Mother No. 1 (1964)
Despite the title of the little magazine and this being the first issue of Mother, this is the only poem in the whole issue that is about a mother. And even with this being the only poem, the interaction of the mother in this poem is ordinary, yet “off”. The poem starts off in the first stanza with a child waking up in the morning of a humid night to see their mother drinking juice and smoking to the point it has left yellow traces in her eyes. The child grows unhappy seeing her repeatedly ingesting the smoke to the point they are now concerned to the point that it compels them to bring attention to his observation to the mother, but the mom doesn't listen. The child also notices the chair that the mother is sitting in, seems that it will break and then yells “Listen!” for the mother to hear the wood of the frail chair to begin to shake from under the weight of her body. The mother mockingly says “What?” in response to his tearful gaze which she then breaks into laughter that he describes as
“ribald” that breaks the distressed atmosphere for the child. This leaves the child to damn the mother’s “lascivious grin”. This seems like a tense yet ordinary of a child and their mother, right? The poem then turns odd when you realize Rowe used the words ribald, meaning referring to sexual matters in an amusingly rude or irrelevant way, and lascivious, that means feeling or revealing an overt and often offensive sexual desire. These words aren't inherently odd itself until you realize he used these words for the child to describe their mother. This realization makes the reader now make this sweet interaction between a child and their mother to be disturbing.
Mother No. 2 (1964)
Matlin presents a collage of photo cut outs that's supposed to represent a heterosexua wedding. The cut out pictures include naked white woman, a white couple in wedding attire, silverware, american flags, and a wedding ring. The cut out texts says “The next affair you have, make it formal.”, “SUFFER FINKS GLADLY”, “Nice People: habits they have”, “SHE LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER WITH-STRONG KISS”, and “in wedding gowns…”. The cutouts show Kay’s pessimistic perspective on marriage that the glamorization of marriage by pictures might be seen royal, romantic, and beautiful but in reality it's a scam and it's the opposite. Expressing that marriage isn't what it seems.
Mother No. 3 (1964)
Drawn by Kenneth Koch and Joe Brainard, "Size 40" is a comic-like painting that replicates what a shirt that belongs to women would supposedly think of. Inside the cloud bubble expresses how the shirt loves being able to lie across the woman’s breast and admits that it shouldn't be a thought it should thinking “when there is work [for it] to do”, “men to be fed”, and to be in the “green mercedes [that is] stalled in paradise of music”. This shirt is usually left in the Mercedes and is daydreaming of the day to be of use that the only thing he can do is listen to the music that the woman plays when she’s in the car. One quotation shows the misogyny of Koch and Brainard to think automatically assume a woman has “men to food” as if it's her duty to serve men.
Mother No. 4 (1965)
The comic, "The Adventures of Dr. Vulva", by Joe Brainard & Ron Padgett entails a very disturbing story of a twisted love between an experimental doctor and a woman. The story starts with Dr.Vulva printing out his plans for his complexion problem ray machine late one night and a woman named Edna knocked on the door and came in to ask Dr.Vulva to show him the machine and he pressed the button to start the machine. He then tells Edna to “step through [the] energy field into flaming tong room” after she calls him sexy and he starts licking her finger that is infected that he pierced with tongs whilst saying he loves her and then drags her to “the pustulizer”. Edna is sobbing, yet still in love, while she is put it the machine that is hurting her in multiple different ways:
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Her torso being zapped in a microwave while consuming deadly fumes
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Her left arm being twisted and munched on by a monster
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Her right arm being stretched, stabbed by a hide needle, one finger being lit on fire by a match, and another being pinched by the tong
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Her lower back being shot with nails
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Her lower body being fed to a bowl of piranha fish
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Her legs being squished into one skinny tube
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Her leg foot shooting blood
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Her right arm being struck through by an arrow and her feet being chopped on dentures
3 days later Edna’s remains turn into a pimple and Dr.Vulva states that “forever will I cherish your love”. How romantic!
Mother No. 5 (1965)
The Jump by John Perreault, the last poem in issue no. 5, delves into the idea of jumping away from “false kinds of caring” to a harmless and perhaps peaceful place. Perreault begins the poem by describing bits of his memories that take us to a cold winter setting. It is here where we acknowledge that Perreault joins the abstractive pattern that is present in almost all poets of Mother. The descriptive sense of The Jump leaves space for self-interpretation, which is a key element of abstract literature. The following paragraph suggests that the memory he recalls the most out of all is the smile of a person dear to him. Perreault then begins saying his goodbyes while lettings the reader connect the words to the title and letting them find their way from the descriptions to the moment of the jump. In his poem, Perreault describes what most of us experience at some point in our lifetimes, that is, being disconnected from the world by false hopes and realities. It is at the end where we make sense of the title The Jump as we realize that, just as Perreault does, the way to escape these false ideas is to first acknowledge them and then entirely escape them by free falling into a real, more peaceful, and better place.
Mother No. 6 (1965)
Being one of the few female contributors to Mother, Barbara Guest is the first poet that appears in issue No. 6. In fact, it is also the only appearance she makes in this issue. Guest sets a good foundation for the rest of the magazine to build upon as Prefaces opens the door to many dimensions of continuation. The noticeable and random double letters and spacing make us wonder if we can find specific meaning behind them as we later notice that it is a recurrent characteristic of this issue. Prefaces by Barbara Guest seems like a poem that Guest uses to make the reader aware of the playful yet intellectual nature of the magazine.
Mother No. 7 (1966)
There’s no telling how much Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard collaborated on this image, but regardless, it is very representative of femininity. Due to the techniques that could be used to customize art at this time, it is likely that Joe Brainard drew the flowery image in the center of the page and Dick Gallup added the words surrounding it. The words that are marked out may not be necessary, even to the interpretation of the piece- they could have been genuine mistakes. But they represent the iconic function of the mimeograph: it can be used to print anything. It was so hands-on that here we see the process of the making of the piece.
Now the work itself is a bit ironic. The name of this Little Magazine, Mother, indicates femininity but there were so few female contributors, and even more ironic, so many works surrounding women, but made by men. To support this irony, the image in the middle resembles female genitalia or an orchid. There’s a circle at the top where the representative material flows out. This relates back to the title “A Birth”. The commentary on the sides is by the father, and we can tell they have had a daughter, and the words are from the perspective of the father.
Could the image be Carol Gallup, due to the line “this is my wife Carol,”? What would she have thought of it? The piece seems to highlight the originating of a woman’s motherhood, but why are men the ones making it? Is Dick Gallup subjecting his wife, and now the mother of his child, to the labia-like drawing? Is it beautiful or audacious?
Mother No. 8 (1967)
Issue number 8 of Mother is provocative, sexual, and, masculine. This is a short example of the types of content the rest of the pages of Mother hold. This is excerpted from a long, abstract poem by Ted Berrigan “Tambourine Life” and it isn’t completely out of context. Take note, that the speaker in this line is Dick Gallup, the one with the daughter birthed in issue 7. Now this line could be a metaphor for something else. After all, mass amounts of new, different types of literature were being spread at this time. Maybe “new girls to fuck,” means new literature to write, but regardless of the way he worded it, it would still hint at what really goes on in his mind and even Ted Berrigan’s for his taking note of it.