Parts of a Keynote Lecture at the ‘Writing and the Small Press’
Conference at the University
of Salford, March 2012.
(There is a fine review of the conference by David Kennedy in
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Volume 4: Number 2: September
2012.)
I like and, as you’ll see later, I
distrust, the arbitrary alphabetic democracy of the academic bibliography. It
pleases me to see
Fisher, Allen. Place. Hastings:
Reality Street,
2005.
next to
Goethe, J.W. Faust Book One. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987.
in the ‘works cited’ that completes
one of my essays;
or (to stay with Ken Edwards’ press
Reality Street
or its precursor Reality Studios, for a moment) to spot
Edwards, Ken. The We Expression:
The First Person Plural in Poetry. London:
Reality Studios, 1985.
This is a fugitive self-publication
by Edwards, a Spartan mimeographic production, largely forgotten, rubbing
alphabetically-contiguous slightly-foxed covers with an acknowledged classic of
post-War poetic mediocrity, one re-designed smartly through many trade
editions:
Larkin, Philip. The Whitsun
Weddings. London:
Faber and Faber, 1964.
I like all this because it says:
this small press book is as important to my essay or article as the one
published by the mainstream press. Indeed, there is more on Fisher than on
Goethe and definitely more on Edwards than on Larkin in their respective episodes
in my book When Bad Times Made for Good
Poetry. I like it simply because it allows Reality Street to announce its vital
mediation of the work cited on a level field of literary production with OUP
and Faber and Faber. I like all this because the names of small presses are
often colourful compared to those of many commercial presses: they intoxicate
the sobriety of the bibliography. As Nigel Wheale said: ‘The only opulence
which small presses and magazines traditionally allow themselves is their name’.
(9) For example (and in alphabetical order):
Arthur Shilling
Burning Deck
Crater
Damaged Goods
Excello and Bollard
Fleeting Monolith
Galloping Dog
Hangman
If p then q
Joe Soap’s Canoe
Knives Forks and Spoons
Landfill
Magenta
New Departures
Oystercatcher
Pig
Queen of Sheba
Reality Street
Spectacular Diseases
Toads Damp Press
Unidentified Flying Printer
Veer
Writers Forum
X Press
Your Poetry
ZimZalla
Talking about
the small or little presses can feel like cartography of a peculiarly Borgesian
kind: if you’re not careful, the map you make turns out to be the size of the
territory; it’s all or nothing. Summary fails the totality. But I distrust the
temptations of the publisher’s list, the enchantments of the alphabetic
bibliographic, which leaves us insensible in the face of informational
overload. Bibliographic democracy evades (for a moment only) the true
configurations of the power relations of the poetry world, say between the
respective economic and cultural capital of Reality Studios and Faber, their actual
(though shifting) positions in the field of literary production. The academic
representation of small presses, however masterly, as in Wolfgang
Görtschacher’s two massive tomes, or in the recording of Mimeo Mimeo’s journal and blog, breaks down into publisher
profiles, lists of published books and pamphlets, authors, dates, print runs,
the minutiae of printing methods, paper quality, the all-important binding and
– less often – statistics of sales, and accounts of distribution methods, the
last two not always a good story. There are taxonomic distinctions between
small presses and independent presses, private presses and commercial presses
to be negotiated, between art books and small press books, in faintly
fetishistic ways – and that doesn’t even begin to mention little magazines!
The archive or
its burrowers provide additional addictive narratives: the technical histories
of the little presses, with their branches in bibliography, librarianship,
information science, in the Sinclairesque lore of second-hand and rare book
selling, and in the practice and history of publishing generally. Such
particularity is important for the complete mapping of an otherwise incognito
bibliosphere, but this obsession with process and product (material production
and material object) takes us away from the literature produced into hopeless
business studies – by which I mean the study of largely hopeless businesses!
The results are closer to studies of micro-breweries than to discussions of
literary form or the poetics of contemporary writing, which is normally the
focus of my work as a critic. (As a poet I’m obviously interested in the
materiality of my books and booklets!) In short: I like all this detail, could
wallow in it for ever, but I distrust its propensity to obscure the aesthetic,
even where the aesthetics of book production itself is concerned. We build
histories that are distinct from the history of writing, and from the practice
of writing, at their perils.
However, before
I attempt to bring history and practice together, I want to look back at an
organisation called the Association of Little Presses, which was formed in 1965
by Stuart Montgomery of Fulcrum and Bob Cobbing of Writers Forum, and which
continued through what I have seen described as the ‘golden age of the little
presses’ – much under the influence of Bob Cobbing –
as a ‘loosely knit association of individuals
running little presses who have grouped together for mutual self-help and
encouragement’ (n.d 1990/1 cat), until December 1992 when Cobbing resigned
(partly to spend more time with his family, or rather his family magazine:
Cobbing Kith and Kin). ALP fell into
almost immediate disarray despite having (by 1990) over 300 members, many of
them publishing poetry. Two major casualties were the regular listings magazine
PALPI (
Poetry and Little Press Information) and the annual catalogue which
carried publishers’ adverts and as comprehensive listings and addresses as was
possible, and which was produced in editions of 500. In 1990-1991, I provided a
concise introduction to the eleventh annual catalogue: it sums up much of what
I felt about the little presses up to 20 years ago, and much since. Ken Edwards
of Reality Street
had preceded me 5 years earlier with
his introduction
in which he defined the small presses in terms that perhaps have more in common
with Eastern European samiszdat than micro-publishing. The love – the sheer
amateurism in its real sense – is what
essentially divides the small presses from the professionalism of the big
commercial presses, a world in which ‘market research has indicated the
potential for another commodity’, in Edwards’ words. (1985) His themes – of
community and commodity – are ones I consciously pick up in
my introduction five years later, which
is entitled ‘Perfect Knowledge’ and which was dedicated to the memory of the
great publisher (and poet) Asa Benveniste who had died a few months previously.
{At this point I
read the document.}
In some ways
nothing much changed in the first ten years after I made that statement, in
terms of the organisation and systems of the small presses. The gift economy
described jocularly at the end cannot be dismissed as simple embarrassment:
exchange is a major index of creative environment, poetic culture. As Bourdieu
points out the avant-garde has little else to exchange but its lofty ideas –
and its tatty pamphlets, I’d add. Very little has occurred in the last 20 years
as regards the absorption of the avant-garde by the mainstream (not that I’m
advocating that, but I find Lucie-Smith’s remark still suggestive). One could
point to the single example of Keith Tuma’s 2001 Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry which
practised ‘larding’, i.e. mainstream poets are placed next to non-mainstream
ones: Larkin next to Cobbing, cris cheek next to Carol Ann Duffy, instructive
accidents of dates of birth. Oxford, however,
refused to glorify the volume with the imprimateur of The Oxford
Book of…. which such a comprehensive coverage deserves, and which
undermines the very accommodation the book proposes. However, there has been a
revolution in the writing of criticism
about this work, in which Tuma participated, and witnessed by this very
conference. The kind of criticism I’ve written and published in the last ten
years (and books and journal I’ve edited), was difficult in the previous ten –
and unthinkable in the decade before that, the eighties, reviews aside. I
couldn’t have found a publisher for my PhD on Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and the
British Poetry Revival when I was awarded it in 1988; I had to wait until 2005
to complete that project. It is impossible not to reflect on just how important
Peter Barry and Robert Hampson’s New
British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible of 1991 was in that respect.
And, vitally, it contains a lengthy piece on little magazines and publishers by
Roger Ellis, acknowledging the importance of material production to this
poetry. All well and good, but academic criticism has not led (as I’d hoped
with my own criticism) to a revaluation of British poetry and the wider
appreciation of alternative forms: perhaps awareness without assimilation. In
fact, this body of criticism endlessly reiterates the narrative of exclusion
and the concomitant eulogies of praise to the sustaining activities of the little
presses.
One result of
this lack of assimilation is, I believe, the impulse amongst the larger small
presses – Salt, Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Shearsman and Reality Street – to issue retrospective
Collected Works by important figures such as John James, JH Prynne, Roy Fisher,
Lee Harwood, David Chaloner, Tom Raworth, Gael Turnbull, and Bill Griffiths, in
the early years of this century. Unassimilated into the canon, they are, to use
the vocabulary of Pierre Bourdieu, which has already crept in here once or twice,
consecrated outside it instead (which in the long run may be a better thing).
To
publish a Collected Works you need the ability to produce large books and POD
enables that. Which brings us to technology. I want to pause on the large, and
obvious, changes that have occurred over that last 20 years, again,
concentrated in the second decade: digitalisation and digital media of various
kinds with various and even contradictory effects. With POD a pretty lean
outfit can publish many books and bigger books. Salt, for example, has always
reminded me of one of those either courageous or foolish small dogs in the park
that bark at you as if they were five times their real size. In some ways,
though, POD made commercially available what had been the MO of many smaller
presses for years, particularly after difficult and messy mimeography gave way
to clean and flexible photocopying. To run off a small number and do some more
when (or if) needed, whether that’s on a substantial scale, with ownership of
the means of production (Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum had over a thousand
publications effectively in print) or like Ship of Fools, where Patricia
Farrell and I were running booklets off now and then on others’ machines, was
both economical and doable.
POD can be used to make books, bigger,
brighter, more frequent, but essentially the same sorts of book as before. POD
is only one of the new digital technologies, of course, and we might
legitimately wonder where the small presses will go with it. ‘What is this
technology telling us?’ asks David Shields, fashionably plunderphoning Kevin
Kelly, in his book Reality Hunger,
‘Copies don’t count anymore; copies of isolated books, bound between inert
covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning
as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and
copied again. What counts are ways in which these common copies of a creative
work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated,
enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.’
(Shields, p. 30)
Digital
technology can be used for the publishing of poetry and for the generation of a
new type of poetry, texts that morph into the fluid channels of the medium, as
in the work of, and as exemplified by the website of, Caroline Bergvall. Or, as
Tom Jenks says: ‘After
years of seeing the page as simply a place to put words, my increasing
familiarity with computers has gradually transformed my practice to the extent
that I now view myself as a producer of illuminated manuscripts, incorporating
images and non-verbal figures to work in a way that is as much about the eye as
the ear and the voice. The screen, far from being a stifling, standardising
influence, can be liberating.’ (Jenks 2008)
However, it’s
surprising how the internet is often used more effectively for the publicising
and selling of poetry, whether conventional or digitally produced for the page,
like Jenks’s. The ALP Catalogue seems archaic and slow looking back at it now.
Google and links take you to easily navigable catalogues of contemporary
presses, where you can often read samples of a book as a pdf, see its cover,
read the blurb and author page, and buy online: Shearsman’s website is a model
of this. Perfect knowledge is almost possible, given the links and the energy
required to click on them.
Brian Reed asks:
‘Why limit oneself to publishing a chapbook with a small press when sound files
uploaded to the internet can travel further, faster, and cheaper? Nowadays many
poets have Web pages that promote the full range of their work, including
everything from blogs to poem drafts to webcasts of their latest public
readings.’ (282)
Indeed, why
publish a chapbook with a small press at all, with those possibilities at one’s
fingertips? And that was certainly the attitude around the millennium, when the
pamphlet went into decline as the large POD books rose. The chief surprise of
the last 10 years has been the re-birth of the printed pamphlet, whether the
cheap samizhat model like yt communications of Bonney and Kruk or the fine
letterpress model of Richard Parker’s Crater Press. There is even, and for the
first time, a major national prize for publishers of these fascicles, which
ensures their persistence. Obdurate but ostensibly obsolete, I contend that
they are reactions to the extensive catalogues of POD presses, and the
ever-growing size of monumental books, collected or otherwise. I can talk! Twentieth Century Blues was huger than
I’d imagined, but most of it had been produced as short run pamphlets first,
like the ones I’m considering. Indeed, like me before them, newer authors may
not have had the bulk of work and a short sample seems a sensible preliminary
showing. But there’s something beyond the practicalities. I think people have
re-discovered that the pamphlet is a good format to access units of poetry: a
20 pp sequence in a 20 pp pamphlet offers readerly satisfaction (Nicholas
Royle’s Nightjar has similarly focussed on the neatness of single short stories
packaged as booklets). In short, a pamphlet provides the satisfaction of
literal (or literary) and psychological closure. You hold the object in your
hands; you hold its contents (complete) in your mind. Form and function of one
interinanimates form and function of the other. When unique design is added to
text, it’s irresistible.
Something
comparable and instructive is going on in the alternative music scene. ‘There’s
more vinyl than ever – sometimes in editions as low as 200 – and the strike
rate for memorable LPs is way better than for CDs’, says Derek Walmsley of The Wire. ‘They’re produced with
passion, with vivid sleeves and quick turnaround.’ (issue 335: p. 48) The
analogy is obvious.
This
retro-analogue jive is a reaction against the world of instant downloading:
like the pamphlet there’s a human investment in the physicality of groove and
tape over intangible e-files. The interaction between media is interesting too.
Reed says that ‘broad media literacy … has had profound effects on how certain
authors write’, as Tom Jenks points out, but he names Caroline Bergvall,
Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök. ‘One consequence has been the emergence of
figures who define a poem less as a one-off artwork … than as a cluster of
related works in different media.’ (282)
Caroline Bergvall’s work often versions into print (including pamphlets)
and back into digital media (not to mention installation work and performance),
just as record outfits are producing LPs, CDs, DLs and even cassettes,
sometimes packaged in ingenious combinations.
Musician James
Kirby made all of his work available online, free, in a Creative Commons-like
gesture, but after a few years ‘it had grown so vast it had reached the point
where nothing could be seen’. (1 p. 14). He begs other artists to contemplate
the ‘long-term consequences of making everything available, never to be
erased’. (14) The internet’s dream as a ‘fluid set of possibilities’, he says,
becomes ‘a vast online mausoleum’. (14) I wonder how many poets will be tempted
to resist the additive linking nature of the web and rationalise their web
presence, or like Kirby, eliminate it. ‘Including everything’ may not be the
answer. The pamphlet also offers resistance to this form of monumentalism, as
well as to the codexical tome.
The e-book has
been around for a while, unsexy pdfs dangling off the edges of websites, as
well as embedded on host sites like Lulu Books for print download. It has been
embraced in a limited way by small presses. The Kindle – despite the fact it
looks like something out of 1950s SF – carries the potential to download
poetry, though it’s little used by small presses, as yet. I suspect it will be
superseded by integrated computer systems and involve multi-media, but for the
moment it presents the screen as page rather than as video. It is interesting
to imagine whether small presses will morph into file-sharing databases and
whether books will become luxury items. Whatever the case, there will remain
the potential for a close tie-in between the making of poetry and the making of
books (or whatever is expected to supersede them).
I want to pursue
this issue, not via online or digital technologies nor with the gleaming
machinic thinkerly plunderhood of conceptual writing that owes to them, but by
a return to the making of small press books which was also the making of poems,
to examine an earlier example of how ‘media … had profound effects on how ..
authors write’. (Reed 282) I hope to bring the history of publishing and the
practice of writing closer to one another, as I promised earlier. I want to
trace not just a fashionable materiality but (something that could survive the
e-book revolution,) the extraordinary author-designer-publisher-printer
relationship (even if conducted within one person), the means by which booklets
(and even the poems in them) come into being. This extended poesis of the
physical medium ultimately leads outwards into communities of readers (elites
and wide networks alike) and in doing so makes innovative contemporary poetries
signal their very contemporaneity. Though that outward possibility is beyond my
scope today, I’ve hinted at its effects in the past by emphasising the work of
ALP.
The rest of the lecture was on the
small press book forms of Bill Griffiths. Read it
here.
Or link here for the full set of links to the emerging critical work (of which this post was prefatory)
The Meaning of Form here.
You can read about my own recent poetry published by small presses
here and
here, and follow the links to points of online purchase.
Asa Benveniste of Trigram Press. Indeed, the issue
opens with his Kabbalistic poetics essay ‘Language: Enemy, Pursuit,’ (1980)
which feels out of place until you realise that ‘the black fire on white Fire’
of letter-press printing is part of his poesis, as he faces the bareness of
word, the metaphysics of type, watching all that language falling to pieces,
then thrown back together as a page of a book. I returned to Benveniste’s
excellent selected poems Throw Out the
Life Line Lay Out the Corse (1983) and wondered whether the impaction of
the sequence ‘Dense Lens’ derived not just from a reading of Zukofsky but from
the experience of typesetting sections of A
for Trigram.
Nigel Wheale sees it the other way round: ‘The current
economic situation … has affected the publication of poetry by making
established publishers unwilling to continue paternally with their poetry
lists… This restriction has driven a good deal of writing into the arms of the
small presses.’ (quoted in Brinton: 112)
