adv. fans - the 1968 series
Tina Darragh
adv. fans - the 1968 series was published by Leave Books (Buffalo, NY) in 1993 in a squared octavo format hand-sewn into paper wraps.
In Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, edited by Maggie O'Sullivan (London: Reality Street, 1996), Darragh explains that the title comes from "a public library display of old 'advertising fans' ripped so that words from other fans and/or the display's backdrop showed through. At the time I was trying to figure out if a poem could be in the form of a theater with words/sounds in every seat. The image in my mind was a Hannah Weiner performance in DC in the early '80s in which voices arose from the audience in conjunction with Hannah reading alone on stage. I wanted to "build" a poem based on my memory of that reading, avoiding both the "naturalization" and stigmatization of multiple, overlapping voices.
[...]
A concurrent desire was to investigate what went wrong with language in 1968. I remembered the dissolution of alternative living arrangements and businesses as beginning with words -- the failure of political projects as being partly a language problem. I started to collect words/expressions first used in 1968 after a documentary on the '60s included a right-wing strategist proclaiming that, after the Left's speeches at the Democratic National Convention, 'they knew they had us.'
In Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, edited by Maggie O'Sullivan (London: Reality Street, 1996), Darragh explains that the title comes from "a public library display of old 'advertising fans' ripped so that words from other fans and/or the display's backdrop showed through. At the time I was trying to figure out if a poem could be in the form of a theater with words/sounds in every seat. The image in my mind was a Hannah Weiner performance in DC in the early '80s in which voices arose from the audience in conjunction with Hannah reading alone on stage. I wanted to "build" a poem based on my memory of that reading, avoiding both the "naturalization" and stigmatization of multiple, overlapping voices.
[...]
A concurrent desire was to investigate what went wrong with language in 1968. I remembered the dissolution of alternative living arrangements and businesses as beginning with words -- the failure of political projects as being partly a language problem. I started to collect words/expressions first used in 1968 after a documentary on the '60s included a right-wing strategist proclaiming that, after the Left's speeches at the Democratic National Convention, 'they knew they had us.'