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?  

Su Zi's review of FATA MORGANA by Joel Chace

   

There are those for whom scholarship still matters -–that ancient practice of study and dialogue with a text, outside the temporal constraints of our mortal transience. Sometimes, this scholarship might take another form than the philosophical treatise; sometimes this scholarship, this dialogue with a text, will result in a variety of other written genres, sometimes even poetry. In the instance of Fata Morgana (Unlikely Books, 2021), the opening section is a poem in response to another poet, Jack Spicer; which is, in turn, also in dialogue with the process by which the poem was written. While experiments in spacing, unreliable narration and odd trim size are not new to literary endeavors, Fata Morgana makes ample use of these techniques to try and prompt the reader to consider multiple ways of reading while reading; there’s no definitive approach to this work beyond the traditional format of opening the book and turning pages.

   The book as an entity is an object of 8 by 8 inches, which does not fit tidily on the shelf, and thus demands consideration of its physical nature: a perfect-bound volume of less than 80 pages. Within these pages are graphic devices, simple drawings, which both divide sections within the book, as well as sections within poems. While the paper for the book is traditional enough in trade volumes—standard weight, matt cover, low gloss for easier reading of the text—the physical appearance of the text, in two columns, makes the decision for the extra wide pages a logical, editorial choice.

   The title poem is a seven-page section in the volume, presented in two columns with an underscore line creating a graphic connection from the end of the left stanza to the italicized column on the right. This presents the reader with the decision of how to read the poem, to follow the graphic right and left and right again, to read the left column through before that of the right, or to beg a scholarly patience from the reader by reading the poem multiple times. In seeking from the text itself how it wants to be read, the reader discovers the dialogue between, apparently, the two minds of the author: the left column presenting a more traditional poem, the right presenting a mind considering aspects of consideration external to the poem. In the case of this title poem, the external consideration is a meditation on architecture, which “is about asking questions concerning the/meaning of human ha-/bitation”(35). While the narrative of the entire poem is the sort of curious disaster found in local news, Chace uses overt allusion to clearly demark the poem’s genre as also being that of a ghost story:q“ if he is a Banquo come/back to tell them[…]that those/ he returns to instruct or[…]murder will not stay murdered/ or instructed, unlike/a Banuo who returns but/cannot be unmur/dered”(37-38). Chace’s meditation on the ghost here returns to the external consideration of philosophy and architecture, as if the mortal lives that appear in the poem are more dust to him than the ideas their lives might represent.

   While the book presents itself as a work of poetry, it is also an obvious philosophical work about the distance from life events that critical thought requires. Ironically, the last section of this volume contains 14 poems written during the first flush of the pandemic. In these poems, the dialogue of the scholarly mind in the right column begins to break down into a counterpoint of other physical observations, into comments about music, and finally into auditory verbs. The poems’ narrative scaffolding seems to retreat from a wider world view into an observation about sanitation workers. 

    Yet, still the sense of dual thought, of observing and thinking about what is observed, is consistent through this volume. Whether or not such meditations are of value, or whether or not the pursuit of a critical and philosophical endeavor is mere mirage is a larger cultural issue of our time. For those for whom such intellectual endeavors are still crucial, this work posits a number of worthy considerations.

Fata Morgana is available on Amazon.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

An Interview with J. D. Nelson by Hex'm J'ai

 

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poetry has appeared in many small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). His first full-length collection, entitled in ghostly onehead, is slated for a 2021 release by mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press. Visit Mad Verse for more information and links to his published work. Nelson lives in Colorado.

A few months ago, while reviewing poetry books for GAS, I came across a manuscript: In ghostly onehead 

This was a curious manuscript.  First, what did the title reference, if anything?  Next, and more importantly, was the content of this book.  This was not just a collection of poems.  No, these were experiments, honest to goodness experiments!  Yes, I could discern certain elements such as Dada or Surrealism and definitely a bit of Beat, but these were not the diluted imitation of some poetry super-fan.  These experiments built upon certain aspects of these but did not copy, no, these were a push forward, these were NEW CREATURES!  Who did this?  Who is the mad scientist or poetic alchemist who discovered this technique?  Who is J.D. Nelson!?!

Recently, to my delight, I had the opportunity to ask those questions and more!

Hex’m J’ai:  To start, how long have you been writing? Have you always channeled your creative energies towards Poetic experimentation?

J. D.:  In 1977, when I was about six years old, I was experimenting with my parents’ typewriter, and I showed my dad something that I had created. He said that it reminded him of the poetry of e e cummings. He told me about cummings' work, and he was the first major poet I was introduced to. I started writing poems and little stories in 2nd grade. I was encouraged by my teacher and my parents. For one week in 4th grade, my class participated in a poetry workshop with a young woman who was a poet. (I wish that I knew her name!) She took me aside and said that my work was very good, and that I would make a great poet. In my 9th grade language arts class, I wrote a series of about thirty prose poems entitled Chicken Noodle Ice Cream for extra credit. That was my first real foray into writing that was influenced by Surrealism. Twelve years later, I started seriously writing poems inspired by Dada and Surrealism, especially the work of the visual artists of these movements. The work of the Beat writers was also a big influence by that point. I had been writing lyrics for several years when I started writing poetry. I've always been drawn to surrealist imagery, nonsense, wordplay, and the mystical.

Hex:  Can you think of, or is there a reason, why writing, specifically Poetics, is your chosen creative medium?

J. D.:   I studied visual arts in college for eight years, working in several mediums. I also played in bands, primarily as a vocalist and lyricist, from my teenage years until my early thirties. I had always felt as though I wasn't able to express myself fully through visual arts and music. I've loved writing since elementary school, and in my late twenties, I found that through writing poetry, I was able to express myself more effectively, and with more fulfilling results. Although I did well in school, I found creating artwork to be a stressful and frustrating process, and I was never really satisfied with my work. Writing poetry is a more enjoyable and satisfying enterprise for me.

Hex: Your work has a very distinct voice/flavor (this is an aspect I truly enjoy!). Is this something that developed over time? Would you attribute it to specific influences or experiences?

J.D.:  I have been working on developing my voice for almost 25 years, since I began seriously writing poetry. There are certainly writers who have influenced me, but I do not try to imitate their styles. Kerouac's spontaneous prose techniques and the cut-up technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs are my major influences. Most of my work is created through the cutting up and collaging of my own daily freewriting. My work is also influenced by Dada, Surrealism, and the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. The element of chance and juxtaposition are especially important in my writing.

Hex:  It is no great secret that you have a prolific collection of work, many pieces of which have been published in various venues. Could you elaborate on your experience with this such as ‘how your work has been received’ or have you received any ‘weird’ comments or questions during the process?

J.D.:  I have been fortunate that my work has been very well received, especially when considering its experimental and surrealist nature. I do receive some comments like, "Hmm," or "Not my cup of tea," etc. I don't let such criticisms get to me.

Hex:  When selecting work to submit and who/what to submit to do you have a specific process? How do you determine which pieces or examples you want to submit? How do you choose which venue to submit to?

J.D.:  It really depends upon which publications are accepting submissions at any given time, and which poems of mine are not under consideration elsewhere. I don't submit simultaneously to multiple publications. Sometimes I submit to publications with themed issues, but not very often. I often write poems with a particular publication specifically in mind. I keep a list of publications that I would like to submit work to, and I maintain a submissions log that shows me which poems are available to submit at any given time. I am always being introduced to publications by my friends on social media. I also search for publications online. I submit to publications that are open to experimental and surrealist work. I read a publication’s back issues and submission guidelines to determine if my work would be a good fit.

Hex:   Recently I’ve had the honor of reading an upcoming collection of your work before it has been released. To my shock, I discovered that this is the FIRST full length collection of your work to be published! With such a large body of work is there a reason as to why you haven’t published a collection earlier?

J.D.:  For many years, my goal was to focus on publishing widely in small press publications in print and online, and to build a name for myself. I have had several smaller chapbooks and e-books published over the years, but, as you've mentioned, my forthcoming collection, in ghostly onehead, is my first full-length effort. I had made a few attempts at putting together longer collections in the past, but I wasn't satisfied with them. In July, 2015, I set out to write a full-length collection from start to finish. Each of the 75 never-before-published poems were written especially for the collection. I feel that there is an energy, as well as thematic interplay, that ties all of the poems together. I finished editing the collection in January, 2021, exactly 2,000 days after I started writing the poems. (In late 2020, I noticed that the 2,000-day milestone was approaching, and I set a deadline to complete the editing at that point.) Upon its completion, I was finally satisfied with a full-length collection of my work. It felt like a working unit, more than simply a collection of loose poems. That is not to say that a collection must be assembled in this manner; I have simply found that this method has been successful for me.

Hex:   All of this considered, is there anything you would like to add? Any words of advice for others or any pros or cons you would like to elaborate on the creative or publishing experience?

J.D.:  Write every day. I have found that to be successful, it is important to develop a daily discipline. Sacrifices must be made. It is important to create a burning desire to succeed. One must be determined. A writer cannot be deterred by rejections from publishers. One must absolutely develop a thick skin to rejections, and learn to see them as being part of the process. Approximately 75% of the work I submit is rejected. Whenever I receive a rejection, I turn right around and submit it to another publication. It's a numbers game; the more one submits, the better one's chances are of being published.

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rainbow grout arizoney

this is the morning of the world

this is the pab-bow

shawing that cob

credit cobe

this is the shape of the universe when I’m not looking

in the dream, we were kicked off of the bus at the expanded park-n-ride

earth is a planned community

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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.