This was an early KOFF girls prank, or project, when we liberated a subway ad placard & changed "constipated" to "consumptive" then silk-screened the image onto t-shirts. When I say we, I mean Maggie. It was actually the Consumptive Poets League that did it; the magazine, KOFF (get it?), grew out of the League, but Maggie, Rachel & I were called the KOFF girls ever after.
We went on to bigger & better, which you can read about here.
So funny to see this for sale, at a ridiculous price. Though anyone can charge whatever they want; it doesn't mean they'll get it or that the magazine is worth it. What is worth what? Oh, don't get sidetracked. Here's this little magazine we did 40+ years ago, with construction paper covers &—delicately not mentioned here—a nude male poet as a centerfold. We thought poetry was boring so we should spice it up. I mean, we loved poetry but still, wouldn't it be better with naked men? Eventually we did a calendar with 12 naked poets & then that was the end of it. Even I had had enough of naked men.
Buy it & join the fun! Not that we get a cut.
Entranced to get my hands on Daniel Kane's latest book about the intersection of punk & poetry. Our magazine KOFF ("a publication of the Consumptive Poets League") gets a write-up. Part of what entrances me is how much intention he finds in what we were doing, when we thought we were just having fun & épater la bourgeoisie.
We printed, what?, 50 copies? 100 tops. Who knew that almost 40 years later we would be considered "the punk magazine" (Eileen Myles) & worthy of scholarly research. That KOFF would exist at all beyond us occasionally remembering we published the first-ever poetry magazine with nude male centerfolds of poets. And not the only! Someone since us did a much more (MUCH MORE) tasteful & artistic calendar of beautiful young English poets in the Lake District.
Ahem, I've only read the chapter about us, but I can assure you the whole book is totally worth reading!
The tradition of fictional personae and false attribution goes back pretty much as far as writing has existed. There are Greek, Biblical, and classical works where the claimed author is not who really wrote it. Homer didn't write Homer, King David didn't write the psalms.
Some writers use pseudonyms: George Eliot, Mark Twain, and there are people who invent a whole separate person, an alter ego (Latin for "the other I"). In the literary world it's common: Chatterton attributed a series of poems to a 15th-century priest named Thomas Rowley; James Macpherson wrote the works supposedly composed by a 3rd century Scottish bard named Ossian (and incidentally gave a boost to Scottish cultural nationalism); Richard Hell wrote Theresa Stern's Wanna Go Out?, the KOFF poets gave us Maria (Surprise Surprise Surprise That's Not My Finger) Mancini.
I can barely think of a writer who hasn't fooled around with identity—it's part of what artists do: change words into poems, change personality into novels. We speak in the voices of Civil War veterans, Lord Byron, aliens. We become someone else in order to explore other lives, thoughts, ideas.
I edit the smallest magazine in the world, 16 pages, circulation 350. I ran a sweet 50-word story by a woman whom a few people believe to be an invention, & boy have I heard about it. They are not amused.
There's no financial fraud. The story was good, no matter the source. So why are they bugging? Why do they care? Is it that non-artists feel somehow cheated or fooled or that someone is getting away with something? Do they have no sense of humor? Do they feel like it's somehow a joke at their expense?
I really don't understand it. In art all that matters is if it works.
