John Wilcock Heads to the EVO

February 3, 1966, Vol. XI, No. 16

By John Wilcock

(With this column John Wilcock ends his regular weekly series "The Village Square" in The Village Voice. He has become an owner of a new newspaper, the East Village Other, in which he is actively engaged and for which he writes. We wish him the best in his new venture. Ed.)

Quotes

"It is above all to understand chaos that we are living, because what we call chaos is nothing but that for which we lack a pattern of understanding. And since the artist is an individual who yearns to grasp that which escapes him, our chaos is the only certain object to which he must direct his preoccupations...Long live chaos because it is the only thing which is alive!" (painter and critic Luis Felipe Noe in an introducton to his show at the Bonino Gallery)

"Gerard (Malanga) is said to be the most widely published young poet in America. His calmly worded and rhythed poems with their unabashed indeciperability, their frank echoes of all the verse of this decade, his fashion exercises, and his ready-mades are extremely important comments on the poetical tone of our recent times...He is archly contemporary and so inextricably and innocently so that his achievement is as yet recognized by very few." (from Ronnie Tavel's "The Harlot Diary")...

After 10 years the editors have decided they want to drop my column and I have agreed with this decision. My column will still appear in the East Village Other (New York), the Los Angeles Free Press (California), and the Mainichi Daily News (Tokyo)...

John Wilcock

[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956. John Wilcock is still going strong at ojaiorange.com, and a Kindle edition of his new autobiography, "Manhattan Memories" is for sale here.]