Flying from San Francisco to London over the weekend, I found myself sitting next to a woman whose accent sounded more British than American, so I assumed she was a Brit going home, but no, Randi Cathinka Neverdal was a Norwegian doing her doctorate thesis on small press literary publishing in the U.S. What serendipity! “I’m a poet,” I admitted to Cathinka without shame. We talked.
Although there are still many small presses in America, their poetry lists are ignored by almost all bookstores. In this era of media consolidation, corporate monsters like Barnes & Noble and Borders dominate the field, with independent operators going out of business left and right. It’s not all bad, however, since readers can now order books through Small Press Distribution and Amazon (another corporate beast), or directly from the publisher. Before the internet, most Americans outside major cities and college towns had almost no access to anything beyond Stephen King and Danielle Steele.
With a population of only four millions, Norway has almost no small presses, Cathinka told me, although every library is required to purchase every poetry book published in the country. What a startling concept! I’ve taught at Bard College for three years and the library there doesn’t carry any of my four volumes of poetry. “Maybe you should move to Norway,” Cathinka joked. Yes, maybe I should start learning Norwegian.
Being roughly the same age, Cathinka and I remembered with fondness the many zines that accompanied the punk scene, their wise-assed, often nihilistic humor and indifference to any slicked-up production standard. These types of rebels have mostly migrated to the internet, we agreed. I told Cathinka that when I lived in Saigon from 1999 to 2001, I would pass out home-made chapbooks, stapled-together cheapies that were obviously inspired by the zines I had seen in the States during my college days. Check out these recent Vietnamese chapbooks by poets Ly Doi, Bui Chat and Khuc Duy, with the chopped dog drawing done by yours truly:
[I'm in Paris at the moment, typing on a French keyboard that's driving me nuts. Where the A should be, there's a Q, etc, so I must cut this post a little short...]
Dear Linh:
What a wonderful beginning: please share with us more about your forays into small press publishing, where poetry is concerned. It’s an area I’m immensely interested in, and completely converted to.
Thanks,
Francisco
I don’t know if it’s still so, but I remember reading back in the ’70s that Swedish libraries paid a small royalty to the author every time a book was checked out. Payments actually were funneled through the Swedish writers guild, as I recall. Did I dream this, or was it some commentary Robert Bly wrote in connection with Tomas Tranströmer?
Linh–Re typing on French keyboards, you have to ask them if they have a “clavier anglais”–a lot of those net places have them…esp. in the more touristy areas. Daisy
Joseph, in the UK there’s what’s called the Public Lending Right, which provides for annual payments to writers and other creators whose works are freely available in libraries. Could be what you had in mind…
I enjoyed reading your writing as well as about the Open Your Mouth literary quartet
thanks for sharing