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ERIC LARSEN, FOUNDER & PUBLISHER
ADAM ENGEL, ASSOCIATE EDITOR & PUBLISHER
"The Nation's Last Truly Independent Press"
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THE OLIVER ARTS & OPEN PRESS
HAS A NEW WEBSITE
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SINCE 2009, Isotta Nogarola (c. 1418-1466) has watched over The Oliver Arts & Open Press, serving as stalwart guide and unflagging source of inspiration for all of the six long years that Oliver has been in existence. And now, at long last, her room, desk, environs, her very place of employment itself have been cleaned, spiffed up, remodeled, brightened, and altogether shined and made to sparkle.
In short, Isotta and Oliver have a brand new website--and it's bright, airy, nice, clean, open, and trim. Please give it a look and please visit it often!
By the way, we are so fond of Isotta and depend on her so much that we have come up with a kind of nickname for her--we call her Oliver's "mythstress."
Oliver's Manifesto, in fact, is also Isotta's Manifesto, even though, when you look at it, you'll find that it was actually a collaboration between Isotta and Adam Engel.
Adam has collaborated with Isotta also in composing a poem in honor of the late Barbara Mor. It could have been called "Homage a Barbara Mor," but Adam and Isotta, instead, decided to give it a greater depth by calling it "The Cursive Mythtress Mor."
Please read it here. Barbara Mor was an immensely principled, vastly learned, unflaggingly powerful feminist thinker, writer, historian, and observer. She was also a poet of the first rank. And she was also a great wit. Please think of her as you read "The Cursive Mythstress Mor." |
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WITH THE RECENT DEATH of Barbara Mor (1936-2015), the world lost a uniquely principled, learned, and powerful feminist thinker, writer, historian, observer-and poet. Mor was-and is-best known to readers as the author of last century's extraordinary (1987) landmark classic, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. Mor, indeed, was gifted, encyclopedic, and ground-breaking as a scholar, but she was also a poet--and one of the very first order. In 1911, The Oliver Arts & Open Press published her earlier collection, The Blue Rental
And what is this poem, exactly, or what is it like? In its passion, it's like Howl, in its grit and power, it's like Paterson, and in both its learnedness and in its unflinching gaze as it looks out at the end-time of American civilization and culture, it's like The Waste Land.
As you will learn in Edgar Garcia's revealing Foreword to this edition of the poem, James Dean said to Barbara Mor when she was all of nineteen, "It's important to me that you write." Six days after that, James Dean met his death; and now, after another fifty-nine years, we are without the writer herself. But we do still have her work. And what work it is. A passage from The Victory of sex & Metal shows the poem's intensity, range, complexity, and intellectual breadth:
women in particular the decorative sex if human hair long
female hair drifts from their antennae like flags or labia
spread open on chrome grills a slick trophy or confetti of
skin drifting down on us as dust we thought it flattery
as girls so manufacturd and cool we cannot think cannot
speak face in a mirror construct of oil it cannot care as
the ship naglfar compressd of dead metallic fingernails
once clawd guitars as erotic flesh and riding the gorgeous
back of the sea it takes her down
memorys body as
all the beasts convergd in catastrophic metals is a stuffd
mouth all knowledge shutup beaten down inside is hard
rock absoluteTime nothing speaks until earth speaks or
mantic utters spoils of war&warriors speak their engines
of awful groins humming or purring or rumbling and slow
haunches more beautiful than women their animal eyes
seek nothing but are terrible lights some voluspa growl
or howl of extinct things or death orgasm that is not me
this is history is history of my body
. . . . .
To buy The Victory of Sex & Metal from Amazon, CLICK HERE
For praise of Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, CLICK HERE
And to listen to the voice of Barbara Mor as she reads pages 89-90 of The Blue Rental, CLICK HERE
. . . . .
Barbara Mor was born October 3, 1936, in San Diego, California. Her mother died when Mor was twelve. For the next few years, the young girl lived with her father and step-mother, leaving home immediately after high school.
Attracted by the Beat Movement of the late 50s and early 60s, she lived and wrote in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Baja California, and Los Angeles before returning to San Diego to attend San Diego State University. In the late 60s Mor became involved with the Feminist Movement in San Diego. She taught poetry, gave readings and lectures, and helped compile local, limited-run poetry anthologies.
Mor spent the mid-1970s in Taos, New Mexico, before moving to Albuquerque in 1979. During this period she published Bitter Root Rituals (WomanSpirit, 1975), Mother Tongue (Athena Press, 1977), and Winter Ditch (Second Porcupine Press, 1982), and began work on The Great Cosmic Mother (Harper & Row, 1987), widely considered among the great American feminist texts of the 20th century. Mor moved to Portland, Oregon, in the late 1990s, drawing on her experience in the Southwest to forge a prose style that is as innovative and demanding as it is compelling. The Blue Rental, a collection of these prose texts, was published by The Oliver Arts & Open Press in 2011. The Victory of sex and Metal (The Oliver Arts & Open Press, 2015), completed during the Spring of 2014, marked Mor's return to poetry and her stark vision of the American Southwest. Barbara Mor died on January 24, 2015.
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After first reading a typescript of The Victory of Sex & Metal, a person at The Oliver Arts & Open Press wrote this about it:
"I finished it two or three days ago, was going to write you at once, but life has been hell, or at least hellish. My god. The book is austere, hard, severe, unendingly inventive, not always pleasant, sometimes a slog, brilliantly determined, doggedly paced (or doggedly 'paced'), not always 'rewarding' but always demanding, never compromising, extraordinarily allusive and learned, drenched in imagery of slut and slime, aimed at the heaven of purity and release, boundless in concept and aim, by no means 'fun' or 'entertaining,' dead-serious throughout, a work of genius, vision, compulsion, cause, aesthetic-social-emotional impulse, or all of the above.
"How could we not, given the opportunity, be part of bringing it to print and public?"
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OLIVER AND ITS GRACIOUS BENEFACTORS
Working without assets, endowment, or reserves, The Oliver Arts & Open Press aims to publish works of high merit and importance that are ignored or suppressed by mainstream publishing. If you care about this cause and are able or would like to help with it, we at Oliver would be exceedingly grateful, as would the authors whose work we seek to celebrate and make known. To donate, make a check or money order out to "Eric Larsen Press" and mail it to:
The Oliver Arts & Open Press
2578 Broadway (Suite #102)
New York, New York 10025
Our deepest thanks to these kind, generous, and thoughtful benefactors
of The Oliver Arts & Open Press:
Michael Fahey
Roxanne Griffith
Michael J. Rivard
Helen Tzagoloff
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