Let Us Hail The Millennium, As Prophets With Computer Printers

By the summer of 2000, despite the fun I had had on the web, it seemed time to get back to producing books on real, live paper - and to do something about the price of books and the new technologies available to me. Although each of the books has its individual story, I initially decided to see about doing books by a master from the generation before mine, one my own age, and two who were younger. I wanted at least one to be a score, and one to be a home-made coffee table art book. I had produced my web anthology with no more resources than the average university student in the U.S. (in fact, being without a broadband connection, the majority of college kids might have had more advanced toys by that time). William Blake made a point of quoting a favorite passage from the Biblical Book of Isaiah: "would that all God's children were prophets." He seemed to be heading for something like this in his printing. A bit over a century and a half after that, I and a number of other young people had made an attempt at distributing our poems (or prophecies, if the term seems different) via mimeo machines. I had gone on to building a home around an offset press with similar intentions. It seemed only logical, as well as serendipitous, to welcome in the new millennium with the tools for universal prophecy that computer technology was mass producing at a dizzying speed. Nearly everyone who owned a computer also owned at least one printer, and these devices did just what they were called they PRINTED. Everybody with one could become a publisher. If that weren't enough, and unlike those of us who had started with mimeo and offset, the new toys allowed color printing and the computers that drove them not only made classic type faces readily available, they also provided tools to manipulate and reproduce photos and other forms of graphic art in ways never before available. In addition to printing books on paper once more, I wanted to make the point that the new tech not only universalized the printing press. This was a challenge and an invitation to the world, whether anyone paid any attention to what I was doing or not.

In addition to the computer and two printers, I also had a machine for wire binding. This was not part of a student's standard desk top equipment. But it was not expensive, and if any of God's children wanted to become prophets, they could either buy one or have books bound in similar manner at a modest cost at a Kinko's or other duplicating service. I did not want to consider these bindings as neutral expedients. Unlike the plastic combs that had preceded them, they were environmentally friendly. Unlike saddle stitched or perfect bound books, you could turn their pages with only the slightest effort, and the books could lie absolutely flat on a table, the way all books should in an ideal world. This capacity simply makes reading more pleasant under what had become standard reading situations. For scores for music, theater or other types of performance, a binding of this sort becomes more important in learning parts or in looking at the score on a lectern or music stand.

Of those I had in mind to publish in this series, Michael McClure was one among the elders. Joel Lipman was definitely the one I wanted to work with among poets of my own age group. I definitely wanted Susan Smith Nash to be one of the younger group, which also included Mike Basinski among several others. I believe I thought of doing one multilingual book that went beyond mere translation separately from Susan's, though I'm not sure, and what I asked her for was just that. This book expanded as soon as we began talking about it, and we found a funding source for an offset edition quickly, so a book by her left the list almost immediately.

I had in mind a book of Joel Lipman's stamp and collage visual poetry. This we began discussing right away, and we are still talking about it. It is a book that needs to be done. Virtually all of Joel's work of this sort that has been reproduced has been done so in black and white. The major exception has been the work of his which I put up at my web site. This alone is not fitting for an exquisite colorist like Joel, and I would like to see our edition, whenever we get it done, as a prelude to a larger offset edition done by a publisher who can afford it. To go to my Survey of Joel's work on-line click here

Michael McClure's The Masked Choir

As much as I admired Michael's poems, my presentation of him on the web seemed incomplete without one of his plays. The web site does include a passage from The Beard, but this comes across more like a poem than a passage from a play. Few of Michael's plays had been performed in recent years, and most weren't even in print. The Masked Choir had never been published in book form, but simply in a magazine. I asked Michael if I could publish this play, and he was enthusiastic. The basic edition we had in mind would be primarily for people to read to themselves, though it could be used by actors as a script easily enough. In addition, once we had the type set in electronic format, we could pass that on to anyone wishing to mount a production. They would still have royalties to pay, but the costs of having copies made would disappear. In addition, if they had cast members with visual impairments, or if there were any other reason why they might want to change the format for active use, they could move the file from the disk to their computer and alter it to suit their needs. If they lost copies, they could print new ones immediately.

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As a poet, Michael has remained the essential Orphic singer of the second half of the 20th Century in North America. Trends and fashions have come and gone during the last 50 years, but no matter how much they've run into dead-ends or clouds of pretension and obfuscation, the ancient and basic mammalian capacity to vocalize from personal impulse has never lost its usefulness and its indestructible beauty and strangeness. No matter how much fops and savants try to crush it, it always remains. And no one has been able to keep attuned to it over decades as Michael McClure.

The orphic voice can emerge in Michael's plays, but the plays tend to bring out other dimensions of his personality and ability. One of these characteristics is wit, in the classic sense. Just as important, Michael assimilates a large number of modes and models in his dramatic work. In his plays, you can see Aristophanes bump into Buster Keaton, Eugene Ionesco shake hands with the Goths from Icelandic Sagas, John Webster find his descendants in Restoration farces, TV sitcoms hold conversations with the harshest linguistic minimalism, stick figures carved in the walls of men's restrooms hold hands with angelic holographic projections filling the skies, courtly masques find themselves at home among shamanistic ritual. The main patron of the plays may be Antonin Artaud, but nothing holds them to any sort of subservience to that master's approach to magical theater.

In their heyday of the 1960s, the plays tended to generate other plays around them. When the wardens of the University of Wisconsin - Madison threatened to have the theater company and supporting faculty members producing Michael's first play, The Blossom removed from the campus, the student actors expelled from the school, and prohibit all future productions, Michael, aided by Morgan Gibson, made an agreement with the people in authority. According to this agreement, the play could be staged once, as long as it was not advertised and no mention of it was made to anyone. Although this meant only one showing, no advertising strategy could have worked better than the prohibition on announcements, and the theater was packed to overflowing. Michael's most celebrated and notorious play, The Beard, went through numerous busts and closures, becoming ritualized in their own right. In one important performance, the police made video tapes of the play while people opposed to its censorship made videos of the police making the videos, creating movies within movies. One production was mounted at the Fillmore Auditorium accompanied by the kind of light show that only such a venue could provide. Legislators used it as a prime example of decadence in proposed legislation to ban all obscene theater in the state where, in the strange irony that always seems to follow censors, topless bars first appeared. After a long period of incessant busts in California, the production moved to New York City, where it won two Obies, and to London, where it received an equally enthusiastic audience, and as close to an equal measure of censures as Britain could manage. During this period, raucous rock and jazz musicians, actors attuned to experimental forms of improvisation and experiment, and audiences devoted to creating a new culture made Michael's plays more like festivals than sober places for uninterested people to show their culturedness and to doze off in spite of themselves.

Some major playwrights have written plays meant as much to be read alone and in silence as to be brought to the boards. Michael's plays read best when you imagine the production, visualizing the actors on-stage, and the audience moved to unpredictable responses. Like any other Orphic productions, they have a life of their own, and you can tap into it just as you can with Michael's poetry.

The cast includes two giant pandas, and for the cover I used images of pandas with photos of people at a sporting event in their eyes. I thought it would be fun to make it look like its cover had a film lamination finish. To accomplish this, I printed the cover on paper normally used for photographs. I printed the text out on a duplexing lazer printer. I had hoped that this would be the easiest way to go. It wasn't. The paper buckled considerably and had to be pressed for a long time to get them to lie flat. This meant that I didn't get more than a couple sample copies to Michael before Christmas, but perhaps Christmas wasn't a bad time for him to receive the copies. In the meantime, I had Mike's book to do.

Michael Basinski's Beseechers

My first publications of Mike's came out of a set of unfortunate circumstances, one of which was my most painful experience as a publisher. I had begun a love affair and dumped most of my mail, with little examination, into cardboard boxes in a foyer closet during the affair first flowering. Some of it got lost, and I didn't discover it until considerably later, after the lady and I parted company. The most important envelope that I didn't open included a copy of a book another poet had dedicated to me. Since I didn't open the envelope, I didn't know about the dedication for over half a year, and hence didn't write to the poet. This left him assuming that I had rejected the dedication.

This gets complicated by another factor. After over 30 years of publishing, and almost as long being part of the mail art network, I developed some eccentric attitudes toward mail which may be difficult to understand for people in other circumstances. The mail art I always looked forward to. The endless barrage of unsolicited submissions I did not. It was easy enough to distinguish the two types of mail from each other, and from other types of mail by their packages. I think going for periods lasting as long as several months during which one receives an average of 80 unsolicited manuscripts a day can induce a callousness to them, particularly when my time and energy are finite, and I'm working in an area of publishing where rewards tend to small and rare. I know that due to my callouses I have undoubtedly missed out on some magnificent books. But, again, my time and energy are finite. Once the habit of ignoring some mail becomes established, it can spread to others. I have, for instance, taken to not answering mail that would tend to lead to meaningless contention, or to rudeness on my part that would be no more severe than simply not answering the mail at all. There are some types of mail that are blatantly hostile or coercive, and these I usually do not deign to answer, in part to lift a middle finger toward the sender.

Under ordinary circumstances, its easy enough to distinguish between envelopes (or even e-mail addresses), but at times when new love flourishes, all sorts of things outside of it become blurry. There's no way I can ever make up for not responding to the book dedicated to me. It is something about which I will feel profound shame for the rest of my life, and about which nothing can be done. This makes the quantitatively most wretched part of being a publisher, the typos that act as myriads of never-healing, ever-infected little wounds seem much less important.

Fortunately, this kind of extreme was not the case with the envelope that came from Mike. It contained some notes on my poetry, and a request for some work in exchange for that enclosed. That I did not answer this immediately was perhaps rude, but no big deal. I had liked other poems I'd seen by Mike and particularly one of the pieces in the envelope. Feeling like an idiot, I got Mike's phone number from a friend and called him. To my relief, he had no problems accepting my apology. I later got the sense that this was the kind of thing he might do himself. Although I've still not met Mike in person, there have been some odd little sitcoms that we've wandered into in part due to our sometimes similar eccentricities.

The bundle Mike sent included a draft of "The Wild Elephant," a performance piece made out of references to elephants and divided into entries for each reference. I asked if I could use this piece on the web. Further, I said I'd like to try suing different colors for each entry, not only so that it would look more interesting but also so the color codes could be used by performers. I said I'd put it up in a "sequester," that is a place on the web linked to nothing else so that nobody would see it unless one of us gave them the address. Mike agreed to this, and we proceeded with the coloring of the elephant lines. Along with Mike's notes on the piece and on performances, I put in a request that anyone wishing to perform the piece should use the web version to create the score to use, and to send us a recording of the performance.

I had seen several versions of Mike's "Venedian Beseechers" before the advanced form he sent me. These too I arranged in color code, and we included performance notes and beseeched readers to perform the work and send us copies.

Harry Polkinhorn and I acted as the Anglo-American curators for the 6th Post Arte Biennial, held in Mexico City. I asked Mike for "The Coming of the Circles" to send for exhibition in Mexico, and also for the Biennial web site that we put on-line. I put several other pieces by Mike on-line, but these three seemed to make a good nucleus for a different kind of project. Mike is a poet of basic and intuitive magic, of impulses that proceed from a type of wisdom not hindered by anything but direct personal experience, of pungencies and tactilities that other poets tend to ignore. This does not mean he's a sort of nature-boy type who can't read or learn from his artistic environment. He is a sophisticated librarian and a shrewd organizer of conferences and other events. But his poetry still gives a new definition to terms like "earthy." On the most apparent level, he takes some of his most basic ideas from moss on stones, mold in the corners of basements, spider webs in the back yard. In his correspondence, he bases a kind of improvised poetry out of his uncorrected misspellings, keys struck accidentally or too hastily, letters multiplied by leaving his fingers on a key a bit too long. This he elaborates, often adding intentional distortions to those he has learned to let happen and not even try to keep himself from avoiding.

When he sent me the copy of Venedian Beseechers, I was glad to see not only that he had played with the type since the last version that I'd seen, but also by the fact that this time it had a title. I wrote asking him to what extent he saw the Venedians as his Polish ancestors, and to what extent he saw himself working in a tradition outside and perhaps preceding that of Greco-Roman culture. I wondered if he might particularly see this as important in the context of the majority of Poles being Roman Catholic. He didn't pay attention to much of this when I first wrote to him, but did provide notes saying that, yes, he did like celebrating a pagan culture outside the "arrogance of western culture and its imagining that it had sprung from some positive hybrid of pastoral Greece and Imperial Rome." He also noted that the Venedians "had an elite pantheon and a host of household gods and spirits." The latter seemed like a perfect Basinskian pantheon, probably including spirits for the energies and substances of lost paper clips and oatmeal clumps wiped off the breakfast table a few seconds after they'd been spilled. The lines of the poem, each made up of discrete columns of two, three, and four letters, some suggesting parts of words, some suggesting a proto-language, or an urge toward articulation, or a jolly or contented avoidance of specific meaning gave a performer (silent with the page, or aloud in ensemble vocalization) a great deal of room to work in, and allowed for almost infinitely diverse performances.

The Wild Elephant included a polemic for the preservation of an endangered species, but also allowed for a range of precise and punctilious articulations, some in the manner of antique rhetoric, and the opportunity for hoots, honks, and abstract sonorities of all sorts. Unlike Beseechers, the work has a specified over-all shape and pattern, rather than one whose structure was left as close to completely up to the performers as possible.

I liked the was the round shapes disrupted and played games with grids in The Coming of the Circles, and saw this as related to the paganism of Beseechers without knowing precisely why. Mike's notes made what I had intuited clear, and in the process made me feel more confident in my intuition about Mike's poetry: "All notion and recognition of other energy originates with the circle. . . the coming of circles is the moment in which paganism - which in my mind.heart is the recognition of the great solar wheel - begins. Therefore, this Coming of Circles celebrates that instant when poetry enters the too often, or always, dark, dumb, unpoetic mind of the poet, which is here represented by the reality of straight lines and the words enclosed by and locked into slavery by the dictionary. I am sure that Dr. Johnson was the anti-Christ and Webster's book remains the bible of the dark." In this he rants almost the way I do - but better!

This seemed like the basis for a book - particularly one that could be used as performance scores for those too lazy or shy to print out the copies I put on the web. As we proceeded, Mike added two more poems that did not employ color: "Breathe Song of the Soil Fungi" and "City of Webs." These made the book more rounded and extended it in a number of directions beyond those I had originally conceived.

Unlike the Joel Lipman book I was trying to figure out how to do, this one lent itself perfectly to recycled papers, and gave me opportunities to solve several problems in producing art books with a college kid's school supplies.

The two new poems Mike added, being plain type and monochrome, presented no technical problems or challenges. The problem presented by "The Wild Elephant" seems almost comic, and perhaps demanded a comic solution. Although a purely typographical work, I could not get the kind of colors I had used in the web version from a word processor. Using the type tool of PhotoShop didn't give good definition to the letters. After a certain amount of tinkering it occurred to me that if I was satisfied with the colors I got on the web, I might as well use the web to print the pages. All I had to do was to create new web pages that would match the pages on which the type would be printed. The next step was to set the print function of the web browser so that it didn't print such things as date, time, location, and other defaults. This solution not only worked well enough, there's something both Rube Goldbergish and perhaps childish about it that still strikes me as funny, and at the same time totally in keeping with the great bard of cob webs and soil fungi whose work I was printing.

The size of the letters in Beseechers made it likely that they would produce significant bleed when printed with an inkjet printer. I could have solved this problem in a number of ways, but one appealed to me more than others. I had used a dark background and complex but luminous colors for the text in the web version. For the print version, I experimented with blue-green colors that didn't seem to have the right density to create bleeds. This unusual color range bring out a slightly different emphasis of the poem.

There was no way to prevent bleeds with Circles, and they would not have worked with this poem. This gave me the chance to try something I had planned for the Joel Lipman book. This idea was suggested to me by oriental book binding methods. If I printed two pages on an 11" x 17" sheet with a fold in the middle placed in such a way as to leave the pages facing outward, and the loose ends facing into the spine, the bleeds would be encased in the page and hence not show. Given the nature of Mike's poetry, and an important book of my own, Five Kwaidan In Sleeve Pages which used a different variant on pages with insides and outside, the tucked away bleeds seemed appropriate book for their own sake as well as practical purposes.

For the cover, I used a drawing Mike had included with the first copy of The Wild Elephant, colored in various ways.

There had been some additional fun and oddities going on during the book's production, and one continued after the book was done.

Mike had applied for tenure as Associate Librarian at SUNY-Buffalo. He asked me to write a letter of recommendation to his review committee. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, a fair number of people make such requests of me - some for academic positions some for NEA or Guggenheim fellowships, some for nearly any purpose imaginable. Since my academic credentials are meager (I don't have a Doctor's Degree, haven't taught in over a decade and when I have it's just been little odd creative writing gigs), I'm not a widely recognized figure in any field, I haven't won (or tried for) any major awards, and so on. I still like having the opportunity to make recommendations when the candidate deserves to win. As is my custom, I wrote a basic draft and sent it around to a number of friends in academe to see if I'd done a job within the standard parameters and to make sure I hadn't committed some sort of blunder or indiscretion. A couple made suggestions for minor revisions, and I sent the finished paper to Mike's review committee. I had assumed that Robert Bertholf, the head librarian, and several other people on the staff would know something about my, and that one of the reasons Mike asked for the recommendation was that I was one of the very few people who had taken part in what had come to be known as "the mimeo revolution" to still be actively putting out books, and that I had been involved in all sorts of other alternative publishing in all sorts of areas. In this case I did have something like credentials, and as a matter of fact would actually be a resource for someone in a special collections library dealing with the poetry of the second half of the 20th Century. I also thought I would not be a completely alien entity to Bertholf. So once Mike had safely received his tenured position, I thought it would be a good idea to check with Bertholf as to why my recommendation might be taken seriously, and what were good and bad points in it that I should remember in writing other recommendations. Bertholf somehow got the idea that I was suspicious about something other than my credentials and my ability to write a letter of recommendation. His response to my telephone call on the subject was simply to repeat that there was no "hidden agenda" involved, that I was not being asked to take part in any nefarious plots, and so on. Hidden agendas, nefarious plots - hunh? Well, okay. I will behave myself and simply write recommendations when asked for them, and not try to figure out why or how they were received. How this poetry of soil fungi leads into the paranoias of bureaucracy, I don't know, and apparently am not supposed to know. But I can't help but think of the last part of this episode as being not only funny, but paradigmatic of institutions I don't understand.

I finished the book just after what had so far been the most disgraceful presidential election in U.S. history. Unlike the election of 1972, this one had not been rigged by an incumbent, but by a dynasty working in coalition with some of the nastiest political entities and most destructive industries in the country. This was before the attack on the World Trade Center, and in my strong but eccentric patriotism, I have seen the U.S. as a country that makes at least as many horrendous mistakes as any other, but that we make efforts to correct them. This was also before the 2004 election, when the nation had gone precisely against its greatest strengths across the board, and had refused to correct its mistake at a time when that mistake had trashed and was continuing to trash everything positive the country has embodied. This was not yet the case when I finished Mike's book. What was going on was an attempt at self correction through extensive examination of chads in Florida ballots, a process that included detailed study of chads and the formation of a new vocabulary for their condition - there were dimpled chads, pregnant chads, hanging chads, for instance - and the television and radio were filled with discussion of them. I had not yet bound Michael's book, so that all (or nearly all -- certainly a purer count than Florida's) the chads in my binder's collection bin were from Mike's book. The laureate of lost lint and moss should surely be able to appreciate a bag full of real, unmistakable chads, and I sent him the collected chads along with his copies of the book. He wrote that he was pleased and amused by the chads. Whether he has found a use for them or his wife has thrown them out, I don't know, but I'm sure he was at least amused by receiving a bag of chads from his publisher at a crucial historical moment, and for the first and probably only time.

Mike is in the habit of giving away books when he gets them, and I assume that all the copies he received from me went to other poets and friends within a few weeks of receipt.