Small Press Publishing Research Articles

The Work at Hand

Donahue continuedfrom previous page ever. Time and the eternal, trauma and memory: one ponders such dichotomies with each new stanza. The poem is both ingenious and moving. As someone who lived in New York for many years. I would argue that "Hum" takes its place among poems like Lorca's "After a Walk" (with its resonant first line, "Cut down by the sky") and O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died." poems that speak on behalf of the city and preserve for the future an aspect of its inner life: Everyone is incidental. Everyone weeps. Detailfrom cover ofThe Night Sky The tears of today will put out tomorrow. The rain is ashes. The days are beautiful. The vocabulary of public events circulates throughout Hum. as if to illustrate a project outlined in The Night Sky: "how to conceive of words not as locked within the self, awaiting liberty, but as freely circulating outside of the self, waiting to be taken in. transformed, and sent back out." Even though we pass through moments of spellbinding clarity and opaque rebuffs to our impertinent demands for picture language, words move through us to reflect our social and political world. Lauterbach cannot, it seems to me, simply celebrate that circulation of words. She cannot sing untroubled the transformation of words that takes place within us. The incomprehensible has happened. It may not be something we care to admit. A bit retro. A symbolist crisis in a postmodern world. A gaudy predicament, she might say, one where the gaudy hides a God, who gives way to a doll, becoming in turn a gull. The flight of the adjective distracts us. The predicament remains, whether at the edge of Ground Zero, or looking at a painting, or talking to a friend, or watching MTV, or just looking out Malarmé's window: Fragment (September) Filtered through the cast of happiness so that evening has the weight of unconditional assent beyond the debris. Joseph Donahue's collection of poems include Incidental Eclipse, from Talisman House, and In This Paradise: Terra Lucinda XXI-XL, from Carolina Wren Press. The Work at Hand Larry Smith Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations Sam Hamill Shambhala http://www.shambhala.com 276 pages: paper. S 1 5.95 This world isfrost on an old man's breath, memory rushing into memory. Sam Hamill is one of the hardest working poets in America, and this includes his 30 years of work as editor-publisher at Copper Canyon Press (he's now retired). Like many poets who also edit and publish the works of others -James Laughlin. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Dennis Maloney, and the countless others of us in the small press publishing world -his own poetry is often given short shrift. It"s ironic since one wonders who. other than a true poet, would do the slave labor of this publishing work? Its chief reward, of course, is allowing us to work with those whose writing we respect, even love. Look at Hamill 's recent defiance of the Bush White House that led to his editing of the important Poets Against the War (2003) anthology. Other major achievements include his books of transía lions from the Latin, Greek. Chinese, and Japanese, selections of which are included here; then there's his monumental The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002). done with fellow Rexroth disciple Bradford Morrow, to keep a tradition of nature and engaged writing alive in American verse. He and others at Copper Canyon repeatedly cross the borders of mainstream and academic poetry. It's a calling, to be sure, but it shouldn't cause neglect. One of the finest statements on the task of a poet in the world is his A Poet's Work: The Other Side of Poetry (Broken Moon. 1990; Carnegie Mellon, 1998). Hamill is. then, a model to many others, but. that said, I want to offer an appreciation of his own poetry assembled so wisely here. More than a third of the collection is selections of Hamill's translations. It begins with Sappho, Anakreon, Asklepiados, and Catullus, and launches into his best work with the Chinese masters, most of them from the golden T'ang...

Iain Sinclair's Excremental Narratives

Iain Sinclair's Excremental Narratives

Fear, Loathing, and Moby-Dick

T eaching Moby-Dick to first time readers can be almost as daunting as a first reading. Novices often approach Melville’s opus with hesitancy, fear and loathing. Prior experience with literature shapes student attitudes, and re-education can be as challenging as cultivating lucid textual analysis. One student confessed, “My preconceived perception of Moby-Dick was an impossible, dull, daunting epic; but I was surprised that a novel written over a century ago could be so humorous, fast-paced, and relevant to the human condition today.” A student whose mother had studied Moby-Dick at a prestigious university was predisposed to approach the novel with dread. After hearing her mother’s recollections, she expected pontification and dry lecture. In contrast, a student whose mother, a small press publisher, studied the novel with Harrison Hayford at Northwestern anticipated challenge and excitement. As they shared experiences, her mother reminisced enthusiastically Preparation is important and preconceived notions may have to be dispelled. Students who understand the text is approachable appreciate its subtlety. Students identify with Ishmael’s journey, his unsuitability for the voyage, and his precociousness. They enjoy the humor, meandering meditations, unconventional narrative, and sympathetic and salient characters: I was surprised how much I related to Moby-Dick. I expected it to be dated, and, generally, when I read books that old, I don’t really relate to or identify with the characters. Sometimes I appreciate the quality of the book, how it’s crafted, and the thematic content; but rarely do I become involved with its characters. Midway through the book, I found myself drawn to Ahab, charmed by Queequeg, and understanding Ishmael. I don’t usually come this close to characters, certainly not in one hundred-fifty year old books. The book is surprisingly contemporary, powerful and easy to follow. To encourage students to enjoy the novel, it is helpful to remove some of the common stigmas. The readings and assignments need to be perceived as necessary tools for the journey, not as punitive weapons of a distrustful teacher. The instructor should be guide, not vengeful captain, or bureaucratic examiner. Informal theme papers, for example, can be as effective as major

Ron Edwards and the Rams Skull Press

ABSTRACTRon Edwards is a publishing and artistic phenonemon, an outstanding figure in Australian cultural history. His career as the owner of a small private press, printer and publisher spews 40 years, and he has worked with artists, writers, printers, and folklorists, who are important figures in the post-war Australian cultural renaissance. His interests are diverse, ranging from his early days in Victoria as a small press publisher of limited edition books (mainly vehicles for fine black and white lino-cut illustration), his work in Australian book illustration and as a landscape painter in oils and water colour, through his passionate and enduring devotion to the collection and publishing of folksongs and yarns and crafts of the North Queensland frontier.He is probably the most influential, and certainly the most versatile figure of the Australian folk revival, with work in folksong, folk yarns, bushcrafts and traditional leatherwork, and traditional Torres Strait Island cookery. He is still active i...

Lester's Progress , and: The Great Appalachian Sperm Bank and Other Writings (review)

bread." But things have changed. Now they have a cat named Garfield, cable tv and a microwave oven, Elsie works at the library and Harper builds houses in a subdivision. Harper Watts is no Appalachian totem when he takes a spill while cleaning gutters: "Three months short of his 70th birthday Harper Watts reached to clean a clogged section of guttering, leaned too far to the left, and groaned as his paint-spattered old aluminum ladder started sliding. Harper looked down and saw two clotheslines and a rose arbor coming up fast, bailed out and jumped. He landed left foot first, did a hopand -skip to miss the yellow cat Garfield, and collided head-on with two rows of wet sheets. "Harper took out forty pounds of wet bed linen and a dozen clothespins, hit the ground in a flapping, sopping tangle, and finally skidded to a stop just short of the pumpkins piled against the garden fence." Still Harper is no less "Appalachian" for coming down in a domestic disaster worthy of Dagwood. This change through time, as reflected in the Watts family (change which is certainly typical of what has gone on in the region in this century) might have been further highlighted by a slightly different arrangement of two of the stories. The man and woman in "Take Two" are referred to only as "he" and "she," but this story could fit well into the second rather than the first part of Mountain Passage; it feels like a story involving young Vernon Watts and his cheerleader girlfriend in the story "Merry Christmas." "Take Two" might be about Vernon (the poor boy from out in the county) and Sarah Collier (the pretty cheerleader with the well-to-do father) after two decades. "Little Lost Sheep," while one of the more recently written stories, according to the author's foreword, might also have been more appropriately positioned, say between "A Matter of Vision" and "River City Run," for it is a story about Vernon Watts at age eleven, after he feigns blindness in the second grade, to keep from going to school, and before he is introduced to the masculine world of the tobacco market in Maysville. But these are quibbles about arrangement , not about the intrinsic merit of these stories, all well worth reading. —Jim Wayne Miller Caudill, Harry. Lester's Progress. Berea, Kentucky: Kentucke Imprints, 1986. Paperback , $6.95. Best, Bill. 77ie Great Appalachian Sperm Bank and Other Writings. Berea, Kentucky: Kentucke Imprints, 1986. Paperback, $6.95. When two outspoken authors tackle the ills of Appalachia in biting satire, the results can be hilarious and hard to ignore. Harry Caudill's Lester's Progress and Bill Best's The Great Appalachian Sperm Bank are new from Kentucke Imprints, two tonguein -cheek volumes whose very presence—as George Brosi says—are a tribute to small press publishing. Lester's Progress is Harry Caudill's saga of welfare fraud, corruption, politics, and much more, set in fictional Fletcher County in the Quackgrass State. Hero Lester Warrick manipulates the system to collect black lung benefits, payments to the blind, low cost housing, and enough other fraudulent claims to fill a cedar chest with cash and drive a deliberately scuffed and muddied but brandnew Cadillac. Lester also collects, along the way, a colorful credibility as a squire of the county. Caudill lays it on too thick, but his chapter on "The Unreasonable Becomes Public Policy" is alone worth the price of the book. Caudill uses examples such as the unarmed Marines in Lebanon, university degrees freely conferred on those who cannot read or write, and the million dollar army tank which has to have its engine removed for an oil change to convince a jury that "what is crazy, what is deviant, what is in fact unreasonable is now publicly, socially, and legally accepted as reasonable behavior." The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the verdict: "In America, the justices said, norms have been turned around and upside down." Of course, says Bill Best in The Great Appalachian Sperm Bank, some of Harry Caudill's theories—specifically those regarding the genetic defects of the Appalachian people—are themselves "turned around and upside...