Tottel’s is now online. At least partly. Craig Dworkin’s Eclipse archive, which, in its own words, is dedicated to “digital facsimiles of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century” is in the process of making my 1970s ‘zine its 100th collection. JPEG photo files of every page of all 18 issues are now available. “Reading copies” of each issue in PDF format will follow shortly. This feels particularly amazing to me since no issue of Tottel’s had more than 150 copies and some of the early ones may have had as few as 50. Two libraries – NYPL and SUNY Buffalo – took out subscriptions early on, but their collections may be the only other complete (or near complete) sets in the world.

I got the idea of trying a magazine in the fall of 1968 while I was a student in the creative writing program at San Francisco State. My linguistics professor, Ed van Aelstyn, one of the founding editor’s of Coyote’s Journal, argued that if I was a poet, I should have a magazine – it would give me a chance to contact all of the poets whose work I admired, sharpen my own critical thinking about poetry, and even give me the chance to print my own work. The late d alexander helped immeasurably when he heard from mutual friend Clayton Eshleman that I had embarked on this venture & showed up one day at my door with his address book in hand. d – his full first name – had been editing Odda Talla for a few years at that point & knew the whereabouts of just about every living New American or otherwise post-avant poet in the U.S. And Canada, as it so happened – the subsequent appearance of Daphne Marlatt in Tottel’s was certainly his doing. d hosted Marlatt at his home in the hills behind Stanford & persuaded me to screw up the courage to ask Ken Irby to let me ride along with him & David Bromige – in those years, Irby was the only one of us who even knew how to drive. On our way there, we stopped at a liquor store near d’s to pick up a six pack only to find ourselves standing in line behind Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Ted Enslin, John Thorpe & Chuck Stein were other names that emerged from d’s address book, as were some folks who don’t appear in Tottel’s, most notably Armand Schwerner. I accepted some of Schwerner’s Tablets for my embryonic journal, which I was calling Alpha Sort, but by the time the initial issue of Tottel’s showed up, Armand’s work was already widely available in his first Black Sparrow collection of those poems.

As the hand-scripted logo from the first issue above may attest, one thing I clearly didn’t have a clue about was the production of any publication. I was also living on little more than $100 per month in those days, which didn’t leave me much in the way of resources to pay for printing, let alone typesetting & design. So I found myself for about two years with a stack of work that just sat there as I felt more & more guilty & confused about what to do. Even now, some three dozen years later, when somebody asks me for work for a something that never emerges – where is Leslie Davis’s anthology, Poetry and the Year 2000? – I always keep in mind that I’ve been there too and know precisely what that’s like.

What finally go me going was an unsolicited submission from David Gitin that I felt was just too good not to publish – the work’s neo-Objectivist impulses totally persuaded me – but that brought me face-to-face with the nasty reality that soliciting work & just sitting on it wasn’t “publishing,” but quite the opposite – I was keeping what I felt was significant work from getting out. So I finally went for an option that at the time I thought was inventing on the spot – I trundled down to the local Krishna Copy shop in Berkeley and had the first five-page issue photocopied. I chose a different title, that of the first anthology of poetry in English, both to connect what I thought I was doing to the larger stream of literature and to separate it out from what I thought of as the debacle of Alpha Sort. Gitin’s poems actually turn up in the second issue.

I was very much interested in defining this project as new. I didn’t even know enough to date the first issue, but it was probably December 1970 or January of 1971. I had separated from my first wife, Rochelle Nameroff, in late October 1970 after a five-year marriage & was living in a backyard cottage in North Oakland. At some level, finally getting off the dime on a publication helped to mark the difference between my former life & the one towards which I was optimistically plunging ahead.

Tottel’s has sometimes been referred to as the first language poetry journal &, in the narrow sense that it beat This magazine to print by a few months, this may be true. In 1969, David Melnick & I had co-edited a selection of “Fifteen Young Poets the San Francisco Bay Area” for the Chicago Review – it appeared in the summer 1970 issue, not long before I took the first Tottel’s to the copy shop. We had had the opportunity at the time to include the writing of Rae Armantrout & Robert Grenier in that selection, but for different reasons failed to do so. In Rae’s case, I think we just lacked self-confidence that one of our fellow students at Berkeley was “ready” to publish. In Grenier’s case, I think we worried that Chicago Review would reject the entire project if we tried to include something like

STEAM

inside

in our manuscript. I’m not persuaded even now that the latter fear wasn’t reasonable, but I was determined not to make the same mistake twice and included five poems from Grenier’s Sentences in the first issue – possibly the first appearance anywhere of that seminal work. The third issue was devoted entirely to Armantrout’s poetry, and the fifth to Grenier’s. Two of the poems in the Armantrout number have survived all the way to her selected poems, Veil. So much for her not having been ready. Other single-author issues included David Gitin (#7), Thomas Meyer (9), Clark Coolidge (11), Ray DiPalma (12), David Melnick (13), Bruce Andrews (14), Larry Eigner (15) and Steve Benson (18). That’s a pretty good line-up after all these years.

One non-contributor whose presence in Tottel’s I also enjoyed was Phil Whalen, who can be seen climbing atop & then jumping from a large rock at the San Francisco Zen Center on the cover of issue 17. I forget how exactly I came by that selection. Somebody gave me the photos as a lark at some point & I recall writing away for permission to use them & waiting anxiously until I got a note back that said, basically, “Sure.”

A more ominous cover ran on the 16^th issue, which made use of the execution record form from San Quentin, at the time the only document used by the California Department of Corrections that actually called a prisoner a prisoner rather than a resident or a client. This was something that I picked up on the job during the years I worked in the prisoner rights’ movement.

The sixty real contributors to Tottel’s included each of the following:

Keith Abbott

Tom Ahern

d alexander

Bruce Andrews

Rae Armantrout

Barbara Baracks

Steve Benson

Charles Bernstein

Ted Berrigan

Harvey Bialy

David Bromige

Robert David Cohen

Clark Coolidge

Alan Davies

Lee De Jasu

Raymond DiPalma

Mike Doyle

Lynne Dreyer

Larry Eigner

Theodore Enslin

Seymour Faust

Curtis Faville

David Gitin

John Gorham

Bob Grenier

Lyn Hejinian

Joyce Holland

William B. Hunt

Ken Irby

Robert Kelly

Michael Lally

Iven Lourie

Jackson Mac Low

Lewis MacAdams

Paul Mariah

Daphne Marlatt

David McAleavey

Brian McInerney

David Melnick

Thomas Meyer

Rochelle Nameroff

Opal L. Nations

Bob Perelman

David Perry

Jim Preston

Margaret Randall

Jerome Rothenberg

Dennis Schmitz

Ron Silliman

Charles Stein

Richard Tagett

John Taggart

John Thorpe

Michael Torlen

Keith Waldrop

Rosmarie Waldrop

Barrett Watten

Hannah Weiner

Michael Wiater

Karl Young

Not a perfect list – I’m appalled to think I never printed Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Alan Bernheimer, Beverly Dahlen, Leslie Scalapino, Steve Ratcliffe, Erica Hunt, Aaron Shurin, Bob Glück, Norman Fischer, Kathy Acker, Steve Vincent etc. etc. etc., all of whom I knew in the 1970s – but a decent one overall.

Eclipse, the host institution, so to speak, is becoming one of the major archival sites for poetry of the last half century. Tottel’s is my third item in the Eclipse archive, as my issue of Stations dedicated to the work of Clark Coolidge and Legend, the booklength collaborative poem I wrote with Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery & Bruce Andrews are already there. But I’m also in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, whose complete archives are here, and the index to This magazine. The archive also has some 15 books by Clark Coolidge, the complete books of David Melnick, Rae Armantrout’s first book, nine books by Bruce Andrews, five books by Lyn Hejinian, four by Robert Grenier (not including, alas, Cambridge M’ass, the giant poster of a book), all of the important early works by Bernadette Mayer, and all manner of really rare items, including books by N.H. Pritchard, the African-American avant-gardist, Peter Seaton’s great Agreement or Alden Van Buskirk’s Lami, one of the lost works of the Beat generation. I keep hoping that Dworkin eventually will add all of the early volumes of Coyote’s Journal, or Caterpillar, or Yugen or C. But like such sister sites as UBU, EPC & PENNsound, I’ll wager that Dworkin is doing this on a shoestring, sweat equity all the way beyond, perhaps, storage on a university server somewhere. It’s ironic that the Poetry Foundation, with its endowment of $100-plus million, or even the Academy of American Poetry, have done so much less with so many more resources.

David Bromige

 

Early in 1968, a friend at SF State, David Perry (a graduate of the writing program at Bard & master’s level writing student at State not to be confused with the current, much younger poet of the same name) convinced me to attend a reading at the Albany Public Library in order to hear one of his old Bard classmates, Harvey Bialy. The great irony, from my perspective, being that this was the very same room, even, where I’d spent nearly every Saturday morning for the past 20 years as part of my mother’s ongoing attempts to get my brother & I out of the house – it was the very room where I’d first discovered poetry, seriously discovered it, just six years before.

Bialy was quieter than I expected, more low key. But it was the fellow with whom he read, a Canadian grad student at Berkeley born in the U.K., with a deep voice that could have earned him a living introducing Masterpiece Theater episodes, David Bromige, who totally thrilled me. This was somebody whose every word I wanted to read.

On my way home, tho, David Perry caught the F Bus back to his home in the City while I proceeded to hitchhike back to my apartment in the Adams Point section of Oakland when I got a ride from another attendee at the reading. This happened to be David Melnick, a UC grad student &, by great co-incidence, a one-time roommate of the Chicago Review’s Iven Lourie. We talked as fast as we could about all the different things we suddenly discovered we shared, beginning with a similar taste in poetics – at that moment, I think both of us would have suggested that Louis Zukofsky was our second favorite poet (I would have put Duncan first & Melnick Ashbery). I’d never met another Zukofsky fan, as such, so this seemed amazing to me. Almost immediately, Melnick started to recruit me for a project that he had in mind. He wanted to create a revolution of sorts with the campus magazine at UC, Occident, in those days as sad an example of School of Quietude college journal as one might find. Specifically, David was interested in getting the work of the New York School, in particular, David Shapiro, into the pages of this publication that had once been edited by the likes of Diane Wakoski, Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer when they were students. My own interest was in promoting the next generation of the New American poets generally – this fellow Bromige seemed like a perfect example – and so I agreed to help out – I wouldn’t actually transfer to UC for another 18 months, but I started coming to editorial meetings & nobody thought to throw me out. So Occident became the focal point, magazine-wise, for the next period of my life.

The immediate problem – challenge might be a better word – was that the executive editor of the journal, Lewis Dolinsky, was certain that bringing beatniks into the magazine was a career stopper for his editorial ambitions and so he appointed a new grad student, David McAleavey, poetry editor largely to serve as gatekeeper, hoping to ensure that the barbarians would stay on the right side of the wall. The problem with Dolinsky’s plan was that McAleavey wasn’t really a literary conservative – he was interested in the work of John Berryman, but mostly he was unread in the New Americans. So Melnick & I simply shared our various enthusiasms with the man – in response, McAleavey actually taught me, finally, how to play at least a passable game of chess.

This project had all kinds of repercussions beyond simply getting the work of Bromige & Shapiro into Occident. Melnick & I used our mutual Chicago Review connections to propose a feature on new poets of the Bay Area, which eventually was published in 1970, David McAleavey would go on to publish both my first book, Crow, and Melnick’s, Eclogs, when he was with Ithaca House (McAleavey having transferred to Cornell to finish his PhD, which turned out to be on George Oppen), and Melnick went on to work for decades alongside Lewis Dolinsky on the editorial staff of the San Francisco Chronicle (both retired when it was taken over by the Hearst syndicate). The Chicago Review feature, which got the work of d alexander, Harvey Bialy, David Bromige, Ken Irby, Joanne Kyger, McAleavey, David Perry, George Stanley, Julia Vinograd & Al Young into that publication, in turn is what set me up for the feature I would later edit for Alcheringa, which in turn led directly to In the American Tree.

That’s a lot to get out of a single act of hitch-hiking.

But throughout this entire period, it was always evident that the committee structure of Occident was not going to lead to great literature, as such. The best journals have always reflected the aesthetic commitment of a single individual, or a cabal of like minded co-conspirators. I was, by now, both disinterested in academic rags & had not yet fully found any alternatives that fit my own sense of what was needed.

While I was at SF State in 1968, my linguistics professor, Ed van Aelstyn, one of the founding editors of Coyote’s Journal, persuaded me that I should solve this problem by doing my own publication. That sounded like a great idea, so I began to solicit work, drawing principally from my favorite contributors to Caterpillar – this was made easier one afternoon when d alexander showed up at my apartment just below the Rad Lab woods in the Berkeley Hills with his rolodex in hand.

There was only one catch. I had no clue about how to publish a magazine and no cash whatsoever. My strategy for getting through college had been to get a student loan that would cover my tuition, books and rent for a semester – always taking care to pay the whole semester’s rent in advance – at which point I had so little cash that I always qualified for food stamps. Even if I’d understood what I was getting into, there was no cash around – I could go for a month on just $20 once I’d handled the rent, etc., so long as I had my “agricultural coupons.”

When, one day, I got a terrific unsolicited submission of work from David Gitin, somebody whom I really didn’t know – I had met him once or twice & that was all – I knew I had to do something. So I typed up a few pages of work, hand drew a title logo & took the first issue of Tottel’s to Krishna Copy on Telegraph Avenue. The first issue had work from David Bromige, Jerry Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Daphne Marlatt, Robert David Cohen, David Perry & somebody I’d just gotten to know, Robert Grenier.

If you look at my bibliography on the EPC website, you can trace this transition in interests & focus. In 1969, I published work in Poetry and Caterpillar, and in Arts in Society, all essentially the outcome of attempts I’d made to do so over the two previous years. I also had work in the South Florida Poetry Journal, to which I’d been steered by Duane Locke. Herbert Kubly, a writer of travel memoirs, also used my poem from TriQuarterly as the frontispiece to a book on Greece. And I’d managed to get work into Occident.

The following year, I had work only in Occident and the first issue of Tottels (tho this is also the year when the Chicago Review feature came out). At this point, I was focused in on my own projects in writing, not concerned with publishing somewhere that might cause me to “get ahead.”