Item #30266 Asp of the Age. Merle Hoyleman.
Asp of the Age

Asp of the Age

Cleveland: Mother/Asphodel, 1966. First edition. Large 4to, unpaginated, printed in green from holograph. Bound in side-stapled covers backed in green tape, with the title and author's name handwritten in green ink to cover. One of 326 copies.

A superb collection of channeled poems by the Pittsburgh poet, who remains a largely enigmatic figure despite the efforts of both Jonathan Williams and James Laughlin to bring her work to a larger reading public. A substantial collection, which includes some portions of her work "Letters to Christopher," which Jonathan Williams attempted to publish as Jargon 47, but which ended up being distributed only in a tiny edition of 25 copies. Hoyleman claimed that many of the poems within were dictated to her by a collection of supernatural voices she called the Scum.

As C. A. Conrad remembers, "He [Jonathan Williams] said she was like anyone's grandmother with a tidy hair doo and apron, baking and cooking and laughing with Jonathan in the kitchen. THEN she abruptly put her knife down and said, "They have returned." He asked, "Who has returned?" It was as if she had not heard him and walked into the living room.

In one corner of the living room, the walls were completely bare of any art and sitting in the corner was a chair and small table with paper and writing tools. She stood facing the corner of the ceiling above the chair and table while SCREAMING at what she called The Scum, which was a group of spirits who would visit through this ceiling portal in her house. Jonathan said her screams terrified him like someone was being murdered. Then she calmly said to The Scum, "Okay, okay, I hear you, I am sitting down now." And then she sat at the table and began writing for the next two hours without stop. All of her poems were messages from The Scum.

A couple light rust stains to green cloth backing, else fine. Item #30266

Price: $300.00

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