A primer for starving artists

On her blog, poet Barbara Jane Reyes reflects on a recent talk at the San Francisco Public Library by Diane Di Prima entitled “Making it Happen.”

In her "Report Back," Reyes recounts Di Prima's take on what it was like to self-publish long before the ease of the Internet, and her advice to aspiring writers: start where you are. Publish where you are. Do what you have to do.

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She told us about  creating and operating Poets Press, which came about as she heard  David Henderson read and was impressed with what she heard. She  approached him after his reading, asked him, “Do you have a book?” And  then proceeded to publish him. This was in 1964, and remember this was  pre-desktop publishing, when actual printing always happened on a  printing press, only after manually typsetting a manuscript and making  it camera ready. Equipment was cumbersome and a major investment. And  because Henderson was a new poet at the time, it was appropriate to have  a known, established poet write an introduction to the collection;  Amiri Baraka did this. Poets Press went on to publish 28 books in its  first two and a half years; they published many poets’ first books.  Audre Lorde was one of these poets. They had no money for author  royalties, and so they would give ten percent of the print run to the  author. Everyone chipped in, collating, folding, stuffing envelopes, bringing food, doing what they could.