Introduction
We use the word "volume" as a synonym for a book. In my practice, and
in the essays in this retrospective, I try to explore the volume of books
as objects, and as they interact with the world around them.
Their volume is not simply the shelf space they take up, but the way they
lead into networks of human association, create sounds that fill small
apartments and large performance spaces, and build lives around
themselves. Volume needn't be large, but it does need three dimensions.
A means of enhancing the sense of volume in music is polyphony, the use
of simultaneous melody lines that run separately, converge, and diverge
again. You can hear it as easily in the music of the Baroque as you can
in classic Jazz, and the primal musics of cultures around the world. Even
in the private space created by silent reading, the sense of possibilities,
of freedom of movement, pleases me, in a way that the narrowness of
dogma can never do. For me, the sense of volume in the poetry most
important to me has always implied liberation.
This June, the June of 2006, will mark the 40th anniversary of the day
on which I typed my first mimeo stencil, cranked up a Gestetner, and
produced my first chapbook. Since then, I have published over 250 books,
produced countless more for other people on a job basis, engaged in editorial
and organizational processes to make poetry more widely accessible (both
in the sense of available and understandable). I have also composed poetry
and related arts myself and they have been brought forth by other publishers.
Some have been created through collaborative processes, and their publication
has often been a form of collaboration itself. In the last 12 years,
my main effort has been in setting up the
Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry. The latter has allowed me to do
all sorts of things I could not have done in any other medium, though
it has involved a sense of déjà-vu in relation to the mimeo and make-shift
letter press with which I began. As much as I am happy with web publishing,
I don't like the idea of replacing one medium with another, and have
continued to publish a few books on paper. The biggest limitation on this
activity has not been media orientation but lack of facilities to print
books such as I had for some 20 years and lack of money to farm out
printing.
In 1966, I was only partially aware of how many people were publishing
with mimeo machines, and certainly didn't imagine that it would someday
be considered a "revolution." Mimeo machines were just readily available,
and in the early years, I used letter presses when I could without seeing
much difference between the two. They both got lines of poetry on paper,
though neither was very good at reproducing graphics. Silk screen, one of the
forgotten arts of the period, was good for art and visual poetry. In many of
my early books I used what might now seem curious if not perverse hybrid tech:
mimeo books with letterpress covers, for instance. Approximately 30 years
after my first mimeo books, I had become thoroughly self conscious about
the long route which had lead me from mimeo through offset to the real
revolution of electronic publication. I have hopes that part of this
revolution will not be a replacement of one medium with another, but
a means of collaboration between the two. I don't like single approaches
to poetry, and a thread that runs thorough my work on all levels is
an argument against any sort of monoculture.
Back in 1966, I had formulated, albeit tentatively, some basic ideas that
would work themselves out in a multitude of different ways as I went
along. The most important were that A books should be seen as
pieces of sculpture, that they should be apprehended and perceived as
more than the illusion of two dimensional space presented on any single
page. B That books were not final resting places or static
containers, but rather stages in transactional processes which could go
on indefinitely, potentially connecting all experience. C That
books should never be impersonal.
In 1966, I did not know that in less than a decade I would be making books
out of everything from cinder blocks to human hair, books that could be
played as musical instruments or worn as earrings. I did, however, have
the strong sense that a book should be felt in the hands as well as read
with the eyes, and that even its smell could have significance. Although
I could be pleased with the complete, utilitarian simplicity of the magic
books published by City Lights, I could also be dissatisfied with the much
more elegant covers of the more miraculous books published by New
Directions. As well chosen and profoundly moving as the photos on the front
of New Directions books might be, they had nothing to do with the blurbs on
the backs. This is something I have consistently tried to avoid during the
40 years of publishing books. I have at times seen this disjuncture as
metaphor and evidence for a fracturing of books into separate departments
for decoration, promotion, and contents, and have resisted this kind of
division to the extent that I could.
In designing books, I have tried to make
the front and back covers coherent and continuous visual units. These in turn
should in some way relate to the design of the pages inside the book. And
all design should start from the text or graphics that made up the book's
contents. The book should be a piece of sculpture, designed to work with
the changes it goes through as the reader holds it, opens it, and moves
from page to page.
Likewise, once a book has been published it should begin a process of
interactions that, ideally, should not have a final goal or stopping
point. The interactions can go from simple to complex, and there's never been
a way to predict how or where they will exfoliate. On the simplest level in
1966, they became focal points in my conversations with my home-town
literary friends. The books took part in the active and animated
discussions of poetry while I was a university student, and literary
discussions tended to include pulling books out of shelves in apartments
or to be centers of discussion during cross-country drives or shorter
trips for local adventures. They would later become a medium of
exchange, in all senses, with poets throughout the world, eventually
reaching leading edge writers as far away as Eritriya, Paraguay, and
Japan. Some would foster long stretches of what has been a nearly monastic
discipline, while others would lead to love affairs, soap operas, changes
in attitudes and perceptions, new friends, preposterous situations,
strange farces, and dedicated social activism.
In the late 1960s, sending the books out brought others back to me in
exchange. d.a.levy was the great master of passing books around during that
phase of American letters, and although I didn't fully appreciate the first
books I received from him in 66, his work and his presence still continue to
grow long after his death. Some of the books I sent out did not bring back
immediate responses, but lead to meetings at later times. Once I started
getting things around, I started getting mail from people I did not know.
In a short time, this lead to networks of correspondence that were in many
respects more complex than those later facilitated by the internet. Those
networks sometimes lead to meetings and long-term friendships. Some during
the 1970s were part of the lavish performance and intermedia festivals of
the era. Others lead to travels to visit poets, attend readings, go to art
exhibitions, find books and manuscripts in special collections departments
and odd little libraries, and so forth. Yet others have been magnets to draw
people here, for readings, for visits, for collaborations. The volumes of
interchange even in a flickering and ethereal medium like the internet
could still explore the volume of the world and its potentials as no
other medium had done before.
By 1970, I had come to the conclusion that poetry needed what I called
"triangulation." On a private level, this lead to my basic practices as a
poet, editor, and critic: There were many ways to understand poetry and
other art forms than simply assimilating information on pages. Translation
has been a basic stage of apprenticeship in many literary milieux, and it
has been essential to me, even though most of my translations have not
been done for publication and will not be published with my consent. Writing
criticism and essays is not only a way of getting closer to the
work of other people, it has also stimulated my own poetry. With certain
types of visual poetry and art, painting facsimiles has been an essential
tool in understanding the work. Publishing poetry should enhance understanding
of the work published, and it can be seen as a form of translation.
This work requires (at least for me) particularly careful reading, keyboarding,
design, and all the care and concentration needed for those processes
to make sense. The interpersonal web of human
connections makes sense of making sense. Setting up readings and performances
not only got poets to a place where I could hear them, but conversation
with them augmented the work - as discussion of them as poets with whomever
I've worked in setting up the reading deepens the understanding of
the text. Trying to create a scene where this can take place and generate
more poetry becomes yet another part of reading the city and the world and
trying to make something of both. My sense of the importance of reading venues
was fostered in part by poets in Milwaukee, my home for over two decades, but
it was augmented by checking out other scenes, particularly that in near-by
Chicago, and most importantly that of Lower Manhattan, which was
going through one of its most active and creative periods when I started
writing.
In the early 70s, I felt the need to work out triangulations by
a practice I kept up through the period in which I produced books, and
carried on to the time when the web was my major medium of publication.
This consisted of publishing multiple books by the same author. At first,
I tried creating synergy between the different levels of ephemerality
of magazines and the greater durability of books. From this starting place,
I tended to publish at least two books by the majority of poets whose
work I wanted to present. This practice meant that I did books
by a smaller number of poets, but went in-depth with each writer
I published.
At the same time, I realized the flawed nature of criticism written from
a single point of view and usually by a single critic. Tom Montag's
Margins magazine gave me the perfect place to start trying
out multiple reviews of the same book, or books by the same author.
The importance of breaking the one-review-per-title custom cannot be
stressed too much, though it has not been widely practiced. In the armed
citadels of the seemingly never-ending 1990s (ya, we're still in them), this
could easily degenerate into a tool for enforcing conformity and idol worship,
so maybe it's an approach that should lie dormant for another generation.
The publishing of multiple books by the same author helped bring forth a
greater diversity of response. Part of the attempt to break away from the
single opinion of the solitary critic included the attempt to create bodies
of criticism and commentary by the poets who best understood the work
which they discussed. As much as the need for multiple points of view seemed
a near-absolute, I also wondered if poets would better understand their
own work if they were the ones who produced literary criticism. This latter
point remains uncertain to me today, but still, the encouragement
of critical and historical (as opposed to fashionable and theoretical)
writing by practitioners seems an important step in creating voluminous
webs of interaction.
A text is something you usually see on a page, imitating two-dimensional
space. Poems read aloud moves in waves, filling the space within the
range of the waves. Silent reading can create something completely
different: in reading silently, you can create a private space for yourself
that pulls in your concentration and focuses it. The function of
reading which carves out private space often works best when it
interacts with more public correlatives. Yet there are times when shutting
out the world through reading has a significance which can't otherwise be
recreated and without which life seems tacky. Visual poetry, sometimes
without any semantic content, can none the less be vocalized, or create a
private space around it equal in intensity or serenity to that of the silent
reading of text.
Mallarmé had quipped that everything existed to find its way into a
book a bit over a century ago. I later found a more intense and, to me,
more appropriate statement of what the French savant had been fumbling for
in the Aztec oral poems, collectively known as the Cantares
Mexicanos,
Only as painted images in your books
have we come to be alive in this place.
This first became a motto of sorts. Later, the title of my collected essays,
the first volume of which will be forthcoming this spring. Books aren't
simply passive receptacles but creative instruments that shape
the human world.
A year and a half ago, Michael Rothenberg and I began discussing this
retrospective. It may seem like 40 years to him
that I've worked on it, missing his deadlines with great chagrin as
new adventures, growing obligations, and nasty health problems
intervened. All this tested his ever immaculate patience. I can only
thank him most profoundly for putting up with the delays.
At the time we began, we had something more modest in mind. It's difficult,
however, for me not to push basic ideas to new conclusions. Thus the
original plan of presenting 100 of my book covers with comments on their
design grew into what now might be called multi-genre essays, which
include autobiography, literary criticism, literary history, discussion
of funding projects and on how to do them without funds, and notes on
reading, performance and other manifestations and transformations.
It's also typical
of me to need something to make my variations on the Watts Towers more
manageable. In this instance, we decided that the way to make this
project do-able was to break it down into installments. I decided to do
the same with the above mentioned collection of my essays during this time.
The first installment, for the Winter 2006 issue of Big Bridge, sketches
books and cognate projects that began in the 1970s. This time frame does not
encompass everything that went on during that decade, just work that
began then or that demonstrates the volume of triangulation in its early
stages. What I try to do in this installment is
sketch out the growth of my ideas on poetry as it relates to other
people. That is, my activities as a publisher in the widest sense. Learning
to print books is most important. But the section also deals with the
means of production and the politics of cottage industries. None of that
makes any sense without consideration of the poetry in the books, their
authors, the authors' reading or performance style, the history of the
times, attempts at finding and/or creating an audience, the establishment
of a public exchange center for ideas, books, and virtually all forms
of human interaction with poetry. The volume of interactions involved
is much more than the shelf space a book takes up. But in this section,
it stays on an immediate and personal level. If this installment spends
more time on printing than those to follow, so it should. It seems
important to me that we do not get so engrossed in consumer culture that
we forget that books are the product of labor. They do not magically
appear on the shelves of book stores or libraries or, increasingly, arrive
from nowhere through the mail or over the internet.
Other projects I began in the 70s will be chronicled in later installments
along with periods before and after the decade. The second installment will
include a greater sense of completion and maturity which I associate more
with the later 1970s and the first years of the 1980s. The books I
have published by Jerome Rothenberg and Theodore Enslin began in the 70s,
for instance, and have been more numerous than those of Toby Olson and Jackson
Mac Low. The presence of these two poets in this section seems an important
pairing for this section on a number of levels. On the simplest, I had
written an essay on four poets of the early 1960s, of which they were two.
I wrote the essay in sonata form, with Toby's part being an allegro and
Jackson's, an adagio. I didn't publish the essay, but the contrasting
tones and materials seemed worthy of preservation, even if they worked
their way into a larger and less linear work. As I proceed with the
current work, these two sections took on greater significance for the
new project. Toby's books I began as an apprentice, and their history
seems a good example of ways things can be done easily, pleasantly, and
efficiently. Jackson was altogether
different. Producing his books was always difficult, and the most important
of them did not get published. In this section, I try to
affirm the importance of doing what is difficult, as well as pointing
out where the only type of real loss of the last 40 years has
occurred in my publishing activities. As the greatest poet of my time,
it seems important to get Jackson in early, as simple homage and as a
hedge in case something prevents me from finishing this project.
Foregrounding his importance does not diminish in any way the abilities of
other poets I have published. As in acknowledging my sources and influences,
my homage to Jackson simply raises the standard of all the poets I have
worked with, whether they have received adequate recognition or not.
The third installment may deal with the late
1980s and with electronic publishing, or there may be separate
installments for the two. If enough people seem interested in the series,
the last installment will deal with my own poetry and criticism. I am
leaving my own work for the last section for a simple reason. It has
nothing to do with modesty, but with the nature of the project. Although
autobiography is the thread that holds this group of reflections together, I
don't see myself as the major figure in it. Most of the 40 years I've spent as
a publisher has been oriented toward publishing and otherwise interacting with
other people. They, the poetry they produced, and the milieu in which
they functioned are the subject of these observations. Likewise,
my primary purpose in doing this project has not been to document things that
have already happened, but to suggest and encourage developments
from this point onward. As a utopian, I'd like to see a future in
which the fronts and backs of books are no longer alienated, and in
which new generations accomplish better things than I and others of
my age have managed.
You can see two photos of me at the top of this page. The one on the
left was taken in 1970; the one on the right in 2000. It amuses me
how little my appearance seems to have changed in that time. Other photos
over the years don't bear as much similarity to each other. I like the
ur-rhythm created by the repetition of expression and posture in these two
images. And more so the way the dimmer young figure seems to be looking
toward the older one. The older one also seems to be looking at something
outside the frame. I hope to continue to look outside the box for
the rest of my creative life. Whatever I seek out there, it will not
be trendy, fashionable, or predictable, but always searching out what
has not been used up and chronicling what for me are the figures and
tendencies of my time, most of whom remain in obscurity. For me,
publishing has always been an art of exploration, and I hope that
some readers will find what I have to offer more than worth the
effort of checking them out.
Note on Part 2, added January, 2007
Autobiography may be the thread that holds these notes together, as I
wrote last year. If so, autobiography as it unfolds at sany given moment can
be a stronger force. I had to give constant care to my parents during the
period when I would have written and assembling the Part 2 I originally
had in mind. The original conception would have been impossible, given
the time restraints placed on me by the situation of the last months.
Much of the Part 2 that you may find here was written or assembled
for other projects and put together for this issue. Planned or
not, this installment seems to have merits in its own rights.
Note on Part 3, added February, 2008
I hurriedly put together last year's entry at the beginning of January.
During November and December of that year, my father was undergoing a
great deal of pain, and my companion and I had a difficulty arranging for
competent and adequate care. He was relatively pain free during the
brief period at the beginning of January when I hurriedly put together
some preexisting pieces for the year's installment. He died peacefully
shortly after the issue went on-line. He would have liked to have been
a writer himself, and wanted me to do that as his proxy and heir. Problems
left in the wake of his death have set me back in that task for much of the
year, and my main literary activity has been finishing the Selected Poems of
Kitasono Katue, discussed elsewhere in this issue, and, perhaps ironically
enough, acting as web monkey for this issue of Big Bridge. I was still unable
to continue my original plan for this retrospective, but there's so much of
my stuff elsewhere in this issue that I imagine most readers will have
more than enough of me in it. My modest continuation this year is a quiet
reflection on a long arc of association and development, and a small project
I did partly as an example of what can be done with limited resources.
This seems appropriate to the moment. I wouldn't mind directing the
reader's attention to a general
Carl Young
memorial I put up on its own or a
memorial poem for him in this issue of Big Bridge
instead of or as well as reading my ruminations — all of which
are part of his legacy.
Click here to go to Part 1
Click here to go to Part 2
Click here to go to Part 3
Click here to go to Part 4
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