Truth amid the Alien Corn Alastair Johnston. I am writing another kind of poetry, And some of my poems are beautiful to me.

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1 Truth amid the Alien Corn Alastair Johnston I am writing another kind of poetry, And some of my poems are beautiful to me. - Fern Gravel A clever, artistic and rather formal document captures a moment in American literature that many know about and a few experienced: the tentative tenure of two outrider poets in the flat heart of America, Anselm Hollo & Ted Berrigan in Iowa City! Yes, Iowa in the late sixties, of all places, a hotbed of poetry and letterpress activity. So unexpected a little background may be in order before the two outsiders, Berrigan, the Rhode Island rogue who made the Lower East Side his home, and the Finn arrive in our narrative. The big names in Iowa printing in the twentieth century -- the Prairie Press of Carroll Coleman, Abattoir Editions of Harry Duncan, & Stone Wall Press of K. Kimber Merker -- are of the largest sort. Carroll Coleman established the Prairie Press in his parents basement in Muscatine Iowa during the Depression. While he ran it as the quintessential midwestern press, his contacts reached all corners of the literary avant garde. After his successful first book of Contemporary Iowa Poets (1935), he printed a spoof, Oh Millersville! by Fern Gravel, whose fictitious 11-year-old author was hailed as the Lost Sappho of the Midwest by The New York Times. The real author was James Norman Hall, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty, an Iowan who preferred to live in Tahiti. Like the poetry anthology it was set in ATF Bulmer, Coleman s house type. Commissions followed, notably from New Directions, but the press struggled. Materials became scarce with the outbreak of World War II and friends at the University hoped to secure him an academic gig through the newly created Iowa Writers Workshop. An offer came from Grinnell College where one of Prairie s authors, Thomas Duncan, taught writing. But, while Coleman was considering the move, a counter-offer came from the School of Journalism at Iowa where a typographic laboratory was to be set up under Coleman s direction. He would be followed on campus by some distinguished bookmakers: Harry Duncan, Kim Merker, and Kay Amert. The idea was to provide a solid artistic core of bookmaking in the milieu of both the Journalism school and the Writers Workshop. Because without academic support, Prairie Press struggled with the oldest problem of all: publishing living poetry in handsome editions at modest prices. ( Ultimately the University job put so many demands on Coleman his private press languished. Harry Duncan, a Hawkeye from Keokuk, took over from Coleman in 1956 and directed the typographic laboratory until He also ran the Cummington Press, first in Massachusetts (where he d gone to school), then in Iowa, and finally in Omaha, Nebraska where he assumed a professorship in He established Abattoir Editions and was known not only for impeccably made books but also for the unerring taste in authors he printed, including Robert Lowell s first book of poetry (The Land of Unlikeness, 1944) and works by W. C. Williams, Tennessee Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Yvor Winters. Kim Merker was a New Yorker who attended the Iowa Writers Workshop. He started Stone Wall Press in 1957 and published younger poets interspersed with books by Williams and Pound. At Iowa University he founded Windhover Press at the Iowa Center for the Book, based in the Art Department, a cross-campus rival to the Typographic Lab which had changed roles under new administration and was now intended for teaching journalism students without the indulgence of a fine arts agenda. Merker had learned from Harry Duncan and hoped to pass on his position to his star student Kay Amert, but felt betrayed when she moved to the Journalism School and revived their program. In addition to these University-backed publishers there was a strong presence up Interstate 80 in the hamlet of West Branch where Allan and Cinda Kornblum ran Toothpaste Press. Kornblum was another New Yorker who became a student of Harry Duncan and ran a mimeo magazine named Toothpaste. After studying typography with the master he converted to letterpress in 1973 and ran the press out of his home for a decade. West Branch was the rural opposite of the bustling university town where bookstores and pizza parlors were filled with poetry readings, improv and staged plays. Herbert Hoover had been born in West Branch in After the First World War the grateful people of Belgium gave a bronze statue of Veiled Isis, the Egyptian goddess of Life, to Hoover.

2 Hoover placed it in a grove of trees to watch over his birthplace. In 1974 Michael Waltuch started the Whale Cloth Press in Iowa City and printed poetry by Alan Bernheimer, Robert Grenier (who graduated from the Writers Workshop) and Kit Robinson s first book. One major draw for the Iowa Writers Workshop was the faculty. In 1968 Ted Berrigan accepted a position to teach poetry at Iowa (after apparently it was offered to Ron Padgett who said no amount of money would induce him to move to Iowa), and also in 1968 Anselm Hollo arrived as head of the translation workshop. Hollo was there through 1973, while Berrigan passed on his chair to other poets and was only actually present for about a year. ( Which brings us to this slight, yet impressive document -- two casual poems and two informal portraits -- a celebration of Berrigan and Hollo in Iowa, printed in Spring I had this filed in my Toothpaste Press collection because of the use of a double colon, a small typographic affectation, in the colophon which I thought pointed to Kornblum, but a net search turns up a book dealers description calling the publisher, T. G. Miller, a student of Kim Merker. That s more than enough backstory; here is the work. 240 copies were printed on one side of a large sheet of Curtis Rag (in Palatino types) and folded and cut to reveal two doors in the center.

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