Although I published some seven chapbooks and a number of broadsides and
unclassifiable hybrids of my own work, cranked out some pamphlets and
flyers with friends, and intended to publish books by other people, I
shied away from publishing anyone else between
1966 and 1971. The late 60s and early 70s was a period when magazines
were more common and carried more weight than alternative books.
This paradigm was about to make a significant shift toward books.
Perhaps this progression marks the transition out of the mimeo period
and into the ad hoc offset mode that emerged in the 1970s.
Two essential models for magazines, those published by d.a.levy under
shifting titles and Clayton Eshelman's Catterpillar didn't seem
to work for me. levy's because he'd died for them, his tireless
proselytizing for poets everywhere didn't seem to be taken on the
nearly universal level for which it was intended, and the local scene in
Cleveland, comparable to Milwaukee's, didn't seem worth it if it did
not have sufficient outreach beyond its own bailiwick. Catterpillar's
because I couldn't get the money together to do anything like it, and
given my orientation to decentralization, didn't want to see too much
power concentrated in a single space, even if I could somehow manage
to control that space myself. It seemed the models lacked proportion
and the ability to form mutual links in a network that would be
inclusive but which would not be dominated by a single mode, movement,
or group.
I had discussed the possibilities of publishing a
magazine with John Shannon earlier, and we had done some sketches and
dummies for it, but didn't go beyond that. Whether I did magazines or
not, I definitely wanted to publish books, and had done some basic
scheming about setting up a Kropotkinite cottage industry for doing so.
The biggest problem was that I didn't know how to do any of this. Neither
mimeo or make-shift letterpress, which I could do, seemed adequate for anything
but the books of my own done so far - and even there, the limitations
of mimeo were severe, and I had pushed them to their extreme.
The main adjunct to my inability to go farther was that the period between
early 1969 and 1971 was so personally and publicly chaotic and turbulent that
learning how was not part of the picture. In fact, the picture itself had
largely gotten lost in the later part of this phase.
Among the chaotic elements other than such obvious ones as the escalation
of bombing into Cambodia and what seemed like the complete breakdown of
any kind of political system that could be worked with on any level, there
were endless personal problems.
It seemed that the two girls who had dominated my emotions during highschool
had moved completely beyond my grasp. One by disappearing, the other by
coming out as an unequivocal lesbian. A new affair seemed sordid, and I left
it, not knowing it would resume. In addition to assisting several draft
resistors escape into Canada, I got hit on the head during a demonstration.
The bruise was just moving into the yellow phase when my mother had an
accident in which she lost her right eye. Instead of going on to grad school,
I stayed with her to tend the eye socket and related problems, thus losing
my student deferment and making myself vulnerable to the draft. After a
period of extreme insecurity, one of my mother's doctors wrote a letter to
the Selective Service Bureau securing me a permanent 1Y exemption. With
this threat removed, and my mother well enough not to need further
attention from me, I was free to do some extensive traveling (subject for
a separate entry).
Instead of the exhilaration I expected, I had a complete psychological
collapse when I returned in the winter. The collapse brought on extremes of
my basic though as yet not clearly diagnosed manic depressive condition.
In this period, the manic phases included unexpected showers of
hallucinations which may have been caused by flashbacks from previous drug
use or may have had other origins. I made preparations to end my life with
an overdose of heroin, but, as happened several times before and since,
once I had purchased the means of deliverance, and could use it at any time,
I no longer needed it. The means of making a quick and effective exit gave
me a card to play. Even if it was just the equivalent of a three of diamonds,
it let me stay in the game. I had a novel I wanted to finish before the last
goodnight. In order to have enough freedom from distraction while writing this
I cautiously sought the aid of a psychiatrist. Although the first psychiatrist
I had consulted had made my problems considerably worse, this one seemed
to offer at least some help - and in fact I continued as his patient until
cancer brought him to give up his license 27 years later. I resumed a
romance under what were initially difficult circumstances,
but the lady was erotically stimulating beyond anything I'd had before.
Her quick wit and ability to understand new and difficult ideas easily
she provided a nonstop conversation. Practicing art that could at times be
edgy, she was too good to let go. I managed to win her away from the man she
was living with and into a strong, if sometimes turbulent, relationship
with me. I thus had parlayed something like the three of diamonds into
something like a ten of clubs, a Jack of Hearts, and a Queen of Hearts.
In the autumn of 1970, feeling relatively stable again, I made a half-hearted
attempt to begin graduate work in library science. At an informal
reading in the university's student union, I recited several short poems
from memory, not having copies of anything with me. Jim Spencer, a fellow with
a considerable counter-culture reputation, was in the process of putting
together what he thought of as a one-time-only magazine. He asked me if I
wanted to contribute one of the poems I had recited. I was pleased with
the response to the poems from the audience and equally pleased to be asked
to contribute to the magazine. As soon as I had a little encouragement, I
resumed writing poetry, which I hadn't done with any seriousness for the
last year. As Jim worked on the magazine, we discussed the contributions
of other people, and the possible things we could do as editors. He asked
me if I wanted to either take over the magazine or co-edit another issue
with him. I agreed to the latter.
Jim had the magazine produced by photocopier - an unusual step,
since suitable machines were only beginning to appear at the time. We liked
the results, but couldn't afford to continue that way. Besides,
we were thinking of possibilities for doing all sorts of other publications
and trying all sorts of editorial processes. As much fun as we could have
with these schemes, they didn't get anything done, and we wouldn't be able
to do much if we didn't learn how to do something other than pay someone
else to do the printing with money we didn't have.
I had learned the basics of letter press printing in the primary school
system, since Wisconsin is the printing capitol of the world, and I would
have liked taking courses in it even if it was not required in the Industrial
Arts program. Still, this didn't seem any more practical than mimeo. It
was not unusual at the time for young working class males to use a buddy
system in finding factory jobs. If one of the buddies found a job opportunity,
he would apply for it with the other, both would take the initial interview
together, each answering questions the other couldn't so that together they
sounded like they knew what they were doing, and even if the employer
could see through this, he'd know that the two were capable of teamwork.
If the job was only offered to one, he did not take it, suggesting a kind
of loyalty that might make a point to the hiring agent. The buddy system
was one of the building blocks of a much more sophisticated era in U.S.
labor's history, and we were lucky to be part of a generation that had not
yet completely forgotten it, or relegated terms like "solidarity" to
history books, folk songs, and theoretical discussions. Work was still
plentiful at this time, and it wasn't that difficult to get a job, keep it
for a few months, then drop it and go on to another when your money ran out.
Again, this is part of America that now seems lost beyond retrieving.
Instead of going to a technical school, we decided to learn to produce books
on the job. Most of the jobs we did get were at small, eccentric shops,
usually ones that had seen better days, or were somewhat shady, or both. We
got jobs as some of the last typesetters on Merganthaler hot lead machines
for a fly-by-night company, for instance, but Jim only lasted a day and I
didn't manage much more than a week. I only stuck it out that long only to
get a sense of a technology that was already obsolete, though one which had
been the means of production for many of the world's most important books.
When I started, I didn't know how to cast type with one of these giants,
though the fact that I was a two finger typist made the unusual keyboard
configuration less of a challenge. If I didn't know what I was doing, it
was appropriate. The employer was printing such items as bogus coupons and
advertising for mail-drop businesses, and I was given the opportunity to
make up the copy as I went along instead of set prepared texts.
Walter Witz, an elderly Swiss perfectionist, provided us
with our best early jobs. Witz was semi-retired and did nothing but
produce forms for Gimbals department stores. He worked mornings, playing
polkas on the radio, and constantly cursing any single sheet of paper he
might lose in the printing process. His extreme frugality made him a good,
though difficult and demanding, teacher. In the afternoons, his son, who
never spoke to us, ran the press that imprinted numbers on forms and
did other skilled parts of the task of making such items as triplicate
receipt pads. Jim and I did less demanding work of collating and
applying padding compound to stacks of forms in screw-frames. The shop
was located in a once prosperous neighborhood which had in effect fallen
into what became known as the inner city. This was only a few blocks away
from the Sears building, which had been the epicenter of fires during
riots in the summer of 1967, and parts of the area had never been rebuilt
or cleaned up. Witz and his wife and son were the only white people in the
neighborhood, and he had installed multi-layered board walls
over all the windows on the ground floor of the building. Jim and I
got along fine with the black residents in the neighborhood, but
the barricaded windows made the place a bit unsettling. Nonetheless,
in the afternoon when Walter went upstairs to his apartment, and his son
switched the radio over to a country western station, Jim and I went outside
to take a couple tokes of grass, and spent the rest of the day talking as
we assembled and finished the endless business forms.
I had been greatly discouraged by the most active local poetry scene as run
at the time by Rich Mangelsdorf. Morgan Gibson had done an excellent job as
impresario a few years earlier, bringing poets and savants to the
university ranging from Paul Goodman to Kenneth Rexroth, and even coaxing
Lorine Niedecker out of her retreat from the world of literatti. Morgan
was the most likable of egomaniacs. He was constantly telling you that
he was the greatest thing there ever was - and that you were, too. His
constant enthusiasm was infectious and he probably did more to encourage
young poets, playwrights, novelists, artists, and activists than anyone
else who has ever lived in the city. Despite his ceaseless activity in
the late 60s, he had gotten himself into a quicksand of problems
through his anti-war activities in 1970, and was not only unable to
support any kind of poetry scene in the city, he was constantly being
harassed by both the faculty of the English Department at U.W. and by
the FBI, who were in turn putting pressure on his colleagues at the
university. Mangelsdorf had a particular vendetta against me. This
came to such a fever pitch that he once attacked a poet by the name of
Celia Young in a local newspaper, claiming that the only reason she had
gotten into an anthology was because she was my wife, and I had pulled
strings to get her included. She was unmarried, not related to me, a near
recluse, and perhaps the only person in the anthology who'd gotten their
solely on her own merits. Although there were several outstanding poets in
the city, the hip contingent had largely become venal and most of the
academics, lazy and timid. The city seemed to be living down to its lowest
estimation of itself. I didn't want any part of either camp.
Jim insisted that poets simply needed a scene to flourish. It didn't matter
too much to him how good they might be, just so they had a chance to get out
from under venal hierarchies and be themselves. I had a similar sense that
poets could flourish and do important work if only they allowed themselves
to do so. If there was a way to build up self-confidence, and most of all
to get poets interacting with each other and using that interaction as both
support and stimulus, a local scene could develop that might act as a partner
to those in New York and San Francisco, if perhaps on a smaller scale.
After all, nobody was writing poetry better than Lorine Niedecker's,
and she had just died on the last day of 1970 at her home some 40 miles
away. How many others like her might there be in the area? How many
might there be if they were brought into a scene that would in turn
bring out abilities that only the strongest poets could realize in
isolation? Just as important, who was going to read the stuff we published
if we didn't find or create a participatory audience? This seems one of
the most important lessons of the time: most poets may not be very good,
but you need a large ecosystem to support any kind of publications, and
you're not going to find that among many people who don't have immediate
access to live poetry and other arts.
Our discussions along these lines lead us to what we called "Peoples
Poetry," a publishing venture that would allow anyone who wanted it
the opportunity to publish anything they liked under our rubric as long as
we could get the costs low enough to make this a truly democratic
proposition. In the process of putting Freek Two together, we tried
to encourage contributors to edit their own work. Our job was simply to find
them, offer them x amount of space, and then go over their selections very
carefully with them, trying to make this a point of departure for larger
discussions with other poets. Opening up a place where everybody had a
chance to publish what they had might not create the kind of scene I
wanted to see, but it seemed a reasonable place to start.
We learned a good deal from Walter Witz, but he would not consent to let
us print our publications on his presses after hours. He was generous in
offering to print them for us at reduced rates, but that was still not
inexpensive enough for what we had in mind.
While at Witz's, we were looking for other printers to take the next
step. We found one a few blocks to the west, on 35th Street, the great
divide between the African-American part of the inner city and the
Spanish speaking barrio on the other side of the street. The name
of the shop was Wisconsin Speed Press, run by Ed Wolkenheim. Ed, under
the name Ed Walker, had been an important radio DJ in the city, and had
an exquisite gift of gab. He also drank excessively and loved cons and
strange deals almost as much as Jim did. Would he hire us? Well, maybe, but
first we had to have lunch with him and then proceed to a succession of
bars. That didn't result in jobs, but it did establish a mutual friendship
between him and me. Jim was at this time getting weary of the prospects
of printing and had other games to play. After a lot of conversation and
moving around the city with Ed, I started doing something like working for
him. I got no regular pay, just a cut of whatever job I worked on.
How much could Jim and I use the presses and other equipment
he had? Well, he wasn't sure about that, and ducked the question for a while
with partial promises. He actually could get interested in what we wanted
to do, but he had enough difficulty getting any of his own projects,
let alone jobs that came into the shop, done. Jim wanted more of a formal
type of arrangement, and left when he didn't get it. It was time for him
to move on to other things, most importantly, singing and following any odd
trails he could through the mazes of the counter-culture. It was also a time
when his already erratic behavior was getting more pronounced.
The kind of "work" Ed and I did also got more unusual as time went on.
We continued printing until the shop closed, but we also started seeing
what we could do with other printing-related prospects. Milwaukee produces
more print than any other city in the world. You can't go anywhere without
finding magazines such as Newsweek or Cosmopolitan, printed in the city.
This holds true for just about any kind of large job printing, from
dictionaries to coloring books. This meant that there was a lot of
expertise and used equipment in the city. With the latter, we tried to
buy printers' tools that had been damaged or that had to be dumped
quickly to pay the owners' debts or give them some money to get out of town.
We could spend days or weeks eating lunch with other printers, and then
make arrangements with them to handle each others' extra work loads.
We could at times get a few large and lucrative jobs, and work industriously
at them. But then we couldn't manage the smaller ones that came our
way. We could bring in substantial sums as brokers of one
sort or another, but such deals were completely dependent on chance. A
good part of the time, the only thing that kept the shop from folding was
the income Ed's wife Barbara brought in from her job at the phone company.
She could be enormously tolerant with Ed, but the strains on the marriage
increased as time went by. Ed's drinking continued to increase, and it
became more difficult for me to get any of my own printing done at the
shop.
I had already started on several other books and a new magazine by the
time we got Freek Three completed. These early books
were apprentice pieces in the most literal sense. We had a great photo
for the back of Two, but the stock was so absorbent we couldn't
print on it. Even maestro Witz couldn't do that. We did, however, silk screen
a magnificent cover on reflective mylar for Freek Three. Ed's greatest
skills were in the darkroom, and I learned more about cameras and platemaking
than anything else at Speed Press. Although Ed could fantasize about
reconstructing the presses of Gutenberg and doing perfect reproductions
of the Mainz Psalter and the 52 Line Bible, he knew nothing at all about
book binding. I had to invent an ad hoc means of doing that. I continued
using the same methods until the early 90s. This was unfortunate, since the
bindings weren't very good, and I never figured out how to do an adequate
binding without needing to charge for the extensive labor of Smythe
stitching and other bindings that would stay sturdy over decades.
We checked out recycled papers extensively, and decided to use nothing
else in the business. However ill-starred this may have been, I continued
using only salvaged stocks and the most environmentally sound recycled
papers on my own press and even when farming books out after I lost that
shop. The game has always been stacked against recycled papers, except
those used for greeting cards and other low volume consumer goods. By
the late 1990s, there were no responsibly made recycled papers
available to me at a price I could afford, and I finally capitulated.
My commitment to recycled paper played out in strange ways over a span
of nearly 30 years. For the most part, there is no more boring subject
on earth than the manufacture of responsible recycled paper, and I
spent years trying to get people interested in using it, only to
watch their eyes glaze over very quickly and, if I pursued the subject,
yawns broke out on the faces of even the most polite. However, the
recycled papers did give the books I published under the Membrane Press
imprint a distinctive look, and I gained something of a reputation among
paper salesmen. It was particularly surprising for me in the early 1990s
to order some paper from a young salesman in North Carolina who had heard
of the "strange guy up in Wisconsin who actually printed books on Bergstrom
100." During the Speed Press days, we set up booths to demonstrate
how paper could be recycled and one of the last Speed Press schemes was
a line of stationery.
Despite the many oddities and confusions of working with Ed, he proved
a nearly ideal mentor and fellow student in many ways. The constant
conversation we carried out for several years lead everywhere, and Ed's
ability to think out loud in a way that could maintain just about
anybody's interest made him a perfect source of information. He didn't
know much about poetry, but could become interested in it, and he was
the first sounding board for many of the ideas that were coalescing
during this period. There were things I would have liked to have learned
about printing during this period of apprenticeship, but did not. These
might have been filled in by formal education. No matter what the
disadvantages, however, learning how to improvise, talking to what seemed
an army of printers, taking and apart and reassembling used machinery,
taught me lessons I could not have gained in any other way. This worked
when Ed instructed me in the camera work he knew thoroughly; it worked
just as well when we tried to figure out how to assemble machinery or
make deals when neither of us knew what we were doing. Aside from
learning book production, this was one of my most prolific periods of
writing poetry, and I think that has something to do with the constantly
changing situations I found while working with Ed. A job in a stable and
well-run shop would probably not have provided the kind of perppetual
challenge and the stores of raw material opened up to me during this phase.
By the time I left Speed Press, I had bought a house
within easy walking distance from the U.W. library, with a basement
suitable to set up printing presses and other equipment.
Freek was in many ways the period piece this summary suggests. I
haven't felt like reading much of it for this article. The period,
however, wasn't such a bad one, and I'm glad to say didn't resemble the
documentaries of the era that form a television staple and a backdrop
for some wretched movies. Perhaps most important was that although
Milwaukee's poetry scenes were in a dormant phase, the receptivity to
poetry outside them was greater than at other times. This does not mean
that it was better educated or that everybody you met wanted to hear or
read your poetry, but they didn't brush it off or reflexively look on it
with contempt as the general public has since. At the same time, it wasn't
as divorced from other arts. Although Jim played rock, my main interests
were in the blues, jazz, classics, and the experimental music of the time.
Just because Jim and his audiences listened to rock a good deal of the time,
it doesn't not mean that they did not categorically exclude other types
of music. That Jim could both sing and write poems didn't seem unusual,
and neither he nor I wished to do anything that might jeopardize the
association between the two.
