There is no artistic form or chimera that Daniel Kane has not sampled. There is no medium he hasn’t dabbled and dipped before daubing a novelty from it, then subjecting the creation to the kiln of his omnivorous intellectual appetite.

I respect this particular greed in a textual mammals. Surely, something greed-like brings me to share an amusing segment of literary history here, as discovered among Kane’s What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde.

DANIEL KANE:

You know, one thing I wanted to ask you about was your involvement with Ed Sanders, who was one of the kings of the Lower East Side; he edited the legendary Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts, he ran the bookstore The Peace Eye, he formed the band The Fugs. Regarding Sanders’ arrest on obscenity charges for distributing material including his own mimeograph magazine Fuck You / a magazine of the Arts, Sanders told me he remembered you and John Ashbery were character witnesses for him. You were called to testify on a day you were playing tennis, and apparently had to rush downtown and present your case on Sanders’ behalf while holding onto your tennis racket. Do you remember this?

KENNETH KOCH:

Ed Sanders was one of the good guys. How could anything be more absurd than being arrested because you have certain books in your bookstore? It was very funny because Ed called me up and asked me about being a character reference. Fuck You/a magazine of the Arts was not something I subscribed to but I read a lot of them and thought it was very funny. I remember Sanders distributed a great questionnaire which asked all the downtown poets about their buggering habits. I liked very much the magazine’s big solicitation for people to volunteer for a filming of a Mongolian cluster fuck. This turned out to be a key issue of the trial. I was annoyed with the magazine a few times though, especially when I was on the list of people Gerard Malanga fucked—I certainly wasn’t one of those people! John and I agreed to be character witnesses. The trial kept getting delayed. Ed had a civil liberties lawyer who kept on waiting to get a good judge. Every month or so I’d get a phone call saying, “This might be the day for your appearance. Be ready.” I was told to wear a Brooks Brothers suit. On one particular day I was aware I might be called down to testify, but I was scheduled to play tennis. At the tennis court, a big announcement came over the loudspeakers on all the Central Park courts. “Kenneth Cock! Kenneth Cock!”

I jumped into my gray flannel suit and grabbed my tennis racket. John Ashbery was already there. They were just starting the trial. They dismissed the case. Here’s why. This was after the big SCREW magazine case, in which I think the decision had been made that obscenity could only be against the law if it encouraged other people to engage in it. So, our lawyer had sort of tricked the opposition lawyer into concentrating his case entirely on the solicitation of people to be filmed during Mongolian Cluster Fuck. Now, the judge was someone with a sense of humor and a brain, and our lawyer had explained to him, “You don’t really believe that they’re going to make a movie called Mongolian Cluster Fuck! What is that? Obviously, this is a joke, so this doesn’t fall under the purview of the law. "So the judge explained this to the other lawyer and dismissed the case. I had prepared a list of about ten things I thought were socially redeeming about Fuck You, but I never got a chance to state what they were.

DANIEL KANE:

I remember one of the first things I saw going through back issues of Fuck You was a form one could fill out indicating a willingness to participate in a "Fuck-In" against the Vietnam War. There was a box you were supposed to check adjacent to a line which read, "Yes, I will fuck-in." But you also had an option—you could check the line which read, "Preferring to eat dick, I will suck-in."

KENNETH KOCH:

[laughs] That’s good!

[addenda]

__ the fantastic Ed Sanders Archive, as created and made available for PDF download by Granary Books.

__ a little whimsy on whimsy and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kenneth Koch, and hipster t-shirts (or taking them off) from Daniel Kane, himself…