McDonough, Kaye

Zelda with: Ephemera

San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1978. First Edition. “To do Kaye justice in terms of your question here would take a book-length response. She was a constant presence (as much as she could be working a full-time job at a San Francisco printing business) in North Beach and at any Beatitude or literary events. She had been in San Francisco for quite a while when I arrived on the scene. She had started up Greenlight Press and was publishing mostly the Beat poets who had not gotten all the media notoriety during the 50s and 60s. Greenlight did letterpress and phot offset limited editions of poetry and artwork by San Francisco Bay Area artists…She was designer and typesetter of poems, broadsides and books for a plenitude of San Francisco poets and small presses such as Beatitude, Gay Sunshine, Second Coming, 21 Press, and Smoking Mirror. During this time, she also executed several collaborations with Kristen Wtterhahn and Jackie Bacs. Kaye Worked for many years as a typesetter and proofreader at Typeworks, JPP Graphic Arts and Macy’s Advertising in San Francisco, sometimes calling their equipment into service for posters for Beatitude readings and broadsides such as Ken Wainio’s “In a Swoon I Can See It.” She has also written some 300 notebooks since the late sixties to the present. Parts of them have been published in Centrifugal Eye and in Kevin Ring’s Beat Scene magazine…But it was her own work that was maybe most remarkable. She had published a play (Zelda: Frontier Life in America) with City Lights Books based on the person and life of Zelda Fitzgerald…Her work, not unlike Bob Kaufman’s, was original, unique. No small thing then or any time.”--Thomas Rain Crowe, Thomas Rain Crowe Archive, pg 57. Kaye McDonough (b. 1943) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, raised in the fifties (a dreamlike time to be raised), lived in Berkeley in the sixties (a strange time to have survived). There she first met living, breathing poets. She spent the next twenty years in pre-gentrified San Francisco among poets, artists and friends in search of the Moveable Feast, doing readings, working with Alix Geluardi on her 185 and on my own Greenlight Press. Offered today is her 1978 play, Zelda: Frontier Life in America. The play centers around Zelda Fitzgerald–the captivating and intense heroine of a fantasy dramatization of her dazzling exploits, her writing, painting and obsessive dancing, her struggle as a woman and artist in an ambivalent, often hostile environment. Experimental, exciting, erudite, and insightful Zelda explores both truths and mystifications about men and women, alienation and love, creativity and madness. From the collection of Thomas Rain Crowe, the legendary American poet and co-authorial founder of the Second San Francisco Renaissance. For more information on the Thomas Rain Crowe archive (assembled & curated by Third Mind Books), see our book Starting From San Francisco: Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books (item #3071) & the catalog for the Crowe archive, which contains several excerpts and quotations from the book as well as a full listing of the archive’s contents, which are now being offered for sale individually on the Third Mind Books site. Signed by previous owner, Thomas Rain Crowe, in thin black ink at title page. We have found and retained between dedication page, and Author’s Preface an envelope containing a letter from Kaye McDonough to a Tom Dawson. Softcover. First edition though not explicated as such at copyright page, presumed first printing though similarly not explicated thereon. Book is in relatively-fine-to-very-fine condition with moderate wear to fine edges and moderate scratching/smudging to front and back covers. Fine-Very Fine. [Item #7194]

Price: $100.00