YUGEN NR 5. 1959.

NYC: Totem Press, 1959

21 x 14cm, 40pp plus card covers. A single issue of this Beat-era literary review which has contributions by William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg (a selection from Kaddish) , Barbara Guest, David Meltzer, Max Finstein, Paul Blackburn, Philip Whalen, Diane Di Prima, John Wieners, Walter Lowenfels, Michael McClure, Fielding Dawson, Rainer Gerhardt, Jerome Rothenberg, Frank O’Hara, César Vallejo, Lillian Lowefels, Bruce Fearing, Jack Kerouac, Barbara Moraff, Gregory Corso, Larry Eigner, Joel Oppenheimer, Basil King

“Edited by Beat poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Hettie Cohen, Yugen was devoted to “A New Consciousness in the Arts and Letters.” Bringing together the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and the New York School poets of the late 1950s, Yugen took its name from the Japanese aesthetic term meaning “a profound mysterious sense of the beauty of universe … and the sad beauty of human suffering.” Cohen, later Hettie Jones, had worked at the Partisan Review and brought with her a background in little-magazine design that gave Yugen an air of respectability and professionalism. The contents represented a new and untraditional approach to poetry. Jones and Cohen also founded Totem Press, which published important early books by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac, and many others. Like Yugen, Totem Press books typically feature calligraphic covers that mix American abstract expressionism and Japanese Zen painting.”

Slight browning to card covers and some rust to staples else VG+.  Scarce.