One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader

Poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and interviews by George Hitchcock, a major American writer/editor of the 20th century.

Foreword by Philip Levine.

George Hitchcock was the outspoken editor/dictator of kayak, a literary magazine and press that introduced and influenced two generations of American writers and was, as Philip Levine notes in his Foreword, �ransacked with feverish anticipation.”

Hitchcock is himself an accomplished writer, and One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Readeris an eclectic and lively anthology celebrating his colorful oeuvre — surreal, political, and found poems; provocative plays and short stories; candid interviews, reviews, and essays; and his (in)famous (and comically subversive) testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, reprinted from the Congressional Record. (â�“That is a delightful question. Am I directed to answer it?”)

Introduced by Philip Levine; illustrated by Hitchcock’s notorious rejection slips; and including an in-the-trenches attack of kayakby Robert Bly (which Hitchcock solicited and published), One-Man Boatis proof positive that a life dedicated to the literary arts can be, in a word, bountiful.

Poetry, fiction, and drama by George Hitchcock, a major American writer/editor of the 20th century.

Foreword by Philip Levine.

Introduction by Robert McDowell.

In 1960 George Hitchcock co-founded the San Francisco Review, and in 1964 he went solo and launched kayak magazine and press. Both established the work and careers of Robert Bly, Raymond Carver, Charles Simic, James Tate, Kathleen Fraser, Anne Sexton, John Haines, W. S. Merwin, Carolyn Kizer, and many others. As a creative writer, Hitchcock authored a dozen books of distinctive, Surrealist poetry, seven widely produced plays, and two collections of short stories. One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader includes work from all three genres, as well as interviews, Hitchcock's famous testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and a section on kayak.

George Hitchcock, at 88, divides his time between Harrisburg, Oregon, and La Paz, Mexico. His poetry was recently featured in The Los Angeles Times.

George Hitchcock was born in Oregon in 1914. He graduated with honors from the University of Oregon and moved to San Francisco to work as a journalist. Throughout the 1930s he wrote four novels, none of which survive. During World War II he joined the Merchant Marine. After the war he traveled throughout California organizing dairy unions and was eventually invited to teach at the California Labor School. He held a number of positions at the Labor School, including teacher of philosophy.

During the 1950s, Hitchcock became active in writing and performing plays and worked with the Interplayers, The Actor’s Workshop, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, acting in over forty leading roles; his role of Creon in Antigone was recorded by Columbia Records. In 1958 he was called before the Un-American Activities Committee and his testimony was broadcast nationally; his response to the question �What is your profession?”became legend: �My profession is a gardener. I do underground work on plants.”

From 1958-1963 he co-edited the San Francisco Review and in 1964 he founded kayak, a literary magazine �particularly hospitable to surrealist, imagist, and political poems.”For the next twenty years, kayak would be one of the most important, and certainly the liveliest, magazines in the country. During this period, Hitchcock was invited to join the faculty at the experimental College V at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught for nineteen years.

As Philip Levine writes in his Foreword to One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader: �To understate the matter, George Hitchcock gave the American poetry world three priceless gifts: his own writing; kayak, the finest poetry magazine of my era; and his complex and unusual presence, which served as a model for so many of us--the model of the poet as a total human being.”

Philip Levine has received many awards for his books of poems, most recently the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth.Robert McDowell is the founding editor of Story Line Press. He is the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including The Diviners, Quiet Money, and Poetry After Modernism. He is also the co-translator of Ota Pavel's How I Came to Know Fish (New Directions).Mark Jarman's latest collection of poetry is Unholy Sonnets. His previous collection, Question for Ecclesiastes, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for 1998. He is the author of two books of essays on poetry: The Secret of Poetry and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry. He teaches at Vanderbilt University.Joseph Bednarik is the editor of The Sumac Reader (Michigan State, 1997), co-editor of One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader (Story Line, 2003), and a contributor to Conversations with Jim Harrison (University of Mississippi, 2001). His literary interviews and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Poets &Writers, Five Points, Northwest Review, The Oregonian, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He works at Copper Canyon Press.

Poems — Short stories — Miscellany — Plays — On Kayak.