Tumgik
#Station Hill Press of Barrytown
garadinervi · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Hannah Weiner, Signal Flag Poems, issued as S.M.S. [Shit Must Stop] #3, The Letter Edged in Black Press, 1968, Edition of 40. It included a volvelle to be assembled by the reader [Eclipse Archive. MoMA, New York, NY]. Offset color lithograph. A related project, Code Poems: from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations was published by Open Book, an imprint of Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 1982
159 notes · View notes
Photo
Tumblr media
Feast yr eyes & shelves on November’s SPD Recommends *Backlist*!
Ten more titles that continue to rock our world:
1. Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro - Dodie Bellamy and Sam D’Allesandro
“Although Dodie was leading ‘in competition for grossout — but that’s such a yawn since being female all the cards are stacked on my side,’ in the end Sam won for shock and extremity — he died. Dodie’s last letter (1993) is a homage to him (’To look as precisely as possible at the everwavering presence…’) and a series of inventions on mortality in the time of AIDS. The prose is pitched so high it’s thrilling. The letter is a summit of writing on sex and death, a garden in which the void prospers. ‘Sam, I never dreamed that playing dead could make you feel so alive.’” —from the preface by Robert Glück
2. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
"Sharply critical of nationalism, separatism, chauvinism of all kinds, as tendencies toward narrowness and isolation, she was too aware of democracy's failures to embrace false integrations. Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake's scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman's vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks' and Romare Bearden's portrayals of ordinary black people's lives; to James Baldwin's expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic." —Adrienne Rich
3. The Vineyard - Fanny Howe
"If I could talk about divinity to the boss / it would not be pretty." —Fanny Howe, from 'Servitude'
"The breath that animates Howe's poetry seems to blow, not from a contemporary world of 'materials' and 'individuals' but from one of radical mystical belief." —San Francisco Chronicle
4. Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love - Samuel R. Delany
“When you and I live so closely that touch and smell are suddenly half of what we communicate, new laws govern the interchanges as different as strong and weak particle interactions...” —Samuel R. Delany
"In HEAVENLY BREAKFAST we see the genesis of the alternative living arrangements portrayed in Delany's novel Dhalgren (1974)." —James Warner
5. The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker
"One's first impulse, after awe, on reading THE GRANITE PAIL is a double dose of shame: shame at not being more familiar with her work; shame at ever having complained of the narrowness of one's life." —Carolyn Kizer
6. The Black Heralds - Cesar Vallejo (tr. Rebecca Seiferle)
From the publisher: Vallejo radically and fundamentally challenges the canon of Western culture as no other Latin American writer. THE BLACK HERALDS is Vallejo's first book and contains a wide range of poems, from love sonnets in which he struggles to free his erotic life from the bounds of Spanish Catholicism to the linguistically inventive sequence, "Imperial Nostalgias," where he parodies with considerable savagery the pastoral romanticism of Indian and rural life.
7. Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954-1989 - Larry Eigner
"Live thinking—rather than 'theory'—about poetry & prose & living & dying, often starting from or turning into poetry as easily as rivers & puddles become clouds become rain....Starting from anywhere at hand (often with 'input' from 'media'), ending somewhere we're surprised to get to." —Jackson Mac Low
8. The New World Border - Guillermo Gómez-Peña
"Gómez-Peña muses, often tongue-in-cheek, on matters of race, nationality, language, and identity. With a heady mix of pop culture, provocative iconography, political satire, ethnic stereotypes, and guerrilla theory, he explores 'the territory of cultural misunderstanding.'" —The Village Voice
9. Useful Knowledge - Gertrude Stein
"USEFUL KNOWLEDGE is pleasant and therefore it is very much to be enjoyed." — Gertrude Stein in her 'Advertisement for this Book.'
10. THE PAPER CHASE - John Jay Osborne, Jr.
Robert Clark, former Dean of The Harvard Law School, has said "THE PAPER CHASE is one of the most important books ever written about legal education in the United States."
3 notes · View notes
Article originally published on poetryfoundation.org
PAUL CELAN
23rd November 1920–20th April 1970
Tumblr media
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in Czernovitz, Romania, to a German-speaking Jewish family. His surname was later spelled Ancel, and he eventually adopted the anagram Celan as his pen name. In 1938 Celan went to Paris to study medicine, but returned to Romania before the outbreak of World War II. During the war Celan worked in a forced labor camp for 18 months; his parents were deported to a Nazi concentration camp. His father most likely died of typhus and his mother was shot after being unable to work. After escaping the labor camp, Celan lived in Bucharest and Vienna before settling in Paris. Celan was familiar with at least six languages, and fluent in Russian, French, and Romanian. In Paris, he taught German language and literature at L’École Normale Supérieure and earned a significant portion of his income as a translator, translating a wide range of work, from Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Charles Baudelaire. His own work has been translated into English numerous times and by several noted poets and translators including Michael Hamburger, Rosmarie Waldrop, Heather McHugh, John Felstiner, and Pierre Joris.
Though he lived in France and was influenced by the French surrealists, he wrote his own poetry in German. His first collection of poems, Sand from the Urns, was published in Vienna in 1948; his second collection, Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedaechtnis, 1952), brought him critical acclaim. Katherine Washburn, his translator, noted in her introduction to Last Poems (1986): “The title of this book [Poppy and Memory] pointed with a fine vividness to the central predicament of Celan’s poetry—the unstable and dangerous union between Paul Celan, caught early in that sensual music of the Surrealists, pure poet of the intoxicating line, and Paul Ancel, heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.”
While Celan is perhaps best known for his poem “Death Fugue” (or “Todesfuge”), it is not necessarily representative of his later work. Reviewing the 1981 publication Paul Celan: Poems in the New York Times, Rika Lesser said the poem’s “richly sonic, dactylic lines (spoken by the inmates of a camp), while typical of Celan's mastery of form, content, texture and sound, are hardly indicative of the direction his composition would later take.” As his career continued, Celan worked to “purge his poems of readymade contexts - whether historical, traditional or explicitly religious. The late poems still abound in allusions - private, hermeneutic, esoteric - but increasingly each poem becomes and creates its own context and the context within which Celan's other poems must be read.”
This transformation has much to do with the language in which Celan wrote. As Shoshana Olidort notes in her Chicago Tribune review of Breathturn Into Timestead: Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (trans. by Pierre Joris and published by FSG, 2014), Celan was “a Holocaust survivor, [who] wrote in German, his mother tongue and also the language of his mother's murderers … As a German-speaking Jewish survivor living in France, Celan harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through what Joris eloquently describes as a “dismantling and rewelding” of German. The result, Olidort writes, “is arguably even darker than his earlier poems with their direct references to the Shoah. For Celan, darkness is not willed obscurity, rather, the poem comes out of lived experience and is "born dark.”
Celan received the Bremen Prize for German Literature in 1958 and the Georg Buchner Prize in 1960. He suffered from depression and committed suicide in 1970.
Tumblr media
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry Collections
The Sand from the Urns (Der Sand aus den Urnen, 1948).
Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedächtnis, 1952).
From Threshold to Threshold (Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, 1955).
Speechwicket / Speech Grille (Sprachgitter, 1959).
The No-One's-Rose (Die Niemandsrose, 1963).
Breathturn (Atemwende, 1967).
Threadsuns / Twinesuns / Fathomsuns (Fadensonnen, 1968).
Lightduress (Lichtzwang, 1970).
Snow Part [posthumous] (Schneepart, 1971).
Timestead / Homestead of Time [posthumous] (Zeitgehöft, 1976) .
Translations in English
Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Pierre Joris, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014.
Corona: Selected Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Susan H. Gillespie, Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 2013.
From Threshold to Threshold, translated by David Young, Marick Press, 2010.
Snow Part, translated by Ian Fairley, Sheep Meadow Press, 2007.
Threadsuns, translated by Pierre Joris, Green Integer, 2005.
Lightduress, translated by Pierre Joris, Green Integer, 2004.
Paul Celan: Selections, edited and with an introduction by Pierre Joris, University of California Press, 2004.
Romanian Poemsi, translated by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi, Green Integer, 2003.
Fathomsuns and Benighted, translated by Ian Fairley, Sheep Meadow Press, 2001.
Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition, translated by Michael Hamburger, Persea Books, 2002.
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, edited and translated by John Felstiner, W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.
Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, translated by Nikolai B. Popov and Heather McHugh, Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Breathturn, translated by Pierre Joris, Green Integer, 1995.
Collected Prose, edited by Rosmarie Waldrop, Sheep Meadow, 1986.
Last Poems, translated by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin, North Point Press, 1986.
5 notes · View notes
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Artists’ Book Display for the week of September 16th, 2019
Artkards 1992 series by Todd Alden- Conceptual Clearinghouse, 1992
If you sleep on your other side it will go away by Pattie Belle Hasting- Atlanta: Nexus Press, 1991
Art in Everyday Life by Linda Montano- Los Angels, CA: Barrytown, NY: Astro Artz: Station Hill Press, 1981
Das Harburger Mahnmal gegen Faschismus = The Harburg Monument against Fascism by Jochen Gerz- Ostfildern, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994
Enabled him by David Thorne San Francisco, CA : Redress Press, 1990
2 notes · View notes
mybarricades · 7 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
On December 31, 1943 Robert Gilbert-Lecomte died at age 36 in a Paris hospital from tetanus caused by a dirty needle. His possessions were all in one small briefcase in the room where he had been living, the back room of a working-class bar whose owner Mme. Firmat had taken him in three years before out of kindness. To Lecomte's friend the playwright Arthur Adamov she gave the briefcase. It was filled with letters, prose writings, and a hundred poems. A morphine addict, Lecomte had been jabbing the needle into a high muscle through a pair of dirty trousers. Born in Reims, France in 1907, Lecomte was the co-founder, with René Daumal and Roger Vailland, of the literary and artistic movement Le Grand Jeu. Three issues of the group's magazine, Le Grand Jeu, appeared between 1928 and 1930. The Surrealist reacted too Le Grand Jeu with hostility. The group fell apart in 1932. Central to Le Grand Jeu was a vision of the unity of everything in the universe that resulted from experiments with carbon tetrachloride performed by Lecomte with his friend René Daumal when they were teenagers. Daumal later wrote about the experience in his essay, "A Fundament Experiment." Lecomte defined its essence as "the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness." This glimpse of eternity in the void was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a "metaphysics of absence." In imagination he returned to a pre-natal state, "a wondrous prior existence." 
In 1933 Lecomte published a volume titled La Vie L’Amour La Morte le Vide et le Vent (Life Love Death Void and Wind), which went unnoticed by the press, save for a review by Antonin Artaud in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. Over the rest of his life, Lecomte published here and there in literary magazines. His only other book was a tiny volume, Le Miroir Noir (Black Mirror), privately printed in alimited edition in 1938. The last half-dozen poems appearing in the present volume appeared in Le Miroir Noir. Lecomte never explained what he meant by the title. He may have been thinking of the obsidian mirrors of the Aztecs, or perhaps of the black mirrors some painters are said to use to study tonal relationships of colors seen in nature, a kind of mirror that his contemporary Francis Ponge was soon to compare to a summer sky in which he imagined he could glimpse the blackness of interstellar space. No doubt Lecomte was also thinking of how own exploration in Le Miroir Noir of the mind's dark side, "the dark on the blind side of mirrors." In later years Lecomte lived on and off with a German Jewish refugee named Ruth Kronenberg (1) whom he had met on her arrival in Paris in 1934. She was arrested in 1940 after the Fall of France, but got out of jail, obtained false I.D., and emigrated to the Unoccupied Zone in hope of finding safety there. In 1942 she was arrested by the collaborationist military near Carcassone, transported to the concentration camp of Drancy in the German-occupied North, and from there to Auschwitz, where she died. One of Lecomte's last publications in his lifetime was in the nature of a poignant afterthought: a twelve-line poem, "Vacancy in glass," which he retitled "Palace of the void" for publication in the Nouvelle Revue Française, where it appeared shortly after Ruth was deported. It seems possible that the retitled poem in its new context may reflect this personal loss. Lecomte himself never left Paris after the early 1930s. His life was a succession of jail and hospital confinements. Very few old friends would have anything to do with him during the last years. Over the generation following his death, Lecomte's oeuvre acquired the status of an underground classic. His friend Adamov published a selection of his poetry, and leading French literary magazines devoted space to him. The complete works were issued in three volumes during the 1970's by Gallimard. They consist of approximately 100 poems, a booklength collection of prose texts, including essays setting forth the principles of the Grand Jeu movement and various pieces of literary criticism, and, finally, a volume of letters. 
___
(1) Ruth Kronenberg 
Certain facts about the life of the French writer Roger Gilbert-Lecomte also come to bear, indirectly but pertinently, on her story. In 1965, Modiano went to see a doctor named Jean Puyaubert, thinking that he had pleurisy and that the physician could give him a certificate enabling him to avoid military service. He learns several years later that when Gilbert-Lecomte was exactly his age, Puyaubert had given him the same certificate. “[Gilbert-Lecomte] had dragged out his last years in Paris, under the Occupation,” writes Modiano. “In July 1942, his friend, Ruth Kronenberg, was arrested in the Free Zone, on her return from the seaside at Collioure. She was then deported in the transport of 11 September, a week before Dora Bruder.” By writing about these and a few other people (about whom just a little more is known than about Dora), Modiano helps us imagine what she might have been like. He concludes: “So many friends whom I never knew disappeared in 1945, the year I was born.” (by John Taylor / The Arts Fuse / “The Sad Tenderness of Patrick Modiano’s ‘Dora Bruder)
—David Rattray (from Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, 1991) Copyright ©1991 by David Rattray BOOKS OF POETRY La Vie l'Amour la Mort le Vide et le Vent (Paris: Editions des Cahiers Libres [Denoël], 1933); Le Miroir Noir (Paris: Editions Sagesse [chez Fernard Marc], 1938); Sacre et Massacre de l'Amour (Paris: Editions Paul Facchetti, 1960); Oeuvres complètes. Poésies, Volume 2, ed. by Jean Bollery (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1977) ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, trans. by David Rattray (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 1991), The Book is a Ghost; Thoughts & Paroxysms for Going Beyond, trans. by Michael Tweed (Solar Luxuriance 2015)
_________________
© Wols; Roger Gilberte-Lecomte (1907-1943)
20 notes · View notes
garadinervi · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Hannah Weiner, Code Poems: from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations, Open Book, Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 1982 (pdf here) [rel.: Signal Flag Poems, issued as S.M.S. [Shit Must Stop] #3, The Letter Edged in Black Press, 1968] [Eclipse Archive]
55 notes · View notes
garadinervi · 4 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
The Russian Avant Garde [from the collection of Ruth & Marvin Sackner] and American Abstract Artists [from the collection of Patricia & Phillip Frost], Preface by Ira Licht, Text by Peter Frank, Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 1983 [Exhibition: Curated by Peter Frank, The Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, March 10 – April 24, 1983]
94 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
Wazzzzzap internet. Feast your eyes and your shelves on May’s
SPD Recommends *Backlist*,
ten titles from the 90's that continue to rock our world. boo-ya.
Scrunchies, Beverly Hills 90210, Ryan Gosling’s long hair, Xena, The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan, all those Bagel Bites commericals...just a small glimpse into humanity's greatest feats. It's not a coincidence that all these feats took place in the 90's either. That's because the 90's were great. It only makes sense that literature in the 90's was great too.
So hold tight to your Tamagotchi, Furby, or Beanie Baby collection: The 90's are back in the form of 10 awesome SPD backlist titles. These titles will leave you glowing brighter than any glow-in-the-dark star on your bedroom ceiling ever could. feat. New Star Books, Talisman House, Publishers, Kelsey Street Press, & more!
1. Debbie: An Epic by Lisa Robertson (New Star Books, 1997)
Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. As arresting as the cover image, Robertson's strong, confident voice echoes a wide range of influences from Virgil to Edith Sitwell, yet remains unique and utterly unmistakable for that of any other writer. Brainy, witty, sensual, demonstrating a commanding grasp of language and rhetoric, Debbie: An Epic is nevertheless inviting and easy to read, even fun. Its eponymous heroine will annihilate your preconceptions about poetry - and about the name "Debbie."
2. The Tower of Babel by Jack Spicer (Talisman House, Publishers, 1994)
An established writer from an Eastern college returning to his former San Francisco haunts becomes entangled in a labyrinthine series of events that culminate in the sudden violent death of a respected poet. Described by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian as "a satiric look at the private world of poetry gone public in the wake of the Six Gallery HOWL reading of October, 1955," The Tower of Babel includes finely detailed sketches of the San Francisco poetry world and gay life as they existed then.
3. Four Year Old Girl by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (Kelsey Street Press, 1998)
In this extraordinary new collection of poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, writing reflects human presence in the phenomenal world. Physical sensations of experience—a horizon, moisture, a child, a piece of quartz, a loss—become objects of focus and poetic elements. Her written lines, like strings of protein, both create and destroy bonds. Reading affords moments of exquisite vulnerability in which the perceived world is suddenly exposed to the quick. The pace of everday life slips into that of a waking dream. Winner of the 1998 Western States Book Award.
4. Brooklyn Bridge by Leslie Kaplan (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 1992)
This is the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan's haunting novel about the meaning of childhood and the mysteriously intimate interworkings of child and adult. Here four adults and a child come together in a chance meeting in New York's Central Park, where the child's presence is a question to all of them. The novel pursues the erotic complexity of their various relationships with a special focus on the disturbing interaction between Julien and the child Nathalie. Woven through the affecting depictions of human characters, is the extraordinary depiction of the city, its tensions, its unexpected necessities, its urgencies. Written in a rhythm as electric as its setting, Brooklyn Bridge is a novel for the questioning child in us all.
5. WHATSAID Serif by Nathaniel Mackey (City Lights Publishers, 1998)
Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, WHATSAID Serif, is comprised of installments 16 through 35 of Song of the Andoumboulou, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in his two previous books, Eroding Witness and School of Udhra. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and lived apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kalapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology are "a rough draft of human being," that "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft." The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself.
6. Another Smashed Pinecone by Bernadette Mayer (United Artists Books, 1998)
"It's OK that poetry won't save us from circumstance, or pave our road to what we're tempted to call Heaven, but it doesn't matter—because reading Bernadette Mayer's poetry is where I always want to be. Here, within the playfulness of her language, is where consequences of daily living are histories of heart and mind. Poetry is in life and life is in Bernadette's poetry, and that's all the reassurance we need."—Kristin Prevallet
7. Sight by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (Edge Books, 1999)
Equal parts poetry and philosophy, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's collaboration is organized around the act and idea of seeing, written in the form of a literary dialogue. "We were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience," writes Hejinian in the introduction, "how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (perceiving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us." Visual descriptions interact with meditations on contemporary life, Western intellectual history, dream, film, poetry, and collaboration itself.
8. Close to Me & Closer...(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere by Alice Notley (O Books, 1995)
Alice Notley's two books collected here, Close to Me & Closer...and Desamere, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape measure. She's invented a measure. The text is a rich current crossing, as at the moment of imagining, into being in death and in an expanded life. Notley transgresses conventional contemporary categories of genre; rather than genre, the form of the writing is the mind's inner sense and motion. "Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets...infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfullness, full of heart, intensity and wonder, provocatively addressing forever unsolved questions of form and identity, life and death, imagination and gender, Notley's poems are unsettling and inspiring"––the San Francisco Chronicle. 
9. Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child by Elva Trevino Hart (Bilingual Review Press, 1999)
A vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. It brings to life the day-to-day existence of people facing the obstacles of working in the fields and raising a family in an environment that is frequently hostile to those who have little education and speak another language. Assimilation brings its own problems, as the original culture is attenuated and the quality of family relationships is comprimised, consequences that are not inevitable but are instead a series of choices made along the way. It is also the story of how the author overcame the disadvantages of this background and found herself.
10. Local History by Erica Hunt (Roof Books, 1994)
"Erica Hunt's Local History blows the public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip."—Harryette Mullen
3 notes · View notes