Abilene! Abilene!
Subtitle: variorum edition with appendices & commentary
By: Edward Dorn ; Kyle Waugh, editor
Contributors: Waugh, Kyle, editor; Waugh, Kyle; Alcalay, Ammiel, editor of series; Mangum, Megan, book designer; City University of New York. Center for the Humanities
Series: Lost and Found, The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative -- series 4, number 2, Fall 2013; Lost and Found, The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative -- series 4, number 2.
Publisher: Center for the Humanities, the Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 58
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; American Poets; American Motion picture plays
Description: "A cross between The Seventh Seal and Blazing Saddles, Abilene! Abilene! is the unfinished screenplay poet Ed Dorn drafted for a collaboration with filmmaker Stan Brakhage in the late 1960s. Though Brakhage once claimed their film “was to be America’s answer to The Blood of a Poet,” the project was twice abandoned for lack of funding—first in 1969, leaving the script half-finished, then again in 1976, when San Francisco-based Zephyrus Image Press canceled plans to publish its first (and only) section. Four decades later, Abilene! Abilene!’s incompleteness and colorful bibliographic history make it a remarkably reflective text: altogether its many versions afford a privileged glimpse into Dorn’s editorial process, and its multistage, prismatic failure offers a narrative index of the waning autonomy of countercultural production and experimentation over the course of the latter half of the 1970s. A peculiar result of cross-media affinities among the post-war American “avant-garde,” Abilene! Abilene! is an idiosyncratic artifact of “Sicksties” (Dorn’s spelling) zeitgeist, and makes an instructive and entertaining component to Dorn’s mock-epic Gunslinger."--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Part 1, [screenplay] :; title: The opening of the strip: an introduction to Abilene! Abilene! --; title: Abilene! Abilene!, part 1 --; title: Abilene! Abilene!, extension, part 1 ; -- Part 2, Appendices :; title: Materials related to Abilene! Abilene! ;; title: Materials related to The twenty dollar sun (Fall 1968) --; title: Variorum notes for Abilene! Abilene!, part 1 --; title: Biographies ; -- Supplementary booklet:; title: "Someday that'll all be beef": the lives & time of Abilene! Abilene! -- Kyle Waugh.