At the end of 1989, I was still uncertain as to which way to go as a writer,
publisher, and critic. I had books and advertising to produce and hack
journalism to turn out as a means of making money which I hoped to use to
set up a new business. I was actively engaged in The International Shadows
Project, an anti-nuclear mail art project which I had been involved with
for several years, and would continue to be for another half decade. I
wanted to continue publishing books, but doing so with a photocopier in
an exceedingly cramped apartment in a collapsed factory town without a
decent academic library had limitations I didn't like - particularly after
the years spent in my idyllic cottage industry home in a comfortable city
a few blocks from a good library, co-organizing regular readings for poets
from around the world. It would certainly be difficult, if not impossible, to
go back to writing about Aztec and Anglo-Saxon art and poetry. Whether I
could follow bpNichol's last request to go back to writing poetry, I didn't
know. I was able to continue creating book art using unusual materials and
concepts, but what I could do beyond that seemed puzzling. Whatever else
I might or might not do, I continued writing reviews and other crit on
contemporary poetry - in part as a duty, in part resuming an old habit, in
part having fun writing about the poetry scene I no longer felt very
close to.
Rochelle Ratner had given me opportunities to write for American Book
Review. In fact, she and Charles Doria, without knowing it, and without
knowing anything about my state of mind, had gotten me back to writing crit
for publication. As part of her continuing, though unrealized effort to
get me started again, Rochelle sent me Douglas Messerli's
Maxims form My Mother's Milk/Hymns to Him and Pillip Foss's The
composition of Glass. The latter would lead me into a fair number of
interesting projects during the next half decade.
I reviewed the two books together - I usually did reviews in pairs for ABR
at the time. If I could find few other means of triangulation, at least I
could review pairs of books. I had seen a couple Foss poems before, but
hadn't been much impressed by them. Chance brought me several that were
formally so reminiscent of the first three parts of my Questions and
Goddesses that I wondered if he hadn't borrowed some of his ideas from me.
Composition of Glass was a wonderful book. It didn't suggest
anything of mine, and even if it had, the reworking of ideas lifted
from me would have been so profound as not to have mattered. There's a
link to the review at the end of this essay if you'd like to check
it out.
Although the review was short and, well, journalistic, I wanted to get
a better sense of what Foss was doing, and to make sure I understood a
couple points in the poems about which I felt uncertain. I don't buy the
notion that reviews should be written in ignorance of what the author's
doing or that there's something wrong with reviews written by critics who
know the author, or that a reviewer should not get the best sense possible
of what the author means, and what the reader understands by that.
Judgment is trivial and, in single reviews of new books, only relevant to
the extent that it can harm the reader. I write reviews so that i can
understand what I read and so I can pass that understanding on to the
reader. I am not an arbiter of value, and don't think much of critics who
put themselves, or allow themselves to be put, in the position of judges
or other evaluators. Harold Bloom's conception of the critic as canon
castor is a dirty habit left over from the degenerate world of aristocracy,
and its echoes in Bolshevism and hyper-capitalism. The process of reviewing
books to give one clique or another a greater advantage in forming hegemonies
is a disease which has grown out of a corpse. A critic of new work should
simply elucidated. Readers should form the hierarchies of rank over a
period of generations. If I have questions about a book, I want to talk
to the author about them; not make uninformed assumptions.
I got Foss's phone number from the publisher and
gave him a call. He answered my questions easily enough, and we had a
pleasant conversation, though Phil seemed a bit perplexed - as other
writers have often enough - that a reviewer should bother to ask him
anything. He even seemed a bit surprised that the book was going to
be reviewed. This conversation lead to others, to correspondence, to
contacts made by both of us for each other, to my publishing two books
by Phil and, indirectly, several others by people he knew. It also brought
me to farm production out to other printers and to work in standard
formats, film laminate covers and all. I like to think of this situation
when people envision critics as nasty, envious, and malicious creatures
who just need to tear other people's work up to make themselves feel
superior or to advance their coterie. It becomes particularly paradigmatic
in that it brought about major changes in my approach to publishing. The
critic who plays bully not only acts as a major contributor to entropy in
the scene at large, he or she misses a lot.
By the time the review appeared in print, we had set up a brisk exchange
of manuscripts, and Phil had put me in touch with several people engaged
in anti-nuclear activities. He lived near Los Alamos, and
people with anything like a consciences throughout the world were still
reeling from the maniacal nuclear policies of the Reagan
administration. Many (including me) looked forward to the fall of the
Soviet Empire, but didn't see nuclear roulette as the way to achieve it,
particularly given the peaceful achievements of the Solidarity Movement in
Poland. One of those Phil put me in touch with in regard to The Shadows
Project was Arthur Sze, a poet I had admired for some time. I published his
poem "The Silk Road" as a Shadows Project pamphlet. I would later publish this
poem as a screenfold in another international project, and a third time on
the web. It's a poem that can't be distributed widely enough.
The days of printing books inexpensively were obviously over for me, and
it was apparent that if I were to publish the kind of posh editions with
four color process covers and film lamination, I would need to find
subsidies for them. I really disliked the idea of no longer being able to
print the books myself, and felt a certain bitterness in this. I had,
however, begun setting up good relations with some of the printers in the
vicinity of Edwards Brothers in Anne Arbor, the area in which my father's
family owned a string of summer cottages when I was a kid and where I'd spent
happy summers. That the companies in this area had all grown out of Edward's
Brothers, which had started as a cottage industry somewhat like my own, that
the employees of several of them were extremely competent and easy to work
with, and that they were located in a part of the midwest I associated
with good times helped considerably. I began working with these companies
to make a living designing books for other people and seeing them through the
press. If I had to cease being a hands-on printer myself, this was probably
the least painful transition I could go through.
I definitely wanted to publish one of the mss. Phil sent me, and it took
some maneuvering to arrange to pay for this book. One source of funds
came from a strange place - the cover artist. Phil had used covers by
Mark Spencer for his Tyuonyi magazine. Spencer's paintings tended to
be enormous, highly detailed, and they usually took about a year each to
produce. If he sold them, they might disappear into private collections
where they wouldn't be seen regularly, and Spencer couldn't even be
certain that he'd be able to get them on loan for shows. The painting that
ended up on the cover of this book measured 72" x 58." Even reduced down
to fit the book, its detail seems endlessly complex. In addition to paying
the cost of printing the cover, and thus making a thousand copies of the
image, Spencer managed to get it into the film Slaves of new York.
Apparently, the patron who bought the painting liked the publicity, too.
Not that he got credit either in the film or in the book, but when people
saw the painting in his home, its appearances elsewhere made it a more
active conversation piece. As creative funding, this cover - the first
to appear on one of my books in four color process - couldn't be beat.
Phil definitely wanted blurbs on the back of the book, and I went along with
that not only because he wanted them but also because the front cover would
be difficult to integrate with anything else but another Spencer painting.
I did give the painting a gray ground to distract as little as possible
from its own colors, and it's fun to present it gray on gray in this
retrospective.
Although I doubted that we'd be able to get this book done, it came
together easily and in almost a party atmosphere once we got it going.
The next book of Phil's I did, Courtesan of Seizure proved more
difficult. Phil set the type on this one himself, and neither of us
was completely satisfied with it. Funding was considerably more
difficult, and the book had to be considerably more austere. For the
cover, Phil supplied an immaculate photo by James Hart of a sculpture by
Carlos Carulo Ruiz-Lolas. I set this up as though it was the image for the
back of a deck of fanned out cards that reached around the cover, making a pun
and a paradox in relation to the twist of the flat cards around the three
dimensions of the book. The lavishness of the first book's design and the
severity of the second provide a nice contrast. I would have liked to have
continued to publish Phil's work, but had no way to pay for it. I had hoped
that his work with Tyuonyi magazine (one of the most pluralistic and
judiciously edited at the time) would have provided greater triangulation
for the poems in the books. But Phil wasn't having the easiest time of
things financial himself, and had to cease publishing his magazine. It
almost seemed that the zine was too good to survive, the only other
one comparable to it at the time being Nathaniel Mackey's Hambone.
Phil's poetry proceeds with a gentle but unshakeable, unadorned logic.
Although accumulation of logopoea forms the poems, they nonetheless
pick up panoramas of images that never suggest the cult of the image,
and complex structures of sound that never bark or otherwise insist on
their presence in any way but being themselves. It usually takes a
couple readings, at least for me, to pick up fully on these dimensions -
the arguments themselves are strong enough to keep my attention. The
contemplative aura this gives to the poetry makes it particularly
important to produce in durable book form.
Among many interesting accidents, Phil does not read his poems in public.
At a time when I had lost the ability to organize and participate in an
active reading and performance scene, as I had been in Milwaukee, it
seemed a relief as well as a pleasure to publish a book so sonically lush
as this in a silence only broken by telephone conversations with the author.
I never heard him read a complete poem, just a few passages. Perhaps his
his ability to convey sounds in an unobtrusive manner made it easier for
him to find at least rudimentary favor in a literary dispensation where
fashionable poets were moving away from sound into theory.
Phil lived in a simple house in the country, growing some of his own
food and supplementing his family's provisions by hunting. His wife is
a weaver, working in a simple one-room studio. He wrote a fair amount
of his poetry out doors. The mountains around Santa Fe are part of a
different ecosystem than that of Big Portage Lake, Michigan - the place
where I had hunted, fished, and wrote early poetry, and near enough for
the printers at McNaughton and Gunn who produced the book to be familiar
with. It could be that Phil's environment allows for a pace and
concentration conducive to an elegance that in-fighting and striking
fashionable poses hinder in literary hegemonic environments. Whether that's
true or not, Phil's books proved good openers for a new dispensation
in my literary publishing.