Small Press History 4: Soheyl Dahi/Sore Dove/1980s-Present

Leonard Cohen and Soheyl Dahi

 BE:  I was able to find the first issue of Sore Dove.  I did not see a date on it but going by my pic and contributor note I know that I was living in Bechtolsheim, Germany so it must have been mid-80s?  What made you decide to begin Sore Dove?  When did it stop being a print magazine (or did it)?

SD: The plan was to have a Sore Dove magazine parallel to the chapbook publications. I published two issues in the mid-eighties but had to stop for the usual reasons of lack of distribution and funds. For the two issues we received hundreds of submissions and in our submission request I didn’t say what kind of poems I was looking for, I just wrote ‘if we like it, we’ll publish it’. With help from my friends, poet Cathy Voisard and Marco Sottile, we read all the poems we had received and then picked our favorites. One afternoon we gathered in my studio apartment in San Mateo and over lots of cheap wine and shouting and laughter, we chose the final poems for each issue. Most of the copies went to the contributors and our friends and family. There is a copy of each issue at UC Santa Barbara Special Collections library where Sore Dove Press archive is housed.

BE:  I checked your Facebook page and it indicates you’re now publishing “Modern First Edition Poetry, Signed Limited Editions, Beat Poetry, chapbooks and broadsides.”  Tell us about these enterprises and some of the famous people you’ve published.  Do/did you know them in person?  You must have some interesting stories. Tell us at least one, please. And when you came from Iran were you already a poet and did you already know you wanted to edit a magazine?   Were any doors opened for you or did you struggle in the publishing field?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sabine and Soheyl Dahi

SD: The press has gone on several hiatuses as most small presses do. In the early 2000s, I was more financially secure and dived into publishing with gusto and fury. In 2003, The invasion of Iraq was imminent and I knew thousands of people would die over phony WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) charges. My longtime pen pal, the fine Sacramento poet, Ann Menebroker, wrote to me about the North Beach poet, Jack Hirschman. She said he is the best poet we have in San Francisco and if you get a chance, go to his reading. So, I did and it was a transformative experience. I arrived at the North Beach branch of the library where the reading was but I was early and no one was there except Jack in his bright red shirt and long gray wavy hair. As soon as he saw me, he walked towards me with a smile and stretched arms and hugged me Middle Eastern style. Then he asked me who I am and how happy he was that I had come to his reading. The greeting warmed my heart and the reading that followed was phenomenal. Jack read his anti-war poems and it was like he was rubbing a pomade on my wound. Right there and then I decided that I needed this man in my life. After the reading, I went up to him and I asked him if it’s possible to see him for a cup of coffee. He said ‘come tomorrow at 3 to Caffe Trieste’. 

And this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that is still going strong. 

Diane di Prima and Jack Hirschman

When I met him the next day, I told him I wanted to publish a book by him. Days later I met him again and he gave me a folder full of his poems and said ‘put something together from these poems that Ferlinghetti rejected for Front Lines (the book of his that City Lights published in 2002). The following weekend, I had to be in Hopland, CA for a birthday bash so I took the folder of poems with me and late at night when my wife and daughter had gone to bed, I went to the bar in the lobby of the hotel, ordered a double shot of Cognac and began to read the manuscript. That night I chose all the poems for the collection that I later gave the title Fists on Fire. It was remarkable that one of Jack’s famous poems, Path that I included in the book, was rejected by Ferlinghetti. He had written NO in caps with a cross next to it! Years later, I showed the poem again to Ferlinghetti and he read it, and then quietly said ‘This is one of Jack’s best poems.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he had rejected it years ago. 

By mid-2000’s, I had published my book of interviews with Lawrence and we had become good friends. I would visit him regularly. He supported my press by giving me the opportunity to first publish a few of his poems. He was a remarkable man with a great sense of humor. I always felt he treated me like a son he would have liked to have. I went with him to his studio many times and acted as his assistant. He would call me late at night to say please come by tomorrow to fix my printer. I took him to his doctors. I helped him with his groceries. 

published by Sore Dove

His curiosity was endless. He would ask me all kinds of questions about Iran and the Middle East. He would talk to me about his worries and anxieties about the future of the United States. ‘Democracy is not a spectator sport’ he hand-wrote it on a piece of cardboard and hung it on a wall in City Lights. By far, he was the most patriotic American I ever met. 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

As to how I got started in publishing poetry: I left Iran when I was 17 and went to England for my education. I graduated from University of Leeds in 1978 and in the midst of Iranian revolution went back to Iran to get my visa to come to the United States which was always the country that I wanted to visit the most. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran was still in operation. I had an acceptance letter from Iowa State University. But I had to be interviewed before they would issue me a student visa. It was a big deal, because if you didn’t do well in the interview, they could easily reject your application. Fortunately, coming from England, my English was fluent and my ‘interview’ became a lively conversation about great places to visit in London! After, my arrival to the U.S. the horrible episode of hostage crisis happened which of course I was very much against. Iranians living in the U.S. paid a price with all kinds of insults, prejudice and racism. It was 1980 that I discovered City Lights and what a savior it was! I used to go there and sit and read for hours. It was like going to Church. I would see Ferlinghetti pass me by on his way to his office but I did not dare talk to him. I always felt welcome and accepted there.

I had an awareness of the Beats when I was in high school in Tehran. I was reading the intellectual literary journal of the time called Ferdowsi and they would publish translations of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti’s poems and many others.

Around this time, I was writing poems ferociously. I knew that this was the universe I wanted to live in. The only question was how to find my way in. By the mid-eighties I was settled, I was done with school and was working in San Mateo. Cathy Voisard was a co-worker and we became close friends. We used to go to a park in our lunch hour and read our new poems to each other. Then I started submitting to small magazines of the time. After a shoe-box worth of rejections, finally Michael Hathaway of Chiron Review accepted one of my poems. It was a tremendous boost to my ego that someone actually liked something I had written. 

As to whether doors were opened to me or was it a struggle? I must say that I was very lucky and many doors were opened for me, partly being an Iranian and that fact alone was a source of curiosity for many. I always approached poets that I liked and had read their work. I had some encounters that were memorable – some resulted in publication and some didn’t. Through my reading at City Lights, I got to know Bob Kaufman’s work and I found his work extraordinary. I later met him at Caffe Trieste and approached him and bought him a cup of coffee and we talked. Man of few words and he would stare in the distance when he talked. I also had a rare opportunity to see Lenore Kandel at Diane di Prima’s 70^th birthday party. She was a hermit but took a liking to me and invited me to her place which was filled with furniture and stuff and almost totally dark. I found my way to her bedroom. She was sitting up in bed with a purple light to one side of her and I managed to squeeze a chair in near her bed and sat down. We talked for hours. What a fascinating woman she was! She let me take photos of her and then gave me a poem which I published as a broadside that ended up in a portfolio called Meat/Beat which consisted of 23 signed broadsides and original art by Beat and Meat poets.

Lenore Kandel

One of the publications that I am most proud of was a broadside poem by Leonard Cohen. I knew Bill Roberts, publisher of Bottle of Smoke Press and then I met him at Vesuvio in San Francisco. The camaraderie was immediate and we became good friends and he is also publisher of my own work. Later, he generously invited me to go to his house in Delaware and publish a letterpress poem by Cohen and a book by Allen Ginsberg. We worked about 4-5 days in his basement in January of 2005. The letter that Allen Ginsberg had written to Kerouac in 1963 was published in book form in two editions. Bill Morgan, one of the executors of Ginsberg’s estate kindly offered it to me for publication.

The Cohen broadside was later signed by him and these days you’re lucky if you find a copy less than $1000.  

BE:  How did you hear of Gypsy?  (New poets seem to think we had no way of knowing about each other before the internet).

SD: After getting published in Chiron Review, a whole bunch of other small presses published my work and among them was your own Gypsy (Vergin Press). I had correspondence with you around 1986/1987 when you were in West Germany. It’s hard to believe these days but the channels of communications did exist pre-internet. I was exchanging letters with a few publishers and constantly learning from them and plotting my own entry in the field of publishing. You also put out spoken words cassettes and invited me to submit for Sanctuary 8. You were and are the real deal and I remain grateful for what you did for me and others in those years. 

Through the small presses, I also made lasting friendships. I read a poem by Ann Menebroker, ‘The Blue Fish’, so I wrote to her in 1986 and told her how much I loved her poem. We stayed pen pals until the day she died in 2016. Even though, I only met her twice in person in all these years, she was a close friend, and editor of my work. I published her multiple times. She was a sage and an amazing letter-writer that I sorely miss. 

BE: Do you have plans for more Sore Dove publications?  Would you tell us about them?

SD: Like all presses, Sore Dove has gone through its share of evolution. We began by publishing chapbooks, then limited edition broadsides came along and in the mid-2000s, I met a remarkable man named Arnold Martinez. He was an old school bookbinder and box maker. We became good friends and he produced a whole bunch of hand-crafted boxes for the press. These publications were all in very limited editions of no more than 30 copies. Couple of interesting ones were the baseball boxes that I did for Hirschman and Ferlinghetti. I come from the part of world where soccer is a religion but I don’t have the ballgame culture in me, however, both men have written game poems and Jack is a diehard fan of Detroit Lions and Lawrence loved SF Giants. With Arnold’s help, I designed a box that would fit a rolled broadside poem and next to it was a signed baseball. Both Jack and Lawrence loved the production. I never forget how giddy Lawrence was signing the baseballs -- a first for him.

Sadly, Arnold died in early 2021 from Covid so Sore Dove boxed editions are no more. But we continue with broadsides and unique livres d’artiste portfolios. 

BE:  Any advice for young poets or editor/publishers in today’s digital world?

SD: Follow others up to a point but reinvent the rules of the game for yourself. John Martin of Black Sparrow Press managed to sell poetry in the United States and survive and flourish. All he needed to sell to break even was to sell the signed limited editions which often carried an artwork by the poets. It was a brilliant idea that I stole from him (and told him so when I met him) and found out that it actually works. I have included original artworks for many of the poets I have published: Leonard Cohen, Jack Hirschman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Ann Menebroker, Linda King, Neeli Cherkovski, Joanna McClure and others.

And finally to paraphrase Irving Layton: Publishing poetry in the USA is not a choice, it’s a verdict.

Amiri Baraka, unknown and Soheyl Dahi

BONFIRE OPERA by Danusha Laméris, reviewed by Ren Powell

 

I had high expectations for Danusha Laméris’s new book Bonfire Opera from University of Pittsburgh Press. And by the second poem, I knew I wouldn’t be putting the book down until I finished. This is a textured, dark and joyful collection. The voice in these poems is mature in the deepest sense of the word. In the poem “Berkeley” the speaker explains: 

It’s not that I was happy. I was too young
to be happy, knew only its first blush
not the darker tones that come after
and give it shape. […]

Many of the poems celebrate sex and walk a very fine line, managing to avoid slipping into celluloid-worthy clichés or romance. From “World in Worlds”: 

[…] after a little wine, I was surprised when he
leaning in to kiss me, to cross the threshold
that forever marks before and after in the heart’s guest book,
a portal you can open and find nothing —
or there might be nebulas, comets, whole galaxies.

The poems get sexier from here: full of the concrete sensual details that cause us to long for one another. The poem “Threshold” follows not long after “World in Worlds”, and true to the title, it is about crossing that threshold that “forever marks before and after”: 

And I just stood there in my gangly, animal body,
sniffing the air of you, taking in the rough greenery

of your silence. More landscape than man. Or what I’d thought

a man to be. It was clear that you had done this — opened
yourself — of your own volition. And I felt, in that moment,
what I can only call a terrible power, the burden
of holding something that requires a great tenderness. 

These poems never pull heavily on metaphor or symbolism. They are straight-forward and real. There’s nothing clever in the writing. These poems are honest. Sometimes painfully so. 

In the second section of the book, the poet writes of her brother’s death. These are poems of grief, but the author is never morose. In the poem “Dressing for the Burial” the poet laments: 

No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death —

The poem “The Grass” is a meditation on the grass growing over the gravesite of the poet’s brother. The poem begins with a mention of Walt Whitman. But the reader is also very likely to recall Carl Sandberg’s poem “Grass” which ends, “I am the grass, I cover all.”

It seems that Laméris’s poems often begin in one place and take a sudden turn, like a sonnet’s volta or perhaps like a haiku’s cutting word that shifts the reader’s perspective. One example of this is the poem “Feeding the Worms”, which went viral on Facebook this summer. The titular poem “Bonfire Opera” begins with an exuberant, naked woman singing an aria while half submerged in the sea, the water lapping “at the underside of her breasts”. But:

[…] And even though I was young,
somehow, in that moment, I heard it,
the song inside the sone, and I knew then
that this was not the hymn of promise
but the body’s bright wailing against its limits.
A bird caught in a cathedral — the way it tries
to escape by throwing itself, again and again,
against the stained glass.

Having said that, not all of the poems transition from a perspective. “Surfer Girl” is almost an ode to youthful beauty. An unabashed appreciation that never turns bitter or cynical — or covetous, or creepy.

From the poem “O! Darkness”: 

“My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I have
as I ‘m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep. 

These poems are beautiful. 

*

Buy the book from The University of Pittsburg Press. 

Laméris is an American poet born to a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother from the island of Barbados. She was raised in the California Bay Area, spending her early years in Mill Valley, then moving to Berkeley, where she attended The College Preparatory School. Since graduating with a degree in Studio Art from The University of California at Santa Cruz, she has lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Her first book The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014) was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award.

Small Press History 3: Zen Sutherland/Mockersatz/1980s

 

BE: When and why did you start Mockersatz?  What was your day job at the time?

zS: I got started in the early ‘80s as a poet submitting really bad poems around and getting no replies or empty rejections from many of the poetry magazines from the Writer’s Market book borrowed from the library, but really nice and helpful rejections from small press editors and thought “these are my people.” So after a few acceptance poems and some urging from others I started my own litzine. Though I felt like I wasn’t quite qualified, I remember Ron Androla saying “Nobody is. We just do it.”  

It’s funny, one of the pressing reasons I got an office job was to have access to a Xerox machine. Todd Moore chidingly called us the ‘Mimeo Mafia,’ but a majority of the publishers I ran with used copiers, referred to with the eponym Xerox. I had done statistical typing so I worked as a teletype operator for a financial institution and they had nice, fat, feature-rich Xeroxes that could even do 11x17 and the employer didn’t mind me staying late to ‘get caught up.’ Of course I was pushing poetry and blazing through their toner, but bringing my own paper because I preferred not to use plain white. 

BE: How did you land on the name, Mockersatz?  Was it tongue-in-cheek?  Did you feel you published good work?

zS: Mockersatz is a combination of ‘mock’ and ‘ersatz’ and my thinking was maybe two ‘fakes’ will make it ‘real.’ That seemed to encapsulate my mixed feelings of jumping into publishing with no parachute or experience and maybe having and making fun of the whole poetry thing while still taking it seriously if that makes sense. I really felt it needed some lightening up. It was the era of raw-feeling, gritty poetry with a touch of over-seriousness, over-stating it’s worth. So I guess it was a little tongue-in-cheek, but also I felt I had something to contribute to the overall movement. My first issue of Mockersatz even included an insert that was a mock version of itself, called “Mockersatz Fake” poking fun at the poets, the art, and all its seriousness.

I’ve always been most creative around an existing structure rather than creating from thin air. I’m just going to leave that sentence here.

I felt I did publish pretty good works by both poets I knew and those I didn’t. I published some marginal works too that I either didn’t understand or wanted to get a ‘name’ poet in an issue. There was a lot of energy and the feeling was we were subverting the system of larger publishing houses because we could say ‘fuck it,’ when we wanted and just send out a broadsheet to our subscribers and reviewers and just each other. It was a great mail community and we felt giddy at times, overworked at times and defeated sometimes. 

I got a lot more submissions than I thought possible and because I had been treated so lovingly as a fledgling poet by other small press people, tried to reply to each and every one – especially with rejection. I wrote back with what I liked; what I didn’t like; and how I thought their writing could be improved, along with the caveat that I was describing what worked and didn’t for Mockersatz, not whether it was good or bad poetry. I felt pretty comfortable in that role, but was frequently overwhelmed with working, living out in the sticks as a former suburb rat. The first couple of issues were typed and then I began ‘composing’ on a Mac, printing in horrible dot-matrix.

After not too many issues, I found I would really enjoy a set of submissions or a poem in another small press mag and would approach the poet with an idea for a chapbook. Chapbooks were all the rage. We were vomiting chapbooks. I had an electric saddle stapler that my mom had given me – we were both graphic artists – and this made the folded half-size 8 ½ x 11 chapbook size a good format. I even did an issue of Mockersatz in that size. But anyway, chapbooks intrigued me because a single author/poet’s work never seemed like enough in a magazine format, even if there were a couple poems. We had to think of size too – we were generally mailing small press mags in a manila folder and chapbooks could be mailed book rate with an address cover and either stapled or taped shut. It also seemed more immediate that way. It gave the poet a real chance to have their breathing room, and it gave the editors a chance to give their expression in the choice, order, style and artwork (if any) to bring it all home. See my previous sentence about where I’m most creative. 

As a ‘publisher’ Mockersatz Zrox did chapbooks of favorites like Todd Moore, Ron Androla, Don Wentworth, Lyn Lifshin. Lyn was a special case. She wrote so abundantly, and submitted everywhere and you always got an envelope ghastly stuffed and folded with her poems that had obviously seen many submissions and probably many rejections. She was in her ‘Madonna’ phase. I accepted one poem of hers called “Madonna of the Dreams” and made an entire chapbook with that title repeated 20 times and that was it. But it was all with love and intensity that small press had at the time.

BE: What were some of your favorite small mags around that time and who were some of your favorite small press poets that maybe young poets of today should read and why?

zS: I cannot overstate the impact Ron Androla had on me. While embracing the aforementioned gritty and brutally honest ideas of a poet stuck in suburbia and low wage factory work, his word choice and rhythm usually delighted the thinking and musical side of my brain. His Northern Pleasure press put out small but outstanding mag and chapbooks.

Ron Androla and Bart Solarczyk

Don Wentworth, whose poems are minimalist stories of synchronicity I still enjoy. Others, like Todd Moore, Sheila E Murphy, Tony Moffeit, Stacey Sollfrey and Patrick McKinnon all of whom I did chapbooks of. I miss that I never got to do a chap of Bart Solarczyk, but he’s still out there doing his wonderment.

Other small press poets/ mags I enjoyed greatly were: John Elsberg’s Bogg, Dan Raphael’s NRG, Steve Doering’s Random Weirdness, Kurt Nimmo’s Planet Detroit, Michael Hathaway’s Kindred Spirit, David Griesman’s Abby - the list is long and the production values were highly variable – which made it all a beautiful chaos.

I also loved the tapemags: Chuck Connor’s Skate Tape/IDOMO, Lloyd Dunn’s Phonostatic and your own Sanctuary had outstanding compilations.

BE: What were some of your greatest accomplishments with Mockersatz?  How long did it last?  Did it help propel you into other collaborations or adventures?

zS: I started off with the idea that I wanted something different, distinct and fun. Mockersatz’s first issue was a ‘press run’ of 250, each with the unique cover of a tire inked and rolled on it. I remember the covers spilled out into the front yard separated to dry. In each issue I put the poems and artwork in the magazine with the attribution to the poet at the end with a bio. I wanted the flow of the magazine to be it’s own thing without skimming for a favorite poet. I’m not sure that went over well with a few poets – we were all used to seeing our name below our poems. I did issues where all the poems on the right side page were readable, but you had to turn the issue upside-down to read the other half. I drew crazy line drawings, included people’s collage poems and wrote rambling rants about all kinds of shit.

I enjoyed reviewing magazines, chapbooks and cassettes and put out quite a few issues of MockreviewZ and reviews in chapbook size like “Small Pet Repair” and “Accupinchure.” I enjoyed getting review copies and tried to give each their due, strength and falterings. 

In the spirit of Mock and Ersatz, I created “Reviews of this Chapbook,” a chapbook of reviews of itself as would appear in other magazines, by real reviewers like Factsheet Five, Planet Detroit, Gypsy and Dog River Review among others. A fun excursion into recursion.

For me it lasted about 4-5 years which also got me started in doing local readings, mail-art and a wider variety of ‘poetic actions.’ It was crazy and crazy good times. We drank, tripped, read poetry and mostly helped each other with love and energy. I wouldn’t take a second of it back.

BE: Any advice (or musings) for POD mag publisher/sellers of today?

zS: Not really. I’m not one to give advice because when you’re young and impassioned, you probably need to find your own electrical socket to stick a tongue into. We made the most of the technology we had and that’s what I see others doing today, careening in virtual reality driverless cars across artisanal interstates of new networks. Nowadays, I still read poetry in virtual open mics, do graffiti, repurpose goodwill electronic toys to spout haiku, photography and dabble in synth-noise fests. It feels like an extension of those wonderfully explosive days of small press.

Zen Sutherland skips thru life like a smooth flat river rock tossed over a calm lake. Late in life he discovered his greatest love, Helen, who feeds, loves and supports his mad scientist soul. He lives in Asheville, NC painting, writing, photographing, doing graffiti and other renegade art projects along with taking electronic toys he finds at thrift stores and makes them do things other than originally intended. He and Helen hope to live to 85 whereupon they’ll take Dr. Kevorkian’s formula and make room for the next generations.

Small Press History 2: Steven Hirsch/Heaven Bone/1980s-2000

 BE:  When did you begin Heaven Bone and what/who inspired you to do it?

SH: I wanted to continue my education after having left the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute while I ran the family business and raised a family of my own. My professional life was complimentary to my literary publishing side-line as I became an expert in 4-color magazine publishing and color management, having managed workflows and technology for magazines such as Elle, Woman’s Day, Cycle World, Car & Driver, Food & Wine, Travel and Leisure, and Departures magazines. I wanted to publish spiritual and surreal work to keep my own writing practice vital. It became much more and opened doors to many wonderful relationships and memorable reading events.

BE:  Who were some of the people you published?  My memory is wonky but I recall having a poem in an issue that also included Alan Ginsberg.  Am I dreaming?

Found it!

SH:  No, I don’t believe I ever published Allen ironically. It might have been Charles Bukowski, or Diane DiPrima, I need to look at my archives. Over the years we published some really great work from poets and fiction writers such as Anne Waldman, Gerard Malanga, Keith Abbott, Jonathan Brannen, Jack Foley, Janine Pommy Vega, Michael McClure, Jake Berry, Ivan Arguelles, David Chorlton, Mikhail Horowitz, Lyn LIfshin, Jack Collom, Reed Bye, David Cope, Antler, Richard Kostelanetz, as well as Diane and ‘Buk’. So many I can’t list them all here but our criteria was always to select work that moved us in some way at the heart. Hyper-Intellectual or overly academic poetry bores me.

BE:  What were your greatest accomplishments or rewards both as editor and multi-dimensional artist in the 80s?

SH: I think when Anne Waldman won our chapbook competition with her manuscript “Dark Arcana” and we published it with a cover photo by Patti Smith. I was really proud of that production and I think the book stands up as a powerful and timely multimedia collaboration as well as a potent political statement.

I used the prevailing software at the time (Quark, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) to feed my daytime career skills in publishing and to create as beautiful and interesting a literary journal as possible. I think straddling 2 worlds like this was an accomplishment; one hand washed the other so to speak. Most small press concerns are maintained in parallel to gainful employment; I tried to make the best of it. The 80s was surreal enough as it was so it was easy to ask poets for experimental, yet heart-grounded work. I loved the rich balance Heaven Bone had with art, fiction, poetry, reviews, essays, visual poems and I used the tech of the time to enhance what I could. 

BE:  How long did you publish Heaven Bone  and what caused you to stop publishing it? Did you move into other publishing projects and what were/are they?

SH:  We started in 1986 as a mimeo mag with a stapled edge and our final issue was our millennium issue #12 in 2000, done with full 4 color covers, perfect bound, filled with hi-res art and graphics. 

We stopped publishing for the same reasons so many independent publishers stopped. No money. The distributors like Ubiquity and others destroyed more copies than they sold. Unless you had a grant or an angel with deep pockets, it was not sustainable.

Last issue

Recently, I have been helping poets self-publish on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. My friend Kirpal Gordon and I are putting out books under the collaborative marketing imprint Giant Steps Press. We find grants and other funding sources to cover the book prep and cover design, then I show the poet how to upload their mss and cover to the KDP platform. This way the poet gets all the profit from their work and the GSP website maintains an author’s page for each poet as well as a blog, interviews and videos. It’s working well; I just published a book of letters between David Cope and Allen Ginsberg titled The CORRESPONDENCE of DAVID COPE & ALLEN GINSBERG 1976 – 1996   Available on Amazon.

Next book is Poet's Apprentice a book by Randy Roark. It is a memoir of being Allen Ginsberg’s apprentice at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, starting in 1980.

BE:  Any advice or musings about editing/publishing in today’s electronic age?

Digital mags can be fun but there’s nothing like having paper and ink in your hands. Short attention span browsing is a pandemic of psychic attrition. A books’ colors are reflective instead of transmissive; the paper has weight and tone and texture. The experience of digital poetry is far less tactile. There’s nothing like holding a beautiful magazine or journal in your hands and carrying it around with you to share, watching it get worn with study. Virtual reality holds promise for immersive poetry experiences and I am looking to see how that evolves. Thin money for arts in general has slowed down innovation in digital creative media for artists and writers. 

As far as advice to writers goes: Don’t try and write to satisfy an editor’s stated needs or target a specific magazine or contest. Write ‘yourself’ and then find an editor that gets you. Give up on any idea of money, fame and notoriety, just write and give yourself completely to it.

Advice to poetry publishers: Community…Community…Community. This is where the digital landscape excels, building community among artists in various medias. Note that a poet won a major talent competition (AGT?) recently so the opportunity is present for poetry to become more relevant (and more profitable). When things get tough, the poets get heard.

Steve Hirsch is a poet, musician, electronic publishing guru, and former editor/publisher of the literary magazine Heaven Bone. He studied writing and drama at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, where he was a student and apprentice of Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as well as at Bard College where he studied with Robert Kelly. In recent years he has been riding his Harley all over the Northeast, studying buddhism, poetry and writing, and playing latin and african hand drums as a founding member of the drum circle "Spirithawk". Steve is the author of Ramapo 500 Affirmations (Flower Thief, 1998) and he has had poems appear in Hunger, Napalm Health Spa Report, Pudding, Big Scream, Hazmat Review, Muse Apprentice Guild, and Etcetera among others.

THE MYTH OF TALENT AND INSPIRATION by Sylvia Van Nooten

It gives me a lot of pleasure to encourage people to be creative. I want others to find the freedom and joy in expression that I’ve found.  As I have always been fascinated by art, music and writing, I’ve tried them all.  This has allowed me to experience reading, listening to music, looking at art on a deeper level.  Want to know how hard it is to write a novel?  Write one yourself, the same for playing an instrument and the visual arts.  

I think anyone can do this, we’re just not allowed to be bad at something long enough to get good at it.  As a child I loved drawing and painting but—I couldn’t draw a house or a person like the kids who were ‘good’ at art—so I gave it up.  It was imprinted on me, “You are not an artist.” I repeated that for years until I hit my late thirties and was writing my novel.  When I got writer’s block, I started doing art, not caring if I was any good because, “I’m a writer, not an artist.” The art inspired the writing, as did playing the piano.  Creativity is not limited to one genre, just check out Margaret Atwood and Joni Mitchell for genius level examples.  

One thing I hear from many people is, “I don’t have any inspiration.”  I’ve said it myself but now it’s not an excuse.  Inspiration isn’t a Magic Fairy who appears and illuminates one.  Inspiration requires suspension of that culturally programmed brain that’s always telling you what you can’t do.  Inspiration requires work.

Whenever I sit down to work on my Clyde series, I’m not experiencing inspiration.  My internal dialogue goes like this, every single time.  “I don’t want to do another Clyde.  I have no ideas. I can’t.” But I pick up the pen and start drawing.  Eventually a shape takes form, then an idea for the writing and suddenly I’m excited and joyful.  I push through doubt and find....INSPIRATION. 

Here is a painting I did titled, “Creating Neural Pathways”.

This is how I feel about inspiration, it must be created, the neural pathways formed, the doubts and anxiety about being good enough eliminated.  We are all creators conditioned to doubt ourselves.  One might as well try.  

Sylvia Van Nooten is an asemic artist and visual poet but once she was a writer of fiction.  Way back in the late nineties she wrote a novel and it almost made it.  Jonathan Franzen’s agent read it and expressed interest, she sent some ideas for a rewrite.  But that novel-- titled Brain Music--which today sits in a cardboard box in Sylvia’s basement, got her started doing art because of writer’s block. Writer’s block, particularly for writer’s of fiction-without-a-strong-plot, heavy on the beautiful sentences, light on structure---well it’s exhausting.  Sylvia took time away from her novel to start playing with oil paints and pastels.  Eventually the writer’s block became permanent but the art continues, twenty plus years later.  

"i saw god cooking children / paint their bones" by John Compton, reviewed by Hex'm Jai

Greetings and salutations bibliophiles!

This is a small and powerful collection.  I make it no secret that I am sucker for well crafted imagery.  If poetry or the literary canon were an organized religion, I would be a devout zealot of the deities Rimbaud and Baudelaire.  That said, there is imagery and then there is IMAGERY.  IMAGERY being beyond the aesthetically pleasing window dressing of ‘imagery’ which, unfortunately, is the more prevalent of the two.  ‘Imagery’ is decorative, it is filagree, form without function and therefore, though beautiful like a floral arrangement, ultimately free of substance.  IMAGERY on the other hand is a fantastic delivery system.  It provides the same aesthetic nature of ‘imagery’ but with function and purpose.  It’s not just ‘pretty,’ it is engaging and transportive; it can be beatific / horrific but always has an effect beyond two dimensions.  IMAGERY is visceral.

Reading this collection is like being emersed in barrage of film shorts…each image or scene carefully crafted and delivered to your core.  Through his concise use of IMAGERY, John paints images into your eye that you can feel, taste, hear and smell as well as see.  Through this delivery system you are provided with both emotion and meaning that you can experience.  These are not longwinded, verbose bouquets of language.  You will not become lost in impressionistic imagery and texture.  You will BECOME the imagery and texture and therefore experience it.

Sample poem from i saw god cooking children / paint their bones:

like & but & &

i went into the room

collapsing

a song bleeds from my ears

i am deaf

i lie on my back

floating          the river

is dense

saltwater like

the dead sea

like the salt

flats

somewhere in utah

like a log like a

dead fish like a leaf

i drift

in my current

unharmed but

harmed

but screaming

but somewhere there is an old lady

crying

swimming to me

paddling & clawing

through the liquid substance

digging at my eyes

my mouth my chest

clotting my ears

with her fingers

with cotton

breathing into my lungs

her oxygen her carbon

dioxide her meager life

When you have finished this collection, you can put it on the shelf right next to “Les Fleurs du Mal”. 

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i saw god cooking children / paint their bones

is available at Etsy via Blood Pudding Press

john compton (b. 1987) is gay poet who lives in kentucky. his poetry resides in his chest like many hearts & they bloom like vigorously infectious wild flowers. he lives in a tiny town, with his husband josh and their 14 dogs and 3 cats. he feels his head is an auditorium filled with the dead poets from the past. poems are written and edited constantly. his poetry is a personal journey. he reaches for things close and far, trying to give them life: growing up gay; having mental health issues; a journey into his childhood; the world that surrounds us. he writes to be alive, to learn and to grow. he loves imagery, metaphor, simile, abstract language, sounds, when one word can drift you into another direction. he loves playing with vocabulary, creating texture and emotions. he has published 1 book and 5 chapbooks published and forthcoming: trainride elsewhere (august 2016) from Pressed Wafer/tba; that moan like a saxophone (december 2016) from kindle; ampersand (march 2018) from Plan B Press; a child growing wild inside the mothering womb (june 2020) from ghost city press; i saw god cooking children / paint their bones (oct 2020) from blood pudding press; to wash all the pretty things off my skin (sept 2021) from ethel zine & micro-press. he has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.