Bardo Matrix started out as a psychedelic lightshow team in Boulder, Colorado in the second half of the 1960s. Of its original members (John Chick, Craig Love, Dana Young and Greg Sharits) Chick and Young followed the hippie trail to Kathmandu in 1969, where the former started his Spirit Catcher bookstore on “Freak Street”. It was from that bookstore that Chick continued Bardo Matrix as a printing press for Western travellers and American expats. When Angus…
From the Divan of Petra Vogt was published in 1976 in an edition of 250 by Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam. The handsome and sought-after edition contains poems and photographs from Kathmandu by Ira Cohen and artwork by Petra Vogt. During a stay in Rotterdam in the summer of 1976 Cohen put together his edition together with publisher Gerard Bellaart. This particular copy is the first collated one, the pages still uncut and some of them hand…
Arrigo Lora-Totino (1928-2016) was an artist and poet from Turin, Italy. He is considered one of the key figures in Italian sound poetry. Lora-Totino’s first experiments with poetry stem from the late 1950s-early 1960s, a period in which he also founded his first magazine dedicated to concrete poetry. Lora-Totino is perhaps best known…
“… Joan Vollmer’s memory has long been framed within the narrative of the troubled five-year common-law marriage to the writer William S. Burroughs… her accidental death at her husband’s hand is unforgettable, the most enduring event of her short life. The shooting made her life a taboo topic for those who knew her well and a subject of fascination for those who did not. But the shooting tells us nothing about the 28 years of Joan’s life that preceded it… Joan Vollmer was extraordinary. The dean of her college knew it. Burroughs knew it. We knew it, too…”