Long, long ago — in 1970 to be precise — the Berkeley radio station KPFA borrowed a collage of mine for the cover of its guide. I believe it was Charles Amirkhanian who prompted them to use it — and this is how it appeared.
I had titled it “This Is My Song,” thinking it was a kind of obituary for the 1960s. KPFA added “quadraphonic RADIO” and “April 24/25, 1970” to the image, although it had nothing to do with four-channel surround sound. The collage was also used several times elsewhere for other reasons, including in Fantastic Architecture, which was edited by Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins and published by Something Else Press (since reprinted in a facsimile edition by Primary Information). And now, with the Trump regime’s attack on the arts and humanities both by defunding federal grants to support them and using unmitigated propaganda about “wrong ideology,” the collage seems more apt then ever … even if I say so myself.
(Nanos Valaoritis had the original, which I gave him because he admired it. It is probably among his papers, either in his archive at Princeton or elsewhere.)
I love it!
And Nanos is a great poet. I met him on a night we performed together with many other poets at an Aids benefit in San Francisco in Oct, 1994.at the Palace of Fine Arts
I take his book ” My Afterlife Guaranteed” everywhere I go!
Yes, Nanos was a terrific poet and a good friend. Here’s a broadside of his poem “Endless Crucifixion”:
https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2011/04/a_poem_from_the_late_20th_cent.html