For the third of its four spring semester talks, the lecture series Postwar New York and Beyond visited the Department of Special Collections in Firestone Library to view publications, correspondence and other items in the Johnny Stanton Collection of Siamese Banana Press Records, and to listen to an oral history by writer, editor, and publisher Stanton and poet, editor, teacher and guest lecturer Elinor Nauen.
Self-Portrait. Joe Brainard with Anne Waldman. Johnny Stanton Collection of Siamese Banana Press Records, C1727, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Siamese Banana Press started as a newspaper in 1972 and ended, in Stanton’s phrase, “as a performance gang” in 1978.
In running the press, Stanton and Nauen invited and engaged in experiments in form and medium — collage, mimeographs, mixed media; every possibility was to be tried. They embraced the ephemeral and the moment. Irreverent invention by poets and writers of the New York School — some of whom were published for the first time in Siamese Banana Press — figures prominently in the holdings of Princeton University Library Special Collections.
Waldman and Brainard sent handwritten manuscript pages and copyright page.
The oral history was presented in connection with the graduate seminar “Postwar New York,” organized by Joshua Kotin and sponsored by Postwar New York: Workshops, a Humanities Council Magic Grant for Innovation, and the Department of English, and cosponsored by Princeton University Library Special Collections.