On BlazeVox, and other publishing kerfuffles

Facebook has lit up like the 4th of July over BlazeVox's policy of asking authors for $250 toward publication of their books. The first wave involved a blog post (or 5) and some facebook comments accusing Geoffrey Gatza of running a literary scam; the second wave, of BlazeVox admirers and fellow small press publishers, has crashed dialectically on the first. The impression is of a lot of foam. But what lurks beneath the foam is important, very important.

There are a series of needs addressed by small press publishing; these needs often come in conflict. Authors want their work out, increasingly because their professional lives depend upon it. Publishers want the work out, too, but are faced with issues the author doesn't have to deal with, or even know about. How to edit the book, how to fund the book, how to get the book designed, how to distribute the book, how to market the book, how to create and maintain a webpage, how to pay for postage, how to find the time--or the help--to do all of these things--all of these are immediate, practical concerns for the publisher. Time and money.

There is also a terrific impasse at the point books get published. When I think of this problem I see in my mind's eye the AWP book fair (which takes money to get to and stay at), where hundreds upon hundreds of small press publishers sit behind tables under the klieg lights covered with their goods, and try to sell to . . . other small press publishers and writers with a vested interest (if they're lucky) with another press. At the same time, they come under the eye of writers looking for a publisher, eyes that wander quickly past if your press's mission statement does not meet their manuscript. This is not the little magazine scene of Modernism. This is a market-place where writers come because they need work. Poets need publications so that they can work as teachers. Hence a kind of frenzy around publishing. For the publisher, it's the problem not of late capitalism but of a very rudimentary form of it, one where making money is not an option (the guys in the booths sometimes do that), but where scraping by is the point. Well, scraping by and loving the fact of making things, two activities that find themselves at logger-heads.

When I started Tinfish Press in 1995, I had no idea. Over the years, I've poured thousands of my own dollars into the enterprise. That would have accomplished nearly nothing were it not for several titles that have kept us going because they sell. Let me name these titles: Sista Tongue, by Lisa Kanae; Living Pidgin, by Lee Tonouchi; Poeta en San Francisco, by Barbara Jane Reyes; from unincorporated territory, by Craig Santos Perez; Remember to Wave, by Kaia Sand. That's about it. These books have helped to pay for others, including the very worthy Erotics of Geography, by Hazel Smith, a book that seems to wear a heavy raincoat against purchase. So it's not only quality that sells a book; we've published as many good books that don't sell as good books that do. Enter market forces! The way to sell books is to publish at least some (which ones?) that will be taken up by teachers and professors; you need to create a captive audience for them. Selling books toward knowledge--but via coercion. That's the rub, I guess.

And yet students (and sometimes poets) are unaware of this mechanism. Students tell me that books cost too much (which elicits quite an accounting from me--take 40-60% off the top for distribution, add shipping costs from the mainland, etc.), and they probably do. Authors have, on occasion (usually when I screwed up) accused me of making money. I have taken not one cent from the enterprise, nor have I paid any royalties or paid any designers. When I pay people to work for us, I pay out of my pocket so that the books can keep coming.

Our current Retro Chapbook Series has been an effort, among other things, to step outside this series of market forces, to make it simple (again), to create a buzz without overhead. I've had more fun with this project than I've had in years with Tinfish. But the real need for authors is that book with a spine, the book with an aura around it, the book you might just might possibly get a job for having written. And those books, if a publisher is to make them, cost money. Yes, there is the DIY/POD model, and that's been important in bringing down costs. But that model does not open up the work to designers, who have been nearly as important to Tinfish's process as the authors. Not that spending $2,000-$3,000 dollars (plus nearly half that in shipping) is really a ton of money, compared to most consumables. It's just that with grant funding drying up, with people spending more on groceries and gas than on books . . . there are very few resources with which to make these books, especially if you don't have a good job.

Which brings me back to BlazeVox. Their catalogue is impressive. Whatever the problems with Gatza's model of funding his books or distributing them, he's gotten out a lot of books that would otherwise not be published, including a few I sent his way, including work by Goro Takano and Janna Plant. He publishes many books that simply will not sell. That is not to say they are not worth reading, however. That's another rub. Anyone who publishes books that don't sell is either a damn fool or a saint. Geoffrey may be a bit of both, but bless him for it. I'm glad to see just now that he will maintain his enterprise.

In Praise of Blurbs

I've long been a fan of those parts of a book that aren't the book itself, but situate themselves in the book's suburbs. (Yesterday, in talking to graduate students about Ashbery's Three Poems, I found myself in a long digression about Ashbery's use of the trope, the ways in which his poems are almost inevitably suburbs of a city that cannot be mapped.) Among the suburbs of a book of poems or criticism are the acknowledgments, awkward testimonies to professional debts, previous publications, friends, lovers, and children. Never have I felt so strangely happy in opening a book as when I saw a scholar dedicate his book to himself, with thanks to himself for all the hard work he had done on it. Must have been that I was writing a dissertation at the time, a thankless task if there ever was one. I have not yet had the courage to thank the pharmaceuticals that make my work possible, but those too belong in these testaments to literary non-solitude. Then there are the indexes, governed by alphabetical order, that guide us through books and--if we read them on their own--offer myriad juxtapositional jollies. Janus and Jesus. Teabagger and tempest. Derrida and deep image. Bernadette Mayer's exercise, mandating that you write a poem as an index, is a brilliant prompt.

When I first began composing blurbs, I assumed that the only rule was to use the word "brilliant." My first blurb, as I recall, contained that word (as an inside joke, as well as praise for Michelle Murphy's work). The book is Jackknife & Light, published by Avec Books in 1998. But I quickly realized that the blurb form was to criticism as haiku is to the epic poem, or a tweet to a blog post, a blog post to a vetted essay. It was the jar in Tennessee that claimed to order the wilderness of the text that (usually) preceded it. It was a see-through containment principle. And so I fell in love with the blurb form. I only wish Ron Padgett had written one of his down home, pragmatic descriptions of "the blurb" in his handbook of poetic forms, because blurbs can be poetic (if you leave out tired words like "brilliant"). Such a Padgett definition might read as follows:

"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the blurb is 'said to have been originated in 1907 by Gelett Burgess in a comic book jacket embellished with a drawing of a pulchritudinous young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Blinda Blurb. (D.A.)' The blurb is very like a definition: short, active, exacting, if also necessarily a song of praise. An extension of the marketing arm of the publishing house or office or small room (the latter devoted to small press work), the blurber (or blurbista, as she is often under the spell of caffeine) seeks to seduce a jacket reader into opening the book to gaze upon the naked words within. The blurb writer's name is crucial. It ought to be recognizable, crisp, a blurb in and of itself. Often, the blurbist's name will be followed by something of their own that is blurb-worthy--a book, a journal, a department, an institution, some prizes. How do you write a blurb? Imagine yourself privy to writing no one else has seen, but ought to read. Look in your heart and write. Make it snappy."

Late in the process of putting together Kaia Sand's new book Remember to Wave, we realized that, while Lawson Inada had sent us both delightful letters, full of riffs on Tinfish and the book, he had not come up with the requested blurb. He does not do computers, so I pushed some buttons and informed him that I was "calling in his blurb." His blurb came in much less satisfying than the letters, so Kaia had him agree to present letter copy as the blurb, which came out this way:

"Woooo weee!--this book is really something! It's both "too much" and the "total package," and then some--sort of like an "All You Can Eat" site--a "smelter"--in a rock-alcove below petroglyphs. "Sand" plus "Wave" plus "Tinfish"--that's the cool combo, combined with Vision, Heart, Smarts, Reach, Diligence, Direction, and good doses of downhome, downright Whimsy! Are you ready? Step lively now. Be on alert. Keep up with Kaia. And REMEMBER TO WAVE!"

Lawson Fusao Inada, Oregon Poet Laureate


Let me append some of my recent blurbs, with links to where the books can be bought. I've never signed a blurb, but why not begin now? Buy the book, send it to me, and I'll sign the blurb. Appropriation has its place.


Bartleby, the Sportscaster, by Ted Pelton
Ted Pelton has written an allegory about an allegory about real life. The memoir of the end of his first marriage, sandwiched between chapters about a fictional sportscaster and his silent colleague, Bartleby, offers us a sober frame for interpreting the fiction (his and Melville's). More importantly, perhaps, fiction gives us access to the life. Bartleby is real; marriage is allegory. Vice versa, too. Neither life nor art can be imitated in Pelton's novel, for they are one and the same. For an avowed Mets fan, Pelton's a pretty savvy writer.


I really enjoyed that last sentence, as the Mets have been rivals of the St. Louis Cardinals forever, and in my mind since the mid-1980s, when Doc Gooden and that catcher with a perm regularly took on Whitey Herzog's crew, and sometimes won.

Ted's book is very short; Goro Takano's, on the other hand, is a hefty piece of lumber. He wrote his novel as a dissertation and it still includes an extensive bibliography. Were I to blurb it again, I'd mention that a very fine graduate course could be made of the book and its bibliography alone. So there.

Goro Takano, With One More Step Ahead, Blazevox

In One More Step Ahead Goro Takano has composed an amazing post-national post-apocalyptic encyclopedic philosophical trans-genre literary critical untranslated novel with poems about post-war Japan, African America, Hawai`i, film, Japanese literature, television news, dementia, paralysis, a sex cult, the atom bomb, gender, race, culture, the corporate state and much more. Read this book and chant after Virginia Woolf: What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables!


Linking the blurb to a blog post I wrote on the book was a technical mistake, but I'll own it by keeping it there. As I said to a student yesterday, everything's intentional once you've put it down.

Bill Howe also has a new Blazevox book, Translanations:

iPod to a postmodern aeolian harp, William R. Howe projects the altered music of Emily Dickinson’s poems through our ear’s buds. His is not a lyric “I,” but the first person of a dyslexic subject at once trapped and transformed by the sounds of a language that perpetually evades him, and us. While his method is ostensibly that of homolinguistic translation, Howe also ventures into synecdoche (“sign that doc”), as when he offers us Dickinson’s line, “I felt siroccos crawl,” as “Eiffel Volkswagens – scrawl --” Like Janet Holmes in THE MS OF MY KIN, Howe discovers our present in Dickinson’s own. Her “The Soul has Bandaged moments --” becomes “These mole his Baghdad ad foments.” One could write the history of America from that bandaged moment to this Baghdad ad. Perhaps this is Howe. —Susan M. Schultz


Sometimes I'm asked to write blurbs to books by writers whose work I don't know. I was very happy to pass word of Jean Vengua's Meritage Press book, thusly:

Jean Vengua, Prau

Jean Vengua is a poet of the typo, the missed step, the happy and unhappy accident; in short, she is a poet of linguistic and global migration. Prau moves its reader from the Philippines to the Bay Area and back, "always mining past present tenses." In her aptly titled prose poem, "Momentum," Vengua links Gustav Mahler, her mother, Buffalo Soldiers, Marie Curie, Roberto Matta, and Jose Rizal in a dance of histories real and imagined. The momentum of her writing brings together what is otherwise ripped asunder: "That is to make beautiful where the dissonance begins to tear."
--Susan M. Schultz, Editor of Tinfish Press


And there, with my moniker, Editor of Tinfish Press, I end this blog on blurbs. Someday I may get around to blurbing the blog from my perch in the Ahuimanu suburbs.

[Ed. note: the critic who thanked himself was Thomas Vogler in Preludes to Vision: The Epic Venture in Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hart Crane. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1971. 222pp. I remember it was a good book.]

"Good grammar is always glamour, girls": Goro Takano's _With One More Step Ahead_

Years ago, around the turn of the last century, as one might say, I bought a copy of Richard Wright's haiku via the internet. It wasn't that I was a Wright fan, though Native Son had a big impact on me in high school. Nor was it for love of haiku, a form I appreciate mainly in the abstract (though I'll be teaching haiku in a few short weeks). I got the book of Wright's haiku because we were admitting a student to our Ph.D. program--a Japanese national--who had written on them. It was rumored that the student's mother was an important tanka writer in Japan (I have no idea if that is true). As someone whose primary memory of Wright involves an alarm clock, a rat, and a Chicago tenement, the haiku surprised me. They seemed so classical, so wrapped up in nature (despite their provenance in Paris), so faithful to the intentions of their form. "In the damp darkness, / Croaking frogs are belching out / The scent of magnolias," goes #227. Equally intriguing was the Japanese student of Wright, one Goro Takano, whose English was quick, word rich, and accented. Once we were on speaking terms in the hall, I asked him how the Richard Wright project was going. He indicated he'd moved on.

Goro returned to Japan to work on his dissertation. I got an email from him, asking if I'd direct it; it had become a novel, he said, and he'd been working on it for years. He'd started writing in Japanese, then turned to translating the manuscript into English. It had taken on a life of its own in English, insisted on being written in this "stepmother tongue." One of the novel's characters, in other words, was a language that was not its writer's blood relative (not sure I like this parsing of blood and not-blood, but there you have it). As a poet I was unsure how to take this request, but Goro sent writing samples, odd parables more reminiscent of Kafka than Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver. So I said yes. It proved one of those marvelous dissertations that directs its director. I was left to fling pages full of questions at Goro by email slingshot, not so much to recommend revisions as to help us both through knotty philosophical and literary issues. "Is this a Japanese or an American novel?" I remember asking at one point.

Now, on reading the proofs of the large novel--With One More Step Ahead--from Blazevox [books], I realize how little meaning that question ever had. This novel is post-national in the best sense. An American-language novel with African American influences, its primary subject is the amnesia suffered in post-World War II Japan. An American novel, it involves a lot of Hawaiian material. A novel in part about Hawai`i, it engages the Japanese fascination with these islands. The novel owes a lot, perhaps, to the contemporary Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, who has also written about Hawai`i, but its intellectual edge is sharper, its encyclopedic investigations of contemporary literature, film, and gender politics more attuned to the academic eye and ear. Ah, but what to make of a narrator/translator who suffers dementia, a husband/writer who communicates only by moving his eyeballs, a sex cultist named Cosmo who has no gender, a TV producer who wants pathos at the expense of his subjects' happiness, or the boundaries of the A-bomb dome broken by lovers who copulate on ground zero? If much of the energy of the novel is intellectual, it manifests itself in surreal, time-criss-crossing plots and subplots that will make it a page turner, once it escapes the pdf form I'm reading it in. Or is it that I simply haven't yet imagined it and me with a Kindle?

Amusing, yes, that Goro Takano, the expert on three line haiku, emerges here as the author of a 379-page novel (including bibliography!), its pages slathered with words, complicated syntax, an English that is not quite that spoken by a native--sometimes better. This reader became so involved in the subtle differences between her own English and Takano's that actual English words began to become foreign. Take the word "distressful." I was convinced it was the neologism of a non-native speaker until I looked it up on merriamwebster.com and realized that it IS an English word. Goro's prose enacts the (English) language in the process of being reinvented and rediscovered. It's an exciting read on many levels, but this is one that I find crucial to the overall effect of the novel. Nowhere is this as apparent as in the poems Takano includes in the novel, poems by Lulu, the demented narrator/translator. Lulu writes in various modes, including the ballad. Chapter 23 begins with a quote from John Ashbery's "37 Haiku" in A Wave: "He is a monster like everyone else but what do you do if you're a monster." Then we get Lulu's proto-Bob Dylan ballad, which opens:

Hard rain is falling down.
All over this small town.
Misty cold midnight.
Only a few city lights are on.

The poem's tone is odd, to say the least, rather like one of Ashbery's funny/sad poems. "Finnish Rhapsody" comes to mind, though that poem's not so jangly as this one.

Her dearest daughter is gone.
Run over by a truck.
That was also a rainy night.
Her kid was walking after her.

As it takes its nine page course, this poem comes to record the intense ethical conflict of a TV reporter over whether he should have saved the girl or recorded her death on film.

I can't say for sure if that poem was written in that way because Takano is a second language writer in English; in some ways, the poem reminds me of Sarith Peou's simple yet searing poems in Corpse Watching, also composed in non-native English. But there are moments in the book where the second language English emerges, making the writing more effective. Take "Lulu's Fifth Poem: 'Tanka: I Am.'" Ron Padgett's The Handbook of Poetic Forms defines the tanka thusly:

"Tanka (from the Japanese for 'short poem') are mood pieces, usually about love, the shortness of life, the seasons, or sadness. Tanka use strong images and may employ the poetic devices, such as metaphor and personification, that haiku avoid." (187)

Takano's / Lulu's poem opens in unsurprising English (the formatting is going to hell, sorry):

I am a spider
whose dewy web is still
missing many
warps and woofs; yet,
I am master of myself.

I am a mist
who spreads gradually
far and wide,
while still searching for
a chance to confine myself.

But as the poem goes on, its English gets less predictably English. Take this section:

I am a rain;
I won't chase anymore
those who scattered
away--Because, look, here's
someone waiting for me.

Or:

I am a mud
drying up with
a good number of
footsteps of the people
masking their true faces.

Or the last line of the final section:

I am a forest
who flourishes deep inside
of a newborn's mind;
as time goes by, maybe, I'll
be doomed to soil and wane.

Some native English speakers could come up with a line that combines "be doomed to soil" with "be doomed to wane," (the aforementioned Ashbery comes to mind) but something tells me the line is more easily arrived at if these words remain somewhat foreign. And phrases like "I am a mud" and "I am a rain," which seem to ask for the reader to take out the indefinite article, or to add something to the end, like "spot" or "drop," are effective precisely because they resist native fluency. They are more like lines from Peou's "Corpse Watching":

Corpse watching provides excitement,
Corpse watching is filled with fear
The corpses are someone's father, brother, sister, mother--
Sometimes corpse watching brings tears. (np)

It would be "better" English to write that "corpse watching makes me cry," but it would not be more effective communication. Nor would the first two lines benefit, in this context, from being "corrected" out of its cliches, its generalizations. Because, for once, these abstractions work--largely because of the Cambodian genocide that lurks in every line of this poem and the eponymous chapbook. But also because what Evelyn Ch'ien calls "weird English." She writes "about the ushering in of a global subjectivity, in which the diaspora consciousness caused a number of writers to relate their experience polylingually."

To read Takano's entire novel is to be constantly jolted by the often miniscule differences between one's own English and Goro Takano's English. We (native speakers of English) are constantly reminded that we, like Lulu, are translators of this text, even if our translations are from English to English. The frequent parenthetical interruptions by "Translator" emphasize this difference between the American novel we think we're reading and the Japanese content--and/or vice versa. While Ch`ien's interest is primarily in weird Englishes spoken by immigrants, or Pidgin spoken by non-dominant groups (see Lisa Kanae and Lee Tonouchi's works), Takano is a writer who studied in the United States and returned to Japan, where he is now associate professor of English at a medical school. So, while he is now teaching "weird English," he is not immersed in it. His English now belongs more to Japan than to the United States, although his book will find most of its readers in this country. How appropriate that his book be published by Blazevox, "a publisher of weird little books." At first I disliked that phrase, thought to tell the publisher, Geoffrey Gatza, as much. Now I get it. Weird is good, though this book is not "little" in any sense of the word. It's complicatedly astonishing.