Small is Quite Beautiful: Tarasque Press

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Hair
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Small Press ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Broad Overview

The 1960s saw an explosion of mimeographed poetry magazines and books on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter four provides a broad overview of this ‘mimeo revolution,’ tracing its origins back to the do-it-yourself ethos of Black Mountain and the burgeoning of the ‘New American Poetry.’ As chapter 4 discusses, with this explosion of small-scale publishing, however, came more problematic issues of quality, both with regard to the production standards of the publications and the poetry they published. Chapter 4 examines how the British little magazine Tarasque and the eponymous small press established by Stuart Mills and Simon Cutts responded to this side of the mimeo revolution with a potent mix of trenchant irony and a championing of the small poem—as practiced by Finlay and Williams—that emphasized impersonal, constructed formal objectivity in answer to the expressive solipsism of the time.

Charles Olson (1910–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Open Field ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Black Mountain

Actively writing in the 1950s and 1960s, poet and critic Charles Olson is a key figure of both the New American Poetry and the Black Mountain school. He is best known for articulating—in his essay ‘Projective Verse’—the idea of ‘open-field’ poetics, opposed to inherited stanza form, as well as for his exploration of the long poem in The Maximus Poems.

Chance, Time and Silence: the New American Verse

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
The One ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Black Mountain Poetry

The post-Pound, post-Carlos Williams movement in American verse, represented by such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn, has for the most part been received with a deadly critical hush, particularly in England. Apart from the timely special issue of Ian Hamilton's Review in 1964 on Black Mountain Poetry, together with some discreet championing by Eric Mottram and Donald Davie, attention to the New Verse has been largely confined to the off-campus underground scene. The Black Mountaineers are generally thought to be the exclusive province of the Fulcrum Press, Calder and Boyars, the International Times and a tiny circulating broadsheet published from Cambridge called The English Intelligencer. But this critical neglect is, I think, a symptom of a genuine distress in literature departments of universities about the nature of contemporary verse. On the one hand, we have acquired a sophisticated terminology for discussing most of the verbal objects we have learned to call poems: this terminology entails certain assumptions about the working of language itself–that, for instance, the semantic value of an utterance is housed entirely in the words that compose that utterance, that language is a collection of multiply-suggestive symbols, that the operation of language is rational, logical and continuous. On the other hand, we have been recently confronted with a body of verse which either defies, or comes off very badly from, our conventional terminology. Its most striking features have been a metrical, syntactical and logical discontinuity; an insistence that language works, not symbologically, but phenomenologically, as a happening in time and space; that the silence in which a poem occurs has as great a semantic value as the words which are imposed on that silence. Given this battery of opposed assumptions, it is hardly surprising that the case of the New American Poetry offers the unengaging spectacle of criticism and poetics confronting one another with at best a dubious silence, at worst, bared teeth.

The New Inter-American Poetry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Julio Cortazar ◽  
Pablo Neruda ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Julio Cortázar ◽  
Blind Spots

This chapter shows how revolutionary enthusiasms, experimental magazines, and translation fueled inter-American relations in the 1960s on the countercultural left. Previous critics note the Boom, but most US accounts of the period’s poetry center on the intra-national polarities (“margin versus mainstream” or “raw versus cooked”) inflamed by Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960). The chapter instead describes a larger formation called “the new inter-American poetry,” recovering dialogues best emblematized by the hemispheric little magazine El Corno Emplumado, and the reciprocations engendered between the works of rebellious Beats and revolutionary Cuban barbudos, Paul Blackburn and Julio Cortázar, Clayton Eshleman and Javier Heraud, Pablo Neruda among his English translators, and others. These exchanges were not without their blind spots, and the chapter concludes by comparing the communities imagined by Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) to poems by contemporaneous visitors to Manhattan such as Mario Benedetti (Uruguay) and Alcides Iznaga (Cuba).

Tools of Transformation: Appropriate Technology in U.S. Countercultural Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Peter Mortensen
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Environmental Transformation ◽  
Buckminster Fuller ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Environmentally Sound ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Second Wave

This essay takes its cue from second-wave ecocriticism and from recent scholarly interest in the “appropriate technology” movement that evolved during the 1960s and 1970s in California and elsewhere. “Appropriate technology” (or AT) refers to a loosely-knit group of writers, engineers and designers active in the years around 1970, and more generally to the counterculture’s promotion, development and application of technologies that were small-scale, low-cost, user-friendly, human-empowering and environmentally sound. Focusing on two roughly contemporary but now largely forgotten American texts Sidney Goldfarb’s lyric poem “Solar-Heated-Rhombic-Dodecahedron” (1969) and Gurney Norman’s novel Divine Right’s Trip (1971)—I consider how “hip” literary writers contributed to eco-technological discourse and argue for the 1960s counterculture’s relevance to present-day ecological concerns. Goldfarb’s and Norman’s texts interest me because they conceptualize iconic 1960s technologies—especially the Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome and the Volkswagen van—not as inherently alienating machines but as tools of profound individual, social and environmental transformation. Synthesizing antimodernist back-to-nature desires with modernist enthusiasm for (certain kinds of) machinery, these texts adumbrate a humanity- and modernity-centered post-wilderness model of environmentalism that resonates with the dilemmas that we face in our increasingly resource-impoverished, rapidly warming and densely populated world.

The Artificial Pancreas in Cyborg Bodies

2020 ◽  
pp. 412-430
Author(s):  
Anthony Ryan Hatch ◽  
Julia T. Gordon ◽  
Sonya R. Sternlieb
Keyword(s):  
Glucose Sensor ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Infusion Pump ◽  
Artificial Pancreas ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Glucose Levels ◽  
Loop Design ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
And Control

The new artificial pancreas system includes a body-attached blood glucose sensor that tracks glucose levels, a worn insulin infusion pump that communicates with the sensor, and features new software that integrates the two systems. The artificial pancreas is purportedly revolutionary because of its closed-loop design, which means that the machine can give insulin without direct patient intervention. It can read a blood sugar and administer insulin based on an algorithm. But, the hardware for the corporate artificial pancreas is expensive and its software code is closed-access. Yet, well-educated, tech-savvy diabetics have been fashioning their own fully automated do-it-yourself (DIY) artificial pancreases for years, relying on small-scale manufacturing, open-source software, and inventive repurposing of corporate hardware. In this chapter, we trace the corporate and DIY artificial pancreases as they grapple with issues of design and accessibility in a content where not everyone can become a diabetic cyborg. The corporate artificial pancreas offers the cyborg low levels of agency and no ownership and control over his or her own data; it also requires access to health insurance in order to procure and use the technology. The DIY artificial pancreas offers patients a more robust of agency but also requires high levels of intellectual capital to hack the devices and make the system work safely. We argue that efforts to increase agency, radically democratize biotechnology, and expand information ownership in the DIY movement are characterized by ideologies and social inequalities that also define corporate pathways.

The Beats

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
The Road ◽  
Small Press ◽  
Creative Non Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Beat Literature

This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.

Making a Scene: Queercore Cinema

2021 ◽  
pp. 540-566
Author(s):  
Curran Nault
Keyword(s):  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter recuperates the oft-overlooked queer punk cinematic corpus of queercore, and delineates its constituting elements: deviant content and do-it-yourself (DIY) practice, coalescing in an insistence on queercore’s capital D subcultural Difference. In doing so, this chapter engages three films by queercore instigator G. B. Jones as centerpieces around which a constellation of other instructive instances appear: The Troublemakers (1990), The Lollipop Generation (2008), and The Yo-Yo Gang (1992). Irreverent, experimental, and unapologetic, queercore cinema first emerged in the 1980s, as academics and activists were beginning to articulate notions of the “radical queer,” and it forges a neglected link between the mischievous films of the 1960s and 1970s gay underground and the provocative, arty experimentations of 1990s New Queer Cinema.

Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Radway
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Press ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The 1960S

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.

American Indian Soundchiefs

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-411
Author(s):  
Josh Garrett-Davis
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Red Power ◽  
American Media ◽  
Home Recording ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Sound Media ◽  
The 1960S

American Indian Soundchiefs, an independent record label founded by the Rev. Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) in the 1940s, developed a remarkable model of Indigenous sound media that combined home recording, dubbing, and small-scale mass production. Alongside other Native American media producers of the same era, Soundchiefs built on earlier engagements with ethnographic and commercial recording to produce Native citizens’ media a generation prior to the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. This soundwork provided Native music to Native listeners first, while also seeking to preserve a “rich store of folk-lore” sometimes in danger of being lost under ongoing colonial pressures. Pauahty’s label found ways to market commercial recordings while operating within what music and legal scholar Trevor Reed (Hopi) calls “Indigenous sonic networks,” fields of obligation and responsibility.

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