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...]

03.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

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