As a bookseller and collector of rare editions, I do not believe in strict genre classifications. Like strangers in a crowd, books can attract each other for various reasons. Such unforeseen connections become all the more apparent when they end up randomly on your shelves and, over time, start to make affinities and categories of their own. This particular set of books immerses the reader in a dynamic and transformative period of liberation. The 1960s and 70s are widely regarded as an era of both personal and collective emancipation – on the intimate level of individual human bodies exploring sexual freedom and, on a broader societal scale, with movements of resistance advocating for justice and civil rights. These books break free from prevailing norms of the literature of their time. Liberation necessarily involves an engagement in experimentation, which is reflected in these books. Containing elements of eroticism and activism, their content cannot be fixed to either one; they brim with the force and life that sees significance in both. In this sense, they are truly transgressive, reflecting the spirit of the times from which they emerge. To read is to engage with new forms and ideas, to confront and expand the boundaries of one’s thinking and to envision alternative futures. In this way, these books have contributed to the ongoing liberation of the body, mind and spirit.
LIFTING BELLY 1
Every wild act of love needs a bit of foreplay, provided here by forerunner poet and writer Gertrude Stein. As early as the 1910s, she paved the way for the bold experiments with language that were to characterise the 1960s and 70s, and she did so without ever losing sight or sense of the body that also pulses without words. Her book-length poem from 1917, Lifting Belly, is a form of loving. As Gertrude’s biographer Janet Hobhouse writes in Everybody Who Was Anybody (1975), ‘Gertrude’s work, when it is successful, is a dance – but a dance that needs a partner. Where her work is exciting, which it often is, it is not because of the mere presence of the writing, but because of its teasing half-presence, and its invitation to join this dance.’ Lifting Belly is a rhythm: sometimes gentle, sometimes stuttering and staccato. As you partner up with this classic lesbian erotic poem, reprinted in 1989 by the (now defunct) Naiad Press, a Florida-based publisher of lesbian literature, you will sense in your belly that poetry has always been meant for boundless lovemaking.
THE LOVE BOOK 2
Written by the poet Leonore Kandel who helped instigate the summer of love, this chapbook landed her in court. Containing just four poems, initially self-published on six pages, its poem ‘To Fuck With Love’ was classified as hard-core pornography by the state of California. On 15 November 1966, police raided The Psychedelic Shop and City Lights Books in San Francisco, the shops that stocked the publication, and confiscated all copies. Because of the firestorm it had sparked, Stolen Paper Review was quick to produce a reprint, which was published that same year and became an immediate bestseller. Kandel pledged to donate 1% of the proceeds to a police retirement fund to ‘thank’ them for the free publicity.
SEX AND RAGE 3
How do you introduce Eve Babitz’ memoir writing to new readers? Her autobiographic fiction is ‘over-boogie,’ just like her days and nights were, back in Los Angeles’ glamour scene of the 1960s and 70s. Babitz is the tragic embodiment of a blonde too dazzling and beautiful to be taken seriously, but she finally received her recognition as a writer in the 2010s when literary biographer Lili Anolik ‘rediscovered’ her out-of-print writing and worked to get it republished. Sex and Rage begins on a party note in Los Angeles, but changes into a coming-of-age story in New York – more specifically, a coming-off-alcohol story. Boogie it up then sober up with this splendid candid voice of a woman who once played chess naked with Marchel Duchamp. Checkmate, Marcel.
AFRODISIA: OLD AND NEW POEMS 4
My own book collection focuses on ‘writings by women and a few good men.’ Consider Ted Joans – beatnik, surrealist, visual artist, avant-garde trumpeter and jazz poet – among those few, and the only one included in this selection. Afrodisia is dedicated ‘To THE BLACK SISTERS, YELLOW, RED, AND BROWN, AND TO THE WHITE ONES THAT AFRODISIA FOUND, and to my MOTHER.’ In other words, to all the femmoiselles, as he called the women he loved. In contrast to Leonore Kandel, he considered the word fuck ‘an insult & a crime to the sacred act of lovemaking.’ Love and anger, peace and protest, go together in his jazz poetry, which he often performed live with musicians and is best described in his own words: ‘So, in my rather sorrowful impecunious state, I find myself filled to the beautiful brim / with love and with this shared love I continue to live my poem-life.’
MEMOIRS OF A BEATNIK 5
Diane di Prima, a prominent voice of the Beat generation, wrote this book to feed the boho cohort of friends with whom she roomed in an apartment in San Francisco. ‘Clearly,’ she writes, ‘the twenty-odd large and assorted small humans who graced the halls, balconies, and banisters of my pad had to eat. Having written pornographic scenes for the Olympia Press, the publisher’s editor Maurice Girodias proposed that she write a memoir for the imprint. Thus she started writing, reminiscing, adding some extra spice here and there on request of Girodias, who kept asking for ‘MORE SEX’ in handwritten notes on her manuscript pages. Part memoir, part male editorial fantasy, this book is also a testimony to di Prima’s future. To live the life of a poet, she writes, ‘I am leaving the houses I will never own.’ Dishwashers. Carpets. Dull respect of dull neighbors. Reflecting on the book later, she revealed that everything in it was true – except the sex.
SEASONS OF SACRED LUST 6
The Vancouver-born and Japanese-bred avant-garde poet Kazuko Shiraishi died last summer, aged 93, which means that an essential part of her poetry is lost forever: like Ted Joans, she often recited her poetry accompanied by live jazz. For Shiraishi, to make poetry was to perform. Seasons of Sacred Lust is the first of her poetry that appeared in English, translated by Ikuko Atsumi, John Solt, Carol Tinker, Yasuyo Morita and Kenneth Rexroth. Her early work is often referred to as erotic. From the poem ‘My America’: ‘So you’re called America? / No,
you are as nameless as your shining sweat / And you’ve got that barbecue bubbling up / With love / Delicious goo / So good in bed /
I like the inside of your thigh / Your tough elegant penis / That doesn’t let anything on / Wipes out the gods / O let me say my prayers / At a time like this.’ Erotic poetry, yes – but with a political twist.
BEAR 7
This novel from 1977 by Marian Engel, in its Bantam paperback edition, reached cult status when its cover image was posted in 2014 on the pre-Instagram image-sharing platform Imgur, captioned ‘the most fucked up romance novel in existence.’ Bear has been called, amongst other things, ‘Canada’s most controversial novel,’ ‘an erotic masterpiece,’, ‘unbearable’ (all puns intended), and a ‘completely nutty but oddly beguiling fantasy’; but also ‘a forgotten feminist gem.’ No longer forgotten, it was reprinted in 2015 by its original publisher McClelland and Stewart. And yes, it is about a woman developing a passionate relationship with a bear.
TERMINAL BOREDOM 8
Izumi Suzuki’s life was (too) short and turbulent. Before she started writing, she worked as a nude model and actress in ‘pink films.’ Verso Books, which, last time I checked, has always been firmly against any form of exploitation, made the dubious decision to expose her in a lustful pose on the cover of this science-fiction short story collection. Sex keeps selling, including to a left-oriented reading audience, apparently. Whether Suzuki writes about an all-women society, a virtual rehab, interplanetary love, alien spies, or a family keeping up appearances in the bleak suburbs of the future, these stories, written in the 1970s, and commenting on Japanese urban life, always end up being about the trouble of us being human, stuck in the human condition.
TALKING TO WOMEN 9
This is a collection of transcribed interviews between writer Nell Dunn and a number of her female friends in 1964, talking frankly about the major shifts of the time, when women were figuring out in real time what emancipation meant – actually meant – in their daily lives. ‘These girls,’ Dunn writes, ‘severed themselves from some of the conventional forms of living and thinking.’ Some of them are well known, like writer Edna O’Brien and pop artist Pauline Boty. Reading them speak openly about sex, marriage, love and work, it is as if we’re standing on the threshold of a new era, eavesdropping on the doubts, desires and fears that come with such historical change. Talking to Women was republished in 2018 by Silver Press.
SAY JESUS AND COME TO ME 10
This book, finally, was published in the 1980s but still has the flavour of the 1970s in its daring and experimental content and form. ‘The physical and emotional attraction a charismatic black female evangelist feels for a beautiful but damaged blues singer, a woman called Travis Lee, grows into a powerful, sensual love in a southern city [Nashville] rocked by racism, intolerance, and sexual violence,’ states the book’s blurb. Anti-racism did not keep African American writer and librarian Ann Allen Shockley from writing romance. More than a cross-genre novel, Say Jesus is one of the first examples of what we may call intersectional literature today. Shockley was also among the first lesbian novelists to write about interracial love, in her short story collection The Black and White of It (1980)