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Panorama of Detroit Artists Workshop by Emil Bacilla |
Introduction to the Artists Workshop Press
By Cary LorenPOETRY & THE MIMEOGRAPH REVOLUTION
INFLUENCE OF THE ARTISTS WORKSHOP PRESS
THE ARTISTS WORKSHOP PRESS AND THE COMMUNITY
Red Door gallery members and a coalition of other area artists founded the Detroit Artists’ Workshop Society on November 1st, 1964. It began as a small artist colony with a center located in a house at 1252 West Forest near the Lodge
exit, residing on what is now the southern end of the Wayne University Graduate Student Housing Complex, which stretches north from Forest Avenue, across Hancock, and all the way to the alley that ran between (what was then) the Artists Workshop Cooperative Housing Project (4821-23-25-27 John C. Lodge), and the building on the corner of Warren that included 4865-67. From that former alley to the corner of Warren is where a strip shopping mall exists now.
The original house on Forest burned up in the late spring of 1965 and the Workshop's center was moved to the space at 4865-67 John C. Lodge at the corner of Warren. This is the site pictured in the Emil Bacilla photograph above. Within the several storefronts in this corner building resided the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the Fifth Estate newspaper (which was issued every two weeks), and the Northern Student Movement. Also included was a governmental agency that was charged with relocating the people in the neighborhood so the houses and stores could be torn down and a massive Graduate Student Housing Complex built in their place.
The Press was located at 4867 John C. Lodge and flourished between 1964– and 1967. During that time, it produced the WORK series of journals, containing poetry, prose and literary reviews. It also produced journals such as
CHANGE/1, CHANGE/2, WHE’RE/1, FREE POEMS/AMONG FRIENDS, and the COLLECTED ARTISTS WORKSHEETS, as well as twenty individual monographs of poetry and prose. Produced on mimeograph machines in small numbers (usually 500-700 copies), the journals were an important vehicle of counterculture dissemination in Detroit at the time. The building eventually housed an old letterpress that Robin Eichele had acquired and it was later transferred to Ken and Ann Mikolowski, who used it to print their Alternative Press books, broadsides and ephemera in Detroit and, eventually, Grindstone City.
Also , four issues of the Warren-Forest Sun were published (not at all weekly) at the 4867 John C. Lodge site. The Sun was printed on the west side by Hugh Cleage, brother of Albert Cleage of the Shrine of the Black Madonna and a long-time civil rights activist.
POETRY & THE MIMEOGRAPH REVOLUTION
Similar activities to the Detroit Workshop sprung up around neighborhood bookshops in other major urban centers. Some of these included: Lawrence Ferlenghetti’s CITY LIGHTS in San Francisco, THE POETS PRESS, and FLOATING BEAR (run out THE PHOENIX BOOKSHOP by Diane DiPrima and Leroi Jones in New York City, Ed Sander’s PEACE EYE bookstore in New York City and THE ASPHODEL BOOK SHOP in Cleveland. The thriving poetic scenes across the nation helped support various small presses and journals despite the odds of difficult distribution and financial instability.
The radical presses formed in the 1960s can be viewed as having a direct linage to radical and anarchist presses that began in the early teens. These were the first voices of the early labor movement, magazines such as THE MASSES published art work and social commentary side by side. The crossroads of politics and culture in 1915 were as fertile a territory for social reform as jazz, folk music and rock and roll in the early 1960s.
In Detroit the WARREN/FOREST SUN and THE FIFTH ESTATE were bi-weekly underground newspapers, spreading the word on politics and counterculture. Propaganda and information were interchangeable, language was an op-art discotheque of moving images and rapid-fire seduction. Pop oracle Marshall McLuhan wrote his ritual incantation of the new tribal rhythms in his manifesto THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE.
The bulk of radical small journals of the early 1960s were printed on mimeograph machines. This allowed cheap and reasonable copies to be made and distributed in short time. Before a copy could be made on a mimeograph machine a stencil needed to be made first. Most stencils were usually typewritten on then strapped to the machine drum. A hand turned crank (later replaced by an electric motor) would put pressure between sheets of paper and a cylinder as ink was forced through openings cut into the stencil. The entire process went smoothly for professional printers, but for most users it was a messy business with torn stencils and smearing ink.
The mimeograph is now a dead medium made extinct and replaced by high speed copiers, computers and ink jet printers. In 1998 the New York Public Library presented over 400 mimeograph publications in the exhibition A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980. This exhibition included poetry and journals by many New York underground literary luminaries including; William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Leroi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka). Designs and original art were often included by artists Andy Warhol, Robert Rauchenberg, and Alex Katz.
Also on display in the exhibition were two 1951 issues of Origin: A Quarterly for the Creative, a journal published by poet Cid Corman. Origin featured the work of many important poets, including early poems by Charles Olson, who (with Robert Creeley) a few years later created the seminal Black Mountain Review, published from Black Mountain College where he was Rector. Origin is the great godfather of mimeographed journals.
Contributions would flow between major city journals, and traveling poetry readings across country were not uncommon. Radical developments were occurring in jazz as this exciting period of experimental and free verse poetry was flowering and mixing with sound as well as the visual arts and opening up new vistas unimagined before. Absolute artistic freedom was colliding with the birth of a new culture.
There was a close relationship and continual exchange between the mimeograph groups and poetry circles of San Francisco, New York, Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit. Poets often made cross country trips to do readings or short stints at the Workshop. Poets Robert Creely, Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima and Leroi Jones gave early support the Workshop, coming to Detroit for readings and cultural exchange. Their works would often appear in Workshop publications, and Detroit poets would often find their works landing into sister related journals.
INFLUENCE OF THE ARTISTS WORKSHOP PRESS
In 1965, folksinger Jerry Moore asked for permission to record a Dudley Randall poem as a song. In order to protect his rights as the author, Randall printed the poem as a broadside, a single sheet of paper, and founded the Broadside Press. Shortly thereafter, he began the Broadside Series and published poems by such prominent black poets as Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Naomi Long Madgett, Gwendolyn Books, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Melvin Tolson, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes. He called the first set of poems "Poems of the Negro Revolt." As the press grew, it began to publish books by these same broadside authors, and it also introduced new black voices of the 1960s, including Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Etheridge Knight, James Emanuel, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lord. According to poet and scholar Eugene Redmond, Broadside Press became "the hub of black poetry publishing."
The Artists Workshop Press was the stimulus for starting the Alternative Press in 1969. Editors Ken and Ann Mikolowski created a press that gave national opportunity for Detroit-based poets Jim Gustafson, Mick Vranich, John Sinclair, Donna Brooks, Faye Kicknosway, Chris Tysh, and George Tysh. Like Broadside Press, the Alternative Press extended its identity beyond city borders by publishing noted national poets Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder, and others. Their publishing format was as varied as Randall's press, which included broadsides, postcards, and bumper stickers. The goal of the Alternative Press was to create an eclectic, accessible, and inclusive mix of writing for audiences, and an alternative community for artists.
It was during the 1970s, as the city began its dramatic economic decline, that small presses and reading series began to showcase a more diverse roster and encourage more cross-cultural activity within the broader poetry community. The number of independent presses also increased: Wayne State professor and poet Steven Tudor founded the One Hundred Pound Press; Glenn Mannisto, Dennis Teichman, Chris Tysh, George Tysh, and Jim Wanless founded the Detroit River Press, and Mannisto edited the newsletter Straits; and in 1973 Carl Aniel, Greg Hallock, Jeffrey Ensroth, Larry Wilson, Sharon Vanden Brock and M. L. Liebler started the Ridgeway Press and Ridgeway Artist Collective, which was influenced by surrealism, Dada and the Fluxus Movement.
Above excerpted from the introduction to Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001, edited by Melba Joyce Boyd and M. L. Liebler (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), pages 23-28.
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ARTIST WORKSHOP PUBLICATIONS
WB/1 The Book of Humors, James Semark
WB/2 Sit Up Straight, George Tysh
WB/3 This is Our Music, John Sinclair
WB/4
WB/5 The Night Vision Express, Jim Semark
WB/6 Free Poems Among Friends Vol. 1
WB/7 Write About my Buddies...They’re All Dead, Jerry Younkins
WB/8 Fire Music: a record, John Sinclair
WB/9 Runes, Robin Eichele
WB/10 Collected Artist Worksheet 1965
WB/11 Said a Meant, Ron Caplan
WB/12 The Strange Odyssey of Howard Pow!, Bill Hutton
WB/13 Free Poems Among Friends Vol. 2
WB/14
WB/15 Hello, J.D. Whitney
WB/16 The Sirius Poems by Jerry Younkins
WB/17 The Sun, James Semark
WB/18 Meditations, John Sinclair
WB/19 Yup It Is, Tom Mitchell
WB/20 Alice is in You, Ed Rudolph & Your Sweet All, Buzz KlingenbergerOther Titles:
The Poem For Warner Stringfellow, John Sinclair
Bloom, John Ka
The Fugs Songbook
Work Vol.1-5
Change Vol. 1-2
Whe’re
Guerilla Magazine
Journal, Summer 1967
Trans-Love Posters #1-27
Trans-Love Energies/Artist Workshop Press Catalogue 1964-1968 Top
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