Poet, publisher and activist Ed Sanders (1939) dropped out of the University of Missouri in 1958 to hitchhike to New York City. There he founded the avant-garde journal ‘Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts’ a couple of years later and opened his ‘Peace Eye Bookstore’, which soon developed into a hotbed of poetry, art and radical activism. In 1964, the year…
Yannis Livadas (1969) is a Greek experimental poet, writer, jazz scholar and translator who lives in Paris, France. His translations from English into Greek include works by Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara and Ezra Pound. Livadas’s highly individual poetry incorporates an idea of experimentalism that is based on ‘organic antimetathesis’: the scaling…
William Levy (Baltimore, 1939) attended the University of Maryland and Temple University and taught in the literature department at Shippensburg State College, Pennsylvania, during which period he co-founded the Insect Trust Gazette, a poetry magazine which – among others – published William Burroughs. Levy developed into a spearhead of the European underground soon after he had left the US in 1966…
Gustav Sack (1885-1916) grew up in the German village of Schermbeck, close to the Dutch border and the industrial Ruhr district. He attended the grammar school of the nearby town of Wesel and did German Studies and Natural Science at the universities of Greifswald, Münster and Halle before dropping out in 1910. Sack developed an interest in literature during his grammar school days, when he discovered…
‘A Wilderness of Dreams’ is a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’, an early science fiction tale about a balloon flight from Rotterdam to the moon that was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. After its first publication ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’ was revised and reprinted several times and renamed ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall’. A later version, which includes…