Small Press History 5: Richard Peabody-Gargoyle/Paycock Press/1976-Present

 

Rita Dove and Richard Peabody

BE:  By the time I started Gypsy I believe Gargoyle was already well established.  When did you start publishing the magazine and what inspired you to do it?

RP:  First issue appeared in August 1976. I hitchhiked cross-country that bicentennial Spring/Summer and by chance landed in Madison,WI during the annual Mifflin Street Festival.  Went to a reading by Jon Tuschen and Warren Woessner. The first poets my age I’d ever heard. Back home I discovered one of the guys I vaguely knew in grad school had started a litmag called Window. He worked at Bialek’s, a bookshop a block away from the Brentanos in Friendship Heights where two of my friends (Russell Cox and Paul Pasquarella) worked. And the mag was born.

BE:  How did you land on the name Gargoyle?

RP:  We were going to call it Pan.  Rusty was on the verge of launching as a freelance photographer, so along with Paul, we went to the National Cathedral where there was a statue of Pan in front of an Herb Cottage. We tried everything to get a decent shot and nothing worked. While we messed around with screens and angles Rusty took pix of the gargoyles adorning the cathedral. 

When we saw the proof sheet the gargoyle pix stood out and  we chose one for the front cover and took the name. 

BE:  How were you able to afford such gorgeous, large, perfect bound mags before the POD days?  Were you able to get grants or was this all from your own wallet?  How large was your subscriber base?

RP: We can’t afford it but we just keep going.

We were never a nonprofit in an official sense, so no grants. We did win a few editorial awards from CCLM, the earlier version of CLMP. The looks on the faces of NEA staffers when I told them was amazing. I mean of course we’re nonprofit, every issue hemorrhages money. But being a nonprofit also means you are a charity (of sorts) according to the paperwork and you can’t sell your archive you have to gift it. After years in the rare book trade that was the only way I believed I’d ever break even. I did manage to sell the Gargoyle 1976-1991 archive (manuscripts and correspondence) to George Washington University’s Gelman Library.  But libraries can no longer afford to buy, transport, or even pay employees to catalog collections. And they don’t want email correspondence now unless they’re with very big names. 

After Lucinda died in 2017, her best friend Ann and I couldn’t find a buyer for Lucinda’s expansive collection (11,000 books) despite awesome first editions and signed copies. (A Virginia Woolf! Everything by Jeanette Winterson!) In the end we donated the collection to the University of West Virginia, though we still had to pay transport costs. And since Lucinda 

spent her last decade in central WV (she bought the town of Shirley online via Ebay for less than her home near Howard University’s asking price) they’ve claimed her as their own.

The only thing selling now are ultra-rare books or Association copies. You know, F. Scott signed to Hemingway, etc. That type of thing. Cool factoid. Hollywood actors--John Larroquette, Johnny Depp, Steve Martin, and Curtis Armstrong—are noted book collectors.

I don’t believe we ever had more than 100 subscribers and half those were libraries. Back before they changed.  By the time I resurrected the mag in 1997 with Lucinda Ebersole (after shutting it down in 1990) library subscriptions had pretty much dried up. I think maybe 10 have stood by us. In the end we’ve always depended on credit card roulette, art rates, and individual mail order sales.

Oh, and the kindness of strangers.

BE:  Tell us some of the micro press writers you introduced into the larger small press world?  Seems like I heard Ron Androla was one.

From the get-go we wanted to print work by DC area poets and writers, poets coming of age in the late 70s, and lost or forgotten names. One thing led to another in those pre-internet days. We began in the offset days just as mimeo and letterpress were fading. Before DIY mags took off. 

I’d grown up on Evergreen Review, Paris Review, and New American Review. That’s what I wanted to do on a much smaller scale. Though for a few years we mimicked other mags in terms of design and layout.  We began as a folded newsprint monthly paper, switched to a poetry chapbook size, then an 8 ½ by 10 size. But we’ve played around ever since. #15/16 riffed on the Brit mag Bananas, #24 was Antaeus, #32/33 was Paris Review. 

Plunging into the small press world back then was akin to plunging into the online lit world today. David Greisman’s Abbey (a Xeroxed mag out of Columbia, MD) connected me to the larger lit world. I can’t remember whether Larry Eigner sent Androla to us or vice versa. I can’t remember who published Ron first in DC—Greisman, John Elsberg’s Bogg, or Kevin Urick’s The Mill.  But it was via those guys that we all grew and reached out to folks. 

Bogg was based in England (though John lived in Arlington, VA).  And via John I published work by  Pete Brown, George Cairncross, Andy Darlington,  Tina Fulker, Paul House, Graham Sykes, and Dave Ward.  Greisman had published Elizabeth Tallent back when she was living in Santa Fe, and she was a highlight of our first fiction issue 12/13.  Eric Baizer’s MOTA (the Museum of Temporary Art magazine) brought in Michael Horovitz and Charles Plymell and even Allen Ginsberg. By then the group of us (Baizer, Elsberg, Urick, and me) had a radio show on WPFW and interviewed people coming through town. 

So, it grew organically. Every summer I took road trips around the US. New England one year, the South another, the Northwest, the Southwest. There were readings, bookshops, stops with folks like Rosmarie Waldrop and Tom Ahern in Providence, George Myers Jr. in Harrisburg, Steven Ford Brown in Birmingham, Ed Hogan in Carrboro, David Spicer in Memphis, Hugh Fox in East Lansing, Todd Grimson and Joel Weinstein in Portland, Shannon Ravenel in Carrboro, Susan Hankla in Chapel Hill, Will Inman and Laurel Speer in Arizona.  All of those trips inspired by bookseller Len Fulton’s American Odyssey.

Each of our visits generated anecdotes, poems, publications, sales, and making the lit experience tribal. 

Trips to Europe in 1979 and 1981 to meet Ken Timmerman, Fulker, Sneyd and Darlington, Jay and Fran Landesman, attend a poetry reading at Ronnie Scotts with the Horovitzes, where

we saw Roger McGough, Frances Horovitz, Fran Landesman, Margaret Drabble, and Heathcote Williams read. (Williams heckled Drabble throughout.)

BE:  What do you feel was Gargoyle’s biggest accomplishments and who were some of the well known writers you published?

I believe the fiction issues-- #12/13 and subsequent trilogy Fiction/82, Fiction/84 and Fiction/86—took the mag to a new level. #35 with the Bukowski feature, and interviews with Carl Weissner and Charles Johnson pretty much sold out. 

But since the return in 1997 everything is more professional. Our bestselling issue of all time is #51 and I believe that’s because of Patricia Storm’s dynamite cover art. Unfortunately, as indie life goes, our distributor Bernhard DeBoer folded, and we didn’t see a dime. 

We’ve been fortunate to publish work by--

Kathy Acker, Kim Addonizio, Elizabeth Alexander, Kwame Alexander, Sherman Alexie, Lucia Berlin, Nicole Blackman, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ray Bradbury, Kate Braverman, Chandler Brossard, Pete Brown, Charles Bukowski, Alison Bundy, Mary Caponegro, Tom Carson, Nick Cave, Kelly Cherry, Maxine Clair, John Cooper Clarke, Susann Cokal, Wanda Coleman, Rita Dove, Rikki Ducornet, John Dufresne, Cornelius Eady, Russell Edson, Larry Eigner, Elaine Equi, Eurydice, Lauren Fairbanks, Ed Falco, Roy Fisher, Thaisa Frank, Abby Frucht, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Amy Gerstler, Salena Godden, Jaimy Gordon, James Grady, Elizabeth Hand, Lola Haskins, Allison Hedge-Coke, Richard Hell, Essex Hemphill, Michael Horovitz, Dave Housley, Herbert E. Huncke, Lida Husik, Ted Joans, Joolz, George Kalamaras, Wayne Karlin, Pagan Kennedy, Bill Knott, Tuli Kupferberg, Fran Landesman, Louise Wareham Leonard, Elise Levine, William Levy, Susan Lewis, M.L. Liebler,

Trish MacEnulty, Mary Mackey, Nick Mamatas, Aoife Mannix, Sally Wen Mao, Ben Marcus, Michael Martone,

Carole Maso, Heather McHugh, Rick Moody, Thylias Moss, Daniel Mueller, Laura Mullen, Eileen Myles, Antonya Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lance Olson, Toby Olson, Leslie Pietrzyk, Deborah Pintonelli, Charles Plymell, Dorothy Porter, Nani Power, Holly Prado, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kate Pullinger, Joseph M. Queenan, Margaret Randall, Jeremy Reed, Kit Reed, Doug Rice, Lou Robinson, Miriam Sagan, Leslie Scalapino, Lynda Schor, Gregg Shapiro, Aurelie Sheehan, Lewis Shiner, Julia Slavin, Amber Sparks, Marilyn Stablein, Emma Straub, Terese Svodboda, Gladys Swan, Elizabeth Tallent, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Alexander Theroux,  Venus Thrash, An Tran, Lee Upton, Janine Pommy Vega, Rosmarie Waldrop, Afaa M. Weaver, Tim Wendel, ruth weiss, Paul West, Michael Wilding, Diane Williams, Lidia Yuknavitch, Mary Kay Zuravleff, and tons more. 

The growth of the mag was interesting. We went from local DC poets (new and old), to gathering poets and writers from our summer trips, to magazines and books we traded,

and people we met at festivals, to international, and both audience and contributors grew by accretion like a coral reef. Now you can do that online with a few clicks. My time teaching let me embrace my student’s work. 

Though in terms of Paycock Press, publishing 7 anthologies of fiction by DC area women writers might be the happiest I’ve been.  Overall 3,000pp by close to 300 local women. 

We published chapbooks early on but now have short story collections by Ramola D and Carmen Delzell due out by the end of 2021.

I also wanted to mention your feature on Carlo Parcelli. He’s a denizen of DC area used book shops like I am. We both worked in that biz for eons. We were actually in a class together in 1971 or so at the University of Maryland. He had a few books out by the time we actually met and Gretchen Johnsen and I interviewed him in Gargoyle 27 and later released a chapbook of his work entitled Fernparallelismus. He is an absolutely unique personality and voice.

BE:  Any musings about the state of publishing today?

RP: We all need an in-house IT.

I’m not a techie by any stretch of the imagination. I learned layout and design and became an expert hot waxer. When the first computer systems appeared they gave me one continuous line of print, that had to be cut and pasted. Almost impossible to imagine now, when you can take a file into a shop and have the OPUS print on demand machine spit a book out the other end. 

That said, I’m very happy that the indie world is embracing letter press once again. Though it saddens me that the reason the equipment is available is because other publishers are retiring ad selling it off. I miss the days when Coffeehouse was Toothpaste Press, when McPherson and Co. was Treacle Press.  Different world.

I rode Amtrak to Chicago for AWP in 2004. Lucinda and I (we co-owned Atticus Books & Music in DC from 1995-2000) both had Want Lists a mile long. Amazon appeared and books I’d been trying to find for a decade or more were a click away. That changed the entire business. I ate dinner on the train and wound up in a bizarre conversation with a bunch of 

suits, all of whom ran a business of some sort. Not my cuppa. I told them the impact that was coming and what it would do to the book biz and they asked me a ton of questions. Probably

venture capitalists all. But damn, who could have predicted that it would wipe out so many bookshops.

I used to say that the poetry world was divided into three layers—Slam/Spoken Word, Print, and online. Not a lot of crossover 20 years ago. Much more now. Been online Zooming for a year and a half. Never saw that one coming, either. 

My oldest daughter is studying for a business degree. She tells me it’s all about how you present now. Your Brand, Platforms, Targeting, Tik Tok videos, Tweets, getting likes on Good Reads, Amazon reviews.  I never signed on to be an actor or do commercials. I just want to write. Changes come more and more rapidly. Even blogs seem old fashioned now.

Relics like CDs. 

So, I’m a dinosaur. Unsure whether I’ll take the mag online only or bag it entirely. I have two complete print issues in the can for publication later this year. I have 3-4 Paycock Press books in various stages of publication.

Climate Change, COVID, and GOP idiocy, aren’t making this any easier. Part of me just wants to slide on out writing my own stuff. Happy Trails, ya know?  

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

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.