Aldebaran Review 1967-1978

Aldebaran Review, named for the brightest of the Hyades, the red eye of Taurus, was a print journal I ran 1967-78 in Berkeley, California.

Inept pupil of the great printer Grahamn Mackintosh, I started off printing AR on paper masters in the attic of Holmes Bookstore, on 14th Street Oakland, where Robert Hawley, editor of Oyez, which published my first book, Roads to Dawn Lake, worked, but soon graduated to the AB Dick 360 on which Richard Krech and I launched an unground printshop, and which when passed to Alta, becoming Shameless Hussy.

The first few issues of AR included Larry Eigner, Al Young, Sister Mary Norbert Körte, Gene Fowler, Charles Potts, Richard Krech, Ron Silliman, David Meltzer, D.r. Wagner, Lyn Lifshin, Doug Blazek, d.a. levy, Julia Vinograd, the future lesbian separatist Pat Parker and the unilateral Alta, then my spouse. You can read all abouti t in "Berkeley Daze," a suipplement (thanks!) to Big Bridge: <http://www.bigbridge.org/BD-JOS-A.HTM>. 

AR trickled into a series of books, some of them monuments (Potts, Little Lord Shiva, grinning at the moon) and self-published sequences I'd peddle on the street.In 1978, when I was hired at Statewide Coordinator of California Poets In The Schools, I took on a crusade of herding cats and regretfully closed shop. 34 years goes by quickly when you're having fun.

Aldebaran Review lives!!

Empowered by the magic of the digital domain, AR will rise again!

Once I figure out how to load submishmash I'll be open for submissions to my new online journal.

I'll post one submitted poem each week.

I may supplement it with invited poetry, children's poetry, one of my own poems (does it count as an acceptance if you accept yourself? Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today) and translations.

Children's poetry at the River of Words finalist level is welcome.

Translations are eagerly awaited. Include the original language.

Previously published work may be invited.

Some notes about my trajectory and aesthetic, writing off the top of my head to Submission Bombers at FB yesterday 6/1/12:

Big Bridge is more of an overflowing hugeness than I have in mind. I'd probably accept one poem a week. I do appreciate BB publishing Berkeley Daze with my memoir of the 60's and the first Aldebaran <http://www.bigbridge.org/BD-JOS-A.HTM>. Typically, they misspell ALDEBARAN on the title page. My own mentors are not Black Mountain so much as the West Coast Beats — Snyder, Spicer, Welch and Duncan, and among my peers Charlie Potts, Jack Grapes, Mary Norbert Körte. To go back further, Jeffers, Hart Crane, Dickenson, Keats, Shakespeare. I have a formalist quirk with my 11-syllable lines. I don't know how experimental my taste is, but I loved, for example, Rusty Morrison's the true keeps calm biding its story, wherein her technique of opacity ran up against her father's dying. I'd probably republish some of the neglected poets <http://johnoliversimon.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/neglected-poets-anthology/> I featured on my blog. And the two sources I value more than anything are the Latin American poets I've read deeply (Neruda, Vallejo, Paz) and translated (Alberto Blanco, Elsa Cross, Gonzalo Rojas, Jorge Fernández Granados, Eduardo Milán) over 30 years; and the children to whom I've taught poetry over 40 years. I would definitely welcome work in other languages with strong English translation.


John Oliver Simon