PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE

don polluck 1/25/95 i showed my wife yr letter: she thinks you're probably CIA, but hello anyways. returning yr check for $3.00 -- i don't have an account for TRANSLUCENT -- thanks, even more so, for yr interest... the only TRANSLUCENT book i have stock of is A MUTATED AMERICAN DRAMA, everything else is pretty much sold out, gone out into the void, into the wilds of serendipity...PERFECTLY SANE was done at 100 copies, likewise BLUE LABOR...i think nimmo has copies of CRIMINAL CLASS available tho...i also published his CATHOLIC GIRLS chapbook, & in order to secure copies of that you might contact cheryl townsend IMPETUS 4975 comanche trail stow, OH 44244 (i gave her i think 300 uncollated copies about a year ago, but i'm not sure whether there was a cover page)...also ask her about BLUE LABOR, she might have about a dozen of them (for her future plans to open a bookstore)... so here's a MUTATED, & a few of the spoof series in collaboration with paul weinman for yr CIA buddies to grunt over...i'm not sure how far you plan on going with yr research paper in re "SHOCK LIT", but so far we've done 12 of them (ashberry spoof in the works)...i wrote "a spoof history", if you'd like to read it let me know...in any case, i write my stuff, send it to paul, who does his thing & makes the books by the 100's...i generally give them out free at readings...it's more paul's doing to make them shocking, because that's the way he is...he was here last month for a reading at the erie art museum annex, 3 bottles of whiskey coursing thru the people & i think paul guzzled all of them; then went up to the mike in the nude & read...he thrives on "shock"... i hope you don't mind me going off like this: i have a headache: i work steady 3rd shift at a plastic reinforced fiberglass factory, too physical for a fattening, pony-tailed, middle-aged man...sleep is a real issue...wife & kids driving me bonkers...bills & poverty & normal tensions...i swear a lot... at the same time of physical & mental disintegration, much has been happening in my writing world: the new ATOM MIND MOTHER ROAD PUBLICATIONS p.o. box 22068 albuquerque, NM 87154 has run me in "the living poets series", autobiographical sketch, photos, poems: the cover by r. crumb (of the old ZAP COMICS in the 60's) who i NEVER imagined i'd ever have work with in a magazine when i was a teenager: life sure is personal fate...CHIRON REVIEW ran an interview of me in the autumn issue, my previous face on the cover...edges of fame certainly make me feel strange...wrote a novella more or less about it: RETICULATED DAYS IN THE LIVES OF A REGULAR MAN...POETRY MOTEL is running 2 chapters...ALPHA BEAT PRESS is publishing some or all of it...i wish i cld do it off TRANSLUCENT, which is simply my own self-publishing, to get it out, why not...i'll include my biography...THE BOOK OF MEDITATIONS is available from SMILING DOG PRESS 9875 fritz rd. maple city, MI 49664 i think for $2...he believes in the craftmanship of books...o, that's dean creighton... "SHOCK LIT" materials abound...funny, but that's the 3rd term i've heard in recent years to "describe" our crazy clan of poets...first it was "beasts", then "meats"..."shock lit" is cool too... i think it's a matter of AFFECT -- hey, i want art that moves or changes me, so i try to do the same with the things i do -- it's not to "get attention", but maybe to devolve attention, to perk the brain of a reader, to startle awake? america's interest in poetry & its own poets has not really risen past willa cather, & the masses, the american consumer, can really rot in hell -- it's the underground, & perversity is downright inherent...mass media don't want its pants pulled down, so obscurity is eternal thanklessness & i like it that way, it extends our freedom to create, art is limitless, or if it ain't we're a sunk culture for sure...are you familiar with the whole mike diana thing? paul used some of his art in our spoofs, the todd moore one (more odd) was confiscated by the state of florida along with all the other stuff diana was involved with...absolutely craziness...it's CARTOON!! crazy...the freedoms we continually lose...so i push at it sometimes, i'm an adult with too little time too...poetry is the purity of perversity, truths of a moment skinned down to its bones, clattering in the night! i'm a helpless poet to mudda muse's whims...mostly she hates me...but that's ok...i don't dance so i dance...there are 2 very at-the-edge (age statement on them) cassettes of my writing with music by lenny bove available for $5 a piece from LENNIE LINE p.o.b. 151 san carlos, CA 94070 ...lenny jams with tom hermann, ex-pere ubu guitarist...they're shocking cassettes...they elicit response...more physical than paper... the reflection of one's "real" life thru poetry is not a necessarily healthy thing to do, ya know...unless you're jimmy carter i guess... does this still qualify me for yr proposed interview of the editor of TRANSLUCENT TENDENCY PRESS? i've published other poets off various press titles too over the years...i give it all away...i mail them out...my working mail-list is about 50, who i continue to send most things to...a couple bookstores in chicago have things...there was an underground press conference at depaul university this past summer...quite a time...i ended up just giving everything i brought with me away to anybody walking by...i think about 250 people from all around the country came...contact batya goldman MARY KUNTZ PRESS p.o. box 476617 chicago, IL 60647 for information on the 2nd one this august... 2/2/95 don, thanks for yr letter & check, for the run-down who you are (i feared you were a suited businessman if not CIA) & what you plan to do... bibliography i realized i forgot to include in my previous letter (it's in another disk), so i'll get it in here...like i sd, i think, most of my books are in the archives at SUNY thanks to basinski -- in fact, it might be a grand idea for you to consider traveling up that way to check the collection at the library -- mike is the major archivist of our clan & welcomes visitors -- major forces in shock lit? christ..., this'll be off the top of my head, but here goes: kurt nimmo, todd moore, cheryl townsend, pat mckinnon, oberc, howington, paul weinman, steve richmond, bukowski, judson crews, albert huffstickler, bart solarczyk, bill shields, me... dead poets? yeah, lorri jackson, bukowski...lost poets? jim chandler (aka jazzbo koontz), ken sutherland, so many... bridging it all: hugh fox, robert peters, david spicer...adrian c. louis... the dead: d.a. levy, kerouac, most of the beats... hey, don't just ask me the names for yr "canon" -- again, basinski probably has a better grip as to the historical perspective than most of us...o, lyn lifshin shld be on the list too...john m. bennett (do you know him? 137 leyland there in columbus, if memory's right) -- yes, there are many audio tapes available, & video -- but if you saw my room you'd understand the chaos of things -- i can't find much comfortably...nimmo & cheryl are better people to ask about that dearborn session (video)...i lost my copy of the buffalo reading (some jackass from syracuse got it) but cheryl has one mckinnon did much with cassettes, collected a library also ask mark weber 725 van buren place, albuquerque, NM 87108, new address for materials he's been about 5 months without a drink recovering too if it comes down to needing audio tapes beyond the 2 from LENNIE LINE lemme know, send some lesbian porno & i'll try unearthing things no, no interview of me in POETRY MOTEL #40 that's CHIRON REVIEW instead -- 522 e. south ave., st. john, kansas 67576 enclosing the new ATOM MIND with my autobiographical sketch (o, it has my bibliography at the end, so i won't enclose what's in my file) -- addresses of publishers i'll supply if you need also contact dave christy at ALPHA BEAT PRESS 31 A. Waterloo st. new hope, PA 18938 who is also a good bridge from the 50's to the 90's -- hey, i heard paul hoover (norton anthology of post modern american poetry) talk at the UPC last year, & it's true, the academics are downright ignorant & still consider ginsberg to be the underground! also contact gabriele strohschen 1946 w. race ave chicago, IL 60622 with any questions about shock lit (she's an intellectual!) ok, i cld go on but my son has a wrestling scrimmage here in about an hour, so gotta fly for now hey, feel free to phone (friday & sat, usually home nights 6 - midnight is cool) 814-864-8937 2/3/95 don, morning after work here pretty much a cake night tho i'm still exhausted i've been saying for a while now we need an anthology, a representation of our current underground poets, but nobody seems able to pull one off i do believe there's a "market" for it, but it'd take a glossy presentation & shit like that it may indeed best be done by an "outsider" with more objectivity than subjectivity & i also like the idea of a "great lakes" poets anthology (duluth, detroit, cleveland, erie, buffalo) well, if i ever hit the lottery... i think another important factor to consider in shock lit is the utter lack of grants, of funding, of monetary acknowledgement: we got goddamn jobs in hell i guess if i cld LIVE off my writing i'd do it, but i decided a long time ago i wld not write what i didn't want to write to make money (i.e., journalism) or honest, consider kurt nimmo: the fuck writes VOLUMES of material, he cld easily (well, maybe not) write the shit you see in supermarkets, you see anywhere but he sticks by his own rules, by his own designs, financed as a bluecollar slob in a shit job that eats most of one's life away he cherishes the concept of the simple life he'd do poorly at literary new york publishing parties nobody that i know is writing for money! there's a uniqueness there i think it's more traditional in value, involves homage to the scores behind us stuck under dirt remember, & this is bukowski's star: he continued sending his work to the underground even tho he clda turned his back & embraced the whorish future & yes, we are the real mirrors of amerika i'll apologize for the horrific, but then i'd say fuck you not just me by now what we do is addiction nothing's going to stop nimmo's words yeah, maybe sometimes there's a sort of bravado ego puffing up & "instant gratification" is a necessity, but fuck, it's the way things go it's the writer alive humanism breeds unsafe literature i guess nobody i know ponders for weeks over a poem we write fast, as it happens well, i think nimmo proof-reads & shit like that, but he's a novelist i doubt he does more than 2 drafts to any poem, & i'll bet even that's infrequent write like that for 20 years it's the way it is the pleasure we fuck it's been a running joke between me & cheryl when i say all she writes is fuck poems she's done so much i love her most of the people i've mentioned are the assholes who kept the underground poetry shit going thru the 80's, thru some terrible times, most of us are 40ish, or 50ish -- i think crews is 75, huffsticker in his 60's, & todd's in his 60's (i think, he'd kick my ass if i was wrong & he was 59) we're not young kids anymore when raising hell thru the mail was as important as writing a poem shit, if you did order the ATOM MIND i just mailed you, the one i sent you is signed so will one day be worth zillions -- it's like nobody wants more than the ability to write! & man, that escapes daily... i've written stuff on the histories of the underground, but nothing with an over-all view important presses before ours include VAGABOND,GARGOYLE, BOGG... in a small way, i suppose, we kept the thread threading thru the 80's the death of the old culture in the 80's rejuvenated in the 90's of amerika ok, ok, time for the couch 2/17/95 don, SHOCK LIT THOUGHTS Paul Weinman, Cheryl Townsend, & myself were the featured poets for the XXX-rated "poetry maximus circus" on April, 1991 in Buffalo, New York. Organized by Mike Basinski, Dan Sicoli, & others, this was the second or third reading at Central Park Grill I'd been a part of as a reader. I hadn't ever met Paul, but had previously read with Cheryl & we had some hot correspondences going; she mailed me a pair of black lace panties blossoming patchouli & pussy in a plastic baggie claiming she had just masturbated wearing them & I certainly believed her. I was never so drunk & fucked-up as at the "poetry maximus circus" circus, even forgetting on stage during my "reading" that Cheryl, Lonnie Sherman, Bart Solarcyzk, & Paul had all come up to read my simultaneous 4-voice poem, "Voices from Hell"; I'm not sure how five people read a 4-voice poem, but it happened, & 15 minutes later I forgot it had happened. Spilling papers, seeing quadruple, I was rude to the audience, who began leaving when I began yelling they were COMMIEFAGGOTS & where the fuck were the women? Cheryl was drunk in early '94 in Erie, Pennsylvania late in the night in a small apartment partying with the spillage of people from a reading at the Erie Art Museum Annex; again, Paul Weinman journeyed westward from Albany. Bart Solarczyk zipped up from Pittsburgh with his drinking buddy Kevin. I sat against a wall beside Paul sprawled on a bean-bag, & who the hell knows what we talked about, but Cheryl slid facing between us, her sandal, red toe-nails between my knees, sliding up my thigh... Paul was here again two months ago for another reading at the ErieArt Museum Annex. There were 15 people tops there, mostly just us who were reading. I lit a pipe, passing it thru the seats. Bart lit his too. I counted 3 fifths of various brands of whiskey coursing thru us, & I watched amazed how Paul GUZZLED the shit, gulping the up-turned bottle like God! I'm not sure where the idea originated, or how, but Paul soon had it in his head that he was going to read in the nude. Before I had a chance to talk him out of it, he had stripped out of his black jeans & leather jacket & walked to the mike. Half of the audience was gay. There were only 2 girls there. Paul stood naked & talked. Paul, who is not a homosexual, went over & french-kissed Bob Nichols, who did not hesitate, reciprocating entirely. Dates blur, but Kurt Nimmo, in my experience of him as a person & friend, went from battle-fatigues & biker leather in 1984 to dress-slacks & J.C. Penney office shirts ten years later.  Incredibly, his baldness stayed constant. On a visit to Erie in the early 90's on a fourth of July weekend, my friend Joe & I took Kurt to "Jiggles", a strip-bar downtown. I motioned for the girl sweating & smiling & prancing above us to let me whisper in her ear, & she came down; "This is Kurt Nimmo beside me, & he's a famous writer, show him a good time" as she snatched the $5 from my fingers & rolled her leg over his bald head, calf on top of his skull, undulating her pussy a centimeter from his nose. He laughed, licked, & laughed. Sometime in the middle to late 80's Todd Moore came east to read one summer evening at Clayspace, at what is now The Roadhouse Theatre. Rick Lopez lived there in an adjoining room. Before the reading we all sat around his pad smoking this delicious hash...ounces were coursing thru Erie at the time. Todd refrained, sticking to his rum & cokes, but did take a giant hit when I got on his shit, finally, that he was an OLD motherfucker, old enough to be our dad! "Ya see, kid," he explained, "I'm not so old I can't smoke hashish." Oberc knew the 1994 Underground Press Conference in Chicago at DePaul University was happening, he knew Nimmo & Cheryl & myself wld be there along with so many other underground characters, but he chose not to come. Everything I heard about him was negative, everybody who spoke of him complained about various things. I defended him. I knew he was enmeshed in Chicago's underground press politics, & just wanted to be left alone as a hermit. He was described to me by the people in Chicago as being a 6-feet, long-hair, long-beard, hippy/biker with tattoos newly married to an Oriental lady. He had sent me interview questions in early '94 for my feature in the Autumn issue of The Chiron Review. I went thru a 12-pack & pipes answering him. "If there was a serial killer among us poets," I distinctly remember hearing come from the mouth of a fellow writer, "it'd be Larry Oberc." How strange fates are, by now it's normal they're so mystical, surreal, & really reality microscoped & blatantly inspected. The writer I felt was most susceptible to serial murder when he first began publishing Home-made Ice Cream Press was Robert W. Howington. He seemed fixated on the gore of mass media, a disciple of Charles Bukowski. His vignettes were first-person narratives about knifing people, the goddamn feeling in his hand pulsating, & he appeared to be quite psychotic in the photographs I saw of him too; downright creepy. Thru some circumstances I'm not entirely familiar with, he began a heavy communication with a girl I last knew, & saw, as a toddler, the daughter of Joan, my former lover in the middle 70's. Crista, in fact, moved down to Texas to live with him after his divorce. The last I heard they're happy, & true soul-mates. I wasn't quite 30 years old when Todd Moore decided to publish a collection of my poems under the title T ' n A, with the cover supplied by Anita Jean Throbb, who was actually Ken Sutherland's wife, Stephanie, which featured a cartoon slut smiling cum (if that's a possible description). "Twenty years from now we'll still laugh about this, that's the point" Mr. Moore wrote me when he sent me my share of copies. A dozen years later I'm down to one last chapbook, & it's true, it's still funny. shock lit as the shit exposed unto flakes of gold a raw psychic connection develops between poets tumbling thru the roaring underground rivers gasping before death it's the story that stays, the d r e a m when Life becomes Poem, when EVERYTHING IS POETRY, that's the magic process when words energize things with more awareness than visual usualness illusion it's the senses, a sensory description empirical, but alas, individual, the immediate writer alive in his/her world with his/her tongue & angst & dream with the cock & with the cunt entwines our real moments, our vices, our humanist tendencies shock lit best represents & illustrates american culture happening thru history other civilizations at least respect their poets, their mirrors but yonder in the untied states of america mass media has certainly slaughtered the purest art of its nation & the poets? they're fucked by ignorance & obscurity, yet plod on LIKE TRUE AMERICANS! freedom is the issue! perhaps the final bastion of freedom in america is dug in, in the underground maybe we've just been tamped back into the void & gone insane in isolation so we scream & jibber & jack-off to chalk-drawings of genitals on the moist stone walls of america's blind eye of course the academics don't care & common man & common woman certainly have no need for shock lit shit so our own community is our own audience & party-atmospheres go romping thru the postal system we party we celebrate the involvements & cackle & coo lewdly wooing the textures of human communication, of the shape of the earth, of our mythology & recorded psychology of course the human condition is a blatant, shocking experience, situation, & dream most humans are gross, grossness beyond innocent youth come quadrupled multiplying hourly thru the tick of age & disintegration & i have lived on the planet tho how much does that mean? shock lit KNOWS god is a social manifestation, safety-valve-like for the millions of certain suicides & murdering masses humanity has always been satanic because yes we're dogs not angels & yes "the dark side" is temptation & sin & all-around fun america is a disaster & as its artists we REFLECT it this is the way we feel we think create the art of the blaring media intrusion the perversity becomes beauty, greed & conspiracy of greed is AMERICA, its chaos is tenderest in the heart of ranting lunatics whose "NO" is the balance of perspective literature down here with the busted moon down here with apocalyptic personal tragedy with earthquake victims impaled like shish-kabob on a church steeple down here with dope, pussy as acidic as lemonized fish, & madness down in boiling guts where diseases flare in sun-spot slow-motion disgust down with america's shit & piss & blood & cum & vomit & shit & nasal excrement down under radiated dirt with useless fiber optic cables with the growl of earth's volcanic testicle lava build-up down in a dream, a dream in a mind & if, say, all i see are UGLY females, can i not say so? if i'm crazy, stoned & alcoholic, feeling gruesome, perhaps a poem about a sea otter is in order? if i can't think i shldn't speak? if i can speak i shld think? baseness is never a surprise in people i meet, & have met the grounding of our similarity is less intellectual than a smirk is philosophical raunchy humor is all there is we love raunchier reality than the jokes that daily fly over our heads, our stunned, sad faces are normal sidewalk faces job-hacked into sad, mature acceptance nimmo once told me i needed love & that's probably the surest statement about shock lit writers i recognize we're pissed & hurt, damaged, delirious dope-heads smoking up a smoke-screen to hide from mr. death, from fuck-ass fate & less than symbolic destiny imagine god is the worst motherfucking asshole possible optimism is not an alternative doom is a key word whatever tributary of lethe we ride we're sunk to ash & carbon in the meantime, wail & nail the world to Life, to this immediacy in a mind's dream, to these speaking eyes, to the whispers & sighs & college-educated novelists, to the future to insist where we meet, because surely the future, america's future, is more brutal than we can even dream, & i want to explain it's ok, it's cool, it's copacetic no matter what the powers that goddamn be do, it's first-person intense microphoned, the real you, the fuckhead with an attitude & a need to be different, non-robotic, fucking up skin-sensing switches, getting too loaded, getting sick, knotted by struggle, hours strangled, you dangle for a while in the world of writing, this strange maze video where weird things happen continuously by merely grumbling at the masses, making faces, writing down words which burst like fish & water, hook these skinny aquatic hogs! mine has a 25-foot circumference in a ROLLINGSTONE interview in the 70's i remember bukowski talked about his balls, how he had big balls, & masturbated for 7 years celibate of all female piranha cunt told for straight-out reality shock not the 11 p.m. newscast the most interesting people i find talk about the most outlandish conditions of survival they've gone thru or are currently experiencing i don't know anybody on a cake-walk, so i discover most people with their hells & foibles are nonetheless admirable as "real" flesh-walking homo sapiens a few billion years from whatever in all fuck materialized sometimes i drip empathy, but that's what makes me a pleasant guy, i don't want to fight nobody especially since words are the most powerful weapon devised by man but sshhh... let's keep all this shit quiet the public is still reading t.s. elliot it's a spy-like stance sometimes, & shock lit's a coded signal to the north koreans to go ahead & smash a nuclear warhead down america's asshole proceed to code 3 & hold yr breath or bite the cyanide & relax the time for understanding is at a crisis stage participate or sleep fuck or be fucked scream or be screamed at this is our criteria, our platform, these crumbling feet when we're told to jump we squat we ape our peers we kiss the asses of skeletal masters we dismiss the quiet longfellow voice we french plath's maggoty mouth we piggy-back kerouac's hyena terror bristling at an asshole right-wing god we ascend in a bubble of literary ascension, & below, on the ocean-floor, are piles of drowned poets there are no rewards no cash from the NEA no wealthy patrons no acknowledgement beyond the circle we know, the circle we are, no magical oxygen-tanks no wrist of jesus or buddha or allah or anybody to grasp there's the breathlessness & darkness our shimmering eyeballs, the life inside the skin spirit glove we laugh at cruelty we fist-fuck the vessel of the body like ghosts not knowing in or out, like psychedelic aura elasticity it's all the pulse the drama the very dream we dream thru, & buddy, it ain't especially pretty energy down here is not for children, it's for the thick-skinned fuckheads who are shocked & who shock like a heartbeat shocks the utter galactic silence this is the adult world & because a cunt is a cauldron of milk & blood i must say so for the simple event of expository explanation don't worry, i'll leave the picture non-drawn split a word open & all you get is sounds of a gutteral ape attempting communication within its species that's all it's all relative all insignificant all joyful alive thrusting from the pelvis in our furry bunny way shock lit? fuck! 3/18?/95 don, good to see you cooking but i can't imagine you keeping it up over 3 years time for one book? christ, make it a goddamn trilogy, a succession of shocklit books over 3 years well, it's yr baby, but don't lock yrself into a time-frame much cld be done right now a few people have mentioned you asking what's his deal? i'm in yr corner, mr. pollock, so get to it you know what's happening happen with it madness is energetic, so let it loose daily for hours i envy yr position i trust yr intelligence yr deal excites me but don't let ME be more active than YRSELF! roll over me, fella, like giant saturated snowball on a mission you got something too good going to hesitate at the typewriter & not change yr life, a change in yr life & as a writer reflecting for the reader the experience of hyper-space cosmology i hope you ain't shitting yrself or me or the others none of us are as formal as you approach us well, maybe nimmo when he's being confrontational, when he's pissed off at everything his worst writing is when he goes formal, or standard formula, when he tried writing for mass publication when he dropped out of the underground for a couple years in the 80's totally rejected of course don't forget, perhaps in yr 2nd paragraph, the craft, the craftmanship of poetry devices & technique the work with words which echoes pound's "make it new" we're all modern poundian babies pound & whitman as homo love-birds fucking & sucking & birthing generations of american poets anyways, i think we've managed to further the academics & their current studies, we're the future, & that's always the case with academia they don't know the future is happening now which is, honest, stupidity, hence the bitterness, the turn-off, the clash we've transcended olson's "projective verse" christ already, look at what's FORM in todd moore's work he's a master now, as williams was HIS master so while shocklit's so sensory, it's also relevant poetically in the way of structure & technique, line-breaks, etc..., we're not just party monsters, i hope hey, drop the "attempt"s in yr paper either shocklit do or don't don't like yr 3rd paragraph the echoes continue, naturally, & even robert frost intentionally grabs the reader's attention, i mean poetry is a natural shock in the first place, it's near intrusion in the mind c'mon wld you rather have poetry full of longfellowish philosophical experience rather than personal experience? what the fuck listen mother fucker, we are the tradition of poets in america, we're what's now from then, & it's an astounding proposition what the voice of the poet is today, not some academic mind-fuck asshole in dreamy reality, thank god! we're alive, here, in the guts of the land & let there be bad poets! the underground is grass-roots, some grow, some seed, some flower into fire, some die, some go off & play bingo, etc...the underground is a sieve, so let it pour...don't explain academia's ignorance no critical study pluses are basinski's thing, depaul's, other major colleges have bought the archives, or have the archives, of many among us, so let's share some light, c'mon the process of writing in the literary underground is in large part the finesse of an editor who chooses submissions, so it's what's chosen in the proliferation of zines today & a lot of times clunkers result, but so? it's the life of the thing, the breathing of it, the actions, the pulse, the blood & shit a refusal to be critical of their peers, huh? resulting in stagnation & failure o jesus you're missing something here, don, big-time you've gotta be a fan first, a supporter, else yr book'll murder us by left-field objectivity i know you're trying to define this, & i trust you have an open mind, or can open it, as a process of discovery the sharing of discovery, an historically relevant genre in american writing treat us as the crown jewels, asshole! either we're important or don't do a book either you smile or i'm getting off the bus either it's exuberance & excitement, or what go ahead & do a glossy hardcover published by st. martin's or something set the sights on landmark controversy rock & roll expose us mythology, translated from greek, is what is sd of what is sd remember that! get to it! it gotta feel good like the best tit in yr hand are you hearing me? if not, i apologize, sorry for being somewhat sadistic i've just had a chilling thought roll down my spine there have been assholes, real psycho nuts, in the scene over the years, i pray you're cool, i hope you empathize enough don't think i've heard of pete lee ok, my son's up downstairs, keep writing drown with us or fashion a life-raft out of the algae save us, 4/3/95 don, first off i do apologize for my "asshole" reference, but i certainly mean the term way more generally than anything when slapping people with that, but it was wrong to use in a personal letter you had me pissed! & when i'm pissed off i tend to use that word a lot i guess "motherfucker" is usually a term of brotherhood, or malehood, an obscenity bond kinda so, motherfucker, as per yr collectibility essay/idea: good luck. again, i'll try to help, & answer yr questions you never make it easy but to put it simply, i mean it's simple, "collectors" can readily buy & deal with the writers directly, & that's surely a plus as opposed to publisher searches & bookstore investigations i'm probably the least of a business man as anybody among us, so until i NEED representation & sense, i don't think in business terms, i don't care, i need the anarchy & freedom basinski told me years ago how some of the beats were so raped by archivists & universities, taken advantage of basinski is an ideal person to contact about this 777 copy book he spoke at depaul about how things are collected, staples removed, in vaults, concern for paper's fragility, etc..., at SUNY, buffalo i know i gave you his address a while ago, check, or ask me a lot of us have vast libraries of this material collected over the years it just stacks up particular searches are monumental undertakings my room is archival, but a pure mess 1. cheap thin brown paper zerox, folded & stapled. zeroxed off my typer, & not especially carefully. i do have a copy, a few copies, maybe more in the attic (it's been 6 years since i went thru the stuff), & there was only one printing, 100 copies i believe. 2. I was living in Seattle & had come into contact with JUMP RIVERREVIEW via reviews in BOGG, so i sent in submissions, corresponded with the editor, Mark Bruner, who was real & alive & powerful in his editorials, in his mission. i liked the poetry he published, the grass-roots underground approach. 14 POEMS came as a complete surprise to me. they were all the poems i submitted at the time. a box came thru the mail & bruner sd he decided to publish them as a chapbook, & here were all the copies. there was no copyright. last i heard bruner is somewhere in ohio, has a bee farm. i haven't heard from him in mucho years, but remember him fondly. i don't know if SUNY has 14 POEMS or not, positively, but yes, i think so. i didn't sell the thing. i gave them away thru the mail, to friends. it's probable i signed & dated some copies, but i can't recollect details. 3. i do not know. most were printed at about 100, or 300. MORNING PHILOSOPHY might have been 50. it was blue cover stock & white paper again badly zeroxed off my typewriter. it was not reprinted. again, the book came as a surprise from submissions i sent to the editor of THUNDER SANDWICH, Jim Chandler, & he do book like in his jazzbo way of serendipity. we've fallen out of touch but i think he's still in tennessee. i have one or two or 3 copies. i usually always sign & date my books, so i assume i did it on this one too.