Now Digitized: Joanne Kyger’s Trip Out & Fall Back

Poets House invites you to enjoy the 1974 chapbook Trip Out & Fall Back by Joanne Kyger (1934–2017), a legendary figure of American avant-garde poetry on the West Coast and beyond. Published by Berkeley-based Arif Press, this chapbook is the latest installment in our ongoing series Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution, featuring digitized versions of books and chapbooks published from the 1960s to the 1980s, when independent poetry presses proliferated across the U. S.

We welcome online visitors to flip through the digitized pages of this rare fine-press edition, released in a print run of 1,000. The volume includes remarkable red and black illustrations by Gordon Baldwin, a former curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum and winner of the Rome Prize for his architectural drawings. The chapbook charts a poetic journey across the United States, punctuated by social gatherings of writers and artists, spiritual questions, and philosophical meditations. Essays about the chapbook, Joanne Kyger, and Arif Press—run by poet, printer, and designer Wesley Tanner—accompany the digitized volume.

To enrich your experience of the chapbook, we also present a video of Cedar Sigo reading from Trip Out & Fall Back as part of a memorial reading for Joanne Kyger at The Poetry Project, which was co-hosted by Poets House on November 6, 2017. Steven Kushner (“Kush”) of Cloud House, an audiovisual archive and cultural center devoted to American poetry, created the video.

Please enjoy Trip Out & Fall Back!