Dispatch From the Mimeo Revolution: Tuli Kupferberg’s Yeah! Magazine Reissued

The Paris Review reanimates the early 1960s with a look into Tuli Kupferberg’s Yeah! magazine, which ran for ten issues starting in 1961, and which are all now collected in a facsimile, boxed edition, edited by James Hoff and published by Primary Information. We'll take a slice off the top of Alex Zafiris's look into the legendary mimeo mag:

It was 1961. Eisenhower had cut ties with Cuba, JFK was sworn in, the Berlin Wall went up, the Shirelles were in the top ten for “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and America fizzed with the unchartered sexual dynamics created by the newly introduced pill. Meanwhile, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the homegrown poet-anarchist Tuli Kupferberg—already immortalized as the figure who survived after leaping off the Brooklyn Bridge in Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem “Howl”—put out the first issue of Yeah! The opening page presented the zine as “a satyric excursion published at will,” and it begins:

I want
           to put
                       the revolution
at the service of poetry.

I want
           Comrade Stalin
                      to say
Tuli, tell me how to revive
the bodies of my dead Ukrainian peasants
            with your magic words

Recently re-released in facsimile edition by the publishing non-profit Primary Information, the original ten issues of Yeah! were made at Kupferberg’s home on Tenth Street and Avenue B with the help of his wife, Sylvia Topp, and printed on a mimeograph. Kupferberg  asked his friends to contribute. Many delivered poetry and art, such as Allan Sillitoe, Judson Crews, Brigid Murnaghan, Peter Schumann, Anita Steckel, William Wantling; others facilitated. Jonas Mekas submitted a poem from Der Spiegel by Yevgeny Yevtushenko; Ken Jacobs provided newspaper clip collages of absurd, tone-deaf reporting. Other sourced items—a misogynist cartoon from the Yale Record, a New York Times correction detailing the war injuries of a Vietnamese child, happy news of an anti-crossdressing electric shock treatment—are laid bare, their absurdity and cruelty thrown into sharp relief. 

Head to the Paris Review to check out all the rest.