Sophie Seita's Attention to Troll Thread and the Little Magazine

An excerpt from Sophie Seita's much-anticipated book, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital, is up at Stanford University Press. This section of the chapter, "Communities of Print in the Digital Age: Movable Contemporaneity," considers works by digital publishers like Troll Thread and Triple Canopy in order to seek out a "contemporary avant-garde."

"Contemporary avant-gardes in the making are to be found in little magazines, many of which address self-reflexively the politics and hospitality of small-press publishing. Yet scholars of contemporary literature tend to focus not on magazines but on the novel," writes Seita. More:

...[Holly] Melgard's REIMBUR$EMENT (2013), subtitled on its dedication page “For Work,” features images of lottery and scratch-off tickets, the cost of the book amounting to the money Melgard lost to gambling during graduate school to make up for her unpaid labor, thus turning the avant-garde gift economy on its head (“A Gift Economy is a Debt Economy in my book”).21 MONEY (2012) by “Maker” publishes cutouts of hundred-dollar bills, avouching cheekily that the responsibility concerning counterfeit law lies with “the document’s printer,” who is the work’s “maker.”22 Joey Yearous-Algozin’s recent HOW TO STOP WORRYING ABT THE STATE OF PUBLISHING WHEN THE WORLD’S BURNING AND EVERYBODY’S BROKE ANYWAYS AND ALL YOU REALLY CARE ABT IS IF ANYONE IS EVEN READING YR WORK (July 2016) is a half-serious, half-ironic instruction manual in the form of a two-page lineated “poem” in large type that practices the cheap DIY and POD publishing it preaches.23 What could be called Troll Thread’s POD manifesto, HOW TO STOP WORRYING demystifies the publishing business by showing how easy it is to self-publish and start a small press, reminiscent of the many paeans for the small press put forth by earlier avant-gardes. But Yearous-Algozin’s “how-to” document lacks the utopian tinge associated with that genre of avant-garde writing and is in fact quite pragmatic:

don’t worry about making it look good, gutters,
paratext, etc.
that’s all just marketing
leave that to “editors” who can pay “designers”, i.e.
bosses
or until you learn more about laying out books, which
you never need to learn
save yr cover as a .jpg & upload it in the cover
designer or use the default settings
whatever
set the price at zero revenue
that way you can buy more copies when lulu has coupons
for free shipping
also, this is poetry, you shouldn’t be making a profit
don’t be an asshole²⁴

That poets do not usually make a profit—there are, for instance, far fewer “professional” poets than novelists—is a realistic assessment, but it also ironizes the widespread avant-garde imperative for poets to position themselves outside capital... 

Read on right here.