohemian poetry, theater, and music scenes. In 1965, after the death of
Malcolm X, Baraka moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre,
a key part of the Black Arts Movement. He returned to Newark where he continued to
work as a writer and activist until his death in 2014.
E dward D or n (1929-1999) was born in rural Illinois on the verge of the Great
Depression. He studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain in the 1950s. In 1961, then
LeRoi Jones published Dorn’s first book, The Newly Fallen. Over the next four decades,
Dorn taught at universities across the US , and in England and France. He died in Denver,
Colorado, having published over twenty books of poetry and short prose, one novel, and
an anthropological account of the Shoshone Indians.
Claudia Moreno Pisano earned her PhD in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY
where she studied radical American poetics with Ammiel Alcalay. She is an Associate
Professor at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY .
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Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners
by John Wieners
Michael Seth Stewart, editor
City Lights Books
John Wieners was on the periphery of many of
the twentieth century’s most important avantgarde poetry scenes, from Black Mountain and
the Boston Renaissance to the New York School
and the San Fransisco Renaissance. Having
achieved cult status among poets, Wieners
has also become known for the compelling
nature of his journals, a mixture of early drafts
of poems, prose fragments, lists, and other
fascinating minutiae of the poet’s imagination.
Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of
John Wieners collects four of his previously unpublished journals from the period
between 1955 and 1969. The first journal depicts a young, openly gay, self-described
“would-be poet” dashing around bohemian Boston with writer and artist friends,
pre-drugs and pre-fame. By the last book, decimated by repeated institutionalizations
(the first for drug-related psychosis, the rest the consequence of the first) and personal
tragedies, Wieners is broken down and in great pain, but still writing honestly and with
detail about the life he’s left with. These journals capture a post-war bohemian world that
no longer exists, depicted through the prism of Wieners’ sense of glamour.
LOST & FO UND Staff & B oard
Center for the Humanities National Advisory Board
Aoibheann Sweeney, Executive Director
David Abel
Nancy Kuhl
Shea’la Finch, Managing Editor
Neil Baldwin
Megan Mangum
Kendra Sullivan, Associate Publisher
Michael Basinski
James Maynard
Sampson Starkweather, Publicity Coordinator
Jennifer Benka
Thurston Moore
Tonya Foster, Publications Assistant
George Bowering
Bill Morgan
Sandra Braman
Kate Tarlow Morgan
Steve Brier
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Steve Clay
Polly Thistlethwaite
General Editor
Blanche Wiesen Cook
Peter Quartermain
Ammiel Alcalay
Fred Dewey
Alice Quinn
Consulting Editor
Steve Dickison
Archie Rand
Kate Tarlow Morgan
Brent Edwards
Eugene Redmond
Henry Ferrini
Joan Richardson
Sesshu Foster
Amy Scholder
Isaac Gewirtz
Jill Schoolman
Lost & Found Fellows
David Greetham
André Spears
Megan Paslawski
Kimiko Hahn
Stacy Szymasek
Josh Schneiderman
Jan Heller-Levi
Fred Wah
Kyle Waugh
Juan Felipe Herrera
Anne Waldman
Bob Holman
Melissa Watterworth-Batt
Erica Hunt
Al Young
Designer
Megan Mangum, Words That Work
Textual Consultant Emeritus
David Greetham
Lost & Found Fellows
Diane di Prima David Henderson Elaine Katzenberger
Joanne Kyger
J oh n W i e ners studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, and later
edited the small magazine Measure. He lived for a year and a half in San Francisco, where
he wrote his breakthrough book, The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958). In the early 1970s he
settled into an apartment on Boston’s Beacon Hill, where he lived and wrote until his
death in 2002.
Michael Seth Stewart completed his PhD, “For the Voices”: The Letters of John Wieners,
at The Graduate Center, C U N Y. Editor of John Wieners and Charles Olson: Selected
Correspondence (Lost & Found Series III ), his work has appeared in Battersea Review and
is forthcoming in Poetry. A former resident of the Swannanoa Valley, he lives in Astoria,
New York, with a terrier named Frank.
David Meltzer Margaret Randall
Michael Rumaker
Lost & Found would not be possible without the
generous support of:
Sue Lonoff de Cuevas
André Spears
Margo & Anthony Viscusi
Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund
The Leslie Scalapino–O Books Fund
The National Endowment for the Arts
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The Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
Lost & Found is available through Small Press Distribution at www.spdbooks.org