Bern Porter

• Excerpts
• Greatest books of all time
• Best poetry of all time
• Best theater of all time
• Best novels of all time

After graduating in Physics from Brown University (1933), during World War II Bern Porter was drafted into the Manhattan Project, working at Princeton University and at UC Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory. Meanwhile he had set up his own printing press and published "Doldrums: A Study in Surrealism" (1941), the Circle Magazine (1944) and Henry Miller's anti-war pamphlet "Murder the Murderer" (1944). He was therefore Henry Miller's first US publisher. At the end of the war, Porter published his own "The Happy Rock - Tribute to H. Miller" (1945) and Kenneth Patchen's "Panels for the Walls of Heaven" (1946), a pioneering book of "visual" poetry. In 1947 he opened the Contemporary Gallery, launched the A Journal of Modern Culture with James Schevill in Berkeley, and published "Art Techniques" (1947). In 1948 Porter published his pamphlet "The Union of Science and Art" (1948), aka the "SciArt Manifesto". He lived and worked in Mexico, Guam, Japan, Venezuela, Australia, Scandinavia, Russia, Puerto Rico, etc. He published "Aphasia - A Psycho-Visual Satire" (1961) but also the treatise "Physics for Tomorrow" (1959) and his philosophical "I've Left" (1963). In 1964 he was working on rockets with Werner Von Braun in Alabama. In 1965 he published a textbook, "Mathematics for Electronics" (1965). When his friend the painter Harry Bowden died, Porter published his entire work ("Art Productions - 1928-1965"). In 1967 he was arrested in Alabama and committed to a mental hospital. Released, he moved to Maine and published his first book of "found poems", "Dieresis" (1969), made of clippings from newspapers, manuals and postcards, followed by "Found Poems" (1972). He was prolific to the end, alternating sound poetry ("Black Box", 1975), videos ("Earum Magnus", 1979), events ("The Eternal Poetry Festival", 1979) photography "Anatomical Parts", 1979), and more books of found poems ("The Book of Do's", 1982). In 2002 he was still making art. He died in 2004.

Found Poems