1970's Publications

Dick Higgins, Die Fabelhafte Geträume von Taifun-Willi, Abyss Press, 1970

The same small press [Abyss] which had done Towards the 1970’s also did...Die Fabelhafte Geträume von Taifun-Willi in its original mixed German-and-English text (an all-German translation was done in 1969 by a small press in Stuttgart)...Willi is the first of my radio plays—a supposed tape-recorded dialogue between two rep

Dick Higgins, Computers for the Arts, Abyss Press, 1970

Computers for the Arts is a polemic in favor of the artist being his or her own technician; as information it is now very much out of date, but the point remains important to me, that collaboration often leads to diffused works with diluted personality. 

(From "The Strategy of Each of My Books" 1984)

Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, eds. Fantastic Architecture, Something Else Press, 1970

...in 1969 I brought out Pop Architektur with a trade publisher in Germany, a collection co-edited and designed with Wolf Vostell, a colleague from happenings and fluxus; the English text, slightly expanded, appeared in 1970 with Something Else Press as Fantastic Architecture. It is an anthology of ideas by artists 

Dick Higgins, A Book About Love & War & Death, Something Else Press, 1972

...in 1972 there appeared my last Something Else Press book, the complete Book about Love & War & Death (1960-70). As I mentioned before, the first canto had already appeared in 1965, and also the second and third cantos appeared with a small press in California, Nova Broadcast Express, which was edited by Jan Herman, my succ

Dick Higgins, Amigo,  Unpublished Editions, 1972

The first book from [Higgins' other publishing imprint] Unpublished Editions was amigo (1972), a series of gay love poems; it was also my first book of just poems as such, with no theoretical texts included.      

(From "The Strategy of Each of My Books" 1984)

Dick Higgins, For Eugene in Germany,  Unpublished Editions, 1973

Also in 1973 Unpublished Editions brought out For Eugene in Germany, a sort of sequel to amigo but, somehow, dead; it is the only book I have done which I regret.  

(From "The Strategy of Each of My Books" 1984)

Dick Higgins, The Ladder to the Moon, Unpublished Editions, 1973

The Ladder to the Moon (1959-63, rewritten and published in 1973), [is] my largest work for the theater to date. It is a very opulent, romantic piece with sections  (e.g., the “Tiger Lady Episode”) in which the normal time progression is suspended; all my experience in happenings and fluxus is included in that work, and I will write n

Dick Higgins and Bern Porter, City with All the Angles, Unpublished Editions, 1974

City with All the Angles (written in 1970-71), [is] a radio play which satirizes Los Angeles where I was living (if it can be said that anyone really lives there) at the time I wrote it. That completed the cycle of radio literature which I wanted to make. I have written other works for radio, but they belong to anoth

Dick Higgins, Spring Game: An Opera for Shadow Puppets, Unpublished Editions, 1974

For me the big event of 1973 was finally leaving Something Else Press. I celebrated it by setting to work on a huge cycle of prints, 7.7.73, which eventually numbered more than eight hundred graphic works, mostly silk screen, but which also extended into different media-sculptures and environments and even a vis

Dick Higgins, Modular Poems, Unpublished Editions, 1975

In 1975 I collected my aleatoric and other system poems together, destroyed many of them, and published or republished the rest as Modular Poems with Unpublished Editions. Many of these had appeared in mimeographed form earlier, and others had been in little magazines, but I needed a substantial book of such poems to complement the more p

Dick HIggins, Cat Alley (A Long Short Story), Tuumba Press, 1976

[In 1976] a small press in California, Tuumba Press, brought out Cat Alley a very short novel which is in some ways a counterpart to amigo and which tells the story of an imagined affair between a married man and his secretary; it is the same story that is told in “Moments in the Lives of Great Women,” the longest poetic work in 

Dick Higgins, Classic Plays, Unpublished Editions, 1976

My interest in languages other than my native English had been an ongoing preoccupation from the beginning, as the reader can see from the list of books to date. But I also, therefore, felt that I should extend this into a single work in two languages, punning back and forth between the two. So it happened that in 1976 I wrote and Unpubli

Dick Higgins, Legends & Fishnets, Unpublished Editions, 1976

As yet, I had published rather few works of fiction, and so it was now time to bring out the whole set of works, Legends & Fishnets (1959-69) to which What Are Legends (1960) had been the prefatory statement. 

(From "The Strategy of Each of My Books" 1984)

Dick Higgins, Everyone Has Sher Favorite (His or Hers), Unpublished Editions, 1977

...apart from 7.7.73, the decade of the 1970s was, for me, principally my decade as a poet. I therefore decided to publish two books of poems, the first a miscellany and the second a more concentrated, highly visual selection. The first was published by Unpublished Editions as Everyone Has Sher Favorite (His or 

Dick Higgins, George Herbert's Pattern Poems: In Their Tradition, Unpublished Editions, 1977

In 1974-75 I suffered a severe nervous breakdown which left me with- out much sense of who I was. I therefore enrolled in the Graduate English Department at New York University in order to inventory the English-language literature which was of interest to me, to find my roots and precedents, and to imp

Dick Higgins, The Epitaphs/ Gli Epitaphi, Edizioni Morra, Napoli, 1977

Returning to the language investigations again, in 1977 Studio Morra in Naples, Italy, where I had a show of ceramic shards on which their texts were drawn in calligraphy, brought out The Epitaphs/Gli Epitaphi, satirical epigrammatic poems in Latin, French, German, and Swedish. It is poorly edited but handsome. 

(From "The Strate

Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman, The Epickall Quest of the Brothers Dichtung and Other Outrages, Printed Editions [formerly Unpublished Editions], 1978

The Epickall Quest of the Brothers Dichtung and Other Outrages, [was] my first Printed Editions book for 1978. The title story is the result of first writing a long essay on the narrative theory of two of the Jena group of German romantics, Fried

Novalis, Hymns to the Night, Treacle Press, 1978. Dick Higgins trans. 

Part of my desire to call attention to the new relevance of German romanticism was incomplete: many of the texts were unavailable in modern translations. In 1977, as part of my studies at New York University I was obliged to pass an examination in a foreign lan- guage. I chose German, and to brush up on my language, I made 

Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts, Printed Editions, 1978

...my most serious work for 1978 was the other Printed Editions book, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts. By now the Newsletter essays were out of print, and I had broadened my understanding of the dynamics of the new arts of which I was a part, by the ideas of e

George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, B.P. Nichol, Steve McCaffrey, Dieter Roth, Six Fillious, Membrane Press, 1978

In 1967 Robert Filliou had written a set of rock and roll lyrics which, however, proved too risque for commercial broadcasting; so he published them with English translations by George Brecht and German ones by Diter Roth. In due course the book went out of print. We now (

Dick Higgins,Some Recent Snowflakes  (and Other Things), Printed Editions, 1979

Speculating on (Giordano) Bruno [see: 1990's publications] and poetry led me to start a new cycle of poems, the snowflake poems in what I call “snowflake form” because of their visual symmetry. Elements of these poems had been in my work for a long time, but the first full-fledged and conscious use of the visual ca