Paolo Lionni - Head Lines (& Other Poems 1959 - 1970)

Paolo Lionni - Head Lines (& Other Poems 1959 - 1970) WRY N.18 / 2024

PAOLO LIONNI (1938 - 1985), was a poet, artist, editor & graphic designer. Son of famed children’s book author & graphic designer Leo Lionni, he led a somewhat itinerant & intercontinental life as he moved frequently between (or by some accounts, was chased out of) the United States, England, Holland, and Italy. With his close friend Angus Maclise, and Maclise's wife Hetty, he helped edit the famed “Dream Weapon” issue of Aspen Magazine, and had earlier been responsible for the layout of Maclise’s “New Universal Solar Calendar”, published by George Maciunas in 1964. He appeared in a film by another other close friend, Piero Heliczer, organized a legalize marijuana event in early 1960s London before such things were common (or probably wise), and was one of a select group of poets who performed for 7,000 spectators at the infamous International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, alongside Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ernst Jandl, Adrian Mitchell and others. The following year he coordinated the New York Eternal Committee For The Conservation of Freedom In The Arts, whose board members included Ginsberg, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Andy Warhol and others. His poems & drawings appeared in such little mags of the day as Floating Bear, Beatitude, Kauri, El Corno Emplumado, and The Great Society.

Alongside these scattered fragments of his biography are just a handful of poems he published in little magazines throughout the 1960s. His peripatetic existence seemingly kept his work from being properly collected until now, with the discovery of an unreleased poetry manuscript from 1962, called “Head Lines”, which we publish here in its entirety alongside a gathering of work culled from a number of obscure magazines & publications.

Largely written when Lionni was in his early twenties, these are energetic works which bridge beat-poetry to pop-art, assemblage to appropriation. Works snatched from the New York Times and NY Daily News sit next to poems both lyrical and highly abstract, often dedicated to other poet friends such as Philip Lamantia, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gogo Nesbit. Dance, film, television, sex, consumerism, and religious preoccupations all come under his purview, with the cumulative experience being not unlike watching an early 1960s film by Philippe Garrel or Jean-Luc Godard.

Poet/photographer Gerard Malanga has written that “Amongst my poet friends, Paolo Lionni holds the distinction of being the most obscure of poets when he was alive & in death to be the most obscurative.” Following Lionni's premature death from lung cancer in 1985, his work had been believed to be largely lost or destroyed. The previously unpublished manuscript of Head Lines was discovered in the papers of poet Philip Lamantia, to whom he’d mailed it from Milan in December, 1962. Additional poems retrieved from various small publications printed in the United States and Italy. "To The Queen" was printed on the front page of the underground newspaper, The International Times #5, (London: December 12, 1966).

8.5 x 8.5 / 76 pages / Perfect Bound / Layout Ryan Skrabalak / Cover image Michael Klausman / Collected & edited by Michael Klausman