I wanted to kick-start this blog "In a Gathering of Leaves: Poetry Chapbooks from 1960-1980" with an excerpt form Merla Levinston's & Kyle Waugh's essay "Chapbooks from the Mimeo Revolution: From New American Poetry to New Sentence", an essay that served as a primer to a small exhibit of American poetry chapbooks from the later half of the 20th century that was held at the Poetry House in NYC in April of 2014.

     Levinston & Waugh write: "This exhibit focuses on the chapbook production of roughly a dozen small presses (of the many, many dozens) that sprang up in North America (and beyond) during what has now come to be known as the Mimeo Revolution. Stretching from the early 1960's through the early 1980's, this typographical upheaval gathered energy around the members of he Beat movement, as well as former faculty and alumni of the wildly influential North Carolina arts college, Black Mountain, but its soon attracted a much broader spectrum of writers, artists and amateur printers. "With direct access to mimeograph machines, letterpress and inexpensive offset," write Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips, in their indispensable biographical history, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980,  this "underground economy of poets" designed, printed and distributed a massive and vastly diverse body of countercultural, often ephemeral literature that circulated internationally".

     I would add that this "Mimeo Revolution" was not only a cultural movement but an important new renaissance in American letters. As the cost of the means of book production became more affordable literature was taken out of the hands of the overly academic and corporate publishing houses and put in the hands of the people, the self. In this new paradigm the written word flourished, new voices emerged, established voices strengthened. Like a tidal wave in the night the movement captured the spirit of the chaotic and powerful energy of the 60's and 70's with maximum efficiency.

     As Levinston & Waugh states, this revolution in the means of production soon lead to many small presses sprouting up across the North American continent (and the entire world) and the movement solidified and became an established force in how poetry was produced and presented. Today some of these small presses are cultural institutions (City Lights, Coffee House, Black Sparrow to name a few) that forever changed the face of poetry and publishing.

     It is all well and good to read the poetry of the 1960's and 70's in anthologies or collected works, but to hold in your hands and read an original chapbook of poems published by a small press from say 1967 is to experience the force and unbridled beauty of a movement and revolution that we are all now a part of.

     With that said I hope to bring awareness to, and help catalogue, some of the fine, often times more rare examples from the small presses that were part and parcel of this revolution. Not only to present the books themselves but also to discuss the presses, the people behind the presses, and the authors and artists who created these exceptional works of art and literature.