Bern Porter

Bernard Harden Porter (February 14, 1911, Porter Settlement in Houlton, Aroostook County, Maine – June 7, 2004, in Belfast, Maine) was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and physicist.

He was a representative of the avant-garde art movements Mail Art and Found Poetry.

He was born in 1911, in Porter Settlement, Maine.

All his life Porter had a love for literature, the visual arts and poetry in particular.

As a child he created countless scrapbooks filled with collaged cut-outs of texts and images from newspapers.

This process, used in the early scrapbooks, would later be developed into his technique of visual collaged poetry that he refers to as "Founds".

In 1935, Porter received a job with the Acheson Colloids Corporation in New York.

He worked on the development of the coating of the television picture tube with a graphite mixture.

In Paris around 1937-38 he was taken into the circle around Gertrude Stein.

Porter read the manuscript of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (novel).

After the US entry into World War II he worked from 1940 as a soldier for the Manhattan Project in Princeton where he made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein.

He worked there and in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on creating methods for nuclear fission.

He then worked at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since then he authored dozens of books and poetry broadsides as well as created paintings, sculpture, prints, and experimented with photography (included photograms in the early 1940s).

As a pioneer author of artist's books, experiments in poetry, typography, and collage Porter published his first artist book in 1941.

As early as 1944 he was, even during his time at Manhattan Project in Tennessee, a pacifist, publishing an anonymous pamphlet by Henry Miller.

That same year, he came into close contact with Miller in Big Sur, while he worked on a Miller Bibliography.

Porter formed a small press, Bern Porter Books, which published texts by and about Henry Miller and poetry books by California poets.

George Leite, a bookseller from San Francisco, published via Porter, the literary magazine Circle (10 issues, 1944–48) featuring Porter's views on the interplay of Art and Science he presented in his SciArt Manifesto (1950).

Porter's parents arrived for a visit when Porter's father was arrested for fondling a 12-year-old girl, and Porter discovered that his father had a long history of molesting children in Maine.

Refusing to see his father, Porter spent the next five years in Guam, working for the Guam Daily News and as a waiter and writing for an ad agency.

During this time, Porter traveled in the South Pacific and meeting artists and writers and observing the rebirth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

His first marriage (1946) with the young student Helen Elaine Hendren failed after one year.

In 1955, upon his return to California, he married the anthropologist and writer Margaret Eudine Preston.

They worked in Burnie, Tasmania in a wood processing plant and in Venezuela.

In the 1960s, Porter was part of the Saturn V program at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, until 1967). Margaret died in 1975.

Porter spent the next thirty years creating poetry, mail art, correspondence, travelling and hosting visitors at his Institute of Advanced Thinking in Belfast, Maine.

He spent the last decades of his life living in Belfast, Maine.

Porter is best known for his "founds", which he has published in numerous collections including Found Poems, The Wastemaker, The Book of Do's, Dieresis, Here Comes Everybody's Don't Book, and Sweet End.

Publishers of these works included Something Else Press, The Village Print Shop, and Tilbury House.

Bern Porter's underground reputation as an artist-writer-philosopher-scientist is well established among visual artists and writers, and his philosophy of dissent is respected.

Dick Higgins, the avant-garde writer and publisher/editor of the Something Else Press, was inspired to call Porter the Charles Ives of American letters'.

Recognizing Porter as one of the earliest and most prolific practitioners of found poetry, Peter Frank (in his book on Something Else Press) has written: "Porter is to the poem what [Marcel] Duchamp was to the art object, a debunker of handiwork fetishism and exemplary artist-as-intercessor between phenomenon and receptor. He rejects the typical artist's role of semi-divine creator. Porter's eye never tires of seeking accidental, unconventional literature in odd pages of textbooks, far corners of advertisements, the verbiage of greeting cards and repair manuals, ad infinitum."

In the late 1960s Porter's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde journal that experimented with language and meaning-making.

Porter's career was complex and filled with contradictions.

In 2010, his work was recognized by an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Bern Porter was born in Maine and studied at Colby College and Brown University.

Porter's talent showed itself at Ricker Junior College and he soon received a scholarship at the prestigious private Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

His main subjects were physics, chemistry and economics.

Porter earned his master's degree at Brown University.