Legend: The Complete Facsimile in Context

LEGEND was written in the late 1970s by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman. This new editition is edited by Matthew Hofer, Michael Golston and includes a new, unpubished  collaboration by all five poets, written especially for this edition, as well an introduction of a selection of correspondence by the authors while they were writing the poems.

This edition of Legend is dedicated to the memory of Ray DiPalma. 

University of New Mexico Press
Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics
8 1/2" x 11", 316 pp.  / $85.00, cloth and ebook

“LEGEND is justly legendary: a fugitive anthology as oversized in the mythic imagination of Language Poetry’s history as its format. Comprising both the most radical and most typical impulses of the movement, it is a central text that simultaneously demarcates the outer peripheries of the mappable territory of the period’s avant-garde.”—Craig Dworkin

Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. The work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems in the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors’ correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

Photo, from left: Silliman, DiPalma, McCaffery, Bernstein, Andrews