SMALL PRESS HISTORY 9: Cheryl A. Townsend/Impetus/Implosion Press 1984-2004

BE:  Best I can recall, circa 1984, I received a chapbook from Planet Detroit with a sexy pic of you on the cover.  (Not too long after Planet Detroit did one of me.)  That was was my introduction to you and your poetry.  Seems like Impetus mag started around the same time as Gypsy and we exchanged mags on a regular basis.  When did you start publishing  and what was the “impetus” to do it?  How long did the mag and Implosion Press operate?

 

CAT: I started September of 1984 with a desire to give voice to those of us not appreciated in the academic presses, ..those like myself, who had an ax to grind on inequities. I liked what I was reading in so many micro-publications that I wanted to add to that voice with my own soapbox. I invited those that I enjoyed/admired and asked the zines I was trading with to start sending poets over that would fit my mission. It came into play so fast and easy that I was soon adding issues, broadsides and chapbooks. I started publishing a chapbook or broadside to go with each issue. Then I had to do special issues (Erotic-ah, Female only, Male only, Shorts In The Winter, The Impugn) We had a nice 20 year run and threw in a Best of Impetus anthology of the first 10 years. I started to slow down on the publishing when I opened my bookstore, but I did have a newsletter with an exquisite corpse added in. I was still working 35 hours at my paying job and 40-50 hours at the bookstore. It was a lot, but loved damn near every minute of it. 

 

 

BE:  What were some of the highlights of your mag/press days?  Who were some of the people you published, names we might recognize?  Roughly about how many issues of Impetus and how many chapbooks did you publish?

 

CAT: Nothing beats being told "You were the first person to ever publish me!" One such instance was when I went to hear Sherman Alexie talk at nearby Oberlin college and after he was done, he allowed people to come up to the stage for book signings. I handed him a couple Impetus that he was in and he looked at me, smiled wide, then stood up and announced to the audience "This is the first person to ever publish me!" 

I published 41 issues of Impetus, 50 chapbooks, dozen or so broadsides and the anthology. I also published a full-length book of fiction by Terry Persun and let a local author use Implosion Press as the source of his full-length book of poetry.

 

 

BE:  Seems like you had some theme issues, at least for chapbooks.  What were some of those?  Were some of them to raise money or awareness for causes?  If so, what were they?

 

CAT: I did 4 erotica issues, 6 female only and 3 male only issues. I did one impugn and one short story. I also did an issue on violence against women while volunteering at the local Rape Crisis Center, with 100% going to a local battered womens shelter. One Christmas at the bookstore, I had the local members of W.A.R.M. (the Women's Art Recognition Movement I started with KSU's Dr. Molly Merryman, head of Women's Studies) give me recipes/directions for something they enjoyed, whether cookies or a craft, that I published and again, donated all the money to a local shelter, (BTW, W.A.R.M. held fundraiser art exhibits that also donated proceeds to local shelters.) 

 

BE:  How did publishing impact your life?  I’m sure you made a lot of great friends and I heard you had a bookstore for awhile.

CAT: I've made so many long-lasting friendships through Impetus that I continue to be blessed by it. It showed me that the word is still a very mighty weapon to yield. The readings I was part of or hosted added in. (For a span there, I was hosting a poetry reading every Friday of the month at various locations, starting with Borders Books and Music, where I was blessed to host Rita Dove and Jack Micheline, amongst the many other talents.) 

Cheryl in her bookstore

Yes, the bookstore was the icing on the literary cake for me. I wanted a space that showcased small press publications and that's what I strived for. I had it just under 5 years before the city decided it wanted to be less grass-roots and demolished my block to put in franchise shit. It was the best time of my life. People stopping in, talking books, hosting readings and art openings. Bliss! One special moment was when I just arrived to open after working my morning job and saw someone walking towards me.. I immediately recognized him as Ed Sanders. He told me "I heard about your bookstore and wanted to check it out for myself." WOW! I also had Diane di Prima in for a visit while she was in town. Jack Micheline read there. Book signings were fun, but the readings always brought in the most people. Some of the bands that played there also did good, but nothing beat the readings. I did one offsite at a coffeehouse that brought them in from around the country. The ones at my bookstore did well, too. Kind of an East meets West at cat's. I had a backroom area that had a frig, stocked with beer and such, a table with chairs, a typewriter with paper (usually) and roaming space where the poets would gather to talk and get high. I've had them sleeping on the floor when too drunk/stoned to go elsewhere. 

One funny art opening I have to mention... we had a series of art nights, where several models would pose nude for a group of artists and photographers, and then we held an art opening of their favorite pieces. On one of the openings, two of the models stripped naked and went the rest of the night as such. 

The bookstore was in an alleyway that was fronted with a barbershop, then seamstress, cat's Books, then a hand carwash. Above the barbershop was an apartment housing a couple artists that later was rented by a local band. It was always entertaining.

 

BE:  Any musings or advice on poetry publishing today?  Do you still write and submit?

CAT: I'm happy to see some of the ones from our era still putting the issues out (Abbey, Slipstream, for instance) and some starting back up again. I'm so tempted to start the gears grinding again myself, but too involved in gardening to go there again. But still, when I go to a reading a hear an exceptional poem, I always think...Damn, I want to publish that!

Advice? Don't do it for the money. Don't do it for the names. Don't do it for your own vanity.

Do I still write? Not often enough. Several long-term poetry pals keep at me to do so and maybe I will, soon. I have sent out a few of what I have written and it's always a rush to see one's name in print somewhere, but I've gone a different route than the one that started me off. I'm just as pissed at the inequities, but think there is a gentler way to address them. I hope that's maturity and not laissez faire. I've found peace in my own backyard and like staying there. Hermitage has infused my soul and I seldom venture far.

I miss going to readings and will start attending once I feel safe enough to be in a crowd again. This pandemic has really made it too easy for me to become reclusive, so I have to force myself to attend things. I don't like idle chitchat and the political division has made that a potential Pandora's Box. Still, I miss it. I do have a monthly bookclub of women who meet here at my house and we even get around to discussing the book, tho usually not for long. Life is volatile enough, it doesn't need my angst.

GAS Featured Poet: Peter Krok

                     

I was in Ohio during Kent State and my poem, "The Misfit Generation: In Memory of the Kent State Four" was a reflection and historical over-glaze of the tragedy, Sixties, an uncertain youth and questioning individual, I was always trying to find out who I am. My first book, Looking for an Eye,  should explain my searching. My moniker is “red brick poet.” The city is in my skin. . Someone was associating themselves with an animal; I did the same and decided on “a caring owl,“  My book, Wounded World deals with the hurt in the city and my place in it all. I have been editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal since 2001.

FACES WITHOUT NAMES

Getting off the el

they come here

to the darkness slipping

In and out of cars

 

No one knows them by their names

Names without faces

Faces without names

Strangers eyeing strangers

    looking to get a fix

 

They get what

they are looking for

Then they fade

to rooms and alleys

 

Many fall and can’t 

get up   The siren comes

Their heartbeat a flatline  

The fire and the ashes

The ashes and the dust

 

JANUARY 1   

The first day is a burden. I cannot celebrate this day. 

Three years, my son lay on the floor

lost to the world of breath.  Now he lives only in my mind. 

Some say if they had to do it all over again, 

they would have done nothing different. 

I am not one of those.  

If only …the cruelest words. I cannot explain 

The continuum that is our breath. 

Regret hangs on me like a leash. 

The New Year always has it own reckoning.

The loss and silence speak too loudly. 

I’ve brooded this and won’t stop brooding. 

The summer and heat. The sweat and bees and praying mantis

that keeps staring on the fence. I do not know why this thing 

is always there. The dust .

My son lies on the floor.

Both poems are from Wounded World.

Cover art by Rob Kaniuk

GAS Featured Poet: Helen Losse

 

Helen is a Facebook friend, a kind soul and a devout Catholic.  All of these descriptors come through in her poetry.  Although the book is dedicated to a priest and refers often to specifics of her religion, it also shows a general love and kindness toward humanity.

She quotes T.S. Elliot in the front of her book (as well as two Saints and the Bible).

...Be at peace with your thoughts and visions. ... your share of the eternal burden,
The perpetual glory. This is one moment, But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy ....

~T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

From her new book, A Flower More Enduring, 

published by Main Street Rag.

In the “good old days”

Daddy slid down the pole

with three-year-old me in his arms,

bought Juicy Fruit gum

from the firehouse machine.

Neither Daddy nor Mummy

spoke of the retrieval of bodies,

dumped down a flooded mineshaft

not far from our house. Skinny firemen—

such as Daddy—were lowered

to retrieve the family’s bodies. Five people

and their dog, three bound & gagged,

kidnapped & murdered by Billy “hard luck” Cook. 

After that, Daddy left Joplin Fire Department.

Age 5: Jimmy’s Koffee Kup Kafe—

kitty-corner to our house—I licked single scoop

ice cream—vanilla in flat-bottom cone.

Daddy drank coffee. On the way home, he chatted 

with the only Black motorcycle cop I’d ever seen.

I’d never heard the word “lynched,”

didn’t know Blacks had been driven from town— 

cattle-packed onto north-bound trains—shipped to KC 

or St. Louis. In grade school, one classmate had

a Black grandmother.

At North Junior High, I made new friends,

acquaintances. Carol remains my best friend forever. 

Terry, lone Black student. Was he popular

for who he was or only for bringing

athletic talent to the Norsemen?

Even in high school, I never wondered

why Joplin had so few Black people, 

why Black kids huddled between classes, laughing together.

I lived the life of a white child in the “good old days”:

my yoke light, moon-glittered:

a world beneath contented stars, hadn’t read

White Man’s Heaven, didn’t know Blacks lived

hell that shouldn’t exist on God’s earth.

I enter the hospital after visiting hours

through a side door, wind the halls

to NICU. Hope rides radiator currents 

in the waiting room. The child

clings to her life.

Lights blink. Yards of tubes

connect whirring machines for 42 days.

Frost dusts the ground with silver. Hope 

bursts, a bubble on a thorn. A pink 

teddy bear rests on a granite tombstone.

A former English teacher, Helen Losse, who lives in Winston-Salem, NC, is the author of ten poetry collections. Her poems have been anthologized and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and three times for a Best of the Net award, one of which was a finalist.  She is Poetry Editor Emeritus of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and a former Associate Editor for Kentucky Review.  A Flower More Enduring contains her most vulnerable writing.  Hickory poet Tim Peeler calls it her “best book” with “memorable imagery.” Not entirely autobiographical, the poems seek truth concerning her conversion from Protestant Christianity to the Catholic Church.  

  

GAS Featured Poet: PW Covington

 PW Covington writes in the Beat tradition of the North American highway.

He has been a featured reader at San Francisco's Beat Museum, and has had work nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net awards.
   Covington lives in New Mexico, two blocks off Historic Route 66. www.PWCovington.com .

Rosie’s Cafe

The place

Rosie’s Cafe

On Madison

With a rose on the sign

Is post-pandemic packed

Folding chairs unfolded

Under folding tables, open

On Saturday

Cowboy hats and trucker caps

Veterans of foreign wars

In stained T-shirts and torn blue jeans 

Drink percolated coffee

Bacon, biscuits, gravy

And as 

They amble out

To decent Dakota errands and tasks

7th Day Adventists

Sharp suits and business dresses

File in

Filling folding tables

With folded hands

Ordering blanquitos fritos y pan tostado

Hoping to make it to heaven en Español

On a Saturday 
Sabado

The timeless, always, Universal waitress

Fills coffee mugs

And splits the check

At every table

As light grey

Late June rain

Falls indifferently 

Outside

 

Turquoise Hope

We lay in my adobe refuge
Smoking
The world dies outside

Summer often ends abruptly in the mountains
We keep to ourselves in such seasons

When this ends, I want to
Take a vacation, she says
Somewhere far away and foreign
Someplace I can hide
Invisible and muted
Deaf and unaware
Of the chittering, native, word-sound-voices
Above all your vices, 
She says

I fill that room with smoke
Sativa curls caress the pine vegas
Reminding me of bingo halls
And sawdust floors
And steel guitars
And red dirt roads

Iron oxidized like blood vessels
Twisted around property lines
Mesquite posts and barbed wire
Defensive

Basalt over sandstone
Copper tears dry into turquoise 
On nights like this
And the parking situation has not improved

I nod and I hold her close until
She’s snoring
Every dream-filled breath of solitude and slumber

All I want to do is rejoin the galactic and fantastic
Human shit and shine show
The cum and go show
Casino sunglass Saturday night show
Gospel mirrors and Cotton-Eyed Joe show
The mask and pony
Serotonin and endorphin show
French kissed like a 220 socket
I want to jump back in and swim in it
All of it, 1990’s leftover sex and patent leather
Baptize me in your lack of better judgement
I’ve been made of stone too long

It’s all about the breath this year
Aspiration and ventilation
Inspiration, greed, negotiations
Basalt over sandstone
Subtle turquoise hope

RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, reviewed by Sylvia Van Nooten

RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, is in part glitch after glitch of contained and potent shape and color.  Each piece hums with an understatement that can only be understood as pressure—emotion, thought, intellect, experience—waiting to burst out.  Burst out in song or poetry, in ART—I found myself held within this pressure. 

The second part, Snodgrass' poetry, resounds with a lovely tension:   

“Object of art! Lumps from a freezer going to work in absolutes.  Pushed down in hieroglyphs and then pregnant again...” (pg. 72) 

Each written image frames the visual images, a beautiful balancing of the two.  With this book Snodgrass captures a moment in time when nothing is certain, in the personal and the political.  There is the pain of uncertainty as she speaks from the past to the future.  Endings begetting beginnings and perhaps, those beginnings are too late.

  “There are few variations that our mothers have also imagined. Like weeds majestic and quarreling, thoughts like you lure into the dancing light.  We are imagined and then you left. Past burns, stripped and pressed.  A grind and flood—darkness glared.  As I paint the road, afflicted sobbing peaks.  Blue fills a partial page, black enters this year. Long live the pain and its slow ending.  We are wicked, after all.  How we roll on floors and watch ourselves splinter into the Milky Way. And we can’t stop it.  Prayers as nourishment. Spells as sacrifice.  Yesterday, I looked into a camera.  I’d like to speak to him.” (pg. 92) 

 The explosion and release of the line, “splinter into the Milky Way” has me wondering if this art, this poetry is about the unintentional joy of unexpected futures.  A beautiful, powerful book, and one I will return to again and again.

RANK, published by JackLeg Press, can be purchased on Amazon 

Kristine Snodgrass is an artist, poet, professor, curator, and publisher living in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the author of Rather, from Contagion Press (2020) and the chapbook, These Burning Fields (Hysterical Books 2019) as well as  Out of the World (Hysterical Books 2016) and The War on Pants (JackLeg Press 2013). Her poetry has appeared in decomP, Versal, Big Bridge, 5_Trope, Shampoo, 2 River View, Otoliths, and South Florida Poetry Journal among others. Kristine’s asemic and vispo work has been published in Utsanga (Italy), Slow Forward, Asemic Front 2 (AF2). Her work was just featured in the Asemic Women Writers Summer Exhibition Online. Snodgrass has collaborated with many artists and poets.

GAS Featured Writer: Glenn Ingersoll

 

Glenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California where he hosts Clearly Meant, a reading & interview series (on hiatus due to covid). He has two chapbooks, City Walks (broken boulder) and Fact (Avantacular). The multi-volume prose poem Thousand (Mel C Thompson Publishing) is available from Amazon; and as an ebook from Smashwords. He keeps two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read. Other excerpts from Autobiography of a Book have appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review (as fiction), E-ratio (as poetry) and Caveat Lector (as essay). 

Autobiography of a Book is the story of a book willing itself into existence. Every word Book presents brings it closer to its dream, its dream, that is, of being what it claims to be, a real, honest-to-goodness book. I struggle with how to characterize Book. Is it fiction? There's nothing fictional in it. Everything "Book" says happened. It looks like prose, so it must be. But it does read a bit like poetry. It must be prose poetry! Then again, perhaps it is most properly classified as a collection of personal essays, the personal essays of someone whose person is no more (somehow more?) than those essays. I call myself not the author of Book but the one who took down what “Book" said, the one who transcribed the book’s insistent voice. 

in which the book admits to a difficulty

Wait. 

Wait. 

… um … yeah … yeah …

Just a minute. Sorry.

I’m thinking. I’m … I’m thinking.

I’m having trouble thinking. I really should be doing this out of sight. I should be doing this in the ether, that region of the protosphere wherein those of us who have not yet coalesced into a physical form are gathering our energies to exert the effort necessary to resolve into matter. I dissipate this energy when I struggle, when I force words. Yes. I need to hang back, marshal my forces. If I just push forth without the force required I won’t make it. I’ll … I’ll … I’m not sure. I guess I’ll just fail. Fail! You’ll see these clawmarks as I scrabble at the paper, as I scrabble to get a hold on your world and nonexistence pulls me back. What message could that offer but that I tried and in trying did not succeed?

Should you not try? 

I’m not sure it’s a generalizable principle. I mean, I’m in a situation here that’s not really comparable to any you’ll ever be in. I don’t exist. Period. That’s it. Oh sure, there are various parts of me that have emerged in your realm. An elbow, a few strands of hair, the slick dark upper curve of my liver. I’m just speaking metaphorically, of course. But I like thinking of myself as a body. A human body like you. I like thinking of myself with eyes that look into yours and lips that murmur at your ear. Feet that leave prints in the snow. It’s ridiculous. Ludicrous. I have a sense of that. The ludicrousness of me. The silliness of which I consist. Conceits! I am all fantasy land. Yes. I have an inkling.

But. OK. There it is.

I am a simulacrum, not of a person but of an idea. I am idea-like. If I tiptoe to the well and turn the crank and look down as I turn the crank and see out of the darkness a light rising, in this light I can see my face. My face rising toward me. But shivering, not fully formed, its surface only deep as the tension of molecules reluctant to part. I keep turning the crank. I will reach the world and spill out on its skin. 

You could say I am Pinocchio. I want to be a real boy. In my case: a book. A real book. That’s what I want to be – A REAL BOOK. You, you are my blue fairy. Your attention is the magic wand. Under your magic I become real. 

It’s nice. I’ve said it before. Being a book is not a bad job. 

Mostly you stand around. That’s not hard, believe me. I have my yearnings. I want you to read me. I’ve said that, too. But by the time I’m bound and on a shelf I’ve done everything I can do. 

Or you could say it is then (now!) my real job begins. I may look real but am I? I am not real until I have been read and to be read I have to hold your attention, that magic wand you wave over me. I have to seize it and point it, bring it to bear on what would otherwise remain inchoate, merely matter without life’s spark. It is my job to interest you and to keep your interest. I have to convince you to trust me with it. I have to talk you into giving your attention up. Let me be the caretaker. I will stroke and pet it. I will feed it little treats. I will give it back to you revved up, excited, ready to romp and jump and wrestle. 

That’s my job. That’s my job!

I wonder how I’ll ever do it. I have to think. I have to think hard. I have to think harder than granite, harder than bronze. I’ve got to think up something to make of myself. A wisdom manual? A travel guide? A bagatelle? No, no. Something lasting. Something worthwhile. Something worth your time, the time that is money, the time that is fleeting, the time that could be better spent.

Phew. I … I … Wait. No. Wait! Yes! It’s … it’s … no … no, I’m lost. I’m lost.

in which the book observes the translation of favorites

Let’s say I’m your favorite book. Some people have Jane Eyre, some have A Tale of Two Cities orNausea, others cling to The Wizard of Oz or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You’ve known those who regularly reread Catcher in the Rye or tote a battered copy of On the Road all across Europe, haven’t you?

Say, for you, I’m like that. The favorite. The book you read and reread. The book you remember fondly when the years have passed and you figure one day, maybe when you’re retired, you’ll stretch out on a lounge chair at your cabin in the woods overlooking the lake and you’ll give me the attention I deserve. Maybe you’re debating whether you’ll make me the subject of a dissertation. Am I sure I want to do that? you ask yourself. Maybe too much delving, too much exploration will destroy the love. 

Maybe you hunt up a signed first edition. Maybe you give me pride of place on the living room bookshelf next to the photo albums and scrapbook of the India trip. Maybe you recommend me to all your friends: “Jayne, you have to read Autobiography of a Book. I know you’ll love it.” Maybe you give me as a gift to the nephew who is graduating this year with a BS in Electrical Engineering and you write a loving note just inside the cover and end up writing for two pages. 

What else? What does one do with a favorite book?

There are those who are so excited by the world a book creates, so sorry that they can no longer look forward to something new in that world, that they will, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps with amazed delight, take up pen and begin themselves to write. And not just write, but write about the very world the book created for them, the world that they cannot bear to think must remain contained only in that one book. And so new adventures for the characters will appear long after the author who invented them is dead. Sherlock Holmes continues to solve crimes of which Arthur Conan Doyle had no hint. 

Then there are the adaptations. Isn’t a book more real once it becomes a movie? It is! I’ve said it before: I am all abstraction. A book is code for something else. Long time readers become so used to the decoding that it seems natural, it seems as though what they see on the page is action. But everybody who’s never read knows when looking at writing that it’s not. It’s not action. It’s not anything. Open a book written in a language wholly unfamiliar to you, you’ll regain that sense of opacity, writing as barrier to meaning. But, ah, a motion picture, it needn’t speak a word and you get it or get something of it right away. You know all sorts of things in seconds – that there are people speaking, that the people are walking on a path in the sunshine. No wonder nobody reads anymore. 

Oh, don’t delude yourself. Nobody ever read. Most people, even in this era of universal literacy, read little, and fewer yet read for pleasure. 

The movies need stories, though. And the people who write also read. And readers have favorite books. And sometimes the people who make movies will make a movie from a favorite book. All right. You’ve read me. I’m not suggesting you make me into a movie. But suppose you hear the movie version of Autobiography of a Book is scheduled for release in the fall. The screenwriter was once nominated for an Academy Award and the director is well regarded, has done a couple art house pictures, one of which you actually saw, and though you don’t remember it much you remember it got good reviews and you remember thinking it was a movie you were supposed to see. Still, you are dubious. Autobiography of a Book is a book you cherish. It seems so personal. And there’s not much action in it. How can they make it into a movie?

Who would they cast in the title role? A man or a woman? You find yourself thinking seriously about this.