Flying Object interviews Matt Hart about Forklift, OH

Flying Object of South Hadley, MA is shaping up to be more than just a reading site, gallery, letterpress studio, and bookshop filled with rare small-press treasures (yes, it is all these things) -- their website is also amazingly fun (check out Jono Tosch's guest Tweets, the Photo Opportunities and "It's My Decision," a new series featuring "a poem by somebody"). Another recent addition is an interview with poet and Forklift, Ohio editor Matt Hart! Hart gives a shout-out to journals he finds neighborly, including Agriculture Reader, Big Bell, H_NGM_N, Lumberyard, Lungfull!, Sixth Finch, Gondola, Toad, The Equalizer, BPM, Jellyfish, and Coldfront. And he talks more in-depth about Forklift, Ohio:

2.) How did your Journal start?

Eric Appleby and I started Forklift, Ohio back in 1994, and for the most part we’ve been publishing ever since (with a couple of hiccups along the way). We’ve now done 23 issues, and 24 will be out this spring. We do chapbooks here and there (this spring we’re doing one by Stuart Dischell called Touch Monkey), and this spring we’ll publish our first Forklift book book, Wolf’s Milk by Juan Sweeney de la Minas de Cobra (the Oklahoman-Bolivian poet, translated from the Spanish by Chad Sweeney…

In ’94 Eric was just out of college, and I was just off a year in a Master’s program in Philosophy. We were both newly transplanted to Cincinnati where we still live, and we wanted to get a journal going as a way to get work into the world that we thought people should read. Of course, it was also a way to insert ourselves into, and hopefully expand, a community of writers and artists. I should note that we had done a journal in Muncie, Indiana (we both majored in Philosophy at Ball State) before Forklift, OH called Nausea Is the Square Root of Muncie.

We were sitting our kitchen (we were roommates at the time) talking about what to call the journal, and I being the dork Pavement fan that I was said how about Forklift. And Eric said, Yeah, that’s alright, but it needs something. Let’s make the “forklift” a place—Forklift, Ohio. Then came the industrial bit, and since we love food as much as we love words, cooking needed to be in there as well—especially since Fork/lift-ing is what one does when one eats in Ohio and other places, too.

The first ten issues were tabloid size on newsprint, and then we decided we wanted each issue to be an object that people might enjoy looking at and holding as much they might enjoy reading it. That’s when we started trying out weird binding materials—like Schluter Ditra and flooring substrate. One issue had a bolt through the center, another looked like a tiny clipboard wrapped in caution tape. Still another came a bag of chili mix, complete with dry beans and all the spices. The recipe for the chili was a jigsaw puzzle on the back sides of the poems.

Read it all here.