LEE CHAPMAN ARCHIVE

"A generous champion of creative minds, Lee Chapman was also an artist whose talent was largely hidden by her intensely private and modest approach to her own creations.

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"...a creative soul who helped boost Lawrence as a beacon for literature, visual art and poetry, Chapman tirelessly championed other writers and artists--allowing her own work to remain relatively unknown. But her creations were alive, enaging and novel, and her work deserves recognition along with those of the artists she promoted..."

"In May 1968, John Moritz, a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Kansas, wrote to poet Edward Dorn, whom he’d recently met in a writing workshop, about his plan to start an “art and poetry” magazine that would serve as “an extension of what we see and feel, capturing the electricity and energy of the moment.” The first issue of Tansy materialized two years later, in the spring of 1970, featuring work by (among others) Edward Dorn, Charles Plymell, Frank Stanford, George Kimball, David Antin, and a number of drawings by Lee Chapman..."

"The artist Lee Chapman started the literary magazine First Intensity in 1993 when she was living in Staten Island, New York. By issue #6 in 1997 she was back in her old not-exactly-hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, where First Intensity continued to be produced until issue #22, which turned out to be the last one, in 2007. Twenty-two issues in fifteen years. Not bad..."

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"...Lee doesn’t regard the work she published as presenting a coherent aesthetic, but I think it does, at least the poetry: a kind of romantic postmodernism. There is a richness of tone and sound, a sense of the author—that is the romantic part. But also there are fragmentation, incoherence, juxtaposition, a sense of the author dissolving..."

Journal gathers group of poets spawned by Lawrence counterculture and nurtured by one another for four decades. 

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"...Chapman knows the Black Spring poets as well as anybody; she’s published their work for years. The visual artist started First Intensity Press in 1993 and prints a nationally circulated journal of the same name, as well as collections of short poetry and fiction by local and national authors.

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The John Moritz poems in Black Spring first appeared in “Cartography,” a First Intensity publication. The poems are accompanied by drawings Lee created in response to the words..."

"...a new crop of experimental publications dispense with the Language-poetry fetish of wit and radical disjunction in favor of a more reverent or wide-eyed avant-gardism, such as that which characterized the California poetry scene at mid-century. First Intensity, which has appeared twice a year for the past four years, is one of the best of these new journals."

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"...its contents reflect a modernist concern for aesthetic issues (rather than a political agenda, geographical movement, etc.). Further, the writers included tend to engage expressivist forms of experimentalism. In this sense, it is appropriate that the journal invokes 1950s open-form poetry rather than later, more deconstructive models. This connection is particularly apparent in the "elders" who are represented in First Intensity, including Robert Kelly, Larry Eigner, Diane DiPrima, Tom Clark, and Theodore Enslin."