onedit

chris vitiello tips me off to a great online pub called onedit, edited from england by tim atkins (depicted, left, with miles champion).

tho unstated, the editorial mission appears to be to combine new work with older, uncollected, archival type stuff. the courier typeface (produced in image files rather than text) also conveys this retro-contemporary aesthetic.

issue 5 has, among other things, an uncollected sonnet sequence by alice notley and two uncollected poems or poem sequences for the early 1970s by clark coolidge.

notley's "GREAT INTERIORS, WINES AND SPIRITS OF THE WORLD" was written in battersea in 1973 and appeared in out there #4 (1974), an notley issue of a mag published out of northeastern illinois university in chicago. she describes this as something of a follow-up to 165 meeting house lane, her earlier denby-esque sonnet sequence and first book.

selections from coolidge's AIR appeared in All Stars, a monster anthology tom clark edited in 1972 for grossman/goliard and including many of the likely NY/bolinas suspects: berrigan, notley (conincidentally, her 165 meeting house lane sonnets), saroyan, gallup, etc. at the time coolidge was very unhappy with the way poem was excerpted and printed in that anthology (seemingly random selections, individual sections broken up and run on separate pages where the MS clearly shows a three-section-per-page format that he was using in other serial poems of the time), so it's nice to have the complete text as he'd prepared it finally available.

CONGERIES is a 20-page selection that ran in julliard #9 (spring 1972), a mag i know nothing about and as a manuscript completely unknown to me. it's quite a diverse batch of stuff, prose and poems, and in my estimation ranges chronologically from as early as 1965 or 1966 to the early 1970s. "joe the blages" and "onyx" look like they date from the flag flutter and u.s. electric period. "white," "duchamp's door" and "jug ending" look like minimalist word salad, short-line pieces resembling something from space (but not the constellation poems of section 3, not the same attention to arrangement). there are various prose pieces too, "station stratum" resembling the "one's plenties" proses from the something else yearbook and quartz hearts. "the best" is an exploration in statement and the sentence as compositional unit (one sentence per line). other proses like "route five," "instant kyoto postcard," "the coca colas" and "the wrong reflection" resemble the pieces he had collected into a booklength manuscript that was never published: one's plenties: selected proses 1969-1973.

here is a smashing little zukofskyian lyric

          DEEM

          like a nail on
          the way's froze
          by shell
          from a bowl
          in a light

          the red
          stops here
          a time roll rose
          to boom eel

and this is a great little "procedural" lyric (as i call them, not many of which are collected, there's one in the THE WORLD 15, untitled, whose first line reads "the hen one comes to," it takes and manipulates lines from ted berrigan's "tambourine life)

          CARLSBAD CAVERNS

          where night         where night    where
          night will     where night will it enter      enter
          summer         where      stem see
          stem it send
          it or thirst in o where of will        no sight
          tap at the fall    the reef
          and stem laugh of it lights
          our where stem     here in out
          night lick will it
          end      not only where night will         it enter

great thanks to tim atkins for making this stuff available!