Keyboard Mouth • Klaviatür Des Mundes Poems in a bilingual edition with collages from Moloko published in March 2025:
Poems & Collages by Jan Herman
with German translation of the poems by Florian Vetsch. Click to read pages 22-23.
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Phantom Outlaw Editions has published an updated, newly designed collection of the “deformed sonnets”: All That Would Ever After Not Be Said.
Moloko Print has published a bilingual edition of Your Obituary Is Waiting” with German translations on facing pages. Both volumes include Norman O. Mustill’s “flypaper” collages.
My correspondence with writers and poets of the Beat, post-Beat and Fluxus periods, along with other literary artifacts, was acquired by Northwestern University Library. In case you’re interested, the collection is described in the library’s catalogue.
Other books include . . .
Another:SHADOW WORDS / A Selection of Deformed Sonnets (2023):
My biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, A Talent for Trouble, is available as an ebook at Amazon and as an ebook on iTunes at the Apple store. Putnam published it in hardcover, and Da Capo Press published it in paperback.
Several other books include The Z Collection: Portraits & Sketches, published by Blue Wind Press in an American edition (which followed the first American edition by AC Books) and afterward was published by Moloko Print in a European edition.
(Rest assured the title of the book, first published in 2015, has nothing to do with the letter “Z” symbolizing support for rasPUTIN’s criminal war in the Ukraine.)
European edition of The Z Collection
“Once, a mere blink in the eye of eternity but actually several generations ago, literary essays were considered a high art form. Not the kind that appear today in the New York Review of Books continually reinforcing the old in-joke “Review of Each Other’s Books,” or writings in pursuit of academic self-advancement, but something like free spirits writing intelligently about fellow free spirits. Jan Herman is that kind of essayist, with a biography to match. A cultural writer for newspapers in the era when millions of readers looked to serious commentary there, a contributor to literary journals, and an avant-gardist who worked everywhere from City Lights Books in San Francisco to Something Else Press in Vermont, he continues onward these days into his seventies at ArtsJournal. Formats change, the editorial eye remains.” — Paul Buhle, Rain Taxi
Some of my deformed sonnets have also been published by Verlag Engstler in a bi-lingual English-German edition titled FOURTEEN: Deformed Sonnets. (German translations by Gregor Pott.) Other poems in the cycle have been published in The Way the Lines Break, and in handmade limited editions by Cold Turkey Press. Jay Jeff Jones’s review of Your Obituary Is Waiting appeared on Amazon in the U.K.:
This message about Your Obituary Is Waiting came from Charles Plymell:
New from Moloko:
Moloko Print has published an enhanced facsimile edition of my old project Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, and in case anyone is interested, Collateral Damage: The Daily History of a Blog, traces blogposts of mine from more than a decade ago with a foreword by William Osborne. “If there is a single ethos that defines this collection of blog entries,” he writes, “it is that the arts do not exist in a vacuum, that culture is holistically connected to every aspect of society. … This blog captured the American cultural zeitgeist in the aftermath of 9/11. Written in Manhattan during a 14-month period between May 2002 and July 2003, it provided witty, detailed, atmospheric snapshots of a wide cross-section of the arts, media, and politics during a pivotal time in U.S. history, attracting millions of readers as the most popular blog by far during the early years of MSNBC.com.”
Also the experimental fiction Cut Up or Shut Up, a collaboration, written with Carl Weissner and Jürgen Ploog (with a “tickertape” intro by William S. Burroughs). And The Something Else Yearbook, an anthology of the arts, as editor.