At any rate on the way home it occurred to me that the slow demise of the newspaper industry (my old journalism teacher in college, Lee Smith, a by-then-retired former newspaperman used to tell us that tv news really began the work of reducing the citizenry’s reliance on things like multiple editions of papers per day) could kill off the New York Post and I’d have to find another source for terms such as “cheese eating surrender monkeys” to put into poems. I mean, the internet version of the paper is nice and free and all, or mostly free, but I’m less likely to read it as opposed to scanning it as if it were a photograph containing certain points of significance to get loopy with. I learned at an early age to read the newspaper backwards – this, incidentally, led me to instinctively “get” the value of studying any language-based composition from back to front unit by unit (sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, etc) as imparted in instruction manuals for teaching remedial English and comp. – but that pleasure is somewhat negated on-line, though I suppose it’s possible to replicate through some mildly masochistic plodding of course.

Speaking of portals, I have this terrific issue of Callaloo from 1999 (vol. 22 no. 2) that has repeatedly been useful to me through its features on Lorenzo Thomas and Will Alexander along with some very fine essay and interview work by Harryette Mullen. The interview Mullen conducts with Alexander is really great: fluid, funny, searching, and idiosyncratic the way a long conversation between friendly minds might be (Mullen: We all tend to be separated into our various boxes / Alexander: I just want to throw the box away). It’s also especially important to me to have access to an in-person conversation between two poets whose work is radically different from one another and who both openly admire each other’s work. While her essay focuses mainly on Alexander’s book Asia & Haiti, I have recently found Mullen’s descriptive terms vis-à-vis Alexander’s use of hypotaxis (syntactic subordination of one clause or construction to another) to be useful in discussing the title poem from Exobiology as Goddess, a book published five years after the feature in Callaloo.

Mullen muses on WA’s hypotaxis to the point of recasting it as “hyperhypotaxis” and figuring it’s attractive at least in part because it can “accommodate lavishly expansive sentence construction” as well as the many fields of knowledge to which Alexander has access. I started teaching Alexander’s work this year, and while it’s a challenge for me to do so – I tend to feel like his poems know far more than I can convey, for starters, though that should probably be the case for any material one might teach ­– I have found the undergrad writing students I’m working with to be quite open to Alexander’s incantatory ranging from pre-history to post-existence. In fact, we read the poem Exobiology As Goddess, which is fifty pages long, in one sitting a few weeks ago, person-by-person, page-by-page. The poem fuses language from exobiology, geography, Egyptian mythology and paleontology, among other subjects, into a clause-driven swirl that actually has a lot of space in it (double-spaced lines as well as a feeling of an aerial view stretching across the work) and reads fairly quickly once you let yourself go. It does at times feel like one long continuous and insistently rhythmic sentence-as-vehicle.

I’m hesitant to quote from the poem because I’m inclined to believe that you need to take the whole trip and I’m not interested in choosing lines at the moment and when I did begin to I wound up typing up the first five pages of the poem and that’s just not going to work. But there are his poems on this site, as you can find through an author search, and there are recordings of his readings over at Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alexander-Will.php) and that’s plenty. Actually, screw it, have a few lines from the middle:

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

There’s this other bit of his writing in Callaloo that I’m currently fixated on, though: a short personal essay entitled “My Interior Vita” that I’m finding to be valuable and kind (even though I need some of that garish quotidian the way an elm needs to get high). This is the third of seven paragraphs in the piece, and I’ll leave things here:

“For me, language by its very operation is alchemical, mesmeric, totalic in the way that it condenses and at the same time proves capable of leaping the boundaries of genre. Be it the drama, the poem, the essay, the novel, language operates at a level of concentration modulated by the necessity of the character or the circumstance which is speaking. My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that here-to-fore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.”

We love poetry at Poetry. We especially love poetry that comes over the transom, wrapped in fine ink on paper, accompanied by missives that state: “This is the most important letter you have ever received.” This week we’re abuzz over Ryan Murphy’s latest art press incarnation (The North Beach Yacht Club) and its newly minted Hokku Notebook, by Jack Spicer. Here’s a teaser:

… And that’s all you get. Some things live in print and print alone, so you’ll have to do some hunting to find your own (i.e. there is no website). Murphy says, “there is no way to get them but dumb luck word of mouth or to find me, and I generally prefer not to be found. They are simply sent out via USPS into the world haphazardly.” His list of careful creations include Ange Mlinko’s The Children’s Museum (Prefontaine Press), Elizabeth Marie Young’s Sonnets (Omahrahu), and Joseph Massey’s Within Hours (The Fault Line Press). If the books’ elusiveness embitters you, take a cue from Spicer himself. Here’s the first poem of this elegant chapbook:

Bitterness
Bitter – ness
People worry more about bitter than they worry about -ness
Worry more about -ness,
Damn you.

Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, caretakers of the Spicer estate, selected this one notebook from among dozens. Spicer’s use of the hokku contextualizes his developing work in serial forms; his writing “as an Asian” provokes new questions about the designs behind his alter-ego, “Mary Murphy.” See the July/August 2008 issue of Poetry for more of the newly-published Spicer work edited by Gizzi and Killian. Check also Geoffrey O’Brien’s article on Spicer (and don’t miss the embedded slideshow of Spicer’s original books, posters, and photos).

But before you go, see below for a few more looks at the gorgeous books you (probably) won’t get. When pressed about his thinking behind these printing projects, Murphy replied, “Ahhh I don’t know what the hell I’m doing kid, that’s the point.”

Hell yes. Chalk one for “-ness” and stuff we don’t see enough of.

Like many people, my interest in poetry grew out of my interest in music. As a listener, I love the thoughtful lyrics of songwriters like Joe Henry, Rennie Sparks from The Handsome Family, Chuck D, Gershwin. Regardless of the song-genre, great lyrics hit me first.  My interest in reading poetry came about in a much sneakier way. I took voice classes in college and unwittingly sang art songs derived from poems. (One teacher marveled — in what I’m still not sure was a compliment — at my “gift” at turning any art song into a country tune). I had no idea that the German songs I loved were actually poems by Schiller and Goethe, nor that one of my favorite folk songs was a Yeats poem set to music by Benjamin Britten.  Here’s my audio version of this last song, Down By the Salley Gardens.

Interestingly, though, the work I did as a singer then is exactly the sort of work I dream of my students doing with poems today.  Where I breathed, how I read punctuation and phrases all clearly mattered because it affected the way I sang the poem.

Here is a copy of the poem:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Since the poem features two stanzas of equal length, and since so many of the sentence structures appear in both stanzas, the differences practically jump off the page.  My challenge as a singer was the same one facing any good reader — and so, in rehearsal, I really did the work of a literary critic.  What is the significance of the two locations?  What is the difference between meeting and standing?  What move has occurred between feet and hand?  What is the difference between love and life?  (This move was also key for me in memorizing the lyrics).  How does the move from tree to grass indicate the speaker’s emotional state?  What is the significance of the tense shift from being to was?  After that all I needed to think about how I might convey these ideas with my voice — a new challenge every time I sing the song!  This process, though, informs every poem reading I do, even when I don’t end up singing the poem.

I know my current series of posts (#1 | #2) on indie publishing isn’t garnering heaps of Harriet comments, which is fine, because I do know these posts are generating good conversation, and that others about small presses and independent publishing are happening elsewhere in poet e-world.

Over at HTMLGIANT, Rauan Klassnik asks, “What’s Right and What’s Wrong with the Small Press World?” Read responses from Reb Livingston and Justin Marks.

Reb Livingston discusses, among many things, the gift economy:

I like that much of the indie publishing community supports one another.  I love how individuals freely share information on the how-tos of publishing, like Shanna Compton’s DIY Publishing Cooperative (currently on hiatus) or how Mathias Svalina started a blog-store, Press Press Press for indie publishers to announce their new titles. Blog magazines like PANK, What to Wear During an Orange Alert and of course HTMLGIANT bring attention to all kinds of things going on in indie publishing. There are indie publishers starting book review sites like Eileen Tabios’ Galatea Resurrects. Countless individuals generously contributing to this gift economy.

Marks distinguishes between “independent publisher” and “small press,” a distinction I hadn’t previously made (I tend to use the terms interchangeably). More importantly, he talks about community:

This is all just my personal experience, but in the small press world I see a really amazing sense of community. Small presses are often being run by one or two people. When they have the opportunity to get together, they form friendships. They help each other out. Team up for readings. Divvy up the work of organizing somewhat larger events that draw much deserved attention to their poets and their presses.

Perhaps most importantly he says, “If there were more presses, we’d have more books, and that can only be a good thing.” Absolutely. Again with “filtering,” who gets to filter, and what criteria is used to filter poetry for publication.

Over at the Tinfish Editor blog, Susan Schultz discusses publishing as forming communities of destination, in addition to communities of origin:

Filling gaps in rather than accusing others of failing to do so is one way to acknowledge that the future is as important as the past, that origins are no more sacred than are the places we want to get to from here. Hence, the forging of connections between (overly) carefully delineated groups of writers strikes me as necessary. “It is a matter of replacing the question of origin with that of destination,” Bourriaud writes. Later he writes of the importance of the “itinerary, the path” (55), and the need for movement. Now history, too, is a kind of movement. We need not let the past go in order to imagine a future.

Finally, three more indie/small press founders and editors weigh in.

Question: Why did you start your small press/why did you become an independent publisher? What need was not being met by the existing presses?

Answer (Brent E. Beltrán and Consuelo Manríquez de Beltrán, Calaca Press): Calaca Press was founded in 1997 by husband and wife team Brent E. Beltrán and Consuelo Manríquez de Beltrán to help provide publishing opportunities for progressive, bilingual, Chicano/a and Latino/a writers. Recognizing a lack of venues for bilingual authors to get published we decided to create our own. I wanted to publish material that helps raise the social and political consciousness of my community whereas Consuelo wanted to produce relevant literature that her middle school students could relate to. With a background in community activism we modeled ourselves after the literary presses of the Chicano Movement era of the 1960’s and 1970’s: Bilingual Review Press, Arte Publico Press, M&A Editions, TQS, Maize Press, etc.

Calaca Press is a grassroots labor of love. There are no paid staff. No professional editors or book designers. The owners make no profit from the publication of Calaca titles. We do it because of our love for our community and the need to have our stories told.

Answer (Patrick Durgin, Kenning Editions): I founded my press (Kenning Editions) for several reasons. It began in 1998 as a journal, or “newsletter” as I called it. The first goal was publish at least three generations of authors working from, in my curatorial zeal I envisioned as, a resonant set of impulses, without reinforcing generational hierarchies that form within practices that are similarly motivated. The second goal was to challenge these authors to publish their writing under the sign of “progressive social discourse,” taking, initially, Williams’ statement regarding finding (or not) “the news” in poems, “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” The third goal was to transgress geographic boundaries (as I had hoped to defang hierarchical/generational boundaries and also those of staid discourses). To some extent I wanted to transgress linguistic boundaries by publishing work in translation. Since 2006, the press has devoted itself to publishing single volumes (paperback books, occasional chapbooks), essentially under the same premises. I know personally I felt alienated by the creative writing industry’s lockdown on certain circuits of literary legacy-making, and wished to remain resolutely independent of this industry, to circumvent it knowing that doing so would expedite the fulfillment of these particular goals.

I saw some of this happening elsewhere, and continue to, but not often in this specific combination. At the time, Tinfish, Situation, Tripwire, Chain, and others were treading this ground, often with much better results. With the move to producing books instead of a newsletter, I felt existing presses were doing rather poorly by the criteria I had set myself (and against which it is unfair and absurd to evaluate them). The most vivid exception might be Tinfish. I’m interested in how Chain has done something similar with their Chain Links series, though, again, their goals are only comparable, not identical. In any event, the needs to be met are set by the actor-participant, which is a defining structural principle of independent literary publishing, if “independent” has any meaning left. And on that count, most every small press I know is a beacon.

Answer (Willie Perdomo, Cypher Books): Cypher Books was created out of necessity. In her essay,”The Function of the Small Press,” Cynthia Ozick says that the value of small presses is that they “concentrate on making room.” We make room for voices that are ignored, marginalized out of ignorance, fear and comfortable marketing, or excluded from the general publishing conversation.  When I presented the idea for an imprint to Rattapallax, I knew that I wanted to attract poets who had not been published (in Suheir Hammad’s case it had been almost a decade since she published) but had dedicated readerships and audiences, who were original and fearless. My first thought was to call Lisa Simmons, who I have received most of my professional publishing knowledge from (as well as from the literary agent, Marie D. Brown) and who I asked to be our Publisher.  Lisa is passionate about our mission and as you can see from the absolutely brilliant production of our titles, she’s doing a great job.

Cypher authors either do away with the restrictions of performance and spoken poetry definitions or completely own them.  They have been recognized and acclaimed on each end of the reductive spectrum that is the page/stage debate.  They are risk takers, unique in voice, personal and political, formalistic and free, but refuse to be pinned into a corner. breaking poems by Suheir Hammad was a big book for us.  It was a poet’s departure in style and the ultimate artistic risk, the ultimate “cypher,” if you will.  It won the Arab-American Book Award and the American Book Award (yes, we rock on both ends of the hyphen).

First books are hard to get published–we have three first books on our list of five titles. Cypher takes chances on new voices. We published Tarnish & Masquerade by Roger Bonair-Agard and we sold out before we could reach the bookstore. (We plan on publishing his sophomore effort, Gully, in Fall 2010 as part of our fifth anniversary). Rachel McKibbens is as hardcore as it gets. Her work personifies Truth and Beauty and her first book, Pink Elephant, just made the SPD Bestseller List. Then we have Up Jump the Boogie (Spring 2010) by John Murillo who has made the smooth transition from slam stage to academy hall, and is just as comfortable and confident in each camp. John’s book is epic. It comes with a foreword by Martín Espada and glowing endorsements from Junot Díaz, Yusef Koumanyakaa and Kimiko Hahn. Again, the necessary voices are what count at Cypher Books.

Most presses seem to have discriminating tastes and are very exclusive. We have a mission, of course, but we wouldn’t turn our back on a poet just because she comes from the Language Poets, is fond of writing flarf, or is a sonneteer. Yusef recently asked us to take a look at the work of a famous street poet from Chicago.  I told him to send the manuscript.  If said poet has the grits, Cypher Books will try to serve them. When I came up with the name for the press I did a brief survey of friends and fellow writers and asked them, “What comes to your mind when you hear Cypher Books?” Paul Beatty, poet and novelist, had the following reply, “A clandestine room where people with 190 IQs are decoding government secrets and rapping during the lunch break.”  Word. That’s what I had in mind, sin government secrets, but you get the drift.

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

This implies to me, against much that is fashionable in literature today, that it does make sense to talk of people being able to read poetry better than others. There is no need for this to be in the least anti-democratic, because my statement also acknowledges that other interpretations will yield other tunes; but there again the notion of a better or worse reader will arise.

I needed to take such trouble over what may seem a minor point because I couldn’t reform the description of prosody unless I could put into it some secure-ish notion of the melody of a given poem. My prosodic reform begins with a redefinition of what a poetic stress is. All poetic music in any language, just about, depend upon duration, stress (or rhythm), and melody (intonation). Stress seems to happen in an instant of time that we may click with our fingers. Duration is its paradoxical bedfellow because everything that makes a syllable seem to carry a heavy stress takes time to happen. I have given many lectures testing out the following definition of stress before audiences, mostly by playing them the same blues song and asking them what causes a certain syllable to carry stress. As much as possible, I don’t influence their replies.

By common consensus we find at least one or two, often more, of the following elements as reasons why we think a syllable bears a stress. The basic model to bear in mind is like this:

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

… past of stress stress pause future of the stress

From everything audiences say the following can be factors in making us think a stress is heavy or light:

1. The sound: pitch (melody), duration, loudness, and voice quality. Since the stress happens in a notional instant of time – without content – duration is also the element that gives stress its content.

2. The main assignment of the position of a heavy stress is from abstract metrical pattern (if used) – or other poetic forms of patterning – plus linguistic factors, including the natural individual word-stress, the main information focus in the sentence (very important), syntax, etc.

3. In actual performance, 1 and 2 are combined with how important the meaning of the word is and how important is its emotional significance. A stress is a moment when we think we have unified the sound, the meaning, the emotional significance, and the functioning of the word within the sentence, into a single moment when all these come together into a single “beat”.

4. In practice, this gets more complex than I have time to go into. For example, audiences always agree that the pause after the word “Blues” affects our sense of how stressed the word is. How quick the syllables are before counts; how quick they are afterwards counts. The fact that “Blues” is part of the title (meaning) or that it is “blued” in the singing (emotional significance, plus voice quality) are part of the reasons why we think it is stressed. And so on.

5. All that is unified in the beat needs time to develop in the past or the future of the stress, or otherwise we have no time to make the comparisons which tell us whether a word is high or low in pitch or in loudness, important in meaning, emotionally significant, and so on. The past of the stress and the future are therefore read back both ways by the mind on to a single moment when we think the stress had occurred in the immediate past.

–––––––––––––> <––––––––––––––

past of the stress stress pause future of the stress

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

6. All this boils down to saying that the stress is the smallest moment in a poem when we perceive the developing artistic form. For poems I’d define form principally as a unity between sound, meaning, and emotional significance. I accept that forms are never perfect: again, I’m not reactionary. But someone has to explain why an audience when it sings along knows exactly at what moment to clap and knows when it gets the beat slightly “off”. It is not a moment of exact mathematical interval between the beats, but a much more mysterious interval which depends upon a formal perception.

7. Edgar Allen Poe thought metrics was like mathematics. In a way so do I, except that it is a mathematics of durations and pitches which has to take account of our emotional response to meaning.

Once stress has been redefined, it can also be seen as the sliding point where the instant of time through which the sounds have passed is united with duration. That is, it is also the moment when we unite the individual (and ineffable) instant of form into the ongoing processes of form. And we do that by reading durations of time both ways (past and future) on to that instant.

You can think of the instant as quantum-like if you wish. This is why I keep saying “notional instant” and “instant” – it’s an ancient philosophical problem whether we can bring an instant of time into consciousness. We can’t.

Then we may build up a hierarchy of formal development in the poem, considered in its ideal (ineffable) formal perfection:

The stress unites change (notional instant) and flow, but has to be anchored down in time before we can appreciate this. We anchor it in the syllable. The syllables unite into words and poetic lines, phrases, sentences, cadences, stanzas, and so on. Again, described in ideal perfection, the poem would then meet the Romantic poet’s ideal: the union of the part (stress) with the whole (the poem) within the one form, a form which gives “delight”.

Of course poems never do this perfectly and much experimental poetry is designed to allow them to do it as little as possible, by forbidding closure. But the forbidding of closure presupposes closure, so that avant-garde forms or art are always in tension with traditional forms; and much of their interest stems from that. We are, however, in a new era of space-time mathematics and our descriptions of the human mind are, in tandem, changing. This doesn’t mean that the human mind itself has changed much, perhaps….

Love,

Doug

That said, thank you to Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books, Craig Santos Perez and Jennifer Reimer of Achiote Press, and Susan Schultz of Tinfish Press for answering my questions about indie publishing.

Question: Why did you start your small press/why did you become an independent publisher? What need was not being met by the existing presses?

Answer (Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, Action Books): We started the press because we were interested in and engaged with a certain kind of poetry – gothic, influenced by the historical avant-garde and the paraliterary, visceral, grotesque, maximalist – and very few of those books were being published. We knew a lot of other people were reading and writing in this vein, and some of it was being published in journals, but not in books. To a large extent, we felt this had to do with the normative publishing conventions of US publishing (including small press publishing)–this was writing that was “too much,” “excessive,” “in bad taste” (kitsch)– which to our mind copied over the normative reading conventions of workshops and English classes. In particular, we loved our friend Lara Glenum’s manuscript The Hounds of No, but no press dared to publish it. So we thought we would.

We were also frustrated at the lack of engagement with foreign literature and poetry in translation. At the time I had translated a lot of the work of Swedish poet Aase Berg. She’s a very influential young Swedish poet whose poetry – influenced by Surrealism, grotesque tales, Plath and b-movies – is not only very unique but also intricately translingual; that is to say it was not a poetry that feared getting “lost in translation” but a minor poetry, a poetry that deforms and transforms. But it was hard for me to find publishers for my translation. This struck me as insane – here was a young, happening poet from another country whose writing was different from anything published in the US. One would think US publishers would be rabid to publish it! But I was having a hard time finding a publisher for the book of translations, and looking around, I saw very little translated texts published. So we decided to publish Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg and to make our interest in foreign literature become an important element of our press. We don’t think everyone must publish works in translation – but the fact that almost no small press publishes works in translation should at least cause some pause.

Answer (Craig Santos Perez and Jennifer Reimer, Achiote Press): We started Achiote Press in 2006 because we wanted to contribute to the ongoing dialogue of independent publishing. Our first projects were limited edition hand-made chapbooks and evolved over the years to also include single-author chapbooks, multi-author chap-journals, novel-excerpt chapbooks, chap-anthologies, and perfect bound books. We’ve also teamed up with non-profit organizations, such as Kundiman, to publish fundraising projects.

In terms of aesthetic, genre, and author choices, we aim to highlight the vibrant diversity that exists in the literary community, both in the United States and abroad. We’ve published fiction, poetry, translation, and nonfiction; our writers hail from the Unites States, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific; and their work can be described as avant-garde, post-avant, ethnic-avant, language, narrative, new-narrative, documentary, and testimonial. Our cover designs, curated by our art director Jason Buchholz, vary compellingly issue to issue.

While many publishers work along aesthetic, ethnic, gender, regional, or social boundaries, we felt a need to express the transborder possibilities of a more open and diverse publishing dialogue. If you share our values, please visit us at www.achiotepress.com, subscribe to our mailing list, and support Achiote Press.

Answer (Susan Schultz, Tinfish Press): I founded Tinfish Press in 1995 in an attempt to find, or create, a conversation between experimental writing (written mostly outside of Hawai`i) and the important writing being done in Hawai`i.  My developing sense has been that writers like Lisa Kanae, whose Sista Tongue (2001, 2008) is one of our most important titles, have a lot to say to writers in other places who think about language and power issues, and whose work uses non-standard languages and forms.  We began with a thin journal that was xeroxed and stapled, and moved into chapbooks with the publication of Joe Balaz’s Ola in 1996.  Since then we have published 19 issues of the journal, many chapbooks and a couple fistfuls of perfect bound volumes.  Our designs, mainly by Hawai`i artists,  are strikingly non-standard.  We publish work from the Pacific region, concentrating on issues and materials like language, colonialism, Buddhism and place, and seek to create alliances between writers, make communities as much of difference as of ostensible sameness.  Some of these (at times tense) alliances are seen in the books themselves: Barbara Jane Reyes writes out of Modernist and Filipino traditions; Craig Santos Perez owes a lot to both Charles Olson and to his Chamorro grandmother; the Hawai`i writers of Tinfish 18.5 reach to traditions as various as Hawaiian chant and flarf.   My frustration at the moment comes of the fact that no publisher can demand her customers read the press as well as its authors.  So the conversations we mean to get going are sometimes overlooked when people buy only work by Pacific writers, or Buddhist writers, or Asian American writers or Bay Area writers (for example).  But  the publisher may have died (Roland Barthes style) with her authors.  And so our publications do happily find readers and occasionally one of our authors will ask a surprising question about another of them.  Pam Brown of Australia and Maged Zaher of Egypt and Seattle, both published by Tinfish, collaborated (sight unseen) on a chapbook, farout_library_software.  I would like in future to inspire more such direct links between Tinfish writers.

Tue, July 2, 1996

Dear Anselm

You asked me to describe the basic themes of Poetry and Narrative in Performance: it’s a very dense, technical book, so I’m just going to describe those themes which relate to poetry, not to fiction.

My central concentration is upon the idea that a poem has a possible infinity of meanings depending upon the individual response of readers. Allied to that, does it make any sense to say that a poem has a particular music natural to it – since, again, a multitude of readers when reading it give it a different music? Is it elitist to say that any reader’s version of the poem is superior to anyone else’s and is even the poet’s own version subject to this? Such an ideology fits in with all manner of other kinds of philosophy which are currently fashionable: multi-culturalism with its insistence that no-one’s culture can be challenged without taking up an elitist or power-driven position; anti-foundationalist philosophy, which states that there are no truths external to language and to our individual expressions of them: that both truths and the “self” therefore are social constructions and have no warrant outside language.

This line of philosophy starts with Wittgenstein, and runs through Heidegger, Derrida, to people like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. Rorty, in particular, has promoted a new form of pragmatic philosophy which ran very hot at the time I wrote the book – and even today the new philosophy books bought by the American Library in Paris carry that stamp: they’re about Nietzche, Dewey, Rorty, and “anti-foundationalism”.

I’m not reactionary about this: I believe 100% in the multi-cultural attitude and almost entirely (with one vital reservation) in the notion that truth is a socially constructed entity which is difficult, perhaps impossible, to extricate from its imprisonment in language. However, if no one reading of a poem is better than any other reading (an obvious nonsense), then all my own readings of my own poems are as good as any other readings! And if that were true, I could never improve either my reading or my writing of my own poems. And if a given reading is superior there would have to be, I think, some generally shared notion of what a good reading consists in. The idea of an external standard of truth comes very near us then, though it is not quite reached. I am more interested in the fact that we nearly reach it than in the fact that we don’t finally do reach it; and that is a difference between me and the anti-foundationalists.

So I have this reservation: there is a crucial distinction between describing an experience and performing it. There is a similar distinction between trying to fix Truth into a single description (which would be wrong) and half-sensing a perfect truthfulness as a possibility hidden within our actions (performances). The first kind of Truth would be dogmatic and religious; the second kind is a non-existent entity which nevertheless seems to guide us – a real mystery in fact.

If I describe my “self” I see it as a social entity: if I “perform” my “self” by being it, it is something more mysterious. Similarly, if I try to describe the tune of a poem I can’t without seeking a consensus in society about what tune it should be. If I perform the poem, then, for that moment, there is only one tune that I’m trying to make. The description is public and subject to all the problems of truth as socially constructed. The performance is private, interior, and almost indescribable. In poetry, by “performance” I mean that moment when the poem is first written down (created), or read out loud by a reader or “performed” silently in the reader’s head.

What I have done is to get different readers to record performances of the same poem by reading into linguistic machinery with electrodes round their necks. The results basically give a graph of:

1. the rise and fall of the voice (the intonation)
2. plus the speed at which the sounds travel (duration)
3. plus the presence of any pauses in the reading
4. plus the patterns created by those stretches of sound when the larynx (voice box, adam’s apple) is continuously sounding (during the speaking of vowels and voiced consonants) and those other shorter moments when unvoiced consonants occur. In the following words, I have underlined the voiced parts when the voice-box is sounding:

buzzing wasp

Try it: b and z make your voicebox vibrate, w is made only with
the lips and air, and so are sp.

The significance of point 4 is that we are able to make the tune of a song or a poem only when the voice box is sounding: it is in the throat that we make the fundamental frequency of the voice, and it is in higher parts of the vocal apparatus that we make all the higher frequencies. The ear chooses to regard only the fundamental frequency as the tune. This has been much neglected in the study of poetry, in my view. Stretches of continuous voicing affect the pace of a poem and also such questions as the continuousness of a held thought or awareness. My favourite line to show this is from Wyatt:

So unwarily was never no man caught
With steadfast look upon a goodly face…

where the whole of that first segment shows up as continuously voiced and helps to convey an expression of continuous rapture at the sight of the beautiful face before the word caught raps at the end of the line to catch our attention back again. (The w, by the way, is strictly unvoiced but the nasalization of the n can just about maintain the voicing while the lips are forming the w.) The role of voicing in a poem is never talked about by anyone, but I believe I have shown it is complex in its effects.

So I’ve made all these recordings and compared the results from the different readers. They were asked not to read “dramatically” but to feel for the neutral music of the words. There is, in fact, some old work by a German linguist, Sievers, showing that it is possible to identify the neutral music.

Then, in some of my experiments especially, I have asked audiences of, say 20-30 people, to identify the “best” readings, so that I can escape, as much as possible, my own subjective, “elitist” judgments about which are good and which are bad readings. This is the social consensus I’ve talked of.

I have then developed a complicated method for comparing the graphs of these “best” readers and measuring them against those of “worst” readers. The basic results are these:

(a) It is important first of all to make sure there is a broad consensus
about how to interpret the meaning of a poem

(b) If a poem is orthodox metrically, inexperienced readers generally find it
easier to decide what tune to give it.

(c) When performing orthodox, clear poems, the “best” readers tend to
create markedly similar tunes. The “worst” readers typically read
with a flat intonation or give a unorthodox interpretation
of meaning. This does not alter (c).

(d) Talented alternative versions of the tune are possible, but will be
perceived as “dramatic” or unusual in some allied way.

(e) If a poem is very experimental in its prosody, inexperienced readers
may mess up in reading it. Again, this does not alter the convincing
evidence from (c) that it does make sense to talk of a neutral tune for
a poem, providing the reader knows how to interpret it.

People sometimes think I’m being Platonic: claiming that there is a perfect tune that arises within the performance like an Ideal form. In fact, I believe that this perfect tune is ineffable, which is the same as saying it doesn’t quite exist. Nevertheless we sense it as a possibility.

Question: Why did you start your small press/why did you become an independent publisher? What need was not being met by the existing presses?

Answer (Eileen Tabios, Meritage Press): I started my press Meritage Press to publish the historic and necessary tome PINOY POETICS: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino American Poetics, a long-time dream that came to be edited by Nick Carbo.  I had anticipated that it would be difficult for PINOY POETICS to find a publisher in a timely manner because of its subject matter and (Filipino) authors. At the time the book was created, most of its poets were not well-known, though many of these poets since have come to receive numerous international and national-U.S. poetry prizes.  Moreover, reflecting a long tradition of Filipino grassroots activism that overlaps with what’s become the DIY (Do It Yourself) small press movement, I thought that creating a press to present this project was an apt reflection of its underlying poetics.  Having said all that, I did not want to start what looks to be a Filipino-only press because I wanted to reflect the (oft-ignored) reality that, as Filipino poet-novelist Eric Gamalinda once succinctly stated, “The history of the Philippines is the history of the world.”

Thus, while releasing titles focused on or by Filipino authors & artists, Meritage Press’ larger vision is simply to expand fresh, multidisciplinary ways of featuring a wide range of interests and artists from around the world. Multiple aesthetic concerns allow Meritage to address a variety of disciplines — politics, culture, identity, science, humor, religion, history, technology, philosophy and wine (I do also concede that without wine, I wouldn’t have pressed on with a small press effort). Reflecting how poets make instead of inherit language, the press is named after “meritage,” a word created to describe the Bordeaux-style of wine-making that uses California-grown grapes. Meritage style combines the grapes of cabernet, cabernet franc and merlot to create a wine characterized by robustness in flavor, bouquet, color and body – symbolizing the passion underlying the vision of Meritage’s artists.  Proof to date?  Well, Meritage Press began by presenting an etchings-based collaboration between artist Archie Rand and poet John Yau, encompasses first poetry books by Tom Beckett, Jean Vengua, Barry Schwabsky, and Bruna Mori, presents a poetry-kali martial arts book by Michelle Bautista, enables the first children’s poetry collection by Geoffrey Gatza, offers the unique and popular STAGE PRESENCE: Conversations with Filipino American Performing Artists edited by jazz musician-scholar Theodore S. Gonzalves, and presents three unique anthologies of the 21st century Filipino diasporic poetic form called the “hay(na)ku” (Vol I, Vol II and the forthcoming THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU are all co-published with the radiant Finnish avant garde publisher xPress(ed), further attesting to Meritage Press’ international scope).

Answer (Francisco Aragón, Momotombo Press): On the heels of publishing in Gary Soto’s Chicano Chapbook Series, I conceived of Momotombo Press in the spring of 2000. I’ve said it before: it was empowering to have my chapbook published; it served as a calling card and led to readings and a couple of anthology publications. I wanted to replicate that experience for my peers—that is: poets without a full-length book. Also crucial was studying with Gary Snyder: in his workshop and seminars at UC Davis, it was instilled in us time and again that starting local and small was one way to go. That was the case, we learned, with Riprap; that was the case with Jack Spicer and White Rabbit Press. In this sense, taking in the literary landscape of San Francisco, my native city, in Poet, Be Like God, was a seminal experience in my formation as a small press publisher.

And yet Momotombo Press didn’t settle into its true skin until its fifth volume: Steven Cordova’s Slow Dissolve marked the moment Momotombo became a place for new voices in Latino literature. It made sense, especially since the Chicano Chapbook Series had ended. Since Cordova’s volume, some memorable titles, in terms of sales and classroom adoptions, have included Brenda Cárdenas’ From the Tongues of Brick and Stone and Paul Martínez Pompa’s Pepper Spray. Our only title to go into a second printing was Malinche’s Daughter, a collection of nonfiction prose by Michelle Otero. Our chapbooks also distinguish themselves in that they are introduced by more established voices. These have included, among others, Luis Alberto Urrea, Helena Maria Viramontes, Terrence Hayes and, most recently, Rigoberto González, who penned the Intro to the forthcoming This Book of Ours by Octavio R. González. Finally, my particular role has evolved into that of Publisher only while early Momotombo author Maria Melendez has assumed the post of acquiring and managing editor.

Answer (Reb Livingston, No Tell Books): I always wanted to be involved in poetry publishing.  Connecting readers to poems and poets always seemed an important and noble cause.  Considering that I live in Northern Virginia, my options were limited.  Not a lot of poetry publishers in these parts.  Limited options turned out to be a gift and worked out well because it happens that I enjoy running my own press, operating as I want, choosing which rules to follow and which to disregard.  I think it’s really important for all poets and publishers to regularly reevaluate the rules and guidelines we follow.  Are we doing something because it’s a legacy?  Why did we begin following a particular process in the first place?  Is it beneficial today?  Is it still necessary?  Is it holding us back? I’m reminded of when my grandmother became too elderly to hold the annual family 4th of July picnic.  My father took over and the first thing he did was to nix the two lunch tradition.  The whole family was up in arms.  Only one lunch!?!  We’d been serving two lunches for over 40 years.  How dare he!  My father’s decision was sound.  The tradition began because once upon a time all the men worked different shifts at the steel mill.  Serving two lunches made sure everyone was fed.  It was a good idea from 1950-1975.  But when my father took over, nobody in our family was working at a mill, in fact, the mills had been torn down for 10+ years.  We didn’t need to do double the work.  One lunch was more than enough for everyone.  There were better ways to use our time and energy.

In poetry, I think the need not being met is enough good outlets for poets to share their work.  I imagine many people disagree.  There are thousands of poetry magazines and presses.  Why do we need more?  Why would we need anything else or different?  I would respond that my anecdotal evidence is that I personally know of many wonderful manuscripts without a publisher.  I can’t publish them all.  I can’t publish more than a tiny percentage.  I can’t even read them all.  Most indie publishers I know are in similar situations.  Also, I’m really opposed to the concept of a small group of people controlling what poems and poets make it to readers.  Come to think of it, I’m kind of opposed to the idea that sharing one’s own work with an audience is out of her own power or somehow beneath her.

Answer (Rusty Morrison, Omnidawn): We started Omnidawn in 2001 because we wanted to involve ourselves in small press publishing. Both Ken and I feel that one of the most important things we can do with our time and our resources is to participate in the work of bringing to the reading public books that are exciting, thought-provoking, enlivening — books that may not find a home with larger publishing houses.

When you asked why we started, you added to that question: what need was ‘not’ being met by existing presses.

We do feel that we fill a particular need, which I’ll say more about in a moment. But we don’t think we are the only ones to fill it. Rather, we believe there is always a great need for many different small presses, and that this need MUST be met by a widely diverse variety of small press publishers. Without them, the unifying, stifling, benumbing drone of the large, for-profit-only publishing houses will crush variation in literature and language and thought.

We started Omnidawn because we wanted to be one of those presses — we wanted to participate in that diverse, vibrant, vital community and, in so doing, help that constantly evolving conversation flourish.

But, having said that, I should add that we do see ourselves as one of the presses that fulfill an important need that readers have: Omnidawn is especially interested in works that invigorate the reader, that infuse the reader with new possibility, that leave the reader refreshed, or challenged, or charged with heightened attention
– whether because of the work’s ability to let readers experience ‘language’ engaging with ‘meaning’ in newly expansive, enlivening ways;
–or because of the frame-shifting dimensions of the content, which might test, stretch, challenge those beliefs and attitudes that can too easily grow restrictive;
–or because of the ways that the work is itself a constellation of difference that coheres in ways that illuminate new potentials to the reader.

Of course, each Omnidawn book will achieve its ends in its own uniquely different ways, so each one teaches us how to read it, and how to expand our perspective on the kinds of books that we want to publish. As our name suggests, we are interested in “all” and “every” “dawning.”

Rachel McKibbens’s lovely and serrated debut collection, Pink Elephant (Cypher Books), reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary. Ex-punk rock chola and mother of five, 2009 Women’s Individual World Poetry Slam champion Rachel McKibbens writes about abandonment and abuse in stark, startling language and well-wrought fable, delivered in well-paced lines, laying bare the history of a woman who’s “fed [her] body to the hungry for years.”

In “The First Time,” the speaker and her little brother run away:

…we filled a shopping bag full of toys,
spoons and a jar of peanut butter

climbed the wall behind our apartment complex
and walked along the train tracks,
where we had sacrificed handfuls of pennies
and misbehaved dolls.

I was six years old, wearing a nightgown

In hindsight, her speaker concludes that “the maggots in the kitchen sink, / mother passed out on the porch,” that home life which she and her brother flee, is what truly belongs to them. McKibbens’s poems give us substance and not therapy. She reveals the learned and practical codes of behavior which enable the children to get by. In “Doggie Bag Etiquette (Stepmother 101),” the children listen to dad and stepmom through the bedroom door, and learn about their father’s love. “But if there was screaming, the crash of a body, / then silence — the phones were ripped out of the walls and we became // his children again. And the three of us would take off….”

McKibbens does not romanticize victimhood; she simply means to show us how unchecked violence reproduces itself. Her tone is matter-of-fact, and the scenes she writes are unflinching. “Tomboy,” reads as fable of internalized misogyny, in which her speaker captures a mermaid, who is the mythic idealized woman. She speaks “a wild ocean language I could not comprehend.” The mermaid’s inability to be understood causes the speaker to enact the learned behavior of belittling and inflicting pain. “I stood over her, disgusted. Smashed a mirror against her breasts / then sucked the final splinters of moisture from her lips.” In “The Day After the First Time We Ran Away From Home,” we see the brother enact a learned behavior upon the neighbor’s turtle. He has lured it into his yard with piece of lettuce. Once the lettuce has run out, once the brother has nothing left to offer it such that it starts to leave, the brother’s rage is switched on. He kicks and cracks the turtle; “by then / there was no going back, so he sprayed / the turtle’s head with Raid / and wrapped it in up a bath towel / and threw it into the garbage bin….”

There is a difference between running away, and bringing the abuse to an end by confronting it. Something else can begin only after a previous thing ends. In “The Last Time,” alone, her speaker uses the father’s tool, “the hammer / with his initials burned deep / into the handle” against him.

… he stared
only at the weapon in my hand
and I looked at him and said,
If you ever touch us again,
I will kill you.

And then he saw me.

Okay, he said.
Okay.

In “Cardinal” and other poems, her speaker appears split in two, as if she is becoming acquainted with the grown-up she is becoming:

In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.

It’s not over yet.

As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?

Let’s begin with the conservative translation project, guided by ten commandments of sorts. One warns against “emasculation,” urging translators to avoid “unisex, ‘gender inclusive’ language.” Socialist incursions into Biblical text present problems, too (in one edition of the Bible, they write, “the socialistic word ‘comrade’ is used three times”). The authors of the Wikipedia-style page detailing this undertaking anticipate some discomfort with their ideas: “liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds,” they write.

In analyzing this project, where does one begin?

The first word of the first sentence of the first book of the Bible, naturally.

With Milton’s opening in mind, I decided to compare and contrast their version of Genesis 1:1 with the King James translation. The latter reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth.” This makes sense; the first word of Genesis is “B’reisheet,” meaning “In the beginning.” The “Proposed Conservative Translation,” by contrast, reads: “God created heaven and earth in the beginning.” The site provides the following “analysis” as explanation: “The first word is God.”

All right. But it isn’t. Also, the explanation itself rings of the King James translation of the Gospel According to John (”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). If only they could offer a Miltonic defense for the revision–something about Classical syntax, perhaps.

Moving on to the second word of Genesis. Over in the Low Countries, academic Ellen van Wolde is scrutinizing the Hebrew verb “bara.” She argues that it means not “created,” as traditionally understood, but “separated.”

According to The Telegraph, she based this conclusion on the observation that God always “created” in plurals: “God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?” Genesis according to van Wolde, then, begins: “In the beginning, God separated heaven and earth.” The idea that heaven and earth predated humans appears in other ancient texts, she writes.

But let’s not dither. The third word of Genesis is Elohim, or God, whose details, physical and otherwise, have provided fodder for R. Crumb. While crafting his recent comic book Genesis, which hews closely to the King James text, he told Time:

He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.

(See picture at top.)

If this is getting to be too much, why not eschew that troubling sentence altogether? In his forthcoming tome A Literary Bible, David Rosenberg treats the Bible as a literary work rich with fissures and mysteries. Rather than insist on tidiness, as the conservative translators appear to, he delights in the work’s innate messiness. He writes:

The Bible is a deeply complex text, and its primitive passages are set in a sophisticated writer’s looking back, so it’s the wrong material for literal-minded comedians and artists, who are prone to react before they think. My translations, whether they render the Bible as strange or strangely familiar, engage the ancient texts in contemporary terms. I do not seek to embellish or alter the originals, but mainly to restore the original experience of reading them.

That original chaos, he suggests, is most generative.