Magazine of Further Studies 6 (Fall 1969)

Submitted by:
srudy
May, 2010

---

Sixth of six issues of the Magazine of Further Studies published between 1965-1969. Issue 7 (1972-2010) has been published as the 29 fascicles of The Curriculum of the Soul. Each of the six issues was published letter size, one side only, stapled with a grey, wrap-around corrugated cardboard cover.

Citation

title:

Magazine of Further Studies 6

title without prefix:

Magazine of Further Studies 6

full citation:

Magazine of Further Studies 6 (1969).

publication date:

1969

first published:

1969

archival date:

2010

catalogue description:

F3 MAGAZINE OF FURTHER STUDIES 1965-69

Contents of the Magazine of Further Studies (6):

publication_notes:

Contextual information about and description of the Magazine of Further Studies by Michael Boughn from “Olson’s Buffalo,” Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 38 (November 2000): 5-22.
Reprinted in The World in Time and Space: Toward a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2002. Pp. 34-48.

• "They immediately began publishing the Magazine of Further Studies, the first issue of which appeared in the fall of 1965. `I think it was Glover’s IBM Selectric we used,’ Fred Wah writes. `And we got a big roll of corrugated stuff for covers . . . and us and our wives wld set up in one of our basements and cut covers and paint chicken blood (George wanted the thing to decay in the readers’ hands) and glue fur.’ Butterick’s desire for decay emphasized the projective nature of the magazine, the fact that as you held it, it disintegrated, leaving you with nothing to hold to but what was further. Butterick was successful in that the various objects and substances applied to the covers of the magazine have by and large either faded over time or fallen off.”


• "`Between 1965 and 1969 IFS [Institute of Further Studies] published 6 issues (see appendix B, item 8). Al Glover describes the first issue as `awkward’ beside the professionalism of the Niagara Frontier Review: `this homemade thing that did put most people off. The lucky part was that Charles (and then Robert Duncan shortly) were interested in finding a means of production outside the establishment, even the “small press” one.’ Olson joins the conversation in the second issue, Duncan in the sixth.”


• "The magazine was unique for its time for a couple of reasons, both of which had to do with the rejection of the showcase model of the poetry magazine, already prevalent even then among small press magazines. The showcase magazine typically presents poems completely isolated and decontextualized. They appear as beautiful (or ugly) objects on the page. This mode of presentation reinforces the culture of the literary by stripping the poem from the intellectual matrix it is part of, and then emphasizing its object status as a pure literary event. “


• “The Magazine of Further Studies refused, first of all, to isolate the poem. It included, in the body of the magazine, letters, prose exchanges, and bibliographies (most from the Poetry/Myth class John Clarke took over when Olson left), so that the poems that were also presented there were clearly proposed as simply one kind of event in a larger discourse that included many different kinds of events. They were not proposed as products with implicit value in and of themselves. On the contrary, the larger discourse was emphasized.”


• "As the magazine developed, it increasingly embodied an active conversation, further undermining the product-status of the `poetry’ it included. Rather than including poems intended as finished and self-sufficient literary products, the magazine increasingly published fragments, challenges, responses, broken utterances that provoked other broken, incomplete utterances, so that by the final issue, the magazine has become a kind of clamor, a convocation of a conversation, in action. The result is that even within a single issue, there is nothing to hold on to, not even a poem, which can be proposed as `literature.’ There is rather an event that is constantly pushing beyond itself."

Files Available for Download	Size
MFS 6.pdf	15.24 MB