Bibbe Hansen: Factory Poems

Bibbe Hansen grew up within an extraordinary family of artists. Her father, Al Hansen, was a central figure in Fluxus, while her mother, Audrey Ostlin Hansen, was a poet, artist, and writer. Her sons are musician Beck Hansen and visual artist Channing Hansen. A writer, performer, and visual artist in her own right, Bibbe became part of New York’s underground cultural world while still in her teens.

In 1964, she recorded the single “Go Go Go with Ringo” as a member of the Whippets alongside Jan Kerouac. That same year, while visiting galleries with her father, she met Andy Warhol. Intrigued by her experiences, Warhol cast her in Prison with Edie Sedgwick, Pat Hartley, and Marie Menken. Hansen subsequently appeared in several other Warhol films, including Restaurant, 10 Beautiful Girls, and 10 More Beautiful Girls, and sat for two of his Screen Tests.

Factory Poems gathers Hansen’s poetic portraits of the artists, performers, writers, and personalities who moved through Warhol’s Factory during the 1960s and 1970s. Written from the perspective of someone who knew this community firsthand, the poems offer an intimate and highly personal view of a world too often reduced to mythology.

Subjects include Andy Warhol, Billy Name, Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling, Chuck Wein, Dorothy Dean, Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick, Freddie Herko, Holly Woodlawn, Ivy Nicholson, Jane Holzer, Joe Dallesandro, John Giorno, Leee Black Childers, Marie Menken, Mario Montez, Mary Woronov, Ondine, Pat Hartley, Stephen Shore, Taylor Mead, Tiger Morse, Ultra Violet, and Viva.

Each poem is accompanied by a photograph of its subject. The book includes images by Bobby Grossman, Kate Simon, Dagon James, and previously unpublished Factory photographs by Billy Name, Hansen’s lifelong friend and one of the principal visual chroniclers of the Silver Factory.

With a foreword by Andy Warhol scholar Anastasia James, Factory Poems is both a work of poetry and an intimate record of a community remembered by one of its participants.