BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES: KARL YOUNG

This essay has special significance for me, and I'm pleased that Fabio Doctorovich has given me the opportunity to reproduce it here, at a good site, among good friends John Fowler and Harry Polkinhorn, and Clemente Padin, whom I don't know as well, but with whom I have worked on a number of important projects. The essay, "Notation and the Art of Reading," was commissioned by the great Canadian poet bpNichol for Open Letter magazine. At the time, I had a hefty book in mind, and wasn't all that interested in reducing it for an essay. I think bp knew I'd never get the book done, and pestered me remorselessly about it, pointing out manuscript passages from the book that might be just the thing for part of the essay, etc. As it turned out,I didn't finish the book, though this is my favorite essay. bp died of complications to remove a tumor in his spine in 1988, and left a large, empty space behind him. I don't think many of his friends will ever get over the loss. In my case, I published more of his books than anyone else outside Canada, and he published more of me in Canada than any other non-Canadian. I continue to reprint some of the work I originally printed at my web site.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS PUBLISHED IN EDITIONS:

Letters, Homebrew, 1968.
Membranes, Membrane press, 1970. [At the time of publication of this book, the game plan was to rename the press after each new book it published. I wish I'd stuck to that.]
Prayer Through Saturn's Rings, Monday Morning Press, 1973.
First Book of Omens (from Middle American Dialogues), Membrane Press,1976.
Cried an Measured, Tree Books, 1977.
To Dream Kalapuya, Truck Press, 1977.
Questions and Goddesses (from Middle American Dialogues), Salthouse Mining, 1978.
Should Sun Forever Shine, Underwhich Editions, 1980.
A Book of Openings and Closings (from Middle American Dialogues), Membrane Press, 1984.
Five Kwaidan in Sleeve Pages, Chax Press, 1986.
Days and Years, Membrane Press, 1987.
Milestones, Set 1, Landlocked Press, 1987.
Seafarer, with carpet pages by Nancy Leavitt, Tatlin Books, 1990.
Orange Gold, Light and Dust, 1992.
a few short lines with Sherry Reniker, copublished by Word Press, Japan, and Light and Dust, U.S., 1993.
Solar Dreams, 1997 Tatlin Books, 1997.

FORTHCOMING IN 1998:

Only As Painted Images In Your Books Have We Come To Be Alive In This Place from Chax Press. This book was originally scheduled for publication in 1992. The title is from the Cantares Mexicanos, Aztec oral poems transcribed in Nahuatal using the Roman alphabet shortly after the conquest of Mexico -- to me this body of songs is the water table of American poetry. The book includes a study of poetry, including manufacture and production of books, and how they were read from ancient times through the new books being created electronically on the world wide web. Essays on individual poets appear in this historical context. This is essentially a consideration of book art as an ongoing process, not a colonialist fad of the 20th century.

ONE OF A KIND BOOK ART WORKS:

These are of two types: (1.) Books made as book art by me. The most important of these have been books made so that they can be used as musical instruments. A photo of a simple book, that produces sounds by clapping pages together, may be seen in "Notation and the Art of Reading." Some include strings, resonating chambers, etc. For many years I made these for use in my own performances or for use by other performance artists. My favorite of these books is Make A Joyful Noise, in the collection of Ruth and Marvin Sackner. Photos of this book will be on the web sooner or later. (2.) For nearly a decade, Nancy Leavitt has painted books with texts by me. Although she usually gets classified as a calligrapher, this simply demonstrates the reductionism ad absurdum of contemporary classification. The texts and images are completely fused, and she usually builds on the texts in ways that I could not, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I should be credited as the author. The most important of these so far is Crossroads in the collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, but frequently photographed and exhibited.

SOME RELATED ACTIVITIES:

I began publishing books in 1966. During parts of the first six years of this activity, I worked for printers, learning to print, and printing my books after hours. Between 1971 and 1989, I ran my press as a cottage industry with my own equipment.

Co-founded (with Patricia Wagner) Milwaukee's Water Street Arts Center, 1972. When Pat left in 1975, we hired Karl Gartung as manager. His wife, Anne Kingsberry, joined us a few years later. The organization morphed into Woodland Pattern in 1979. Stayed on as vice-president until 1990, though had ceased crucial participation in 1984.

Associate Editor, Margins magazine, 1973 - 1977. Margins was a large, eclectic review magazine, certainly the most wide ranging, and one of the most important review journals in the U.S. in the 70s. One of the projects I started with Margins was a set of symposiums on contemporary writers. I continued to commission and find publishers for these for several years after the magazine folded, the most important being A Symposium on Clark Coolidge edited by Ron Silliman, which appeared as Stations, number 5, and Between Poetry and Painting: Tom Phillips, Ian Tyson, and Joe Tilson edited by Kevin Power, and published as Open Letter Fourth Series, Numbers 1 and 2, 1978. Both of these were ground breakers in fields that have since become more prominent. Excerpts from a symposium I edited on Rochelle Owens may be found on-line at Light and Dust. I'll add new tiers to this as time goes by, and I have plans for other on-line continuations of the projects.

During the 70s and part of the 80s, I studied the Pre-Conquest central Mexican manuscript painting as one source for ideas for visual poetry, painting facsimiles of each book I studied. My use of a Mixtec scribe as a logo is not capricious nor disrespectful of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. I ceased this activity in the 1980s, feeling that this area of study should be left to the descendants of those who painted the original books. I also studied Chinese calligraphy during this period for similar reasons, and my most important, though unfinished, work in the area of visual poetry is Clouds Over Fortjade, based on the poetry of Tu Fu and Wang wei.

THE INTERNATIONAL SHADOWS PROJECT:

I curated my first International Shadows Project show in 1990, and my second in 1991. Have assisted in others since. Shadows Projects are memorials to those who died as a result of the use of nuclear bombs, and protests against the manufacture, keeping, and deployment of nuclear weapons and the use of nuclear power for any purpose whatsoever. I have worked with Clemente Padin and Harry Polkinhorn, also at Postypographika, on some of these projects. These and other Shadows Projects are now documented at the Light and Dust web site.

With my cousin, Kris Kondo, a resident of Japan since the early 70s, I began working on projects to bring Japanese poets to the U.S. to compose poetry with American poets. This was joined with Shadows Projects in 1994 and 1995.

LIGHT AND DUST ON-LINE:

In 1993 I got a letter from John Fowler asking if I'd like to contribute to his Grist On-Line magazine. I was delighted, since the paper incarnation of Grist had been one of the best poetry magazines around when I was a student, and I was just stumbling around through the first levels of going on-line myself at the time. John gave me all sorts of technical help, and I gave him some assistance first with his magazine, then with his Grist BBS. In the meantime, I joined the Spunk Anarchist Collective, a group that maintained a large on-line library. Working with Spunk gave me my first chance to put a Light and Dust archive on-line. This was followed shortly by John Fowler's securing a web site for Grist. John offered me space at Grist for an expanded archive. Although Grist has run out of space, and a lot of the work I put on my site is stored elsewhere, Grist still remains the main affiliate of Light and Dust On-Line, my main publishing project at present. 1996, the 30th anniversary of my publishing efforts, was marked by a singular event: I didn't publish a single book on paper for the year. This does not mean that I've renounced books, or take the phony either/or, print/electronic argument seriously, but it was a good excuse for a vacation. I will bring out several books on paper this year.

KALDRON ON-LINE:

Karl Kempton has edited Kaldron magazine since the mid 70s, making it the longest running visual poetry magazine in North America. It went on-line on Bastille Day, 1997 at Light and Dust with Harry Polkinhorn and I joining Karl Kempton as editors. This will include the Kaldron archives as well as new work, and we hope many links with Postypographika.

GO TO LIGHT AND DUST

GO TO KALDRON

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