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Series One
Number Four
PASTERNAK
GUILLEVIC
TARN
ROTH
MERTON
GOMRINGER
MARSHALL
BLY
HAINES
SABINES
CONGRESS
SERIAL RECORD
JAN-9 1968
Series One
Contributors
Number Four
[???]THOMAS MERTON will be featured in Unicorn Journal with an essay on Camus' The Stranger, Father Louis, as he is known in the Cisterdan Abbey of Gethsemani, has for a decade represented the finest in Catholic humanist regeneration and, from the woods near the Abbey where he lives as a solitary, he sees with the artist's eye the spiritual dilemma of our time. His poem, “The Originators,” was in Folio Three. The illustration of “Carol 1967” is his own.
[???]JOHN HAINES will have six poems in Unicorn Journal. His first book of poetry, Winter News, was published in 1966 by Wesleyan University Press in their fine series of volumes by contemporary poets. Living as he has in Alaska for twenty years, sixty-eight miles from Fairbanks, he, like Thomas Merton, observes our world with the perception gained from a distant perspective and his work offers a link between the primitive but mythical Alaskan wilderness and the sophistication of urban lives.
[???]WOLFGANG ROTH has conceived the art work for Unicorn Journal. He is presently showing collages, paintings and drawings at the Herbert Benlevy Gallery in New York City. His “Landskaetchs?lied” appeared in Folio Two. In Europe he collaborated with Brecht in Berlin and in this Folio presents a poem from Brecht's Theatre, translated by the playwright George Tabori. Roth is a gifted minnesinger as well as originator of The Littlest Circus and has brought the world of the clown to art and poetry. He is an eminent designer.
[???]ROBERT BLY's contribution to the Unicorn Broadsheet series will be “In A Boat On Big Stone Lake.” He is our leading contemporary man-of-letters and as editor of The Fifties and The Sixties has introduced European writing to present-day North American poets. As a publisher, Bly has continued to produce timely and handsome volumes, instructing and inspiring us by the quality of the verse. As a critic, he is constantly disciplining his contemporaries, holding us to the line of imagist poetry of association. As a poet, he has shown extraordinary growth in his second published volume, The Light Around The Body (Harper & Row, 1967). The letter to the National Foundation of the Arts seemed to us to combine these four faces of Robert Bly and, as well, to underline his outspoken and compassionate opposition to the U.S. War in Viet Nam.
[???]EACH OF THE FOUR ISSUES OF UNICORN FOLIO, SERIES ONE, HAS A UNIFYING THEME. NUMBER ONE (JANUARY 15, 1967) INCLUDES POETS WHO WERE EITHER TO GIVE POETRY READINGS AT UNICORN BOOK SHOP OR WHOSE BOOKS WERE TO BE BROUGHT OUT BY THIS PRESS DURING ITS FIRST QUARTER NUMBER TWO (APRIL 15, 1967), OUR WAR-AND-PEACE ISSUE, CAME OUT ON NATIONAL PEACE MOBILIZATION DAY AND WAS DEDICATED TO A. J. MUSTE. NUMBER THREE (OCTOBER 15, 1967), REFERRED TO AS OUR BLACK-AND-WHITE ISSUE WITH ITS CHESSBOARD COVER BY JEFFREY SORENSON, WAS IN MEMORY OF LANGSTON HUGHES. NUMBER FOUR (DECEMBER 15, 1967), LIKE THE FIRST OF OUR FOUR SERIES-ONE FOLIOS, RETURNS TO THE THEME OF POETS WHOSE WORK OR VOICE WE WILL BE FEATURING IN THE COMING MONTHS.
[???]IN THE SPRING OF 1968 WE WILL BRING OUT THE FIRST ISSUE OF OUR TWICE-A-YEAR UNICORN JOURNAL, A ONE-HUNDRED PAGE BOOK IN BOTH HARD AND SOFT COVERS, WHICH WILL BE AN ATTEMPT AT INTEGRATION OF ART AND SOCIETY THROUGH ARTISTS' EYES. TEO SAVORY IS EDITOR OF THE JOURNAL. [???]THE FIRST FIVE OF A SERIES OF TEN BROADSIDES WILL COME OUT IN 1968. JAMES TATE, GARY SNYDER AND ROBERT BLY HAVE HAD NEW POEMS ACCEPTED FOR BROADSHEETS. [???]THE UNICORN FRENCH SERIES NOW INCLUDES SIX BOOKS AND IN THE SPRING OF 1968 WE WILL ISSUE THREE MORE VOLUMES, BI-LINGUAL AS USUAL—REVERDY, GUILLEVIC AND SEGALEN. [???]THE UNICORN GERMAN SERIES WILL COMMENCE NEXT YEAR WITH VOLUMES OF POEMS BY INGEBORG BACHMANN AND EUGEN GOMRINGER. [???]A SHORT SELECTION OF POEMS BY BORIS PASTERNAK WILL BE PUBLISHED IN PAPER-COVERED EDITION THIS WINTER. [???]SERGE MONDRAGON, EDITOR OF EL CORNO EMPLUMADO. HAS PREPARED A LARGE ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN POETRY, AUTHORS RANGING FROM OCTAVIO PAZ TO JAIME SABINES, TO BE PUBLISHED IN BI-LINGUAL EDITION NEXT SUMMER. [???]SERIES TWO OF UNICORN POETRY CARDS WILL BE LAUNCHED WITH A LENORE MARSHALL POEM. [???]THE RECENT DAVID MELTZER BROADSIDE WAS ENRICHED WITH A LINOLEUM BLOCK BY JANEEN VANDEN BERG. [???]UNICORN FOLIO SERIES TWO WILL CONTINUE TO FEATURE COVERS BY JEFFREY SORENSEN AND PRINTING SERVICES OF NOEL YOUNG[???].
[???]GUILLEVIC is the poet chosen for the eighth volume of the Unicorn French Series. He was born in Brittany in 1907 and began writing poetry when he was twenty-two, but did not publish until he was thirty, when Requiem brought him deserved recognition. Seventeen books have followed, but this will be his first U.S. publication in book form. Guillevic's poetic vision is of contemporaneous interest: he views objects as things-in-themselves rather than in relationship to man.
[???]TEO SAVORY, novelist and poet, has translated six volumes for the French Series and is now finishing her work on the Guillevic collection. Her Traveler's Palm was published by Unicorn Press in March, 1967.
[???]NATHANIEL TARN will translate the Segalen volume in the French Series. Segalen (1878-1919), like Claudel, Pound, Waley and Perse, found much of his inspiration through his affinity for Oriental culture. Tarn is a young English poet who edits the Goitard series for Jonathan Cape. His most recent works are the translation of Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967) and his own volume of poetry, Old Savage Young City (Random House, 1965). He spent the summer of 1967 visiting the United States.
[???]EUGEN GOMRINGER, whose Constellations, translated by Jerome Rothenberg, will inaugurate the Unicorn German Series, is the post-war German poet who was born in Bolivia in 1925. One of the originators of Concrete Poetry, which he has been publishing for fifteen years, he has moved “from line to constellation.” In “Manifesto for a new poetry, visual and phonic,” the poet Pierre Garnier states that “the rhythms of poetry have succeeded in deadening the reader's mind ... Every word is an abstract picture ... The constellation is the simplest kind of configuration in poetry which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster.” The Constellations was printed and published by Gomringer at his own press in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, in 12-point lean-faced Helvetica, as it is here produced.
[???]BORIS PASTERNAK will have translations of five of his poems published here in a separate volume next year. GEORGE L. KLINE, his translator, is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Russian at Bryn Mawr and has already translated Tolstoi as well as many contemporary Russian poets. He has just returned from a visit to the Soviet Union where Iosif Brodsky gave him several of his new poems, some of which will appear in Unicorn Journal.
[???]JAIME SABINES is the youngest of the Mexican poets in the forthcoming An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poets; he was born in Chiapas in 1925. His milieu has not been a literary one but, like several others of the poets in this Folio, he has lived a life of farm and field. His colloquial language of every-day origin reveals profound scepticism and a horror of death, moving because of his unique insight into events of immediate experience. His books, as yet unavailable in English, include Horal (1950), La Señal (1950), Tarumba (1956), Diario Sentenario y poemas en prosa (1961) and Recuento de Poemas (1962). The two poems here were translated by the U.S. poet, Ellinor Randall.
[???]LENORE MARSHALL'S poem, “El Greco: St. Francis and the Skull,” will be the first in the new series of Poetry Cards. She has published a novel, The Hill Is Level (Random House, 1959) and Other Knowledge, a book of poems (Noonday, 1957). Spoken Arts has issued a record of Mrs. Marshall reading her own poems. Norton will be bringing out a volume of short stories by this versatile writer.
[???]JANEEN VANDEN BERG executed the engravings illustrating the poems of Haines and Marshall in this number. She is a young artist who has recently moved to Santa Barbara from New York.
[???]JEFFREY SORENSON has given us the engravings for the covers of Series One of the Unicorn Folios. He is currently enrolled at U.C.S.B. and when his studies permit or his struggle with Selective Service allows, he assists with printing at the press offices.
[???]NOEL YOUNG is the genius behind the printing we offer. Mr. Young has done most of our printing, including all the work in the Folios. He is a poet himself and one of his stories recently appeared in “The California Review.”
[???]No. 137
©1967, Unicorn Press
CONGRESS
SERIAL RECORD
JAN-9 1968
PASTERNAK
GUILLEVIC
TARN
ROTH
MERTON
GOMRINGER
MARSHALL
BLY
HAINES
SABINES