Tom Phillips. Johanna Drucker was trained as a printmaker and visual poet
and wrote her PhD thesis at Berkeley on the Russian avant-gardist Iliazd.
Rosmarie Waldrop was a student of modernism and of Concrete poetry, and
a translator of Edmund Jabès, Maurice Blanchot, and many Austrian and
German avant-gardists. Kathleen Fraser had studied with the New York po-
ets, especially Kenneth Koch. And so on.
The increasing recognition of the women poets associated with
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was made evident in Lee Hickman’s superb journal
Temblor, which began publication in 1985 and ceased, with issue 10, in 1989
because its editor was dying of AIDS and could no longer sustain the opera-
tion. Hickman is to my mind one of the great unsung heroes of the so-called
innovative poetry scene. Unaf¤liated with a university or even a speci¤c
movement, he published Temblor from his home on Cahuenga Boulevard in
the much despised San Fernando Valley above Holly wood. Temblor had no
editorial board, no mission statement and, until the last few issues, no grant
money; Hickman simply published the poetry that interested him—a good
chunk of it “Language poetry,” but also the related poetries coming out of
the Olson-Duncan school, the Objectivists, and the “ethno-poeticists” asso-
ciated with Jerome Rothenberg: for example, Clayton Eshleman, Armand
Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf
Sobin, and John Taggart. Temblor was a portfolio with a 9 × 12–inch page that
allowed for visual design, as for example in Leslie Scalapino’s “Delay Series”
(#4) and a long (28-page) section from Susan Howe’s Eikon Basilike (#9).^18
The journal published Rosmarie Waldrop’s A Form of Taking It All in its en-
tirety (#6); Kathleen Fraser’s sequence “In Commemoration of the Visit of
Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947” (#9); nine poems from
Hejinian’s “The Person” (#4); Susan Howe’s “Heliopathy” (#4); sections of
Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s long sequence Drafts; and work by Barbara Guest,
Rae Armantrout, Carla Harriman, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, Johanna Drucker,
Norma Cole, and Martha (Ronk) Lifson. The magazine introduced the work
of poets from other countries and cultures: Anthony Barnett, Paul Buck, and
Peter Middleton from Britain; Anne-Marie Albiac, Michel Deguy, Edmond
Jabès, Jacqueline Risset from France; Saúl Yurkievich and Tomás Guido La-
valle from Argentina; Minoru Yashioka from Japan; and so on. And ¤nally,
unlike the various “Language” journals, Temblor focused on poetry rather
than on theory, although it did include critical prose, especially on or by its
own poets.
Here, then, was an opening of the ¤eld that nevertheless avoided the merely
eclectic. Like any editor, Hickman had his idiosyncrasies (a number of poets,
Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 163