Bern Porter

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Bernard Harden Porter (born February 14, 1911 , Porter Settlement, near Houlton , Aroostook County , Maine , † June 7, 2004 in Belfast , Maine) was an American physicist, publisher and writer. He was a representative of the avant-garde art movements Mail Art and Found Poetry . The Museum of Modern Art in New York honored him with an exhibition in 2010.

Life

His aptitude was shown at Ricker Junior College and he was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious private Colby College in Waterville, Maine. His main subjects were physics, chemistry and economics. Porter earned his Masters degree from Brown University . Porter got a job with the Acheson Colloids Corporation in New York in 1935. He worked there on the development of the coating of the television tube with a graphite mixture. In Paris around 1937/38 he was accepted into the circle around Gertrude Stein . Porter read the manuscript of Henry Miller's book Tropic of Cancer ( Tropic of Cancer ).

After the USA entered World War II , he worked from 1940 as a soldier for the Manhattan Project in Princeton . There he made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein . He worked there and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , Tennessee, on fission processes . He then worked at the University of California at Berkeley . His first marriage (1946) with the young student Helen Elaine Hendren failed after a year.

In 1944, while still working for the Manhattan Project in Tennessee, he anonymously published a pacifist pamphlet by Henry Miller. In the same year he came into close contact with Henry Miller in Big Sur while he was working on his Miller bibliography. Porter published in his newly founded small publishing house Bern Porter Books texts by and about Henry Miller and books of poetry by Californian poets. George Leite, a bookseller from San Francisco, published the literary magazine Circle (10 issues, 1944-48) with Porter . Porter's views on the interplay between art (ART) and natural science (SCIence) he presented in his Sciart Manifesto (1950).

After his father had molested a young girl while his parents were visiting Sausalito in the Schillerhaus , as Porter called his apartment, and a long history of such incidents emerged, Porter moved to the South Pacific island of Guam around 1950 , where he worked as a journalist and worked for an advertising agency. He traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki . After returning to California, he married the anthropologist and writer Margaret Eudine Preston in 1955. They worked in different places around the world, for half a year in Burnie , Tasmania in a wood processing company, also in Venezuela . In the 1960s Porter was a member of NASA's Saturn-V program at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville , Alabama (until 1967). Margaret died in 1975. For the next thirty years, Porter lived in what he called the Institute of Advanced Thinking in Belfast , Maine, where he was a poet, artist, letter writer, and host.

Bern Porter Books

Porter published Henry Miller's pacifist treatise Murder the Murderers (1944) and sixteen other books by Miller, et al. a. The Plight of the Creative Artist in the United States of America (Bern Porter, Houlton, Me., 1944), Semblance of a Devoted Past (Bern Porter, Berkeley 1944), a book with watercolors, Echolalia (Bern Porter, Berkeley 1945; also in England), the Henry Miller Miscellania (Bern Porter, San Mateo, Calif., 1945); his Miller Bibliography and Michael Fraenkel's On the Genesis of the Tropic of Cancer (1946).

He designed Kenneth Patchen's Panels for the Walls of Heaven (Berkeley 1946); published the first books by the young Philip Lamantia ( Erotic Poems ; 1946), by Leonard Wolf : Hamadryad Hunted (1946); James Schevill ( Tensions ; 1947) and Robert Duncan : Heavenly City Earthly City (1947). Also: Parker Tyler's The Granite Butterfly: A Poem in Nine Cantos (Berkeley 1945); Yvan Goll's English poems Fruit from Saturn , an answer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945; also in Hemisphères Editions, New York 1946); Hubert Creekmore: Formula (Berkeley 1947); Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot (1948). From Guam Porter published the first book James Erwin Schevills: The American Fantasies (Agana 1951). Published in the 1950s: volumes of poetry by the beat filmmaker (and speed freak) Christopher Maclaine: The Crazy Bird (1951) and Word (1954); Gerd Sterns: First Poems and Others (1952). Stern was a New York friend of Lamantia, whose (first) wife, the photographer Goldian ( Gogo ) Nesbit, published the book Graffiti (1955) and two Broadsides (1955). Other authors in the Bern Porter Broadsides series were James Catnach, Kenneth Patchen, Mason Jordan Mason ( Totem and Tabu ) and Porter himself. In 1955, Schevill published The Right to Greet and Selected Poems (1959). By Kenneth Rexroth : A Bestiary for My Daughters Mary and Katherine (1955).

As a poet

He himself is known for his found poetry , he has published found text in numerous books at Something Else Press , The Village Print Shop and Tilbury House. Dick Higgins called him the Charles Ives of American literature. He was a principal of Mail Art and a contributor to Ray Johnson . He published and illustrated Dick Higgins ' first book , What Are Legends (Bern Porter, Calais, ME, 1960).

Books

  • Water fight . LA Press, Pine Hill Printery, South Dakota 1941
  • As editor: The Happy Rock: A Book about Henry Miller . Packard Press, Berkeley 1945. Contributions by Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel, Philip Lamantia, James Laughlin, George Leite, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams.
  • Aphasia: A Psycho-Visual Satire on Printed Communication . Bern Porter, Madison, ME, 1961.
  • Scandinavian Summer: A Psycho-Visual Recollection in Six Languages ​​of a Journey through Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Denmark . Bern Porter, Madison, ME, 1961
  • 468B Thy Future . Bern Porter, Huntsville, Alabama, 1966. [Computer printouts of the Apollo Mission].
  • Image Above: Dieresis . Bern Porter, Rockland, ME, 1969.
  • I've Left: A Manifesto and Testament of SCIence and -ART (SCIART) . Something Else Press, New York 1971. 47 pp.
  • Found poems . Something Else Press, Millerton, NY, 1972. 380 pp.
  • The Wastemaker (1926-1961) . Abyss Publications, Somerville, Mass., 1972
  • Run-On Bern Porter, Belfast, ME, 1975
  • Gee Whizles . Maine Coast Printers, Rockland, ME, 1977
  • The Book of Do's . The Dog Ear Press, Hulls Cove, ME, 1982
  • Here Comes Everybody's Don't Book . The Dog Ear Press, South Harpswell, ME, 1984
  • The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You . 1985
  • Sweet end . The Dog Ear Press, Brunswick 1989.
Readings

literature

Porter biography
  • James Schevill: Where to Go, What to Do, When You Are Bern Porter: A Personal Biography . Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Me, 1992.
Essays, Porter Interview
General information on found poetry

Web links

  1. ↑ Alex Irvine in Colby Magazine Spring 2005 "How Bern Porter Saw The World"
personal data
SURNAME Porter, Bern
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Porter, Bernard Harden (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist, publisher, and writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Porter Settlement, at Houlton , Aroostook County , Maine
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 2004
Place of death Belfast , Maine