Brandi, John

Looking for Minerals

ISBN: 0916156001
Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1975. Limited First Edition. Stapled Wrappers. Noted San Francisco poet and mentor to the Second San Francisco Renaissance poets, Jack Hirschman, wrote of fellow Californian John Brandi: "He has been an open roader (sic) for much of his life and like his two great forebears, Whitman and Neruda, has named the minute particulars, the details of his sojournings...infusing them with a whole gamut of feelings--compassionate, mischievous, loving and righteous. It's what's made his poetry one of the solid bodies of work that's emerged from the North American West since the '60s." (from the preface to Brandi's publication from the year 2000, "Visits to the City of Light"). It seems Hirschman was not the only outspoken, Beat-entrenched gadfly who saw something in Brandi and his work. Enter Charles Plymell: legendary literary outlaw, onetime roommate of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, printer-publisher extraordinaire and the male midwife behind the explosive first issue of R. Crumb's Zap Comix. Plymell's curated coterie of rabble-rousers, ass-thorns, Seekers & Believers saw publication through his Cherry Valley Editions imprint, and Brandi must have passed muster--vaulting beyond the ever-alert (yet variously faulty) Bullshit Detector of Mr. Plymell. Brandi's "Looking for Minerals," published by Cherry Valley Editions in 1975 during a fruitful and dedicated decade for the press, was among these selected--among those found to be in opposition to the backstage dealmaking of the Grant Barons, of the Acadamagicians and the Old-Brass NEA Gentry who are largely to blame for poetry's sad distance from the lives of everyday Americans. In Brandi, Plymell found a fellow subversive--and the poetry (as it mirrors some Plymell's own style and attitudes) made the grade. One of 500 (un-numbered) copies per colophon. Book in very fine condition, almost as issued--with only slightest shelf-wear to fine-edges and microscopic rusting to bottom staple. Very Fine. [Item #3944]

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