'Fervent and Utopian': Small Press at a Crossroads

In this final installment of this four-part series, I hope to probe some foundational questions about where small press is headed given the cultural, economic, political background discussed in my previous posts. I'd like to touch upon some ways we might think about autonomous literary production and the power of volunteer labor, and how we might reimagine collaboration and collectivity to regain a political relevance for small press aesthetics and practices. As this series of posts has been somewhat out of the ordinary for the Featured Blogger series, at least in terms of word count, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the patient editor of Harriet for his unflagging support and encouragement throughout this process. Again, as before, my views here are not representative of the Ugly Duckling Presse collective of which I am a member, nor do they reflect in any way, shape, or form, the opinions of the Poetry Foundation and Harriet, as the Foundation has been happy to remind you.

What Kind of Reach, and How to Get It?

My previous post included the story of how twenty-first-century small press publishers came to AWP, and some of the ways in which AWP (along with other structures) helped to sever these newer small presses from their anti-institutional roots and bring them into the fold of a professionalized or gentrifying literary field. I argued that AWP and other systems of order and control have seduced the small press away from those aspects of its activity that gave it political relevance (and a non-academic readership) and harnessed its rowdy energies for institutional goals. Still, many of my colleagues in the small press world may ask, didn't we "reach readers" at AWP? For sure, there was that! Yet, the question we now face is whether our participation and cooperation with such institutions has been worth it. At what price did we reach this new audience (the MFA world), or rather, to put it in a less market-inflected way, what did the small press give up in the process?

When I give talks in educational settings on small press practices and UDP's story in particular, I'm often asked if the internet and social media hasn't made it easier for readers to find small press publications; this question is also of course about "reach." Have we found more readers through the internet, and can we keep in touch with them through social media, email blasts, etc.? Yes, of course! But I am starting to respond, rather, with the question of what forms of distribution, communication, and—to borrow a notion from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's "Undercommons"—what sociality are we failing to preserve.

Is the internet really the level playing field it was once imagined to be? Does it not represent the same consolidation of power and resources we see elsewhere? Of course, lots of things are "available" or "accessible," but how does one come upon them? Does not a Google search for a poet bring you, most likely, to the Poetry Foundation website, Poets.org, and Amazon first? Even PennSound, not to mention the small press that may have published one of the poet's books, is unlikely to come up high on the list. Once even the most curious, "experimental," reader gets to Poets.org (the Academy's site) or the Poetry Foundation site, they are assured by the credibility of the organization and the powerful (because professional) look of the interface, that all the poets they'd ever need are here, and that the selections are the most relevant. Why look beyond?

Sometime in the mid-aughts, in a talk on "Non-Barcode People," fellow UDP-member Anna Moschovakis and I imagined a utopian experimental reader as the rat that tries anything in its path regardless of appearance to see if it might find sustenance, or a pleasure it never knew. One hopes the rat will seek further after coming to institutional or commercial websites, and that a student will accidentally see more opportunities beyond the assigned reading list at the independent bookstore, if there's one in town, or the library, which is doing away with the accidental adjacency open stacks provide. Through a combination of institutional controls and the economics and politics of distribution discussed at the end of my third post, such experimental reading is unlikely to be rewarded with a revelation of any underground literary network, and this is not by chance. City-sponsored book fairs (Brooklyn Book Festival, etc.) are increasingly no different, because one pays to play: more centrally-located tables are likely to go to bigger presses and the majority of speakers and readers are the most "popular," i.e. the most commercially viable. Likewise, Amazon or Google algorithms also are unlikely to lead the rat to pastures outside of the narrow, commercially-oriented maze.

Of course, institutional websites, independent bookstores, and city-planned book fairs are useful in the populist effort to build up literacy and reading, but to what extent are they also coercive in terms of the literary landscape they present, and the content (and representation) they naturalize through availability. What kind of literature and what kind of poetry are they most likely to bring to the curious reader's attention? What idea of literature and of poetry—aside from entertainment and authoritative (controlled) knowledge—do they popularize? Certainly, poetry's once indelible connection to political aesthetics and nationalist, radical, or cosmopolitan movements is likely to go unnoticed. If it appears at all, its radical statement is likely to be defused by its perceived willingness to get along.

Optimistic colleagues and peers may remind me that more and more poets of the past aligned to leftist or radical politics, even to the Black Arts and Black Power movements—along with more contemporary poets seen as political—are appearing on the rolls of the Poetry Foundation site and in similar venues. But I would hasten to point out that—just as the glossy indy magazines of the turn of the century took avant-garde poets out of small press contexts and presented them as simply "good" content next to MFA graduates and establishment figures—these professionalized settings neutralize such poets' political positions through the magnanimous gesture of inclusion.

It’s useful to consider that, as Juliana Spahr notes in Du Bois's Telegram, the outward propaganda of the US State Department is at this time campaigning on the diversity of our country in an attempt to deflect (or "preempt") the international left's criticisms of our country's constant and structural race- and ethnicity-related abuses. Racially predicated police violence and the detainment of children of Latin American migrants are just some examples of what such propaganda aims to de-emphasize with the facade of a multi-cultural melting pot, a strategy also employed during the Cold War.

Similarly, the selective inclusion of radical poetics (or "selective appropriation" to borrow a term Steve Evans used in the early 2000s) practiced by (web)sites of benevolent commerce, as well-meaning as they might be, creates a semblance of diversity that is useful to the institution. Meanwhile, it strips poems of their context—as did the New Criticism leading up to and during McCarthyism and the Cold War—and de-activates the bomb that anarchist-aligned poet Stephane Mallarmé called the book. "The book," indeed, because the book gives context, not only by its inter-relation of content, but also by how it was published and by whom, and also for what readers.

"Small Press is ...?" Editor-Run Publishing, Economics, and Volunteerism

We may not have to define the "institution" in the way that I will attempt to define the small press—we tend to know one when we see one. To a younger poet "emerging" on the scene, however, UDP and other presses of its generation might seem like institutions. No doubt my colleagues at other small presses have noted the surprise of younger visitors when they learn that the person they perceive as "running" such an "institution" is not paid or is barely remunerated for their work in this prestigious position and works several other jobs and, as is sometimes the case, donates their elsewhere earnings to keep the press going. (It may similarly surprise the new generation of aspiring literary professionals to know that some of the writers and publishers they look up to don't possess an MFA.) What is the nature of this surprise, what cultural preconceptions are at its root? Would the same information be surprising to the preceding generation of writers?

Partly this surprise is the outcome of professional expectations fostered by MFA programs and the AWP, and the eroding of political distinctions. The definition of a small press has never been more unstable than today, thanks in no small part to the institutions that selectively include and appropriate its work or make gestures of support for its well-being, as we have seen with AWP's Small Press Publishing Award and other examples. In the popular media, the confusion of small press with independent literary presses and even smaller commercial publishers goes back at least as far as the 1980s, a time of changing tides in small press funding. A New York Times article from 1987 titled "Small Presses Flourish" detailed mergers and consolidations in the book industry and focused on "competitive" presses such as David R. Godine, North Point, Graywolf Press, Copper Canyon Press, Ecco Press, and Persea. Examples of "flourishing" small presses given in the article include ones such as this: "Flight of the Old Dog, a novel by Dale Brown and published by Donald I. Fine Inc., a medium-size firm established by the founder of Arbor House, recently sold to paperback reprint for $357,500."

Definitions one finds online range from the crude to the obfuscating. For example, Standout Books Publishing Services, a "dynamic, family-run company that prides itself in providing exceptional services to ambitious authors and publishing companies worldwide" such as career-advising, editing, and coding author websites for self-publishers, defines a small press as "an independent publishing house that has a fully staffed publishing team—think editors, proofreaders, designers, and typesetters—but runs a smaller operation than the big name publishers." According to their blog, in a section on "the drawbacks of a small press" for an author (rather than going with a commercial house, or striking out on your own) include the following advice: "beyond the more obvious cons of this approach (a smaller budget and less influence than major publishers, less freedom and a smaller cut than self-publishing)," one "pitfall," says the website, is the fact that "smaller capital means a smaller advance" and that "[s]ome publishers may not be in a position to offer an advance at all."

Readers of Harriet might surmise that, as my historical outline also suggests, most small presses have nothing close to a "fully staffed publishing team" and that usually editorial work, in particular, is the last thing to be compensated, if it is not completely volunteered. As former Executive Director of CLMP and SPD, Jeffrey Lependorf, noted in Publishers Weekly small press editors "donate their labor," hoping to cover costs "without dipping too far into their own finances." In other words, not only do these editors work for free, they often subsidize the printing of the books out of pocket. (UDP, for example, began publishing books with money pooled from the personal "savings" the editors pieced together from non-publishing jobs, mostly in educational contexts, and—in some cases—from student loans.)

In my first post ("Power to the People's Mimeo-Machines..."), I frequently characterized small presses as the "low-end" publishers of stapled or hand-sewn chapbooks to make a point about the look of authenticity that signals small press belonging and the connection between aesthetic and political persuasions. However, of course, small press publishers—in which category one may include everything from Totem/Corinth, United Artists, Something Else, Station Hill, Burning Deck, Red Dust, and Membrane to The Figures, Atelos, Tender Buttons, Black Square, and on to the younger Krupskaya, Futurepoem, Fence, Nightboat, subpress, Les Figues, Belladonna, Litmus, Cuneiform, Counterpath, Omnidawn, Action, Wonder, Canarium, Tavern, and countless other poetry publishers, and even fiction-oriented presses like Dorothy, Small Beer, and Deep Vellum—have long operated in the gray area of small press trade book publishing, with perfect-bound or sewn-and-glued books produced in modest print runs often with evidently modest aesthetics and inexpensive materials. In most of these cases, these are nonprofits or not profitable, though their books have the necessary ISBNs and distribution networks (though most frequently they use the mission-driven SPD, another marker of small press belonging) and thus available to the trade, albeit with a limited aesthetically-specific audience. Most are single-operator ventures, or minded by a small group of passionate enthusiasts, often poets themselves. They have little or no staff and rarely "hire" editors. They are editor-run, in the sense that the editor/publisher decides the aesthetic vision of its endeavor; indeed, most live only as long as someone can volunteer their labor and passion to support that vision.

We may attribute volunteer labor as a common "problem" for small presses to economies of scale and the costs of printing—the high unit costs of short print runs can be exacerbated by the quality of the editions (archival paper, etc.) that poetry and "intellectual" presses have long been known for. These costs create an extremely small profit margin because such publishers maintain competitive pricing in the trade due to an ethos of access different from that of university press publications marked up for library and institutional markets. Since, after everyone's taken their cut—bookstores, distributors, and let's not forget the author's royalty or upfront fee, and of course the printers' bill and the postal service, not to mention overhead, i.e. rent, internet, paperclips, etc.—the books may break even at best, there can be no conversation about paying editors.

Here I'll get into some of the nitty-gritty, as even serious readers and supporters of literary publishing often have but a superficial sense of what keeps a small press down, or small. The below accounting is based on a recent UDP book—A Tradition of Rupture, Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. Cole Heinowitz—5x8, 160 pages, 900 copies printed on a no-frills acid-free paper and bound at Michigan-based McNaughton & Gunn, a women-owned business, into a two-color-offset cover on French Paper Co. stock, an ecologically-responsible, family mill, also in Michigan.

Start with an $18 retail price tag.

* $7.20 goes to the bookstore, after the traditional 40% bookseller's discount.

* $5.40, half of what's left over, goes to the distributor—assuming it's with Small Press Distribution, as most of us are, and that the bookstore ordered the book directly from SPD and not from a "middleman" (Ingram, etc).

* $1.08 goes to the author or estate if a 6% royalty has been promised, though that is on the low end. Royalties are generally calculated at a rate somewhere between 4% and 11% of the retail price. To make up for our low-end royalties, UDP gives a generous number of copies to the author, as well as 50% off additional copies, so they can sell them at readings we can't staff. (As we all know, even at bookstore readings, small press books are not always made available.) If it's a translation, the publisher might also be sending $.53 to the translator on each copy sold, or more, depending on the contract. UDP gives translator's an author's royalty rate of 6% if we don't also have to pay a lot for rights. (For the Pizarnik book in question, we had to put up a $750 advance and pay 7% royalties, but I'll stick to a our more typical royalties arrangement for the sake of this example.)

* SUBTOTAL: What we have left is $4.32 (or $3.79 if it's a translation). But it's not over yet.

* Now subtract the unit price for production: $2.30.

* Subtract $0.15 per copy for the shipping to the distributor's warehouse (SPD in Berkeley) and the publisher's office/house/apartment, in this case, the UDP studio in Brooklyn. That cost could be much higher, but UDP bundled the shipments with other books of that season, and because of the bulk of the shipment, we got them by freight, which you couldn't do if your "office" is at a residential address. You'd be looking at something like twice the cost, or $.30/copy, for UPS ground.

* Subtract another $0.20 loss for media-mail postage on 60 copies of the print run for promotional purposes (review and desk copies) over the course of the book's life—a frugal estimate, considering all the awards and prizes you'd feel remiss not to apply for on behalf of your authors and translators.

TOTAL: The publisher's "take" on that $18 book sold at a bookstore is now down to $1.67, and $1.14 if it's a translation. (Note that this accounting doesn't include any overhead for storing the books in a dry space at a decent temperature, nor the small per-title distribution fee, nor the internet bill or the toner and paper to print a press release, nor keeping the lights on, not to mention any potentially outsourced labor like design, typesetting, website management, bookkeepers, and accountants.)

In the case of the Pizarnik book with a unit price of $2.30, the cost of printing 900 copies (plus 65 unforeseen overruns) was $2,218. An optimistic sale of 750 copies over a year or two calculated at $1.67/copy (through distribution) would yield a publisher's take of $1252.50—a little more than half of the cost of production. And a bit less than that if you use the $1.14 take on a translation.

If it wasn't obvious already, this shortfall makes clear that the small press publisher must find additional ways of selling the book at more profitable discounts than possible through traditional distribution, even with a nonprofit distributor. In order to break even on a modest print run, the publisher must try its luck in direct bookstore consignment, book fairs, events, subscriptions, and the fulfillment of internet orders, all of which adds up to a substantial amount of labor, including customer service. Any additional printings, if they are needed, are likely to be just as costly as the first, entailing as much outlay and labor, bringing similar or smaller and slower returns. In the best case scenario, as Lyn Hejinian has noted, "once one has a few books in publication, their sales can generate money necessary to pay for the next ones, but the funds needed for the first few books will never get recovered."

The calculations above affirm Roof Books publisher James Sherry's observation that while a piece of blank paper has a "definite economic value," when you print a poem on that piece of paper, that value is lost. That doesn't mean, however, that poetry lies outside of commerce and economics; rather that it is tied up with both cultural and economic value. In truth, the pure potential of the blank page would be more valuable to me if the poem printed on that page is just the same old poetry with the tired "epiphany" that brings me no news. At the same time, that same old poetry may do better than break even with the right financial and distribution structures at its back. Yet, if it's page from a small press book, it is likely to fall short of a profit—not because of the value a reader may find in the poem, but because of the structures that impede its circulation.

In the case of the small press publisher, minding the numbers above, it becomes clear that volunteer editing is often a financial necessity. Furthermore, depending on the publisher's connections to funding streams through grants or donors that may or may not pay part of the printer's bill, the net profits may require volunteer publishing, i.e. volunteer-based publicity, distribution, bookkeeping, financial management, event planning, "marketing," as well as design and typesetting, and even some aspects of printing and binding the books, cutting costs with free labor.

But, while volunteerism may be a necessity, it is also, crucially, the result of an ethos of mission-driven, unprofitable publishing—exactly what small press is. In the absence of an activist ethos, the numbers alone would not persuade anyone to do the work, and much of what our community—if you're reading this, you're at least tangentially a part of it—knows as poetry and other marginal literature with small readerships would not exist in book form, in which case an alternative to commercially published literature would be neither visible nor viable.

I do not wish to say that a mission-driven publisher must necessarily be a nonprofit (officially incorporated as such) or the kind of publisher that puts income from the sales of its books, however slight, back into the publishing project. The choice to align oneself with non-profitability is not simply a matter of economic necessity. There are mission-driven nonprofits where (at least some) editors draw a salary, even a living wage, and there are for-profits where some income is put back into the work. However, not all of such presses are small presses, in the narrow sense that the editors don't do most of the work of publishing—on top of having professional, salaried editors, they may have employees for marketing and sales and rights, and may hire out design work, etc. The larger nonprofits and smaller for-profit independents alike use corporate distribution companies (not SPD) to get their books to the trade, hedging their bets that slightly bigger distributor cut will be worth it, and crossing their fingers they don't get slammed with fees for returned stock. These types of businesses, if they turn out to be profitable, tend to stick around after their founding editors have retired, passed on, or found a buyer.

Whether printing is done exclusively by the editor(s) themselves has never been a point of contention for inclusion in the category of small press; some aspect of production—printing or binding—has traditionally been farmed out by small presses as much as not. The specific designations of "private press" or "fine press" are reserved for those who produce books wholly by their own hands and equipment. During the explosion of small press publishing in the 1950s-1960s, many editors may have printed and/or collated their own publications (e.g. Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones for Floating Bear; LeRoi and Hettie Jones for Yugen; Anne Waldman for The World, and countless others) often with the help of friends, but duplicating equipment (the means of production) was frequently housed in collectively used spaces, co-ops, or arts organizations (like the Poetry Project or Lower East Side Printshop) or belonged to employers and used "after hours." There are of course individual publishers from the post-war period to the present day who, having procured or salvaged the means of production, do all the work themselves in their own shops while preferring to group themselves with "small press" due to the type of book or literature they publish; such examples abound in chapbook publishing—DoubleCross, Third Floor Apartment, Compline, and others—though it is difficult to determine exactly the boundaries of what it means to be doing all the printing yourself and owning the means of production in a digital era. Since production methods alone cannot be the sole defining factor of small press, we must look toward its cultural foundations.

Finally, the small press, at its most basic, is an amateur effort; and like amateur painting or theater, one does it alongside one's job or profession (or the management and investment of inherited wealth, if one is of independent means). Recently, I asked a friend—the main editor of what might be called an "independent poetry press," who had previously, and from a very young age, been an autodidact small press publisher for many years before taking a "job" in publishing—whether he could define the boundaries of the business of publishing and the small press. His reply was clear and simple: in a small press the editor does the work of publishing.

The Politics of Not Being Publishing, Exactly: Small Press and Samizdat

Whether or not its editors entertain any radical politics, by its very nature, the small press upholds what Steve Evans has called "two long-standing commitments of the avant-garde—its anti-capitalism and its insistence on autonomous intellectual/poetic production and evaluation." Note that the work small presses publish does not have to be "avant-garde," nor does its editorial stance have to be explicitly aligned to any aesthetic movement. As Charles Bernstein once noted, "the importance of the small press for poetry is not restricted to any aesthetic or indeed to any segment of poets." Rather, whatever the content it publishes, a publisher's belonging to small press culture is dependent on the negative capability of its economics and its position vis-à-vis the institution.

In the hope of clarifying a defining structural factor of small press culture, I turn to Toronto-based scholar Ann Komaromi's recent work on Soviet-era samizdat culture. According to Komaromi (in the Slavic Review) samizdat is "a historically limited system of uncensored production and circulation of texts in the Soviet Union after Iosif Stalin and before perestroika, as well as the corpus of texts produced by that system." The question Komaromi's research tackles—"whether samizdat should properly be considered a medium, a genre, a corpus of texts, or a specific textual culture"—is one that I see applicable to small press conditions. For Komaromi, "samizdat can be productively approached as a particular 'mode of existence' of the text, one that is similar to and dependent on print, while not being print." I would propose, parroting Komaromi's phrasing, that the products of small press can be productively approached as a particular "mode of existence" of the text, one that is similar to and dependent on publishing, while not being publishing in the business sense in which the term is generally used and understood.

Samizdat publications, regardless of their content or their physical attributes and means of production, were "anti-Soviet," because the Soviet government's injunction against private publication and circulation of any text (literary, political, religious, philosophical, etc.) made it so, whether or not it expressed any anti-Soviet views. What made samizdat dangerous to the state is precisely the fact that it insisted on "autonomous intellectual/poetic production and evaluation." Samizdat publishers and readers (who were in effect also its distribution system) took production and evaluation out of the purview and control of the vetting institutions of state censorship.

To understand small press as a kind of publishing at a remove from publishing, i.e. removed from and often critical of the business of publishing, it may help to think about "artist-run" galleries or "musician-run" spaces and labels for experimental music, like John Zorn's venue The Stone, or his Tzadik label, or the endeavors of enthusiasts, like the legendary experimental jazz label ESP-Disk', founded in 1963 by lawyer and music-lover Bernard Stollman with a small family donation. (Stollman's releases displayed their motto proudly on each LP: "The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk." Their second production was Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity.) A large part of the emerging and avant-garde arts relies on this kind of space and support for circulation. Often when their work has become profitable, artists or authors move on from these spaces to more professionalized representation. Like artists-run galleries, small presses are "editor-run" publishing spaces for work that is not commercially viable, relying on the support of community and of arts funders, who have become less likely to support less "successful" presses. Yet, presses like Action, Argos, Futurepoem, Golias, Krupskaya, Wonder, etc, who publish just two to four titles a year—which fact alone puts them outside the business of publishing—can have substantial influence in contemporary poetry by presenting relevant voices in their communities who are also read nationally, even internationally.

What I end up coming back to is the persistent idea of volunteer labor that separates a small press from all other types of publishing. When a volunteer-based organization starts down the road of institutionalization, the necessity (and benefit) of paying editors is perhaps the first and foremost marker of substantial structural change. Paid editors are, after all, "responsible" for doing their job and making deadlines, and "accountable" in their choices of books for the financial wellbeing of the publisher. Yet, the professionalization of its workforce is not simply a sign of healthy growth and institutionalization for the small press.

In a society where "money alone wields power and therefore is the sole guarantee of truth," as Julia Kristeva writes in "The Revolt of Mallarmé," it is unthinkable to provide for the poet or the small press whose subversive activity of "pure expenditure" calls into question the very basis of society's justice and ironizes its laws. The small press and the poets it publishes question the validity and authority of institutional aesthetics and wage structures. But they cannot do this without "pure expenditure," for the ability to secure space for the creation and evaluation of non-professional literature is dependent on structures that are free of institutional concerns of self-preservation and power. The conditions, and the sociality, that must exist for literature, and specifically poetry, to regain its connection to non-professional audiences is the same that is necessary for the (re)establishment of its political relevance as a space for unexpected thought and, to use Moten and Harney's term, study. The volunteer ethos both qualifies small press activity and constitutes its autonomy, making possible a space of ludic play and unfettered thought, where control and order are always keen to infiltrate.

A lesson to be learned from the CIA involvement in Cold War magazines is that the autonomy of the publisher is a necessary condition for an autonomy of literature, whatever its political "commitments." The gesture made by a claim to autonomy is itself always political and empowering. Autonomy, though, is not the same as pluralism. It is neither the anti-ideological front of magazines like the Paris Review (and other anti-communist outlets of the CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom), nor the depoliticized stance of turn-of-the-century trend-conscious indies, as discussed in the first post of this series.

In this light, the early NEA's allocation of block funding to CCLM (see post two) to spread financing to smaller publishers can be seen as a conscious political move when we situate it in the context of the CIA's 1967 launch of Operation Chaos, which Joel Whitney's Finks calls "a scheme to spy on and destroy a large, independent strain of the American free press, bluntly quashing all homespun editorial opposition and preemptively striking against embarrassing stories." Operation Chaos is known for its attempts (in partnerships with the FBI and police) to infiltrate or sabotage anti-war newspapers and left-wing magazines, like Ramparts, Quicksilver Times, and Dispatch News (which published Seymour Hersh's Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of the Mai Lai massacre). While the NEA could not directly counter such government forces, it could support independent publishing in the cultural realm best by letting go of the strings and lowering the barrier for funding as much as possible. In severe contrast, the very different practices of the NEA today (discussed in my previous post) lack political consciousness and fail to recognize the import and impact of a diverse and autonomous literary scene.

In the words of Fredy Perlman of the Detroit Printing Co-op, the small press is "a creative social enterprise" that is "run by its producers." Volunteerism is not an "investment," it is a political activity within the literary context. Editor-run publishers provide the conditions and sociality necessary for "authentic" literary gestures with little regard for their commercial value. They put their own time and care, and even their money and bodies, to work on their authors' behalf. Here the social function of the book is paramount. The conditions of reading created by autonomous publishers confront the torpor of consumerism and the dangerous inanity of commercialism. These conditions cannot be attained without room for ludic invention allowed by the amateur nature of editor-run publishing.

Professionalization, on the other hand, disarms and defuses the political motivations at the heart of the small press endeavor. The hard battles fought by small press publishers to put non-commercial writing unapproved by existing institutions on the map, into libraries, and on college and MFA syllabi, are for all intents and purposes being forgotten. Oppositional writers are incorporated into the canon by way of "inclusive" websites and professionalized magazines; anti-institutional publishers of the past are legitimized in library and museum vitrines. Likewise, contemporary small press publishers are celebrated with lip-service as examples of originality and entrepreneurship by institutions that garner cultural capital from their acknowledgment of small press while consolidating funding and opportunity to the select few that fit the (a-)political molds of the day.

Collaboration, Collectivity, and the Threat of Institutionalization: A UDP Story

At the close of the twentieth century, a small group of writers and artists with no experience in publishing gathered around the idea of making books in a collective, collaborative, and informal spirit. With roots in DIY xerox zines and chapbooks, UDP's various co-founders took inspiration from a wide swath of historical practices and productions: Russian Futurist books, Dada publications, the mimeo revolution and post-war small presses (Burning Deck, etc.), Fluxus, concrete poetry, the "democratic multiple" artists book, and counter-culture mags and rags like The East Village Other. The predecessor projects and early doings of the friends that would form the group were predominantly collaborative. The formation of the Ugly Duckling Presse Collective was both serious and silly. We were "junior artists" (Yelena Gluzman's term) with bohemian and dadaist attitudes, quite aware of the humor of a collective with no significant resources and a name that reeked of amateurism. Our dream of a multi-use studio and performance space was just that. We could afford to be as anti-institutional as we wanted—sneaking xerox copies at our jobs and making books in our apartments. Our broad and idealistic mission, penned in the late 1990s, was to provide an experience of art "free of expectation, coercion, and utility." Our books could be free of commercialism, could have hand-made elements while being circulated widely and at accessible prices, and we could publish anything anyone in the group wanted to publish. All of this wasn't so very hard to achieve in that we had no market, no capital, and no expectations—it was a game we could play with a minimal ante. We didn't have to try hard to be autonomous.

Against a late-1990s backdrop of sleeker production values (the more professional-looking "indies" and "alternative" poetry magazines—McSweeneys, Tin House, Fence, The Germ, etc.), in the absence of professional experience, education, and financial resources, UDP editors embraced what we sometimes called "intuitive design," making use of available means (rubber stamps, crayon, rubber bands, left-over paper, found materials) and inexpensive or free technologies (xerox, a rickety tabletop letterpress and moveable type, laser printers, newsprint, neighborhood offset, hand-collation, staplers, and pamphlet-stitching). Slogans like "cheap for freaks" ran alongside the laughable price tags on our productions, when they weren't given away for free. You could buy a UDP chapbook (Julien Poirier's Flying over the Fence with Amadou Diallo) at St. Marks Book Shop for twenty-five cents, or 6x6 #1 for $2. In the days of the Anti-Readings (circa 2000-2003)—collaborative literary circuses organized by Loudmouth Collective (James Hoff and Ryan Haley, who later became UDP editors) with the participation of the UDP collective—this ironic attitude toward the "value" of poetry and the "business" of publishing was best expressed by James Hoff's dollar-bill-poetry performance. James and others hand-stamped poems by his friends on dollar bills, taped them to a wall, and sold them for seventy-five cents—a profoundly social experience of the "negative economy" of poetry in a market-oriented society, as James Sherry had once described it (see above).

The Anti-Readings consisted of participatory poetry games, exhibitions of one-of-a-kind and small edition artists books, and made every effort against a central event or reading—chairs were piled in the center of the space to indicate that there was no specific viewing direction and that the audience were just as much participants as were the presenters. Free booklets were handed out or stacked for the taking. These events were indicative of the collective's taste for decentralized activity, process over product, instigation of play, and an anarchic politics at the margins of (and antagonistic to) the more institutionalized art and poetry worlds with which it was tangentially in contact. In hindsight, I'd not hesitate to say that the Anti-Readings were a kind of Temporary Autonomous Zone in a quickly gentrifying city; they enacted the kind of bohemian space of play where human connections promised no "access" to professional advancement; you didn't have to pay to play.

Because of UDP's collective nature, having a "space"—to meet, to collaborate, to print, to host readings and performances—was deemed important in the formative conversations of our group of friends and collaborators in the late 1990s, when the editorial addresses for correspondence printed in our publications changed from one editor's apartment to another. Going in with several downtown theater companies and nonprofits on a temporary situation—18 months rent-free in the dank basement of a DUMBO, Brooklyn building soon to become luxury lofts—UPD suddenly found what it had only dreamed of: a publicly accessible, communally run studio. The 2002 build-out of the studio was almost contemporaneous with a big leap into book publishing, nonprofit incorporation, and two small grants (for the magazine and a nascent Eastern European Poets Series). The huge common space at what came to be called The Nest allowed us to organize readings, and even concerts and fundraisers (with Belladonna* and Futurepoem), and a "Cheap Small Press Fair" (2003). After moving operations out of apartments, living rooms, and basements, and consolidating existing and new equipment in a studio accessible to all the "editors" (as we called collective members), there was no turning back. UDP was changing.

Maintaining a studio and print shop brought with it the possibility for a variety of public programming on the premises: readings, release parties, writing workshops and seminars led by our authors, bookmaking classes, more regular internships, open-house volunteer days, site visits and printing demos for high school, college, and graduate-level classes, the loaning out of the space and equipment for other groups, and more. Other small presses—Argos, Futurepoem, Guillotine, Trafficker, and A Rest Press among them—have made use of our facilities: the big table for meetings or book binding, the presses, the guillotine for cutting paper or trimming chapbooks, shelving for storage, etc.( The journal n+1 held their early editorial meetings in our DUMBO studio in preparation for their first issue, designed by one of UDP's editors, Ryan Haley.) All of that activity—making use of the "space"—has made UDP somewhat more like an arts organization with a peculiar mission: to preserve and pass forward the ethos and practices of small press publishing and amateur book-making.

Now that we had a space—moving, though it was, through several locations—editors had to pool money not only to print and publish, but also to pay rent and finance moves and build-outs—a source of some stress on the collective of friends, due in part to the varied levels of interest and resources available to its membership, what I hesitate to portray in the language of "unequal investments" of time and financing. Having eschewed hierarchy and institutional operational models, without specialized roles and demarcated responsibilities, and disdainful of voting or other regulated decision-making processes, the collective's attempt to manage shared resources (space, time, equipment, the purse strings) inevitably caused many discussions, arguments, and (usually) resolutions based on compromise and consensus. Such is the nature of collectives, and we are still involved in such evolutionary processes: self-selecting and changing in accord with its constituency, the collective is finding it difficult to defend itself against the institutionalization that comes with its own longevity as well as with outside pressures discussed in earlier parts of this essay.

By the mid-2000s, as several of the members (myself included) were increasingly immersed in publishing—producing more and more ambitious editions, applying for grants, growing distribution networks and avenues for public interface with our productions and authors—another shift had taken place. Although the extra "e" in "Presse" suggested a variety of modes of presentation—"extra" activities, performance, the excess and the "et cetera" that reflected the variety of interests of its founding members—there came an inevitable narrowing of focus, or an intensification of the energies put toward publishing over other possible public engagement. However, even with this shift, we imagined the "editor" as a kind of craftsperson who performed the intellectual, artistic, and practical work of publishing, with equally amateur, utopian spirit. Every aspect of the work, from press release to packaging, was meaningful, unquantifiable in wage-based terms.

The pace of production escalated over the next few years, especially with a more secure home at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, also allowing for more stable internship programs. Several members had joined, and some had receded into the background. By the late 2000s, in the interest of sustaining the press in a gentrified city where free-time is scarce, with the backlist growing and the administrative responsibilities ballooning, we had to start thinking about paid administrative positions. First, with an influx of money from the sale of a collection of editions and ephemera to a prestigious library, we hired a part-time "Presse Manager" (recent intern James Copeland). The idiosyncratic nature of the work (more multi-faceted and demanding than a typical administrative job), the low pay, and the press's constant financial crises did not make for a comfortable work environment. These appointments were not long-lasting; three different people filled this position between 2009 to 2014. The admin position we were struggling to afford also had to be supplemented with much volunteered labor.

Fearing burn out, the collective and our board supported the compensation of "work work." Also, because arts-granting bodies—seeing their support as a kind of investment—feel more comfortable with wage-based models, we were promised higher grants if we budgeted for a paid staff. We decided to change our strategy and turned to paying collective members willing to work at low wages to keep the press running (though this was supplemented with volunteered time from the same and other collective members). Taken together, these circumstances forced our hand to draw boundaries between editorial labor (seen as artistic and rewarding) and more administrative "work" (seen as managerial and therefore not meaningful, i.e. a job not worth doing without remuneration). The early volunteerism of UDP—and the equal value given to all kinds of work—was, to a degree, compromised. The artistic direction remained in the hands of a volunteer collective, and though editing continued to be unpaid, its bounds were moving and hard to trace, leading to confusion and frustration among some members.

Whereas previously UDP had an all-volunteer workforce, we now spend a third of our annual budget on labor. Over the years, some of the editors had left the collective due to career and family as they aged into their 30s and 40s. Others remained in volunteer editorial positions, but also pushed for changes that would allow them to have more traditional editorial roles—working with authors to develop projects and preparing final manuscripts—preferring to delegate other aspects of publishing, from layout and fundraising to publicity and distribution.

One might ask, with $250,000 to $300,000 moving through UDP's accounts annually, why aren't the editors at UDP paid for their work? The budget may be up to ten-fold that of the usual one- or two-person poetry press where the editors are similarly unpaid, but so is the "front list" (more than 20 titles a year); without a dedicated office and storage for the books, such a pace of production would not be possible—so there's more overhead. As UDP has grown, and the backlist is maintained, it's become impossible to operate solely on volunteer labor without paying salaries for administrative work, as well as hiring a bookkeeper and outside accountants, etc. So, which work are we talking about?  The need for paid labor at UDP is not an isolated case; we see it with some of our colleagues, even such structurally different publishers as Belladonna*, Fence, Futurepoem, Litmus, Les Figues, and Nightboat.

The division between what can be volunteered and what should be compensated resembles and reinforces commercial models and a capitalist paradigm that engenders alienated labor. It leads to a pragmatic delineation of roles and responsibilities not unlike those found in professional organizations. It can lead to hierarchy where previously anarchic collaboration reigned. Even as we attempt to maintain a non-hierarchical, cooperative "working collective" (those editors getting paid to run the operations), the collaborative and volunteer spirit of the Presse is threatened by the division of paid and volunteered work.

Furthermore, there is little consensus on how to face the pressures of professionalization. It suits some more than others. Understandably, as we get older, it's harder to schlep books to events, or make time to work with volunteers to pack a subscription mailing. No one expects the chef to do the dishes, just as the master printer will let the printer's devils sort the type. Naturally, as with practice we become better editors, we want to do what we're good at, and what's most exciting about our small press autonomy: we want to choose and edit our books. Editing is of course crucial, even defining, to our endeavor. Yet, in concentrating on just the content, we lose another important connection to the books we make, one that seemed integral to our earlier idea of the "editor": we forget to touch each book cover and we lose touch with the names on the mailing list.

The pressure to grow and to professionalize—finally to become an institution in our own right—in order to secure funding for our programs and pay the ever-rising rent and printers' bills plays no small part in this internal confusion. In a way, it has plagued our history since incorporation as a nonprofit. More importantly, it seems to me, we can't agree on our politics, making for a beautifully plural and many-sided collective, while also hampering our ability to envision our future.

Like many collective endeavors, over time UDP's collective has seen it practical to streamline and standardize procedures—in everything from accounting to submission processing to book production. Ideally, institutional knowledge and history is passed down experientially, but it is helpful to have written protocols and guidelines. The writing, upkeep, and periodic rewriting of such documents—from social-media guidelines and editorial style guides to time-lines for book production and publicity to charts and spreadsheets of all kinds that facilitate group involvement, the training of interns and apprentices, and for passing along responsibilities from one collective or staff member to another—especially in light of the turn-over of personnel that small arts organizations routinely face—may be tedious and time-consuming, and in some cases seem as inefficient as doing without them. Yet, UDP's collective remains (I hope) invested in this kind of communal knowledge base, in providing access to all of its practical processes, and in creating opportunities for people new to small press (or any kind of publishing) to get involved.

Our work and decision-making have for a long time been decentralized and the collective structure itself has been written and re-written countless times. Attempts to answer questions about the nature of membership in the collective—from prospective new members eager to know what they might be getting involved in if they join, as well as from existing members wondering about the parameters of their role in the group—have led to much internal debate over the last 20 years. Often we have ended up stuck on the question of whether we should have any answers at all, whether membership should require any expectations, responsibilities, or delineated roles whatsoever. What should we even call ourselves—collective members or editors? We've even gone so far as to wonder whether it's a collective in the first place. The most recent attempt at defining what being an "editor" or "member" might entail led us to the following description, housed in a "Collective Structure" Google Doc approved by our board in Spring 2019, under the heading "Notes on Collective Membership and Expectations":

The expectations of UDP are not really a checklist, they are an ethos. A UDP Collective member is someone who is engaged in our evolving collective endeavor in a meaningful way. In the most general sense, when you are a member of the Collective you might think about UDP as part of your life: Help out as much you can, keep in touch with everyone, keep your eyes and ears open for where fellow editors or the organization as a whole might need help and give as you can. Remember to be fervent and utopian about what can be accomplished through volunteer labor. Enjoy working with your co-editors on creating readable objects and experiment with new forms. Take initiative and develop projects and activities to further UDP's mission and trajectory, to expand the scope of the Presse, and to help sustain it.

I like this statement. I like the way it foregrounds "initiative," because I've worked hard among others to create a space where anyone can take on a project, however big or small, and see it through experimentation to fruition. I can get behind a "fervent and utopian" belief in the power of volunteering in the service of art, a kind of "work" that is not tied to wages and free of the conceptual division of labor and leisure that is foundational for capitalist exploitation. But there are times when I wonder, when "fervently" pleading an editor to stay on deadline (or trying but failing to do so myself) with a task that the editor has volunteered to take on, how far from "utopian" we might be falling. I have to remind myself that not everything can be accomplished on desire—and the "pure expenditure" of volunteer labor—alone, that the resources we have to complete our self-selected task are limited by external factors as much as, if not more, than internal ones.

It's also not easy to stay "fervent and utopian" about managing a spreadsheet of printing costs, ordering padded mailers, or sweeping the studio floor. Keeping the overall spirit of the project in mind can help find meaning in the most "meaningless" tasks, but disheartening menial moments are inevitable. All of this wouldn't be so hard, actually, if the "culture" were a bit more understanding—if you didn't have to qualify your spending on those padded mailers in grant reports, calculate sales tax (on poetry books!) at different rates for every county in the state, create spreadsheets to spec for arts-granting bureaucrats who could probably glean the same info from your website, and if institutions paid your rent in return for enriching their "cultural programming" instead of thinking that they're doing you a favor by "including" your small press. And, of course, if everyone picked up a broom. Maybe... in the utopian future.

So when a friend—let's say a poet with a normal job that allows them "leisure"—comes to me with the benevolent advice of not working more hours than I'm paid for, I have some complicated feelings. Shall I refer them to a historical argument for small press culture's foundations on the sacrifice of one's time? Shall I point out that their attitude only reaffirms the concept of wage labor I've been "working" against a good 20 years? Shall I also point out external structures (like economies of scale, academic-corporate collusion, and institutional pressures to professionalize) that make it impossible to do all the work that's necessary to keeping a small press afloat within its labor budget? Instead, knowing the labor entailed in explaining, I might nod and acquiesce, taking solace in the fact that, at least for now, volunteer labor—without which the organization cannot function at the level of productivity (and creativity) desired by its membership—serves also to undermine the institutionalization that would make for a more efficient, professionalized work force.

A Fragile Trust: Small Press Solidarity

The ongoing creation and revision of board-approved codes of conduct, work-flows, job descriptions, organizational charts, etc. (though these are never static enough for long enough to become rigid) can be characterized as efforts toward institutionalization. To the extent that these regulatory processes are determined by external pressures, the small press runs the risk of submitting to a codification, a law, a policing, which has to be seen clearly for what it is—a mechanism of control that wears away at collaborative processes based on trust and solidarity of purpose.

Who is responsible for going to the post office, packing a subscription, or paying the rent? These were not our questions in the early days of the UDP collective; we simply trusted that someone would, and that somehow we'd have enough time and money to do it. But, somewhere along the way, as a small press "grows up" the idea of trust begins to be squeezed toward the margins by the idea of responsibility. The pressure to professionalize comes not only from outside—from arts-funders, professional associations, and the increasingly gentrified literary culture—but also from inside. The small press publisher's "pure expenditure" creates a generative community of trust which is ever in danger of becoming an unwieldy network of responsibilities. The paradigm of responsibility engenders a context in which "work" can be judged and deemed fallible according to measurable criteria that replace the unquantifiable emotional/affective scales of solidarity. 

Today, the circulation of hundreds of (mostly poetry) titles—including some books from very small presses that we help distribute, and the chapbooks of the defunct Trafficker press which we make available through our website—depends on the continued organizational functioning of UDP. Whoever may be said to "run" UDP or "work" there is currently responsible for that circulation, and, in turn, the contractual royalties to authors and estates. The responsibilities also include (but do not end at) keeping up with the achievements and events of its several hundred authors and translators; the education, payment, and workplace welfare of four year-long apprentices; the maintenance of a space that is safe both physically and psychologically according to terms imposed by state regulations. UDP is also answerable for the proper use of funds granted by city, state, and federal government, and for timely reporting on the use of those funds, as well as filing taxes, sending out W9s, and other business management—no easy feat for an understaffed small press (what small press isn't understaffed?). The more grants received and the more titles in print, the higher the operational work load. It goes without saying that we have to mind budgets, make rent, and pay for staff and contract workers that make possible the fulfillment of these obligations. Of course, the reality of the labor entailed by these growing responsibilities would have been at best a hazy premonition for the wide-eyed, idealistic collective of early years.

However, the most important responsibility—ever the same as before—is the most invisible. In fact, it is not a responsibility. If a generous, ethical engagement with authors and readers and a commitment to publishing work outside the bounds of institutionally approved writing and an increasingly professionalized literary market continue to be imperatives and, indeed, constitutive of small press practice, how is a small press to become sustainable without losing the autonomy predicating its values and judgments? Put another way, how does a small press sustain a political aesthetics and avoid marginalization without losing the resources (grant funding, etc.) which depend on placating a politics of professionalization. In a gentrified culture increasingly swayed by quantification and the rewards of a professional conformism at cross-purposes with its politics, what shall a small press do?

When those who determine an organization's aesthetic vision and shepherd books from manuscript to publication are paid, we see a movement away from the amateur, volunteer spirit that makes possible small press autonomy. Moreover, the process of institutionalization wears away at small press foundations, so that where previously there was trust, responsibility emerges. Where previously there was play and initiative, now there is a job to get done. External motivators begin to replace internal motivations. Whereas giving something up—social advancement, "normal" lifestyles, a living wage, time for one's art-making—served as a pathway to preserving a sociality of solidarity, the professionalized small press needs to justify paychecks and see to the "comfort" of employees in the name of sustainability.

Trust, though powerful, is fragile, particularly today; whereas responsibility is policeable, controllable, it comes from and is overseen by systems of order. Yet, to think outside of "expectation, utility, and coercion," one must think outside of responsibility. (Remember, that during the Cold War, "irresponsible" was the word of choice for the Congress of Cultural Freedom when it chided magazine editors—its beneficiaries—for publishing pieces critical of United States policy.) A small press may outwardly project responsibility to those that need to see it, but it must continue to develop and operate under the sign of trust in order to inspire the same in its authors and readership—a trust in its autonomy, in its non-coercive engagement with literature, and with each other as individuals connected (and empowered) by a condition of collectivity.

Thus small presses possess two faces, or two masks. One—facing potential funders and state agencies, the mainstream media, and service-to-the-field organizations—projects professionalism. The other—addressing its readers, counter-culture media, its supporters and subscribers—projects a labor of love and an integrity of anti-commercial spirit. Sometimes the masks are switched or get confused. For example, the media will want to play up a publisher's grass-roots and hard-scrabble DIY idealism, yet also wants to know the publisher has "reach" to consider the story in the first place.

Authors may also ask to see both faces before signing on: they want to know if their books will be distributed and show up on Amazon, if there will be a contract and a fee or royalties, yet also they'd like to have a letterpress cover or other markers of hip, hands-on, underground design. Pressured to publish in order to compete for a "writing job," writers face a false conundrum perpetuated by institutions that control the arbitration of value: although a small press book might gain you street cred in certain outsider circles, it won't guarantee you tenure, much less a competitive application. The choices the author faces are, inevitably, political: the very notion of street cred as an antonym of institutional legitimization undercuts the oppositional history of the small press movement. If the professionalized writer weighs street cred against employment, the institution has succeeded in defusing attempts to bypass its stamp of approval for access to readership. Thus, by working outside of mainstream distribution models and attempting to wrest the arbitration of value from elite and commercial institutions (by, for example, a withdrawal from AWP) small presses risk alienating those writers who desire reach, readership, and more traditional legitimization.

The schizophrenic switching of masks causes no little stress to the publisher; it also creates confusion for grantors and donors. When an NEA Director of Literature suggested we try selling our "letterpress editions" in artisanal gift shops, he thought he was paying us a compliment for the look of our "book objects." He was strangely unaware of what this comment betrayed about institutional attitudes toward the non-professionalized small press, toward books that signal an oppositional aesthetics, not seeing them as either distributable forms, nor—in fact—as literature. It seems that instead of imagining a cultural responsibility to enhance small press distribution, the institution of "support" would rather marginalize small press out of the market completely.

The problem here does not arise from the small press itself, nor from grantors, journalists, or authors. The problem is structural. It resides in the erasure of the political history of the literary field by a combination of cultural and institutional forces. Without a shared politics—a solidarity—the writer, the small press, and the reader will continue to empower institutional and commercial prescriptions of literary value, fostering a literature that passes muster with the ultimate American censor—the market. Decades of cultural intervention and re-drawing of boundaries of legitimacy undertaken and enacted by small presses has been swept away by a gentrifying amnesia, a rewriting of history that has blinded us to the issues at stake and eroded our trust in autonomy, in each other, and in literature itself.

How to lift this veil? The answer—apart from looking back to our history—may lie in asking some quite simple questions of ourselves, of what we will do tomorrow. Poets, whatever press you want to publish with, what reasons would you give for your choice? Publishers, what motivates you to publish? What audience do you want to reach, and what community do you wish to foster? Esteemed donors, grant-makers, foundation panelists, and juries: which kind of publisher do you want to support—the one that has the largest piece of the pie, or the one that hasn't been invited to the table? And, finally, dear reader, which side are you on?

 

***

For earlier installments in this series, please find Part 1 "'Power to the people's mimeo machines!' or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics," Part 2 "Autonomy's Compromise and the Professionalization of the Small Press," and Part 3 "The New Normal: How We Gave Up the Small Press."

 

[Editor’s Note: The editors of Harriet endeavor to provide space for individual poets to explore and experiment with writing which informs, influences, and furthers the art of poetry and its institutions. Writing on Harriet does not go through the same fact-checking process in which our weekly articles are submitted. The views stated here do not reflect those of the Poetry Foundation but are the sole perspective of the author.]