Poetry News

At the Berg Collection, Iris Cushing Reads Diane di Prima & LeRoi Jones's The Floating Bear

Originally Published: August 23, 2017

Real good read at the CUNY GC Center for Humanities' blog: poet and editor Iris Cushing writes about her time working with the Collaborative Research Seminar, "a cross-institutional pilot program hosted by the Graduate Center’s Library and the New York Public Library," where she discovered–through her interest in Wallace Berman's Semina–The Floating Bear, "a bi-monthly, mimeographed newsletter started in 1961 by Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)." (The NYPL's Berg Collection has a full set of the The Floating Bear.) An excerpt from Cushing's piece on this archival work:

The pages of the Bear consist solely of lines typed by hand. There are no graphics, columns, advertisements, or author photos. Di Prima typed the Bear’s contents—poems, essays, plays, critical texts and letters—herself on her IBM typewriter before making them into mimeograph sheets, which were then printed at the Phoenix Bookshop on Cornelia Street in the West Village. Baraka and Di Prima got help with proofreading from James Waring, and Freddie Herko helped out with managing the mailing list. They started out mailing the newsletter for free to about 150 poets, artists, playwrights and choreographers around the country; the list of recipients grew over the years to a few hundred. So, the ‘boundary stones’ include the canvas of the 8 ½ x 11” page, the typewriter, the mimeo, the mailing list. The field those stones describe is a magical field of inquiry, of affinity, of intellectual and spiritual freedom.

The tension between two simultaneous realities—between the boundary stones of the Bear and the wild, living, radical field of ideas and art it contains—is what interests me most about primary source research. To sit and be absorbed in reading an extra-literary artifact like the Bear is an experience of inhabiting two realities at once. Issue #2—the one that contains Creeley’s essay—begins with a beautiful poem by Frank O’Hara, “Now That I am in Madrid And Can Think.” The poem begins “I think of you/ and the continents brilliant and arid/ and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air”. Reading the Bear, I feel that, like O’Hara, I am sharing breath with those who printed its pages. Those people are very close (their work is in my hands) and yet very far away (as it was made over half a century ago). In the Bear the names of the authors are placed after their work, so if I didn’t recognize the poem, I wouldn’t know who wrote it unless I turned a few pages. There’s no table of contents. The poem is the total focus of attention. I begin to read, my eyes wandering over the plain, uncluttered space of the page. The poem was typed on a typewriter, which gives it an intimate, handmade quality, as if it were written in a letter between friends.

And indeed, the Bear is a sort of letter between friends, many friends over long distances. Range. While Di Prima and Baraka were hanging out in O’Hara’s apartment, finding pages of poems wedged between couch cushions, Creeley was living in New Mexico with Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Duncan was in San Francisco, and Olson in Gloucester. Much of the dialogue among these poets happened in text—in the private space of correspondence, or in the semi-public of small-press publications. Like the numerous other “little magazines” central to the Beats, New American Poetry, the New York School, the Bear was a coming-together place, a way for poets and artists to engage each other asynchronously.