The First Books of David Henderson and Mary Korte: A Research
The First Books of David Henderson and Mary Korte: A Research
$12.00
In stock
About the Book
In 1967, the first books of two poets were published by small presses on opposite coasts of the USA: David Henderson’s Felix of the Silent Forest and Mary Norbert Korte’s Hymn to the Gentle Sun. In this essay, poet, scholar, educator, and publisher Iris Cushing looks at the context of these supposedly “minor” poets, and through research and conversation with Korte, Henderson, and Diane di Prima, reconstructs the role of small presses in the countercultural resistance of the late 1960s.
This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral. To view a full list of pamphlets, click here.
Author
Iris Cushing
Iris Cushing is a poet, scholar, educator and founding editor for Argos Books, an independent poetry press. She is the author, most recently, of Into the Long Long Time: How Mary Korte Saved the Trees (Ink Cap Press, 2019). Her poems and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the Boston Review, Fence, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, and her poetry collection Wyoming won the 2013 Furniture Press Poetry Prize. She has edited three chapbooks for the Lost & Found Poetics Documents Initiative: Diane di Prima: Prometheus Unbound as a Magickal Working (Series VIII, 2019), Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word, and Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread and Roses (Series VI, 2016). A doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, Iris is currently at work on a biographical dissertation titled Pierce and Pine: Diane di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte and the Question of Matter and Spirit.
Praise
Praise for Previous Work
Excerpt
The time after the Berkeley Poetry Conference was an incredibly transformative one for Korte. It was during this time that she began to step outside of the convent with increasing frequency to meet with other poets, attend poetry readings, and learn about the intersections of countercultural literature and activism happening in San Francisco. She surreptitiously took food from the convent kitchen and brought it to the Diggers’ headquarters on Haight St., where she turned it over to Diane di Prima, who was organizing food distribution for the Diggers at the time. The Diggers shared a space–an apartment, really– with the San Francisco Oracle, an underground newspaper that specialized in psychedelic, spiritual and politically subversive content. On one of her visits to this space on Haight St., Korte was invited to use the typewriter if she wished. She began to take her handwritten poems to the office there, and type them up.
So when David Meltzer encouraged Korte to submit some of her work to Hawley for Oyez Press in November of 1966, she sent a sheaf of poems she had written in the convent and typed up at the Oracle/Diggers office. This order of operations is remarkable, as a symbol for Korte’s liminal position between two worlds: the work was generated in the cloistered quiet of her familiar, orderly religious world, but typed up in preparation for its entrance into the radical poetry-reading public in the chaotic hub of two countercultural organizations. The poems, like Korte herself, straddled both realms in the way they were literally rendered onto the page.