Introduction to Barbara Holland's Medusa

Barbara A. Holland died in 1988. For most of the years between 1973 and her death, I was her principal book publisher (under the imprints of The Poet’s Press, Grim Reaper Books, and B. Rutherford Books). During the intervening years, I have kept most of her chapbooks and books available, some in print and some on-line. 
After 31 years in the keeping of the McAllister family in Philadelphia, the poet's notebooks and papers have been transferred to The Poet’s Press. The objective is to find an archive that will maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital form. The present volume is the first product of this project, as we have begun to catalog and scan the papers. 
Approximately 200 printed magazines containing Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s have been scanned.  Some of these may be added to the Collected Poems edition published in 1980; others will form a separate, large Collected Poems, Volume 2.
Astonishingly, the trove of typed manuscripts contains five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar “warhorses,” are largely made up of poems no one has seen outside of their appearance in obscure magazines. An enormous folder of “Old Poems” spans from the late 1960s  up to as late as 1987.  If possible, I intend to see each of these manuscripts into a print and/or digital edition before the papers are archived. Holland published, by her own account, in more than 1,000 small press and literary journals, making her one of the nation’s most prolific published poets.

Medusa and Other Poems
The present book exists, so far as I know, in only the single copy found in the Holland papers. It is self-published, undated,  and bears the address of 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. By my guess and from internal evidence, the chapbook was printed sometime between 1958 and 1961. The copy at hand is personally inscribed by Holland to Leonie Adams, a famed poet who was her aunt, and whose help and encouragement she solicited. This copy has penciled markings not in Holland’s hand, and some typographic corrections by the poet. 
Barbara told me sometime in the mid-1970s that Leonie Adams had refused to help her in her poetry career, and it is no small wonder considering how shocking the content was, especially from a woman poet at the cusp of the 1960s, a daughter of two accomplished Philadelphia academics. Medusa has to be the most shocking first book of poems by any American female poet, erotic, Satanic, raw in Chthonic myth, and assured in its bardic manner.
There is some indication that Holland was persuaded to withdraw the chapbook. She never listed it in her publication credits and never offered any of the other poems for inclusion in my anthology, May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poetry in 1975, nor at any time after. Her notebooks offer evidence that she strove to write in other veins, but the supernatural affinity roared back by the early 1970s with Holland’s two most famous live-performance pieces, “Black Sabbat” and “Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.” 
Medusa includes 13 poems in its table of contents. Two more poems were added, apparently to fill out two blank pages at the end of the book, so the poems “Undermined” and “Fire Tumor” should be considered as outside the conceived cycle of poems centered around the title-poem.
Although this book might seem to belong to the horror genre, this was a minor niche in 1961 and rather limited to fiction (Barbara knew the work of writers such as Ray Bradbury and Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft quite well). Along with Holland, Shirley Powell, Claudia Dobkins, and, later, Jack Veasey, we formed the Gothic avant garde in Greenwich Village, cemented with the publication of May Eve in 1975. It is safe to say that we were regarded as lunatics. But at no time did we consider ourselves part of a sub-genre: we were fellow poets in the New York poetry scene of the time, contending against all the other styles and manners of the era. And it is important to note that none of us wrote rhymed verse.  The poems we wrote were intended for performance, and we read them all over the Northeast. Barbara was our exemplar, and her readings from memory were riveting. Those who only heard her in her last few years, after illness had affected her eyesight and memory, have no idea how powerful and incantory her performances were. She was called, rightfully, the Sybil of Greenwich Village.

Poems from Notebooks and Manuscripts
For the remainder of this book, I have turned to Holland’s hand-written notebooks, and to the large “Old Poems” typescript folder. Holland’s hand-written notes are mostly preliminary sketches for poems, often a dense block of lines, not yet broken up in any kind of meter or breath-phrasing. The same lines might appear on several successive pages, re-ordered but still with little hint of what might become a typed poem for submission to a magazine. A number of these were coherent and polished enough that I felt them worthy, especially as they demonstrate Holland’s attempt to take everyday journal ideas and make them into poems.
Thus, from these notebook sketches, I have “constructed” poems. Some needed only lineation and punctuation, and since I often worked with Barbara on the final appearance of her poems in print, I did what I always did. I know her style and her voice. I passed by sketches that seemed unyielding, and prepared others that seemed almost ready to be poems.  I have invented titles, and I have made small groupings of short lyric pieces that were found on adjacent sheets and which seem to go together.
I found a clump of poems written during off-season visits to Coney Island, so I put some of these into a group titled “Coney Island Suite.”
I have also done what any book editor would do, which is silently to correct spellings, to replace words where another word was clearly intended, and in a couple of places, indicated with square brackets, to insert a word that I would have persuaded Barbara to add.  I have added a few footnotes to help the general reader.
Holland was famed for a kind of trance-like, floating “run on sentence” manner in her readings, and I have judiciously added semicolons and other punctuations that serve to make her syntax clear. In “Medusa,” which I heard Holland recite from memory hundreds of times, there was always a syntactical knot in the middle which I have finally addressed.
From the typed manuscripts I have selected a range of poems that include the everyday, as well as re-appearances of the raw desires of the Medusa poems. Those who knew Holland as an eccentric but staid “spinster poet” may be startled at her emotional confessions. But what may come back to haunt the reader is that Holland is always one brave outsider, contending with solitude, desire, scorn, and genteel poverty, the soul of a Homeric poet in the guise of a shopping bag lady. And we may see also from these poems that “Medusa” is about becoming the dreaded monster no one may regard, simply by becoming old. Holland told an interviewer, “I am my own prison.”