“I think I’ve always had this wonder about how the world was formed.”

Fran Herndon^[1]

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We first came across Fran Herndon’s work through that of the poet Jack Spicer, who had gained attention recently in Madrid thanks to the poetry seminars organized by Euraca.^[2] For years, we have explored her work closely, as it has accompanied us in our research on the relationship between poetry and the visual arts, and we have gradually come to know Herndon through friends who care for and preserve her legacy in the city of San Francisco.

Fran Herndon was born in Oklahoma in 1929, of Native American origins and the ninth of ten children.^[3]The artist remembers her childhood on a farm as already characterized by an impulse to observe her surroundings — the sky, the insects, fleeting moments, taking in the heat and the color — probably seeking a connection to what was at hand that would bring her out of her isolation.^[4] This orientation towards that which is beyond oneself is, we believe, one of the motors behind Herndon’s artistic work. Our text follows a particular approach to her practice, one that underlines her disposition to be continually attuned to the fluctuation of external material and immaterial fluxes instead of trying to control them and reduce their disparities. We will first contextualize Herndon’s participation in the context of San Francisco, where she was influenced and surrounded by a very particular circle of mainly white gay poets and artists, who established a fascinating dialogue between poetry, art, and the tradition of collage, as well as the distinctive forms of abstraction and figuration that emerged in the Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s. We will then finish with a close analysis of her painting Can The Circle Be Unbroken? (1961). This painting guides our reflection on the relevance of Herndon’s art at a time when the effects of colonial, extractivist, and genocidal forces — as well as the rise of militarism and individualizing ideologies — are as pressing as ever.

After finishing high school, Herndon left for Chicago and, as she recalls in an interview with poet and friend Elizabeth Robinson, it was after much struggle and discrimination that she found a job at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.^[5] Nonetheless, she soon escaped to Europe for, as she said, “The US was then no place for a brown face.”^[6] In France, she met her husband James Herndon, and together they returned to San Francisco in 1957 where they reconnected with James’s friends from Berkeley — now key figures of the poetry scene and originators of the San Francisco Renaissance. It is at this moment that Spicer comes into her life. James Herndon’s book Everything as Expected (1973) is a valuable source to follow their friendship and collaborations. According to him, Spicer didn’t own a television and would often go to the Herndons’ house to watch it. Herndon relates that Spicer would sit for hours watching the McCarthy hearings, drinking beer while criticizing and yelling at the people who were testifying.^[7] In an interview with Christopher Wagstaff, Fran Herndon also recalls that Spicer was lonely, and wandered around always with his radio in hand.^[8] The closeness of their relationship, as well as Herndon’s ability to identify in Spicer a capacity to receive signals from a realm outside of what we know, can be inferred from her oil painting Jack Spicer and His Radio (1960). In the painting, the poet appears writing — a nod to his practice of dictation^[9] — surrounded by toys and a child that is likely one of Herndon’s sons whom Spicer occasionally babysat.

During the beginning of the 1960s, Herndon and Spicer realized lithographic work together, and it is at this moment that she started her celebrated collages. The late writer and curator of Herndon’s work, Kevin Killian, explains how Herndon painted over images that she collected from Life and Sports Illustrated creating a dreamlike misty atmosphere.”^[10] Killian also points to how the “sports collages” engaged directly with issues of race and the Civil Rights struggle, as well as with the anti-war activism that grew stronger during those years and that continued to appear in her later collages. In doing so, Herndon inscribes herself in a rich tradition of political and social collages — from Dada, to the Pop art of Richard Hamilton, to Romare Bearden’s 1960s collages, as well as to the mixed media suspensions of Bruce Conner.^[11] Nearer to her, in the same city and at the same time, Jess was also making his collages, works that Herndon would have seen for the first time around 1960 or 1963.^[12]

While Spicer alienated himself from the other poets and artists of the San Francisco Renaissance, over the years, Herndon became close to a circle of poets and artists that included Robert Duncan, Jess, Robin Blaser, Norma Cole, and Helen Adams, amongst others. In 1960, Herndon began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts with many of her teachers being prominent artists from the Bay Area school – such as Bruce McGaw, Frank Lobdell, and Richard Diebenkorn.^[13] Being a woman of color and coming from a working-class background,^[14] Herndon came to art later than most of her peers, and she recalls being by far the oldest student and not being able to enroll in all the classes, as she didn’t always have the financial means to afford them.^[15]

It is worth stating the influence on the artistic community of the city of the vertical geological forms of Clyfford Still (he held a tenure position on the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts from 1946 to 1950), or the great revival of romance and symbolism in poetry and painting that took place in San Francisco and stands in clear contrast to the artistic trends in New York. This revival can be tracked in Herndon’s works and those of her circle (Jess, Paul Alexander, Harry Jacobus, George Stanley, or Tom Field), all of whom share a deep admiration for Vuillard, Ensor, Munch, and Bonnard.^[16] At the same time, the importance of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, where abstraction morphed into a figurative expressionism -– with Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Nathan Olivera, David Park and Diebenkork being some of its prominent figures — can also be located in certain aspects of Herndon’s work.^[17] Specifically, her strong feeling for color and her attention to everythingness animate all elements in her surroundings. This attention emphasizes more than physicality, producing an explicit emotional tension within abstraction and figuration. 

In addition to this tending to everythingness, we find it generative to think of Herndon’s work in relation to open field poetry, and to what poet Robert Duncan refers to as “permission.” That is, the poet's ability to participate (not control) in the potencies that are held in common things, to acknowledge them, attune to them, and then release them.^[18] This kind of poetics already approaches the materiality of the world and larger systems with an attention that, instead of dominating, wants to be permeated, more opened, to external forces. Duncan was a poet who, beyond being the artist Jess’s partner, also knew a great deal about visual arts. He even co-founded the gallery King Ubu,^[19] where Herndon and Jess selected with him the artists for the first exhibition.^[20] Herndon also participated in this independent circuit of the 1960s by showing her work in spaces like Peacock Gallery, Borregaard's Museum, and Buzz.^[21] As Wagstaff notes, among all the artists around Duncan, it’s Herndon whose work most clearly embodies the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the seen and the unseen. These intersections grow out of Herndon’s efforts to preserve a sense of wonder in a world she often described as poisonous — one that could strip away her softness, her warmth, and her sense of romance.^[22] At the same time, this movement between what’s seen and what’s hidden but intensely felt, reflects her desire to make visible the forces that shape and limit the present, even when they aren’t visible enough.

Herndon said that the painter she learned the most from was Jess.^[23] Although their works materialize in distinct ways and arise from different experiences, Jess and Herndon were close friends that shared a sense of mystery and the presence of dreamlike atmospheres in their works. In their paintings, we often find figures isolated in space. Yet beyond these isolated figures, artists such as Jess, Paul Alexander, and Herndon tended to create secret compartments or cavities within their compositions. These pockets of space subtly compartmentalize the surface of the painting, suggesting openings onto other settings throughout the same artwork. Jess explored these cavities in works like A Mile to the Bus Stop (1955), where two figures seem to enter a tunnel within a wood, and Secret Compartments (1952), where a patchwork of portals compose a very particular still life. For her part, Herndon also carefully isolated areas of the painting, a proneness she connects with a childhood marked by the loss of her sister to polio and the arduous farm labor that began for her and her siblings when she was only four.^[24] Herndon developed a unique capacity to let the viewer sense certain objects or scenes, without ever guaranteeing that what one thinks one sees is actually fixed in the image. This ambiguity is evident in works such as File Rats (1961), an abstract painting with elusive figurative elements in which a rat peeking out from one of the two yellow cavities is identifiable but remains mysterious and evasive, sharing a space and time with the viewer only for a fleeting moment before it disappears to its own underground and invisible world. Other paintings, such as Zig Zag and Triangles,^[25] feature broad, rapid brushstrokes and reveal a tendency toward geometric patterning that is also prominent in various paintings by the artists. In these, the triangular or angular compartments that appear serve too as zones that allow specificity to proliferate.

Fran Herndon’s work generates spaces where recognition slips away. The tension between seeing and grasping certain objects or figures is indefinitely extended. This aligns with the disruptive agency of abstraction that art historian Kobena Mercer explores in Discrepant Abstraction (2006), where meaning proliferates through a process of semiosis that can never be sealed by a single interpretation. Mercer’s groundbreaking book analyzes visual art inspired by Nathaniel Mackey’s poetics of “discrepant engagement.”^[26] A disciple and close friend of Robert Duncan and Jess, Mackey uses the term to describe a mode of examination that rather than suppressing resonance, dissonance, and noise, remains open to it. “Discrepant engagement” is a way of engaging contradiction and resisting homogenization — of allowing things, in Charles Olson’s words, to “keep their proper confusions.”^[27] Such an approach resists the reification of fixed identities, in his case acknowledging resonances between Black traditions, Euro-American avant-gardes, Caribbean writing, African ritual and music, and other influences to emerge without collapsing their distinct histories. 

Like the artists Mercer engages with, Herndon’s story is marked by the conflicted experience of a partial and intermittent inclusion within a white, masculinist world — a story of both recognition and rejection. Her practice can be read as a form of discrepant abstraction that resists the taxonomies and categories that obscure heterogeneity and mixture, embracing a highly promiscuous visual style that never settled across the decades. Her acknowledgment of the chaos of a material world in constant flux, her openness to it, makes evident the impossibility of what Mackey refers as “presumably closed orders of identity and signification.”^[28]

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Can the Circle Be Unbroken?

We continue this text by focusing on Herndon’s painting Can the Circle be Unbroken (1961, BAMPFA collection, San Francisco).^[29] Our reading of this artwork opens up space — a cavity we could say — to focus on traces of politics, physics, and energetic entanglements that organize and reorganize matter. In preparation to paint, Herndon would often read poetry,^[30] and this text honors this fact by letting poetry guide our analysis. Here, we place the painting in conversation with poets and writers who have accompanied us in our research on Herndon in recent years.

At the center of the painting, a large figure seems to span or embrace three smaller ones with yellow radiant heads, gathering around a gray helix. Two more helixes appear in white and blue — perhaps they’re not helices at all, but stars or some other celestial body set against a deep blue background. This ambiguity makes it difficult to place the painting in any specific setting. Everything eludes an absolute literal reference, and yet the artwork maintains the capacity to convey presentness and movement — a movement that we find to be cosmological and geological, transtemporal and connecting. The brushstrokes also denote this actuality and flow; there is an uneven and topographic accumulation of paint across the canvas as well as a very particular quickness to them. A human figure almost entirely occupies the field, its face, while painted in oil, is of such a thin layer that it could almost be watercolor. Their eyelashes seem to dissolve, a deliberate watery blur over the eyelid. Meanwhile the blue space and the helices condense matter through impastos.

When looking closely at the painting, a series of questions arise: 1) What circle does the title refer to? 2) Where are these figures? 3) What are these figures doing? 4) What do those yellow heads irradiate? Although open, interrelated, and difficult to answer precisely, we will use these questions to guide and structure the following analysis.

1) What circle does the title refer to?

The title of the painting probably references an hymn or phrase connected to folk and gospel traditions that has been widely used in protests and sittings in the United States. However, another human circle comes to mind when analysing this work: the circle formed by a group of children — an image very important to Duncan that comes from a recurring childhood dream, one in which he saw himself at the center of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing “Ring a Ring o’ Roses.” In fact, an illustration by Jess of this circle of children was the cover of his best-known book, The Opening of the Field (1960). In his poetry, Duncan sought a field or a ground that would “join center and circumference, microcosm and macrocosm, dream and reality."^[31] The field becomes a metaphor for the cosmos and an expanding state of awareness — no longer controlled by the poet’s personality but attended to (as we stated already). 

Following Duncan, we can therefore think of the circle of the title of Herndon’s artwork as a way to connect the individual with larger systems. Pursuing this line of thought, and looking back at the painting, we can begin to encounter an allusion to the deep entanglements between human interventions and chemical and geological structures — with their political, colonial, military and social repercussions. In this analysis, we take the three yellow headed irradiating figures of Can The Circle Be Unbroken? to be a nod to the post-war and atomic visual imaginaries of the early 1960s, a moment when the ghost of the atomic bomb continued to haunt a generation that had witnessed its devastation. We suggest interpreting its circular arrangement as an indicator of the ways in which science, imperialist agendas, land dispossession, industries and workers, California and Hiroshima, are materially interconnected. 

Only one year later, Jess made his artwork If All the World Were Paper and All the Water Sink (1962). Again, we see a circle of children spinning around, and above them, we find the menacing mushroom cloud, the most prominent symbolic representation of the destructive power of atomic energy. On the left side of the painting, we see the artist in what appears to be a self-portrait, contemplating the nuclear threat and reading the cards — as if reflecting on how we are taking chances with the earth itself, with human life, while also recognizing his own role and implication in the process of creating atomic weaponry.

In “The Irradiated International” (2018), Lou Cornum recounts how Dene elders (an Indigenous group of First Nations who inhabit the boreal, subarctic, and Arctic regions of Canada) traveled to Hiroshima after learning that they had unknowingly worked in mines extracting uranium that was later used for the production of the atomic bomb.^[32] Although they had not known the purpose of their labor at the time, the Dene sought to recognize this material connection, and on the 53rd anniversary of the bombing, they sent six elders to Hiroshima to apologize for their unintentional involvement. As Cornum writes:

They sought out connection with the ruptured irradiated international. They traveled to Hiroshima, unable to undo the bomb but willing to witness its route. [...] As Anthony Burke describes it, they “wanted to draw a cosmic circle between the events and connect their two communities in a shared discourse of mourning and experience.  

Cornum then adds: “the circle is broken all over, in the constructed impossibility of seeing what has tied together and unbound those caught in the routes of uranium. There are the unmarked highways of the other-than-human as well. Movement marked by radiation cuts across life forms.”

If Herndon asks “Can the Circle be Unbroken?” Cornum responds, “the circle is broken all over.” As we can see, breaking the circle implies an attempt to erase bonds, material connections, and solidarities that occur across different geographies and historical moments — a circle premised on a less linear understanding of union and coalition, in which past, present, and future interpenetrate; where colonial traumas and histories are materially alive in the present.

 2) Where are these figures?

Herndon’s painting seems to unfold a field that extends beyond maps. She is capable of directly engaging with a spatiality without location, of creating a pocket of space that brings together different scales — atomic, human, geological, cosmological — and the traces of the different political events and menaces that marked the beginning of the sixties.^[33] The material, even geological, aspect of the painting is emphasized not only through the rocky helixes or stars, but also by the topographical quality of the paint spread across the surface of the canvas.

Just one access to the mesa now 

with a night stew of emerson 

until midnight mist light drizzle and water 

latent sky turns into downpour

into pastures of ghosts 

and mourning woods of angels

Does a place have its own memory?

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I’m on the river and cut off by the flood

What is free from cause and effect?

the poetry song stone that gives off overtones

the quest is to find those lost vibrating overtones

of the poetry stone along the trail of your little town 

sheltered since your death

the beautiful land 

intense nostalgia invades my soul

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Carrying Eta all night

protecting that warm old cat body 

in my arms to get her to a place of respite

comfort and safety

God makes an impenetrable screen of pure sky

pulsating

undulating 

casual^[34]

In her poem “Terrace Road Slumps into the Canyon” (1995), San Francisco poet Joanne Kyger describes poetry as “a stone that gives overtones,” suggesting that the poet’s task is to draw out those resonances that emerge from the poetry-stone and transmit them to the reader. This understanding of poetry as almost a geological event resonates with the way Herndon’s painting remains close to matter, while brilliantly framing it within more systemic elements that actively exert pressure upon it. This is less metaphorical than it may at first appear, and aligns with what Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva describe as poethical work — that is, ways of resisting the fallacies and violences that seek “to reduce, discipline, and contain the unwieldy materiality of the world.”^[35] In this sense, the painting doesn't condense the violence it gestures toward; rather, the figures appear surrounded by a halo of wonderment, as if resisting being reduced to the overarching logics of their time.

3 What are these figures doing?

In Can the Circle Be Unbroken? we see an activity that could possibly speak of the weight of scientific and technological innovation in the 1960s. But words like conjuring, enchantment, invocation, mysticism, or magic also come to mind. We don’t really know what these figures are doing — whether they’re repairing an engine, splitting an atom, or performing magic — but what they do convey is a sense of wonder and continuous curiosity.

Wonder is something deeply present in Herndon’s artistic practice. As already noted, this sense of wonder suggests an attunement to the surroundings that is more inclined to chance and indeterminacy than to control or domination. As the artist herself said of her practice: “And you just let marvelous things occur. You don’t try to censor or control them.”^[36] This immediately made us think of two poets: Rachel Blau DuPlessis — who speaks in very similar terms about how the poem always escapes the poet — and S*an D. Henry-Smith who in their poem Blue (2019) tracks encounters with wonder, even when there seems to be no conditions that could sustain it, suggesting wonderment as a way of creating context within a violent world.

No poem is totally the poem you meant to write, but every poem you’ve written is the one you did or could write, brought to the poise or level of interest to which you could then bring it. That is, the poem escapes the poem. Or the poem escapes the poet. Or is it, the poem escapes the poetics? With the simultaneity of making and a sense of loss, something escapes inside the work. This "escape" authenticates the work.

Rachel Blau Du Plessis, “Preface”

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I.

when i could find no Sun, i built one

burning slow in February lizard beard

watts on acid green roast to olive wash to

blue & all its derivatives crane cross-legged

content continent & crocodile lurk low in

water eyes glassed over glaze gone

open

shut,

open,

shut. chemistry chronological you broke

my sleep you broke my slumber my

saunter my sauna trim trot spiny pom-

pom. all ways learning how heat softens,

calcifies. sleepy DJ brings in the rinsed

crystal chromatics, the sharp edge of

mossy growth. what the light couldn’t

hold, i filled in by hand, i filled in by hand.

S*an D. Henry-Smith, “Blue” (2019) (listen here) 

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4) What do those heads radiate? 

Shortly after being drafted in 1943, the artist Jess was assigned as a lab technician to help develop plutonium at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The young artist — at that time a chemist — was part of the U.S. massive mobilization of plutonium not only domestically but also sourcing a great deal of it from the Congo. In 1983, Nathaniel Mackey wrote a poem for Jess, inspired by the Translations series, titled “The Phantom Light of All Our Day.” In this excerpt, we can see that the presence of the atomic bomb is everywhere:

Up at dawn every day these

days, I'm learning to look into

the lidlessness the North Wind

wakes ...

learning to gaze into the sky

my invented eyes unveil under

acid rain, chemical sunsets, blush

of a

shotgun bride.

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The grass blowing east at the

merest mention of wind where

there is no wind, no place for

a horse in this the riderless

world.

I'm learning to paint. I repeat

these words as an irritable mystic, my

would-be hum, neither life

nor limb not on the edge of

dislocation, some such

dance

I dare ...

But still I stand before

the brook I stood before as a boy.

Thicknesses of paint, as if

the eye

looked into its looking, let the skull

show thru, show the Kings of

Xibalba play with poison gas and me

among them, 1940s' chemical

warfare corps ...

I'm learning to see, says my enamored mage, what's

going on. I hear the rumbling in the music I

paint.

Luminous breezes locked in the nucleus'

inmost reaches echo Atum's vow. These

radiant winds obey the abandon our

learning sought.^[39]

As Devin Johnston explains, in the poem Mackey traces scientific materialism to its own self-devouring end, the point at which matter destroys itself.^[40] These chemical sunsets and warfare corps, and a poison gas that involves chemists such as Jess, but also miners who were unaware of the government's plans such as the Dene elders, or the numerous ​nuclear tests that United States conducted on indigenous lands, particularly in the American Southwest and the Pacific Islands,^[41] kept coming back to us when trying to think about the  three yellow headed figures in Herndon’s painting. With Mackey’s poem in mind, the presence of the atomic bomb is even more palpable, and those three yellow-headed figures in the painting seem to be irradiating something through their flaming heads. Something radioactive. 

The way Herndon’s painting invokes and renders the radioactive stands in direct contrast to the widespread use of the symbol of the mushroom cloud that appears, for example, in Jess’ painting If All the World Were Paper and All the Water Sink (1962). In her book Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (2020), Jessica Hurley insists on the need to avoid treating atomic destruction as an exceptional event, focusing instead on the constant irradiation and infrastructure it entails. If, as she says, “the mushroom cloud (that image and symbol) is designed to reduce the capacity for critical thought and induce habits of submission to the nuclear complex for which the mushroom cloud serves as both metonym and disguise.”^[42] Herndon’s irradiating heads can be said to do the opposite, suggesting a constant irradiation, instead of a one time event, that is harder to track and fix. Herndon’s visual presentation — with its mix of abstraction and figuration, its materiality and mystery, its unanswerable questions — calls for an analysis that attends to the systemic and transtemporal material web arising from colonial extractivism, from the atomic and radioactive, that today still continues to affect already disadvantaged populations.^[43]

Returning to Lou Cornum’s "Irradiated International," we finish our analysis by thinking of revolutionary subjects who contain and radiate an energy capable of reorganizing matter and reestablishing the circle — a reorganization that, as Cornum explains, is a decolonizing act: 

I will myself to radiate outwards, to exceed the constraint of a national body, of a closed border body, to meld with a mutant consciousness and deform what deforms me. The work to do: Making visible, Making felt, Making it stop. I don’t yet know the chain reaction that links these acts. There is no reversal reaction to take away the death and slow death already enacted by leaky waste sites and test site winds. (…) A new geography is coming, cut by the empire's geometry but now shaped into something else.^[44]

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Endnotes

^[1] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 9.

^[2] We quickly learned about their series of collaborative projects, beginning with their editorial work on the mimeo magazine J, and continuing with Fran’s lithographs for Spicer’s The Holy Grail (1964), as well as her illustrations and collages for The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1962) and Golem (1997).

^[3] In her text “She Always Said Yes,” read during the panel “Fran Herndon Recalled” (September 20, 2025 Small Press Traffic, San Francisco), poet Elizabeth Robinson recalls: “Sometimes she [Fran Herndon] would talk about what it was to be from the Indigenous population in rural North Carolina, but her talk became halting. When I asked her what her tribe was, she just said ‘Indian,’ though later she said maybe Lumbee, and later still she spoke about the mixed-race nature of Indigenous people in her region, most certainly coming together with Black people who had escaped enslavement. Even among other Indigenous schoolmates, she met with denigrating comments because her skin was darker than theirs.”

^[4] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 1.

^[5] Elizabeth Robinson, “San Fran Reconnaissance: An Interview with Fran Herndon,” Fact-Simile no. 7 (2011): 6.

^[6] Kevin Killian, “Fran Herndon,” The Capilano Review 3, no. 18 (Fall 2012): 110.

^[7] James Herndon, Everything as Expected (San Francisco, 1973), 1.

^[8] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 2.

^[9] Spicer believed that poems were not the product of individual creativity but rather transmissions from outside forces. He called this "dictation," a concept that challenged traditional notions of authorship. Spicer viewed the poet as a radio receiver, picking up signals from the universe and channeling them into language. As he said in a lecture to young writers in Vancouver in 1965, "The point is that you're not the thing which is broadcasting. You're the receiver." In Peter Gizzi, ed., The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 77.

^[10] Fran Herndon. Booklet published on the occasion of the exhibition organized by Lee Plested and Kevin Killian at Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco, September 8, 2011, 11.

^[11] Kevin Killian, “Fran Herndon,” The Capilano Review 3, no. 18 (Fall 2012), 112.

^[12] Killian rightly points to the difference between their two practices of collage: on the one hand Fran’s expressionist, colourful and vibrant collages, on the other Jess’ “ornate, precise surrealism.” However, it is in one of Jess' translations (Montana Xibalba: Translation 2, 1963), and not in his collages, where we see not only a coincidence in the election of a sports theme, but an indisputable shared attention to the thickness and materiality of the surface in both Jess’ work and Herndon’s paintings.

^[13] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 3.

^[14] Many male artists from low-income backgrounds were able to attend school through the GI Bill. The GI Bill was open to all veterans, both men and women, but its actual impact was profoundly masculinized, reflecting the composition and gender hierarchies of both the Armed Forces and the educational system of the time. During World War II, women made up only about 2% of the U.S. Armed Forces. Moreover, the social and gender norms of the period discouraged many female veterans from using the benefit to pursue university studies or home loans. John Warren Oakes, “How the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) Impacted Women Artists’ Career Opportunities,” Visual Culture & Gender 1 (October 1 2006).

^[15] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 3.

^[16] The artist Harry Jacobus recalls in a conversation with Wagstaff that such tendencies were often dismissed as effeminate or overly decorative—simply “gay.” At the time, artists like the Nabis were being denigrated amid the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. In Christopher Wagstaff, "Harry Jacobus: An Interview, 1985," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books, 2009), 87- 88.

^[17] Keith Wallace, “Fran Herndon and Her Circle,” The Capilano Review 3, no. 18 (Fall 2012): 98.

^[18] Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community in Mid-Century (Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 1989), 127.

^[19] The King Ubu Gallery in San Francisco was established by Robert Duncan, Jess Collins, and Harry Jacobus​. ​This gallery was an important institution situated at 3119 Fillmore Street between 1952 and 1953 (The King Ubu Gallery was later replaced by the Six Gallery, where Allen Ginsberg first publicly read his famous poem "Howl”). Kevin Killian, "Harry Jacobus," SF MOMA Open Space, 2009.

^[20] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 12.

^[21] These all were short lived projects. Buzz was organized by Paul Alexander, Bill Brodecky, and Larry Fagin in 1964. Another poet that founded an art project was Jack Spicer, who, with five of his students from the California School of Fine Arts established the "6" Gallery in 1953. In Kevin Killian, “Fran Herndon,” The Capilano Review 3, no. 18 (Fall 2012), 114.

^[22] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 30.

^[23] Ibid., 12.

^[24] Ibid., 1-2.

^[25] These two Herndon paintings still lack an exact date, highlighting the archival and cataloging work that remains to be done. With the help of friends, family, and experts, we hope to determine their precise dates in the near future.

^[26] Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19-20.

^[27] Ibid., 20.

^[28] Ibid., 19.

^[29] This section of the text is inspired by a talk that Juf gave in September 2025 at Small Press Traffic (San Francisco) as part of a Fall Symposium, Poetry as Magic: Celebrating the Fran Herndon and Jack Spicer Centennials.

^[30] Christopher Wagstaff, Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986) (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 10-11.

^[31] Robert Baird, “Use Use Use: Robert Duncan’s Dream,” London Review of Books 35, no. 20 (24 October 2013).

^[32] Lou Cornum, “The Irradiated International,” paper presented at Future Perfect, Data & Society Research Institute, New York, June 7-8, 2018.

^[33] 1961, the year in which Herndon painted this work, was marked by a fascination with outer space and with two landmark events within the space race, as well as the continuous testing of nuclear bombs and the numerous accidents that followed, and the United States’ official entry into the Vietnam War.

^[34] Cedar Sigo, “Places to Go: A Discussion on the Life & Work of Joanne Elizabeth Kyger,” YouTube video, 1:12:45, posted by Small Press Traffic, May 29, 2022, 35:36:40.

^[35] Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics,” e-flux Journal, no. 120 (September 2021).

^[36] Christopher Wagstaff, "Fran Herndon: An Art of Wonderment (An Interview by Christopher Wagstaff, 1985–1986)," (Berkeley, CA: Rose Books; Rotterdam, NL: A Tale of a Tub, 2025), 7.

^[37] Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Surge: Drafts 96–114 (Salt Publishing, 2013), 15.

^[38] S*an D. Henry-Smith, “blue,” Flotsam Suite: A Strange and Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor ’Til It’s Out of My System, Bandcamp, June 19, 2020.

^[39] Nathaniel Mackey,“The Phantom Light of All our Day” in Eroding witness : poems (1985), 93.

^[40] Devin Johnston. “Nathaniel Mackey and Lost Time: ‘The Phantom Light of All Our Day.’” Boundary 2 23, no. 2 (Spring 2000), 569.

^[41] Hsuan L. Hsu, “Nuclear Colonialism.” Environment & Society Portal: Virtual Exhibitions — Risk and Militarization. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich). Accessed October 25, 2025.

^[42] Jessica Hurley, Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 9.

^[43] U.S. nuclear testing disproportionately affects indigenous and minority groups, including Native American communities and Marshallese islanders, as explored by theorists such as Lisa Nakamura and Teresia K. Teaiwa. This acute form of environmental racism continues today, as evidenced by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) located near Carlsbad, New Mexico. While WIPP is a significant nuclear waste facility situated on historically indigenous lands, its operations raise ongoing environmental justice concerns for local and tribal communities.

^[44] Lou Cornum, “The Irradiated International,” paper presented at Future Perfect, Data & Society Research Institute, New York, June 7-8, 2018.