Wallace Berman’s Semina 

Wallace Berman published the first issue of his hand-printed journal Semina in 1955. Containing individually printed poems, photographs, and a drawing, this small, unassuming envelope was the first in a series that would come to both represent and wield significant influence on the Southern California art and literature scene during the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. 

Between 1955 and 1964, Berman published nine issues of Semina, each printed in a few hundred copies.  While the second issue of Semina took the form of a bound journal, the rest of the issues were each composed of individually printed sheets of paper tucked into an envelope or folio. Both the loose and bound pages featured mostly poetry, in addition to photographs, collages, and reproduced drawings. Berman mailed these limited-edition works to collaborators, friends, and acquaintances, disseminating the literature and art that he perceived as being particularly vital to the California artistic community.

To compose each issue, Berman culled together material from artists and poets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and occasionally New York. Poems by Beat generation luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs peppered Semina’s pages, but the bulk of the journal was dedicated to equally lustrous poets who now occupy a place less visible in the public imagination of the Beats. Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Robert Alexander, David Meltzer, and Robert Kaufman, among others, all contributed poems that exemplify Beat poetry at its most urgent, searching, and surreal. 

In addition to the radical young poets of his contemporary scene, Berman included writings by their poetic forbearers. Early 20th century French poets held great sway over the group, as evidenced by the inclusion of poets such as Antonin Artaud, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Valéry. The group’s interest also extended beyond these classic French writers, and Semina contains works by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913; Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Roman Catholic nun, scholar, and poet in 17th century Spanish colonial Mexico; and 11th century Chinese poet Su Shi, one of the foremost literary figures of the Song era.

Berman pairs this rich variety of poems with an equally intriguing collection of visual art. Some of the images in Semina act as enigmatic illustrations in conjunction with the poems, while others stand alone on a page as a singular work. Berman gathered photographs, drawings, and collages from artists in his circle of friends, such as Charles Brittin, Cameron, and Jess, as well as images from the mass media, which Berman himself often collaged, manipulated, and effaced. Semina’s images widely range from photographs of current events, such as the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, to Surrealist-inspired fantasies, exemplified in Cameron’s drawing of an otherworldly sexual act.

Filled with both literature and visual art, Semina constitutes a work of art in and of itself, created in the most visible style of the journal’s artistic context: assemblage. With roots extending back to Pablo Picasso’s Cubist collages, assemblage art combines found materials—such as discarded toys, newsprint, abandoned furniture, or popular magazine advertisements—to create a new, distinct work of art. This technique was particularly popular in California during the time period in which Berman published Semina, and some of the era’s most influential assemblage artists—including Ed Kienholz and Bruce Connor—were involved in Berman’s circle. With Semina, Berman works in the typical assemblage mode, combining pieces—created in different contexts—together in a new whole. But rather than chair legs and plastic baby dolls, Berman’s components take the form of poetry and visual art. Yet Berman takes the assemblage nature of Semina one step further. Because the poems, photographs, and drawings are printed on separate cards and tucked inside the journal’s cover, the reader/viewer must choose the order and arrangement in which to consider the pieces.  Thus the individual interacting with the journal and its parts becomes the artist and editor, taking already existing components and assembling them into an even tighter—and more personal—net of connections and meanings. 

While Semina never left the underground community during Berman’s lifetime, it became legendary within that circle. In February of 1957, James Boyer May published a favorable review of Semina in Trace: A Chronicle of Living Literature, a journal that nurtured experimental writers and poets, as well as small amateur publications. May expressed admiration for Berman’s unique approach to literary publication:

“This has been launched in what may be called (on the literary side) the ‘pure’ little-mag tradition—for Editor Wallace Berman’s intentions here are comprised wholly in a serious-amateur frame. He is a graphic artist and sculptor, pretending no wide knowledge of modern literature, but with decided tastes and actuated solely by the desire to provide a medium for publication of what meets his personal aesthetic preferences. He offers no attempted theoretical rationalizations, as do so many. Neither does he publish hypotheses in relation to the photography and drawings, fields in which he qualifies as a professional.” (1)

May delineates the differences between amateur and professional, literary editor and visual artist. In this analysis, May somewhat misses the point; Semina collapses the identities of not only the professional and the amateur, but also of poet and visual artist, of creator and reader and viewer. The journal’s strength lies in its ability to forge connections between perceived distinctions.  

The word “semina” itself invokes the Latin translation of “seed,” a fitting description for the fruitful endeavor that Berman pursued in the journal.  In assembling and disseminating what he considered to be the most relevant art and literature of his time, Berman sowed the seeds of further creation and community. By drawing together a fertile group of poems, photographs, and drawings, Berman grafted pictures and literature, and by leaving open the final step of the work’s completion, allows the viewer/reader to cultivate Semina’s further growth.

1) James Boyer May, “Addenda,” Trace: A Chronicle of Living Literature, 21, April 1957, 31.

This text appeared as an in-gallery brochure to accompany the presentation of Semina in the exhibition Picture: Literature, on view at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2013.