Our first move into the Water Street Arts Center started on a tiny scale. Pat made arrangements with John Kishline to set up a rack of books that could be sold before or after plays at Theater X. Some money usually appeared in a can on an honor system, even if no one was tending the shelf. This first steps went remarkably well.

The next step was a big leap. It took considerable scheming, but the scheming was simply more talk about how to create bookstores, coffee houses, lending libraries, and so on. Perhaps fortified by the scheming and by the relative success of the book rack, Pat discussed setting up a bookstore in the building with the Theater X company. The essential deal we finally came to was that we'd watch the building when the company wasn't around, and maybe do some janitorial tasks. The latter weren't clearly specified and caused friction in the future. The need for a building-sitter was real enough, however. The building was large and well suited for an arts center - perhaps more so than a theater. It was not in good repair, and was conditionally condemned by the city in anticipation of an expansion of the freeway that made a tight, elevated curve around one side of it. When not performing or rehearsing, the company didn't have much to do in it, and when they were on tour, they left it untended for considerably stretches of time. This virtually invited squatters, left the possibility of fines from the city for such things as not shoveling snow from the sidewalk, and left the recessed south entrance open for vagrants to sleep in. Legend had it that one had frozen there, and nobody wanted that to happen again.

In the earliest days, with just two members, we weren't sure which of our schemes we were going to try or how we were going to accomplish any of them. Clearly, one of my main functions as Vice President was not to attend committee meetings or make speeches, but to get more books on consignment from publishers around the country. Since this was a period of trust and something like euphoria among alternative publishers, I was able to make a lot of deals this way. Some lead to other things, such as publishers hiring me to print their books. I believe this is how I first met David Wilk, who became a crucial figure in later phases of the organization's development

Marc Haupert had tried to set up a conventional bookstore in a building that primarily housed head shops, bead stores, and outlets for other paraphernalia fashionable at the time. It was also the same building which housed the Merganthaler compositor I had worked on briefly. I imagine Pat had Marc in mind when she made the initial arrangements with Theater X. He seemed reluctant to join us at first, but that didn't last too long. With the stock from his store, we had a fair number of trade books to go along with those I'd gotten on consignment from alternative presses. We also had the third officer in the organization, since Marc became treasurer as soon as he signed on.

Pat and I had named the gallery before we made the deal with Theater X or had any definite plans other than those worked out with our scheming pens. I had made jokes about art being a terminal illness, and this naturally lead into the name Terminal Arts for the gallery. Syncronicitously, the Theater X building had once housed a small factory for making model trains, and once we got the name up, we had people calling to see if we were back in the model railroad business. Since all sorts of people associated the X in the theater's name with pornography, they also got people looking for things the theater didn't offer. Those who were disappointed by the lake of pornographic films may have missed something they could have bragged about later. Willem DaFoe, who would later go on to play roles ranging from Jesus Christ to T.S. Eliot, got his start in the Theater X company. People who didn't check out our venture may have missed out on things more important than celebrity.

Running a gallery that people would take seriously posed its own set of problems. Our solution was to arrange with the Chairman of the U.W.M. Art Department to offer a class in gallery management. This would be open to two students per semester. They were prohibited from showing work by their friends, had to get at least two reviews in mainstream newspapers or magazines, and observe other requirements and restrictions. The students we got were Susan Kurth, who later became my partner for the rest of the decade, and Sue Marcinkus, who took the job much more seriously than we expected, doing more work than her position required long after the course was completed, and buttressing the organization during some of its low points in morale.

With an actual staff or membership about to join us, we set up virtually all of the initial rules we would have for running the organization. I think Pat's stipulation was that everyone who worked in the organization would automatically become part of the board of directors. This anti-elitist move was certainly congenial to me. My contribution to the rules was that we would never resort to voting, no matter how difficult an issue might become or how much this could slow things down. All decisions had to be arrived at by total consensus. This meant that whenever there were disagreements they had to be resolved by tradeoffs. If A decided to concede point 57, he or she would have to get some concession from B in return, even if that meant that B might have to back off from a harder line at some later date. This eliminated the sweepstakes nature that can come with voting. There were never any complete winners or losers, and at least in theory no reason for anyone to feel that their ideas had been completely pushed aside because they were in a minority. It also meant that everyone knew the precise cost of each decision made. Later on, we added a third rule that probably eliminated many squabbles, as well as helping members reach consensus more quickly: at each meeting no one had access to intoxicants until all business was concluded.

As the organization grew, we made provision for autonomous zones, where individuals and groups set up their own programs and ran them as they saw fit without any meddling from the board of directors. This became particularly important in such instances as providing meeting space for organizations such as the Feminist Writers' Guild, which had its own internal organizational structure, and a policy of keeping males out of their decision making processes and preserving their privacy.

Functions proliferated quickly, though some were transient. We had a fair number of concerts and showings of alternative films, for instance, though in this phase not as part of any coherent program or plan.

Readings sometimes seemed as much laboratories as events where people could come to hear poetry. Although we did some standard format readings, we tried a number of ways of making them more like hybrid coffee house environments. Given the resources available to us, we couldn't set up a full-time coffee shop, but we did have coffee and tea and, most important, an open discussion period at readings. This seemed to have some advantages, but not enough to continue with the simple combination of reading, coffee, and an hour or two of discussion. My sense of the coffee house environment in Lower Manhattan was that coffee was simply a common denominator for a place where people who knew each other and were actively proselytizing other participants to exchange ideas. Exchanging ideas in this instance was centered on reading poems and letting the conversations and other interactions spread out from them. Milwaukee had its share of standard coffee houses. In those that featured folk music, the songs might at times hold the audiences' attention, but they tended more to provide a background for conversation. Poetry should not become the equivalent of folksy Muzak. Other coffee shops had simply been places for conversation without any kind of regular background. Occasional readings at these, particularly at the Avant Garde on Prospect, worked extremely well, but primarily because the readings were relatively rare and the poets who got attention got it because of some mythology or aura outside poetry. That also seemed something to move away from. Some taverns had poets among their clientele - including some of our members - but as much as they provided a place to socialize, they didn't advance the poetry scene. The most they seemed to do was solidify cliques. Afternoon readings with longer discussion periods seemed to work best, but even these didn't offer the range I wanted to see. Perhaps ironically, the most successful thing at at least one of the evening readings was Pat's coffee. In these days before the wide dissemination of designer blends, she could put out an array of condiments such as ginger and cinnamon that attracted attention.

Clearly, the thing we needed was a scene, a milieu outside of dogmatic movements, where people maintained continuous and productive interrelations. There were plenty of little cliques functioning in the city, and we didn't want to simply become another one. And most of these cliques simply imitated schools that functioned on a national level. If we couldn't immediately generate poetry that was not derivative, perhaps we could potentially become a trucial zone between the already existing partisans. Or we could go over their heads to a broader audience of people who, like us, didn't like dogmas. What else could we do? We weren't sure, but we knew that something better should be possible.

Although not the essence of scene creation, we did conduct workshops in hopes of encouraging people to become more proficient at what they wanted to do. Pat and I did several on how to produce books. Mine included discussion of contents as well as the mechanics of design, type setting, layout, printing, and binding. The courses tended to tie in with two tentative programs under our general umbrella: Terminal Arts Press and Multizoa Graphics. Both of these were essentially a revival of what Jim Spencer and I had previously called Peoples Publishing. The goal was to make it possible for people to publish their own work inexpensively, however good or bad it might be, and use that as both an educational situation and as something which gave them a base from which to reach higher in their future work, or at least have a focal point in discussion with their peers. Books had been centers for the exchange of ideas, often ideas unrelated to those in the books, in my conversations with other writers for many years, and my feeling was that the closer the books discussed came to the author, the more meaningful the conversation might become. Several books published under the Terminal Arts imprint involved labor exchanges. In these situations, the author might cover the cost of plates, paper, etc., and pay me for my labor by doing jobs such as collation and proofreading. Multizoa involved interlinked subcontractors. As far as I can remember all Multizoa publications and at least half the Terminal Arts Books included the authors doing some of the low-skill work in producing their own books. Most important as an idea, though it didn't get worked into extensive practice, was making lists of Terminal Arts publications and sending them as broadsides to libraries, individuals, and other bookstores along with our regular correspondence. We hoped that the books published had a better chance of distribution with this form of piggy-back advertising.

Some "courses" and DIY groups took on peculiar methodologies. The one that remains most sublimely aetherial in my memory was a class in bread making. Since we had no ovens, the members simply talked about bread at the center, but went to each others' homes to do the actual baking. Some simply wanted to talk about bread, and didn't bake any.

Our biggest problem throughout this phase of the organization's history was lack of money. We received small donation from the beginning. In the early days, we could not buy more books for the store until we sold some of those from Marc's Bamboo Scroll and those I'd received on consignment. This was a slow process, but money did come in. By August, 1973, we had enough to open a checking account. By that time we had a number of members who were only tangentially involved. Given the youthful and impulsive nature of the group, we set it up so that checks had to be endorsed by two members to be valid. Most of the money we brought in from book sales went right back into stock. This meant we could include books that were not available on a consignment basis. Since we tried to keep the membership eclectic, we divided up ordering lists so that those active in the store got to stock books particularly important to them. Among the books that I kept on the shelves were all the titles available by Lorine Niedecker and Paul Metcalf. These weren't of much interest to the rest of the members, but became fetishes after the organization morphed into Woodland Pattern.

With our stock of poetry books on consignment and those we could order through the publishers or through Book People, we had an inventory comparable to the bookstores around U.M. in Anne Arbor or such classic stores in Chicago as Barbara's. The number of titles available at the time was considerably smaller than it would become in the 1980s, and alternative presses were still a long way from the 4 color process covers and spine lettering that became common a decade later. Although we had put together an inventory as good as any other outlet in the Midwest, with the possible exception of Jim Lowell's mail order Asphodel Books in Cleveland, we wanted to be as inclusive as possible. We also wanted to go beyond the limitations of our own interests and bring the city's readership into the decision making process. To accomplish this, we set up what we called The Terminal Arts Reading Room. Here's how I described it in an article in the January 1974 issue of Margins:

This is a section of the store with a growing library of small press publications. Anyone interested can come in and look through the collection. Hopefully, as the reading room's library expands, hard to get and no longer available publications will be accessible there - as they are not in local libraries. . . Many of the publications in the collection are available and can be ordered through Boox, Inc. This makes the number of items that the store can't stock for space or other reasons available to interested people. Boox, Inc. will also use frequency to help determine what to stock. In this way, Boox, Inc. can determine stock without relying on the biases and special interests of its personnel and can give a wider range of publications a chance to get out in the world than any small store could possibly offer if each book had to be stocked in quantity.

The reading room was not a separate compartment, but a space between the store and gallery with comfortable chairs and a growing library. People who read books from the library tended to buy books from the store even if they didn't order what they read from the library's shelves. If they did order books they'd looked at from the library shelves, they could not feel stung or burned when the books arrived, since they had had the main benefit of a bookstore over a mailorder distributor: the ability to examine and skim through books. If they found all they wanted in the book and decided not to buy it, it still contributed to the range of the city's scene. If it cut down on impulse buying, it also built up trust. Sometimes people who came to the reading room moved chairs into the gallery so they could look at the paintings in a relaxed manner. Going back to the coffee house model, this is where discussions among non-members became most important. They could last all afternoon, and as often as not involved whoever was minding the store for at least parts of the conversation. Decades later manufacturing would call a similar process "lean delivery." It may have been the wisest innovation the store offered, and its loss may have been the biggest after the organization's initial period ended. In addition to publishers who had sent books on consignment, I sent requests for single copies from many others for the reading room. I also included books that were sent to Margins but were not reviewed. Tom didn't have the money to return these to the publishers, so I gave them a consolation prize by making them available through the reading room. The ratio of books in stock to books published has not increased over the years, though the number of publications has grown exponentially since the early 1970s. With the adjunct of the reading room, I don't think any of the fabled stores on the coasts made more books any more easily available or did so with less bias.