“I’ve never liked mimeo”: Eileen Myles, Little Magazines, and the “Umpteenth-Generation New York School”

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Disclosure statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Olivia Inwood, upon reasonable request.

Notes

¹ I borrow the term “generational thinking” from the essay “Thinking Generations” by Jonathan White in The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 64 issue 2, 2013.

² In his essay “Angel Hair Magazine, The Second-Generation New York School, and The Poetics of Sociability,” Daniel Kane suggests that “second-generation New York School” is an “arguably unstable tag” (91). Nevertheless, generational thinking appears in nearly all writing on the New York School, including elsewhere in Kane’s work, as well as in writing by David Lehman (The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets), Geoff Ward (Statues of Liberty: The New York School of Poets), Yasmine Shamma (Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry), and many others. It is important to note that generational groupings are also regularly utilized by New York School poets themselves.

³ David Lehman’s justification for excluding Barbara Guest from his all-male iteration of the New York School’s first generation in his book The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poetry has been widely derided by scholars. Similarly, when Lehman writes of the second generation in the omnibus review “The Whole School” that “all too often their poems are so derivative as to appear virtually indistinguishable” (225), or when Marjorie Perloff describes them as “the growing cult of Frank O’Hara” (“Poetry Chronicle” 97), a diverse community of writers is reduced to a homogenous set of acolytes. In these cases, labeling a poet as part of a second-generation New York School signals that we should read them as of secondary importance, if at all.

⁴ The recent growth of post-1960 periodical studies can be tied directly to Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips’s A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980, published in 1998. This book is an invaluable bibliographic resource that repositions small press publishing and little magazines as “the nucleus” of avant-garde “communities and audiences” (13–4). At the same time, their aesthetic taxonomies reify received regionalizing and periodizing labels, including categorizing New York School-associated little magazines as representative of first, second, and third generations. In the book’s introduction, “A Little History of the Mimeograph Revolution,” Clay and Phillips explicitly tie dodgems to a third-generation New York School (41). While there is a relatively familiar argument that studying little magazines reintroduces us to “a history of writing communities,” as Alan Golding writes in From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, this essay, following Seita, suggests novel ways for imagining those communities across groups, print cultures, and without generational hierarchies.

⁵ “Mimeograph Revolution” is a phrase attributed to New York poet Kirby Congdon in the article “The Mimeograph Revolution,” published in the London-based The Times Literary Supplement on August 6, 1964. Written by British poet Eric Mottram, the article describes how the “Mimeograph Revolution” is “the end of the competitive approach to poetry and waiting and pleading at the doors of big-time publishing.”

⁶ See Stephanie Anderson’s essay in this issue for more on the contents of dodgems through the lens of Myles’s editing and humor.

⁷ Greg Masters, one of the editors of the little magazine Mag City (1977–83), publisher of Crony Books and Dead Duke Books, and editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter from 1980–83, recalls that “I never saw an issue of C or Fuck You for years, probably into the ‘90s somewhere” (Interview with the author).

⁸ As Bernadette Mayer, the Executive Director of The Poetry Project from 1980 to 1984, sort-of famously prescribes: “work yr ass off to change the language & don’t ever get famous” (“Experiments” 83).

⁹ It was also a technology they praised in their poems. “Isn’t color xerox a miracle, Steve?” Myles writes in “Tuesday Brightness,” the first poem in Sappho’s Boat (Little Caesar Press, 1982).