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.