Alex Kitnick revisits Unmuzzled OX, the journal Canadian poet Michael Andre launched in New York in 1971. Its achievement wasn’t simply assembling famous contributors: it made poetry, conceptual art, sexual experimentation, and political argument feel like parts of the same social world.
- Early stapled poetry issues evolved into a more deliberately designed journal, with Erika Rothenberg shaping its mid-1970s look.
- Kathy Acker, Romare Bearden, Lucy Lippard, General Idea, and Lou Reed shared its pages across disciplines and the US–Canada border.
- The 1979 Poets’ Encyclopedia let 225 poets, artists, musicians, and novelists rearrange knowledge into an intentionally unruly reference work.
- Its politics included feminism, queer life, anti-war voices, and a conversation between Daniel Berrigan and Thích Nhất Hạnh.
- Ads mapped an alternative cultural infrastructure: fellow small publications, artist spaces, presses, and places to find them.
The title supplies the essay’s sharpest turn. The biblical injunction against muzzling an ox while it threshes grain becomes a claim that workers deserve the fruits of their labor—and, in Kitnick’s reading, that artists deserve to enjoy the worlds they create.
This wasn’t a strategy for conquering a mass market. It was a way to sustain a parallel culture through friendship, irreverence, and shared pleasure. The useful question is less how to scale that world than how to keep making room for it.