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[ed. note - I found "form/id/able" when I was scouring the little magazine collection at SUNY Buffalo's Poetry/Rare Books Room last year. It was published in the first issue of Big Sky, edited in Bolinas by Bill Berkson from 1971-78. In A Secret Location on the Lower East Side Berkson writes: "When I arrived, the literary community in Bolinas numbered fewer than a dozen people, mainly poets like Joanne Kyger who had been associated with the Spicer and Duncan circles in San Francisco, plus a couple of prior interlopers from New York, Tom Clark and Lewis Warsh." I asked Robert Creeley who Charlie Vermont was, and he'd miraculously just received an email from him after being out of touch for some time; they'd been friends in Placitas, New Mexico. Thence my brief correspondence with Charlie Vermont, now an M.D. living in Arkansas, began.
When I first encountered "form/id/able" it seemed to suit to the Joanne Kyger I was trying, archivally, to "find" (or, we might say, "produce"): impossible to surmount in that as much as I wanted I could not make her appear whole, and yet she was everywhere, publishing many of her own poems, appearing in others' poems, effecting the lives of many poets and many places. Her fracturedness, in part, derives critical attention that prefers to the cast shadows of Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, and though not so intimately connected to Joanne, the large shadow-casting Charles Olson, whose presence and poetics causes a disturbance in trying to see any women of that generation with any clarity. Despite the encounter with this critical insistence to overlook Joanne Kyger, she was in a very real sense vertical in my mind, standing among and moving between the poets of her generation. She was not as they say "marginal" in any way - maybe just a tad left of center.
- Linda Russo]
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