Intermedia poetics in and out of Detroit’s Alternative Press

Abstract

This article addresses the experimental Detroit-based publisher known as the Alternative Press, which published eccentric works of art and poetry—in the form of bumper stickers and postcards, among other useful objects—between 1969 and 1999. While the Alternative Press is largely unknown to scholars, this article traces its influences on poets, including Victor Hernández Cruz, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Ted Berrigan, and Alice Notley. It suggests that although these poets (and additional Press contributors) are generally grouped according to other geographical or formal tendencies, involvement with the Alternative Press produced an aesthetics of intermedia experimentation that traversed poetic schools, eras, and allegiances in the late twentieth-century United States. It situates the Alternative Press in the context of better-known art-world movements, such as Mail Art and Fluxus, and links the Press’s founders—Ann and Ken Mikolowski—with other influential publishers and artists of the time, notably Dick Higgins. This article introduces substantial new archival research conducted at the University of Michigan Special Collections, and prompts scholars to consider how a Detroit-based publisher can remap the geographical and generic contours of late-twentieth-century US poetry.