Some news from the editor/poet

At the end of August, the poetry journal, Ladowitch, will feature the first 12 of the Traherne series of Memory Cards. Subscribe via the Apple app store. The editors are Jordan Davis & Chris Edgar, who used to run The Hat.

This Fall, Essay Press will be publishing an on-line chapbook of my Traherne poems in their EP Series. Andy Fitch is the editor. Here's the draft cover:

And next year, Talisman House will publish the full run of 100 memory cards based on Thomas Traherne's first century of meditations. The editor/publisher is Ed Foster, who published some of my early reviews and poems back when they were in Hoboken and we were all a lot younger. I also attended one of the Russian/American poetry shindigs in Hoboken in 1994 (or so) and have fond--and troubling--memories of the event.

A poetics of publishing, part deux

This is the second of two facebook posts I put up this week. The first was removed; if you want to know its contents, ask. Otherwise, I think this series of comments speaks for itself. They answer the question posed in the box.

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Susan M. Schultz

23 hrs · Edited ·

Last year my small press publishing class hosted several publishers, by skype and by embodied presence. Among them, Charles Alexander and Kyle Schlesinger impressed us with their voluble enthusiasm, their sheer love of what they do. But Eric Chock, who co-founded Bamboo Ridge Press in 1979, talked honestly about the "scars" editors get over time. There's something about being an editor and publisher in a place that is radically diverse and post/colonial that causes scarring. My "home" community is probably "white experimental," but my publishing practice is not. That makes certain assumptions in publishing--reciprocity, for example--much more rare than they are in coterie situations. Let's face it, a lot of publishing concerns are coterie or devoted to a single ethnicity/race/nation, and that too has its place. Hell, Modernism was coterie, and there are publishers who specialize in Asian American or indigenous American or Hawaiian or African American literatures. Or in marking the generally invisible category of "Euro-American literature." That's important work.

Over time, I have come to realize that Tinfish Press's vision is impossible in the real world; King Tender had that right years ago in a review of Lee Tonouchi's book she published in the old Jacket magazine. I still hold to that notion of a community composed of difference--and hell, it works in my daughter's soccer community, or my son's school--thank you, Cecil Giscombe, for reminding me that diversity is not always difficult. But there are hopes that need to be "surrendered," as CA Conrad said in a very different context at Naropa in October. In that surrender there remains the present tense of making beautiful objects out of poems, which is what really matters. Eric Chock, again, laughed one time at one of our long lunches, which we share every few years or so, about how he used to think I wanted "to change Hawai`i literature." Oh my. Perhaps, in my middle age, I no longer want to change anything, just be in the practice of publishing and teaching. Publishing as meditation, rather than agitation and the expectations it arouses. Publishing as a possible world. Albert Saijo in his cottage in Volcano telling me he no longer wanted to be published was a great lesson, too.

I want to thank those of you who commented on my post the other day and helped me think and feel through this complex of emotions attached to publishing. Sometimes the lessons I think I've learned return and need to be rerun with a difference (one hopes positive). I've been asked to take that post down. Because I do not want to feel wedded to my own strong emotions, or disturb anyone else's, I will do so. What hurts and angers us is our teacher, and I will look to that teacher for further advice over the next few years of publishing and being a poet. I will also allow a feeling of joy occasionally to wreak havoc with my scars.

Announcing publication of WOODRAT FLAT, by Albert Saijo

Read more about the book, and order it here.

For more on the late Albert Saijo, see here.

There will be a gallery show, a symposium, and a book launch in Hilo in March. Tinfish's editor will keep you posted.

Tinfish Press publishes experimental poetry from the Pacific region. We recently launched a new poetry reading series, in collaboration with Na Mea / Native Books in Honolulu.

Please support Tinfish's work by buying our books and/or by donating to the press (there's a button on the website). We are non-profit.

Small Press Publishing (English 713): The Material Text from Emily Dickinson to Albert Saijo

In the reader for my Small Press Publishing course, essays by Jerome McGann and George Bornstein hammer down the materiality of the text. McGann shows how Yeats's "rag and bone shop of the heart" refers, in large part, to the rags gathered to make paper. While McGann considers the rag-picker to be like Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, a figure of nostalgia, I'm more inclined to think of the rags as the origin of the poem, precisely because they compose the paper the poem is written and then printed on. McGann's essay considers Emily Dickinson's manuscripts vis-à-vis what happens when they are printed, however "faithfully." Bornstein discusses the ways interpretation alters when the text moves from manuscript to journal to book to Norton Anthology.  Anyone who's taught out of one of those Nortons knows to what extent the poem disappears into the apparatus of the canon, the literary history that is only implied by the heft of the volume itself.

Years ago, when we visited Albert Saijo every so often on the Big Island, I mentioned Dickinson's manuscripts, the Franklin edition of the fascicles, to him. His handwritten pages reminded me of hers; nothing was normalized into lines, straight or not! I ordered the two volume set for him (he paid me back). When I went to see Laura Saijo a few weeks ago to talk about publishing his Woodrat Flat, poems from the 1980s and early 1990s in northern California, she suggested I take some of his poetry books. I asked only for the Dickinson volumes, but of course ended up taking others, mainly books with some sign of Albert in them. There were at least two lovely Joanne Kyger inscriptions to him in books of hers.

Yesterday I prepared some class time for moving backwards from the final versions of Saijo's poems in Bamboo Ridge #100, from his Bamboo Ridge book of the late 1990s, from the edited typescript of his forthcoming Tinfish book (edited by Jerry Martien), from the original pile of poems and scatter that Laura sent me, and--finally--with all its Benjaminian aura intact, several manuscript pages. But how marvelous to realize that there was a further "poem" by Saijo that led to all of these. In the first volume of the Franklin Dickinson fascimiles, one page was dog-eared.  I went there and found that Saijo had written in his own pencil above many of Dickinson's words; he had translated her handwriting into his. Here's a photograph of that beautiful moment:

Here is Dickinson, interpreted by Saijo, both using pencil.

This is how Bamboo Ridge Press renders Saijo's writing

This is a screen shot of the Tinfish manuscript, Woodrat Flat, which our intern Kailana Kahawaii is scanning in.

There's a shock in looking back from these all-caps pages dense with print to Saijo's original page (below). It's the shock of losing something, of seeing blunt force where so many tones seem to have been intended, of seeing mass produced product where the workshop had been. This is more than nostalgia; there is something lost in translation from pencil to type.

What I wonder most is how to preserve some of the manuscript in the book. Bamboo Ridge uses occasional scanned pages in amid the caps, but that's only a gesture at the motivation of the writer, the odd grace to his handwriting, the "authenticity" that I usually abhor except here--I'll be asking our designer, Allison Hanabusa, if there might be a third way. Part of me thinks not, but Julia Wieting, a member of the class suggested that alternatives of someone else's handwriting (a form of mimicry that sounds wrong to me, but it may simply be my lack of imagination, or attachment to Albert himself); others suggested a book that might include a sheaf of these pages, or a set of two books. We do not have enough manuscript pages for that, but perhaps a few individual pages slipped into the book? That takes me back to the strong feeling I have when I touch these old pieces of paper of his.

I'm not usually one to coo over manuscripts, though I recall seeing a typed page of an odd Wallace Stevens poem in a case at Yale's Sterling Library and feeling a strange chill. That piece of paper made it clear that someone actually HAD written that odd poem, in a way that seeing the poem in The Palm at the End of The Mind never could. Still, that was typed, and Saijo's work is printed in pencil on smudgy pieces of thick paper; one of these manuscript pages has a tiny round burn mark. The book is, in part, about being a marijuana farmer in California, after all! Perhaps because I knew Albert, albeit not well, these few pieces of paper seem, if not quite sacred, then imbued with his presence, two years after he died, several decades after his pencil wrote on this piece of paper.

Here is the Saijo poem in manuscript

Charles Alexander, who joined us on a laptop via Skype, talked about how much small press publishers love when they do, and at moments like the one last night, I felt that rush of joy in making books (or, in my case, making it possible for them to be made). To the left is a photograph of the class huddled around Charles's head on the computer screen. The room is cold. The weather outside so blustery that the building's louvers have taken to singing; they sound like the wax-paper covered combs we used to "play" as children.


Notes:

George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, Cambridge UP, 2001.

Emily Dickinson, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, Volume 1, edited by R.W. Franklin, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1981.

Jerome McGann, "Introduction" to Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, Princeton UP, 1993.

The nearly completed syllabi in Documentary Writing & Small Press Publishing

On the graduate level, I'll be teaching a course in Small Press Publishing; much of what follows is contingent, but the flux is more sea-worthy than it was:

https://sites.google.com/site/smallpresspublishinguhm/syllabus-spring-2014

On the sophomore honors level, I'm teaching a course in Documentary Writing:

https://sites.google.com/site/documentarywritingspring2014/syllabus

Both syllabi will ramify, especially at the beginning of the course. In any case, I'm really looking forward to both these classes.

Conclusion to Small Press Dicussion

My conversation with Mark Wallace and Carol Mirakove concludes here.

Part Two of a conversation between Carol Mirakove, Mark Wallace and Tinfish's Editor

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace: Cross-Posted with Mark Wallace's blog, here.

Part Two

(Part One can be found here). Or here.

There has been some debate around the expectation that small presses should abide by rules and guidelines versus small-press publishing being fueled by a gift economy and donations. What kinds of transparency does a publisher owe to their readers and authors in terms of submission guidelines and publishing expectations?

SMS: I think we're caught between two models right now. The old model was self-publishing and micro-press publishing. That's where Tinfish started, publishing chaps of 100 copies and a very short run journal that was xeroxed. But we rather quickly became a “real publisher,” meaning that our books cost more to produce and came out in larger runs. The production values went way up. So there was more need for resources. It's very easy to get big fast, because there are so many worthy manuscripts floating around out there. And I have no objection to presses that publish a lot—Salt and BlazeVox come to mind. That doesn't mean they aren't publishing good books or that they don't care about what happens to their product. They are working with possibility, which is a finer thing than prose . . . While I would never publish as many books as they do, I applaud them for their efforts. And, if a publisher tries to live off of his or her work, why not? It may seem “suicidal,” as someone wrote on an fb page, but so much more gratifying than many other jobs with steady incomes.

If a press asks for money from its authors, something I have no problem with, I do think they should be up front about it. Otherwise, I don't think authors need to know the details, except perhaps to realize that the work of publishing involves a lot of resources by someone(s) else—editing, designing, printing, distributing, marketing, and so on. Some of the nastiness of the recent discussions revolved around a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and resources involved. My students sometimes tell me that they are going to make money with their poems. One class accused me of not taking them seriously when I laughed at this notion. We need to disabuse others of the notion that seriousness = money-making, while letting them know that it takes money to put out a product. Our most recent Tinfish book cost us over $2,000 to print (600 copies) and I bought advertising cards and sent out review copies. The book could have been less gorgeous, but we made our choices—it could also have been more gorgeous and a lot more expensive to make.

It's also a good idea, as Craig Santos Perez and others argue, for authors to work harder to promote their own work, and work that they think is important. The problem there is that the fine line between disseminating important information and sounding like someone selling refrigerators (though my local Sears salesman was a former student!), is easily crossed. Keep the emphasis on the work, is my advice. Then make sure people know about it.

CM: Thank you for breaking that down.

MW: The question of the transparency that publishers owe to readers and authors is an important one, and I like Susan’s answer. But is there any reason that the focus of transparency, even in this conversation, should be on publishers alone? Should there be transparency (and is there any?) in Creative Writing MFA programs? What about in education institutions more broadly? Or in the work of political organizations and corporations? The fact is, in all those larger social institutions, there’s little and sometimes no transparency. That lack of transparency serves the interests of those with most access to money and most power.

In the case that led to this discussion, a lot of the expressed frustration with small press publishers, and the expressed frustration about that frustration, comes from a context of massive lack of transparency and honesty in multiple institutions, and not just in relationship to literature. And while many small press publishers, Tinfish and Bloof and others, have been lately explaining and confessing the details of their practices, corporations fuel their power over public life by deploying much larger resources under legal cover and never have to mention it.

CM: Mark, you offer good points in helping us to get out of a myopic framework. At the same time, we don’t interact with small-press publishers on the same terms of MFA programs or corporations. I believe this merits a distinct (and useful) thread. The question I asked around transparency was specifically between a writer who might become a press author and the press. This is a different dimension than those in the relationships you bring up, e.g., I may get my MFA certificate based on the criteria spelled out in the application process, but the meaning of the MFA may not match the implied promise of the degree.

That said, I think one of the best parts of operating in the small-press publishing world is that a sketchy or shady corporate framework is not the standard. There are several people working hard to demand that corporations be more transparent, and I don’t think there’s anyone arguing that there should be low-transparency on any corporate or institutional agreements, so I don’t think it’s true that we’re asking more of publishers more than we are of more powerful institutions, even though the fact that we are often more successful in having reciprocal conversations with publishers makes it seem as though they are subject to more critical scrutiny.

MW: I appreciate you trying to focus the discussion more specifically. Your points have also helped locate for me one of the things I find myself concerned about in this conversation. We’ve put the focus on what writers might ask of and need from publishers, but I’m not sure we can ask that question fairly without also asking what publishers might ask of or need from writers. I think part of the reason that there was recent controversy was an assumption by too many writers that publishers are more or less just a writer service industry, doing the janitorial work of creating a nice clean place for writers to put themselves center stage. I’m not saying anybody thinks this consciously, but that’s often in effect what happens. It’s too easy for writers to think of small press publishers just as people serving to advance a writer’s career, instead of as people who are often writers themselves and who are also working collaboratively to put forward the interests of an interconnected group of people.

SMS: So the new model is “real publishing.” And there's a need for it, because MFA grads and others need jobs. To get a job teaching you need to have published. And you need “real” books, not chaps, journal publications. No quarrel there. The quarrel comes in when the relationship between author and publisher becomes one of producer and—how to put this?--hired but unpaid help. This model is much less personal, much more capitalistic, and much less equitable. Another danger with this second model is that it makes publishing less a visionary enterprise than a business. (Not that businesses can't be visionary, but I would rather use another metaphor for small press publishing, something that describes an enterprise between business and gift economy.) Tinfish Press has been lucky that our vision has—in some instances, if not in many others—proved marketable, especially for classroom use. “Experimental poetry from the Pacific” has been rare, until recently. We helped create a market for it, and the texts with which to teach it. Several of our books have sold in the thousands. They help to pay for those that sell in the hundreds, or in the tens.

The discussion reminds me, in odd and mostly unparallel ways, of conversations in the adoption world. We're talking about a practice (adoption, small press publishing) that has a value (spiritual, familial, aesthetic) apart from the monetary, but which inevitably enters the marketplace. Then the question becomes, to what extent does our pure ethics inevitably get muddied by realities? And how can we act ethically, even after acknowledging our lack of purity?

CM: Susan, you ask a complex question and I appreciate the depth of it. To begin, I believe we can act ethically by making a conscious effort to communicate constructively and with respect for each other. If you think someone is naive, maybe try to remember when you were naive and be a friend, be a neighbor -- if not to an individual, at least to the art.

If your goal is truly to have another poet shut up and sit down, I want to ask about the violence of that reaction.

Mark, I am glad you bring up that publishers might ask things of authors; it may be the question at the crux of this upset. I, personally, believe completely in cooperation. But, I continue to feel that disclosing the terms of cooperation after a manuscript has been accepted is not a good model, and I don't believe that mode is likely to yield positive relationships. Maybe I am proposing an undue burden on the publisher to have figured out what is needed from authors -- I do appreciate that a lot of publishing labor is already invisible and thankless -- but there is right now an opportunity for presses to consider publishing terms, and if they are stated up front then we might avoid vitriolic controversy.

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.