Small Press Poet 4

PJ became my mentor in the mid 1970’s. Born at the end of the Nineteenth Century, he was forty seven years older than me. He spoke of living in the Village since the 1920’s and seldom traveling north of Fourteenth Street. His garret apartment, atop three narrow flights, was filled with boxes of journals, sketchpads, correspondences, and boxes of archived notebooks.
A frail, white bearded man, he lived alone in his garret. In the 1930's he operated a printing press in a basement off Minetta Lane, where he printed “The Poetry Quartos” for Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf at Random House.
When we met, he was using to a photocopier to print “Hue and Cry”, wherein he advocated nonconceptual (noncon) art. Mary Clark has written about him at her blog:
http://erinyespoetwriter.blogspot.com/2009/07/paul-johnston-american-philosopher.html

In 1975, the American Place Theater left its home at St. Clements on West 46th Street for a larger space near Sixth Avenue. The small theater in St. Clements basement became available for weekly readings. I invited small presses from the New York Book Fair to hold readings after 10 p.m. A small room on the top floor of the church became a small press library that was started with a dump display presented by CCLM. The large space in the church was made available to stage benefit readings like those to aid poets Kim Chi Ha and Kofi Awoonor.
I became an intern at the Literature Program of the NEA. Len Randolph was the program director. Literature, along with the rest of the NEA’s funded programs, was under attack. Congress was hostile to artists’ sexual license. Lines were drawn among artists between elitists and populists. The Endowment was transitioning from a Republican (Ford) administration to the Democrat (Carter) administration. Livingston Biddle chairman. When I returned New York, I felt tarnished by the experience.