Bern Porter
Waste Maker: 1926 - 1961
Somerville, USA: Abyss Publications, 1972
[unpaginated], 21.2 x 14 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
Viewed by his biographer - and by Porter himself - as his most successful and important book, the manuscript for Waste Maker sat in the UCLA library for eleven years before Gerard Dombrowski at Abyss retrieved it for publication.
Porter noted that he meant the title of the book to imply not only the careless person who makes waste, but one who “remakes waste, who finds waste that is both significant and beautiful.”
Dedicated to Kenneth Patchen and Bob Brown, Waste Maker was published the same year as his breakthrough volume, Found Poems, by the Something Else Press. Both titles repurposed images from newspaper articles, magazine advertisements, standardized tests, musical scores, instructional booklets and junk mail into “Found Poems” or “Founds”, as Porter preferred them to called.
"Bern Porter is a 20th century Walt Whitman, a sometime printer and publisher, a long-time servant of both U.S. letters and his own very American muse. Wastemaker represents an assiduous discovery of America writ large in the smallest “found” details, as Porter collects native waste into artlessly designed pages, not only reflecting his own love and bitterness, but exposing cultural insights and perspectives that are indigenously true. As haste makes waste, so patient composition, by contrast, makes art, or even insight, in garbage. Wastemaker ranks with Michel Butor’s Mobile (1962) as print’s encompassing pastiche of modern America, but Porter’s is rougher in texture and kinkier in composition, more trivial in detail and more relentless in theme, as well as more intimate and unfinished in typically American ways."
- Richard Kostelanetz, introduction
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