Mouth: Eats Color

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

LOST & FOUND SERIES VI presents work by Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. While the styles and experiences of these writers are radically different, each project presented here enacts a commitment to the exploration of knowledge unbound by disciplinary constraints.

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981, introduced by Anne Waldman, includes two transcribed and annotated lectures that illustrate Corso's vast storehouse of cultural knowledge, animating his poetics both on the page and in the classroom.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word presents two very different lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a new interview with the author. Whether looking at iconic French novelist Colette or examining the poetics of prose, The Sounding Word describes an unflinching empirical approach to knowledge and its transmission through direct experience.

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses explores mythic, societal, and personal relationships to menstruation throughout time, and is accompanied by a recent interview with the legendary poet, teacher, scholar, and activist.

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller, introduced by Diane di Prima, presents an array of previously unpublished texts on jazz, surrealism, travel guides to Africa and Paris, his inimitable Negative Cowboy, and photographs from his life and times. As writers, each considers and refigures the malleable conditions of historical truth and the pursuit of knowledge as part of their creative process. And as readers, we are encouraged to do the same.

SERIES VI includes:

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981 (Part I & II) (ed. William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, Öykü Tekten)

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word (ed. Iris Cushing)

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses (ed. Iemanjá Brown & Iris Cushing)

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller (Part I & II) (ed. Wendy Tronrud & Ammiel Alcalay)

In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort. 

The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more. 

We hope that this issue can be a flame of hope, inspiration, or something that simply sustains in such turbulent times.

Featuring 
Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson 

Contributors
Stella Murphy , Ben Redhead, Phoenix Yemi, Sam Moore, Devils Claws, Pierce Eldridge, Manon Mikolaitis, Caitlin McLoughlin, Isabel MacCarthy, Elodie Saint-Louis , Nettle Grellier, Amelia Abraham, Ryan Pfluger, Rose Higham-Stainton , Emma Crabtree, Ignota, Lydia Luke, Chloe Sheppard , Clem MacLeod , Carolyne Loreé Teston , Emma Cohen, Olive Couri, Raheela Suleman , No Land , Jacqueline Ennis-Cole , Sufia Ikbal-Doucet, Rhett Hammerton, Zara Joan Miller , Kate Morgan , Bug Shepherd-Barron, Zoe Freilich , Slutty Cheff , Clemmie Bache , Violet Conroy , Sarah White , Jemima Skala , Stephanie Francis-Shanahan

In the tradition of poets such as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley and Sappho, Allison Grimaldi Donahues poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.

The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words—its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech; more singing than speaking, form rather than content. Only in the dictum of the pause, the meaningful fragmentation of the breath and the staccato of the Atemwende (Paul Celan) does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression.

In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of Sound over Content! The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born 1984 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, lives and works in Bologna, Italy) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is author of Body to Mineral and On Endings, and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She has given performances at Short Theatre, Almanac Turin, MACRO, MAMbo, Fondazione Giuliani, Kunsthalle Bern, Hangar Biccoca, and Flip Napoli.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.

Poet, editor, filmmaker, actor, child star in Mussolini’s Italy, founder of The Dead Language Press and of the Paris Filmmakers Cooperative, Piero Heliczer (1937–1993) was an essential yet secret agent of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. In the course of his nomadic existence in Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Préaux-du-Perche, where he spent the last few years of his life, he met and worked with a constellation of avant-garde writers, forged friendships with figures from the Beat Generation and the British Poetry Revival as well as the New York art scene. At the crossroads of many underground experiences, Heliczer’s name appears in books dedicated to the artists and poets he collaborated with during his lifetime—names by the likes of Gregory Corso, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, or The Velvet Underground, a band he participated in creating with his friend Angus MacLise.

This myth obscures the fact that Piero Heliczer was first and foremost a poet. Today, this part of his work is overlooked; it is all the more difficult to encounter because Heliczer himself never collected it. So it was scattered, or lost, in the course of his wanderings. Heliczer favored the circulation of his works rather than their archiving: he was committed to the production of mobile forms—flyers, broadsides, and other ephemera—disseminated his verses in magazines, and preferred public readings and performances to the finished form of the book.

The present volume gathers a significant number of Heliczer’s poetic works through facsimile reproduction of his contributions to more than thirty periodicals—mostly stemming from poets’ presses or universities—published between 1958 and 1979. This collection isn’t “complete”—but it makes available again poems that, in some cases, never circulated after their initial publication. 

Un recueil de poèmes de Piero Heliczer (1937–1993), auteur, éditeur et cinéaste, figure de l’underground et de la contre-culture, proche de Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, et Jack Smith. Sa poésie, héritière de la Beat Generation, restitue en métaphores et images saisissantes des expériences et des visions personnelles, tout en s’appuyant sur des formes héritées de la tradition anglaise et des partis-pris typographiques originaux. Ce recueil rassemble des facsimilés des publications originales de poèmes de Heliczer – périodiques d’artistes, revues miméographiées, petits magazines… – accompagnées de leurs traductions en français, ainsi que de plusieurs documents, parmi lesquels une reproduction intégrale d’une publication rare de 1961, Wednesday Paper, et, en insert, un facsimilé d’un placard de 1975, The Handsome Policeman.

Traduction des poèmes: Rachel Valinsky
Publié avec l’aide du CNAP

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

A sweeping centennial edition of Iran’s iconic twentieth-century poet of liberty, whose work shaped modern Persian poetry. Known for his political engagement and deep humanism, and his pivotal role in Persian poetry’s modernist turn toward free verse, Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) crafted poems that carried both lyrical intimacy and cultural force. A central, defiant voice in Iran’s modern literary history, Shamlou championed the power of poetry as an instrument of liberation. His work, long suppressed in his homeland, remains urgent for readers everywhere confronting censorship, exile, and erasure. This bilingual edition honors Shamlou’s centennial with the most expansive selection of his poetry to date in English, encompassing his wide thematic range: from fierce protest to intimate love, mythic storytelling to existential reflection. Niloufar Talebi’s vibrant translations and deeply researched commentary shine new light on Shamlou’s legacy and his relevance today.