Patty Mucha - Love Chops (Wry N.22) 2026

Patty Mucha - Love Chops (Wry N.22) 2026

Wry Press is pleased to present the first book in many moons from poet & artist, Patty Mucha. Born Patty Muschinski in Milwaukee, WI in 1935, she moved to New York City to be an artist in 1957. While working as an artists’ model to pay the rent, she soon met Claes Oldenburg at the beginning of his career. The two were married from 1960 - 1970, for which duration Mucha largely set aside her own career to help with Claes’. However, she not only did all of the sewing and much of the manufacturing for his world renowned soft-sculptures, but was also a featured performer and collaborator in many of the era’s Happenings; appearing in events staged by not only Oldenburg, but also Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Dick Higgins, Sally Gross, Simone Forti, and others. She also appeared in many Pop Art-era films, including works by Rudy Wurlitzer, Andy Warhol, Red Grooms, Robert Breer, Jean Dupuy, and Rudy Burckhardt. Intriguingly, she was also the singer for a pre-Velvet Underground rock band called The Druds (sadly unrecorded), featuring Andy Warhol & Lucas Samaras as back-up singers, alongside Walter De Maria, Larry Poons, and La Monte Young. Jasper Johns provided the lyrics (!).

Towards the end of the sixties and the dissolution of her marriage, Mucha began attending the St. Mark’s Poetry Project readings, where she eventually took a workshop with poet Bill Berkson, who she has said was “my only real teacher”. Her writings soon appeared in The World, Maureen Owen’s Telephone, and Kenward Elmslie’s Z. The book “Poems Traveling: 1971-1973” appeared in 1973, followed by “See Vermont: 1974-1978” in 1979. Her first appearance in print as Patty Mucha was for Charlie Morrow’s New Wilderness Audiographics, who released a cassette tape comprised of performances of songs & poems in 1980. She moved to Vermont in the mid 1970s to be a “poet farmer”, where she also eventually picked up her art career and began to make paintings again. She remains there to this day, and in 2022 finished a memoir of her 1960s years, entitled “Threads”, which has yet to be published (though it very much needs to be).

In “Love Chops”, Mucha, long famous as a muse, turns the tables on many of her past lovers & paramours (both famous and not-so, some real and some imagined) in a series of poetic recollections presented both matter-of-fact and oblique. These are poems deeply concerned with lust, love and memory, but which still somehow never come off as confessional. A brief look back at moments from a most interesting life, entirely free of judgement or manipulation. What we’ve been given by Mucha here in these “love chops” are moving, truthful, and frank (& occasionally frankly wild) depictions of the raw business of love.

“All my dead lovers are standing in a circle / peering down at me / “She’s coming around”, one of them says / I can’t recognize any of them / after all it is a large group”

5x7” / 38 pages / Perfect Bound / First Edition of 200 copies / Designed x Wry Press w/a helpful assist from SEEN / Printed in Colorado