Fugitive publication from Umbra and Black Arts associated poet Lloyd Addison, founder of the legendary Beau Cocoa journal. Published as Volume Eight in the Heritage series by Paul Breman (London) in 1970. Saddle-stapled in card wraps on colored stock.

'I am basically a very humble person with a monumental ego, part of which Is artificial.' — Lloyd Addison

Lloyd Addison was born 10 March 1931 in Boston, Massachusetts, but went to school first in Virginia, later in New York ('we were one black family almost alone in an otherwise unintegrated disintegrating Italian neighbourhood in Brooklyn'), finally at Brooklyn College and the University of New Mexico ('I became a drop-out in 1956 because of the feeling pattern'). He served in the air force, mainly in the Pacific, went through two spells of marriage (1950, 1959) and divorce, now lives with his nine year old son in Harlem and works for the New York City Welfare Department. 'The urge to create (otherwise) and the urge to copulate are continually in a tug-o-war-two systems of creating one's world which must compromise their mutual exclusion for the optimal self-affirmation': on one level, the result is half a dozen lengthy novels, some plays, a number of prose poems, a score of short stories, and a considerable body of poetry (again much of it unfashionably long). 'I have devoted much (which is never much) of my spare time inking paper but of works in printer's ink (other than my own) I can scarcely at the moment exhibit a half dozen pages.'

The published work is mainly confined to poetry: In Rosey Pool's anthology 'Beyond the blues' in 1962 ('my only question is: which side of the Blues is she going beyond'), in the first Issue of the New York magazine 'Umbra' in 1963 itli (group and mag took their names from the central poem in this book), 'Rhythmic adventures beyond jazz into avowal sound seams' (a small brochure of 1965 which contained 'By line abdomen''It has always been one of my favourites, particularly because of the rhythms and the notes of ethos': one of Addison's most constant preoccupations Is 'working up a kind of black ethos' to displace 'this pathos Invitation that I loathe'-'the difference between the two Is as between the clinic and the bedroom for the perverted personality, as between an attempt at cur and resignation perhaps modified by a temporal note of ambivalence'), In the Afro Arts Summer Festival Book for Harlem's warm 1967 (Addison was poet-very-much-in-residence as well as editor), and lately In two Issues of his own magazine Beau-Cocoa (the 1969 volume Is taken up largely by two of his own works, the poem 'Black In search of beauty' which has obtained considerable underground fame since its writing in 1956-7 but which here makes Its first appearance in print, and the first part of 'R.S.V.P.'-'undressing for an autobiography'). 'As you may know, black yea-saying Is fashionable these days. And, as you may also know, I am the original black beauty yea-sayer here among the (younger?) poets. And no one has yet entered this province with nearly the enchanted fervor and beauty of my 50s poems.'

Deadstock copy from 1970.