'Power to the people's mimeo machines!' or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics

Having engaged in small press practices of various kinds for more than half a life, from making the Ugly Duckling zine to co-founding the editorial collective of Ugly Duckling Presse, which was incorporated as a nonprofit in New York and began publishing books in the early years of the twenty-first century, I am beginning an attempt to make sense of what I've seen along the way. I am glad for this opportunity offered by the editors of Harriet, to attempt to publicly think through some of the pressures—cultural, political, pragmatic, and financial—which I perceive affecting small press activity in the US since the end of the twentieth-century, a period which saw the rise to dominance of MFA programs and the inclusion of small presses in the annual national AWP conference, a period we might consider in context of the culmination of gentrification in American cities, a diminishment of state funding for the arts, the hegemony of neo-liberal politics, and the defeat and deflation of popular movements against the consolidation of wealth and ecological impoverishment.

The small press today is threatened by injunctions from funders and institutions to professionalize and to abandon a legacy predicated on amateurism, autonomy, and anti-capitalist and anti-institutional politics. Institutions that ostensibly support the work of the small press, in conjunction with a more professionalized literary culture of the MFA and the AWP, have served to marginalize small press practice, diminishing its political significance and redefining its boundaries, while plunging its mostly volunteer laborers deeper into debt and dependence. In order to ascertain the nature of this predicament, I feel it is vital to trace the history of small press and its defining features and ideology as well as the history of its support networks, professional organizations, and funders. The full story is quite a bit longer than can be accommodated by four blog posts, but I'll attempt to draw out at least a cursory picture.

The first part of this four-part essay will outline some ways in which small press has defined itself aesthetically and politically; how it accrued cultural power identifying authenticity with its own marginality and anti-institutional values; and how these values and positions have been historicized, removed, and replaced through a gentrifying professionalization of the literary field. The second and third parts will explore the ways in which service-to-the-field organizations, professional associations, and arts funders have by turn understood, accommodated, distorted, coopted, and transformed small press values, and in particular how such institutions attempt to control and set parameters for success and value in literary publishing. The fourth post will deal with UDP's evolution in the context of this history, and attempts to set out some working definitions of small press today, and to ascertain possible futures for collective work and small press activity.

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Small press has historically defined itself foremost by its autonomy, by being editor-run, anti-institutional, and anti-commercial. It marked the story of its autonomy by an aesthetic of "authenticity" created through a variety of means: the use of cheap or obsolete technologies, experimental or anti-aesthetic design, unremunerated labor, and alternative systems of distribution. During the 1960s small press movement (or "mimeo revolution") and long after, poet-publishers took into their own hands the production not only of the books (and chapbooks and little magazines) that legitimized new writers outside the academy and aesthetics unacknowledged by commercial publishing, but of the community of its readership and evaluation as well.

The poet-publishers (and other writers) behind the small press movement created communities of writers through publications as well as through printing co-ops, reading series, and workshops (like the Umbra group in New York's East Village) with rarely any institutional support. They often sought out connections with activist groups with radical political programs in order to assert the importance of literature to movements of social change, to bring literature to the streets and give voice to struggle. Offering their labor freely in service of their goals, ignoring motivations of profit, and creating what a 1968 issue of Black & Red called "an enterprise run by its producers" and "a creative social enterprise that functions without hierarchy," they confronted the capitalist exploitation of the wage-worker and the separation of labor and leisure. They experimented with cheap technologies and learned to print by any means necessary. The unpretentious printing and often amateur design of their productions provided a physical context for content that called out the secure complacency of the literary establishment and undermined institutional control and arbitration over taste and cultural capital.

As Charles Bernstein noted in a 1994 talk at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, this "mimeo revolution showed up the stuffy pretensions of the established, letterpress literary quarterlies, not only with their greater literary imagination, but also with innovative designs and graphics." In his book Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, Michael Davidson remarks that "the irony of [Walter] Benjamin's utopian analysis"—that the new means of production could lead to a politicization of aesthetics—"is that the same productive apparatus that contributed to the decline of aura made possible its revival as poets utilized cheap, portable print technologies to render 'authentic' gestures and unique vocal inflections."

If the defining value of the small press depended on its "authenticity," it was important that a reader could judge a small press book by its cover: the technologies of reproduction signaled the small press publication's marginality vis a vis the mainstream. The term "mimeo revolution" itself stands in symbolically for the manner in which small presses identified with the printing technologies they employed and the context of their employment, not the particular printing method. By Bernstein's account, going off of data gathered in Len Fulton's International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, in 1965 only 23% of literary presses were using mimeo, while 31% used offset, and 46% used letterpress. "By 1973, offset had jumped to 69%, with letterpress at 18%, and mimeo only 13%." Bernstein's analysis undergirds Loss Pequeno Glazier's notion that the mimeo in 'the mimeo revolution' is more a metaphor for inexpensive means of reproduction than a commitment to any one technology." These numbers also suggest that the technologies employed by small press publishing have always been those that were most available and accessible for their needs and financial limitations; any printing methods could be adapted to small press aims.

Beginning in the postwar period, if not earlier (The Objectivist Press, for example), small press was consistent in the way its politics and aesthetics were co-dependent. The activity of small press was in itself always a political activity, as it defined itself against institutions, commerce, and the state. As Davidson notes, the small press of the mimeo-revolution era often had strong ties to "antiracist, antiwar" (radical) politics; he mentions Broadside Press, Cranium, and City Lights as examples, and we could add Margaret Randall's El Corno Emplumado, d.a. levy's Renegade Press, the publications of Umbra, and more explicitly anarchist projects like Detroit's Black & Red (Fredy Perlman et al), and countless others. Even when small presses did not publish explicitly political content, their mode of production and distribution signified a political position in antagonism to institutions of power.

Taking a cue from the sub-cultural small press created by marginalized poet-publishers, visual artists of the 1960s and '70s experimented in a mode of self-publishing that came to be called the "artists book" and "democratic multiple" (examples include the books of Ed Ruscha, Dieter Roth, Sol LeWitt, Martha Rosler, etc.). Whatever their content, artists books mounted a protest against the elitism of museums and commercialism of galleries by taking the work out of those contexts and putting them into accessible circulation. In 1975, poet, artist, and mail-art archivist, Ulises Carrión would propose, in a manifesto for the artists book, that "the writer assumes the responsibility for the whole process."

Autonomy of production had particular significance in the 1960s-70s, an era that saw police seizures of print materials related to anti-war activism and Black-nationalist insurrection. Autonomous and amateur printing co-ops sprung up in cities around the US at a time when political publishers struggled to find printers that would run their newspapers, books, and leaflets. In this context, poets' seizure of the means of production was a conscious political act that aligned with the aesthetic positions of the content it sought to legitimize through print. According to Davidson, "[t]he power of the people's mimeo machine was more than a means of reproduction in service to speed and efficiency; it was part of an expressive poetics that validated personal gestures of discovery and speculation over artisanal values of order and control."

A "secret," underground, yet democratic opposition to "stuffy" mainstreams of "order and control," small press has been defined and has defined itself through its self-conscious rhetoric of "authenticity" as directly proportional to its desired autonomy, and, crucially, by the politicization of its aesthetics through inventive and alternative means of production and distribution. Like samizdat in totalitarian nations, defined by scholar Ann Komaromi as an underground "system of uncensored production and circulation of texts," small press was able to circumvent professional, institutional arbiters by claiming its own space, creating its own economy and systems of exchange, and setting its own aesthetic standards (in content and production) that posed a challenge and a critique to reigning ideas of literary quality.

A Necessary Digression on Letterpress and Staples

Lyn Hejinian learned letterpress printing to produce her Tuumba Press chapbook series (1976 to 1984) which published her community of writers, primarily associated with the Language movement. Her conscious models were the periodical pamphlet Sparrow from the Black Sparrow Press and the books of Rosmarie and Keith Waldrops' Burning Deck Press. Like many poet-publishers, Hejinian used her home (in Berkeley, California) as her base for operations as printer and publisher. In an interview, she explains: "The first dozen chapbooks were Linotype and the thirty-eight that followed were handset.… The room where I had the press and the type was adjacent to the kitchen, so I’m sure the lead wandered." At Tuumba, the editor was the printer, and the typesetter, and everything else. In 1997, writing a brief account of the press for a New York Public Library exhibition of small press and mimeo-revolution materials (a show I'll discuss below), Hejinian made this more than clear:

It was a solo venture in that I had no partner(s) or assistant(s) but it was not a private nor solitary one; I had come to realize that poetry exists not in isolation (alone on its lonely page) but in transit, as experience, in the social worlds of people. For poetry to exist, it has to be given meaning, and for meaning to develop there must be communities of people thinking about it. Publishing books as I did was a way of contributing to such a community—even a way of helping to invent it. Invention is essential to every aspect of a life of writing. In order to learn how to print, I invented a job for myself in the shop of a local printer. The shop was in Willits, California [...]; the owner of the shop (the printer, Jim Case) was adamant that "printing ain't for girls," but he took me on three afternoons a week as the shop's cleaning lady. A year later I moved to Berkeley, and purchased an old Chandler & Price press from a newspaper ad. I knew how to run the press but not much about typesetting; friends (particularly Johanna Drucker and Kathy Walkup) taught me a few essentials and a number of tricks. The first eleven chapbooks (printed in Willits in 1976-1977) had a slightly larger trim size than those I did myself (in a back room of the house in Berkeley)—I was using leftover paper in Willits, but in Berkeley I bought paper from a local warehouse and used the trim size that was the most economical (creating the least amount of scrap). The list of authors of the first books makes it clear that for the first year and a half I was looking to various modes of "experimental," "innovative," or "avant-garde" writing for information; the subsequent chapbooks represent a commitment to a particular community—the group of writers who came to be associated with "Language Writing." The chapbook format appealed to me for obvious practical reasons—a shorter book meant less work (and expense) than a longer one. But there were two other advantages to the chapbook. First, most of the books I published were commissioned—I invited poets to give me a manuscript by a certain date (usually six months to a year away)—and I didn't want to make the invitation a burden. And second, I wanted the Tuumba books to come to people in the mode of "news"—in this sense, rather than "chapbook" perhaps one should say "pamphlet." It is for this reason, by the way, that I didn't hand-sew the books; they are all stapled—a transgression in the world of fine printing but highly practical in the world of pamphleteering.

I'd like to underscore Hejinian's invention of an aesthetic through the use of available means alongside her non-institutional arbitration of editorial content, connecting her practice to what was then a well-defined autonomous tradition. In particular, the staples Hejinian mentions—"a transgression in the world of fine printing but highly practical in the world of pamphleteering"—become a site of transformation of material into signifier: a pedestrian and pragmatic binding acquires political significance in antimony to the artisanal fine press (a heavily male field at the time). Hejinian's aesthetic choices were driven by expediency—a desire to get the "information" out into the world at an accessible price point and to avoid a fine press categorization that would make the object itself precious or collectible. As Bernstein has said, the "tactic of turning an economic necessity into an asset is part of the overall poetics that includes the style of writing as well as the book format."

Hejinian's use of letterpress for her Tuumba chapbooks—directly contrary to its reification as artisanal and "high-end" today, and very different from its wider commercial use in the 1950s and 60s—is an extension of what Bernstein terms the "wryly aversive quality" of the poet's choice and use of technology. Hejinian acquired her equipment after "offset began to dominate the printing industry in the early 1970s, [and] letterpresses became very cheap to acquire." As Bernstein, among others, suggests, the deaccessioning of printing equipment made it possible for small presses like Tuumba and Burning Deck to "produce books with little other cash expense than paper costs and mailing, given the editor's willingness to spend hundreds of hours to handset every letter and often hand-feed each page."

In the 1980s, with improvements of layout and design programs available for personal computers and a decrease in the cost of professional printing, small press publishers had the opportunity to attain a professional look that would have been costly under earlier conditions. Yet, small presses continued by choice to use mimeo stencils, ditto machines, Xerox, IBM-Selectric typewriters, and basement- or kitchen-letterpress. Offset printing had often been employed by small publishers with some means (or access to printing co-ops), yet, even so they maintained an "aversive" and non-commercial aesthetic, frequently limiting themselves to one- or two-color covers (e.g. the mostly black-and-white covers of many later Burning Deck books, the simple monochromatic style of saddle-stitched magazines like This and Angel Hair, the signature magenta and cyan of Membrane Press). It's noteworthy that technological advances would not completely change the relationship of aesthetics, printing, and politics for some time to come. As Bernstein observed in 1994, "in the metaphoric sense, the mimeo revolution, was very much alive [...] with some of the very best poetry magazines today consisting of little more than a staple or two holding together from 16 to 60 sheets of paper xeroxed in editions of 50 or 100 or 150." While available technologies were quite different, small presses continued to utilize available and inexpensive means to mark the autonomy of their editorial positions into the 1990s, as many still do today.

Around the time of Hejinian's Tuumba, Alan Kornblum made use of letterpress to publish Toothpaste Press books "in the tradition of fine printing, choice papers, handset types, and tasteful design," printing the poems of Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley, and Carl Rakosi, among others. It's clear that staples didn't cut it for Kornblum; but he also wanted his books to get around. According to a 1978 report for the American Library Association published in American Libraries, Kornblum feared "that his books [were] being lost in rare book rooms and art libraries, and not circulating." Kornblum insisted: "I'm not publishing collectors' items... I'm publishing for readers. ... I'm an independent press, not a small press." Kornblum's complaint was shared by other COSMEP (Council of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers) members attending their tenth annual meeting in Chicago, where one "frequently heard grumblings about being characterized as 'alternative' in the major reviewing media."

In the era of small press networking and grassroots organizing that followed the counter-cultural boom of the 1960s mimeo revolution, these divisions and labels (small press, independent, alternative, mainstream, commercial) were increasingly significant. Asserting a program of publishing "for readers" (i.e., for the general public), Toothpaste Press later grew into an influential institution, the nonprofit independent publisher Coffee House Press, while Tuumba, a "pamphleteer" for a literary movement that commissioned short works and served a small community of writers, remained a chapbook press that quietly folded shop once it ran its course. It is this subtle difference, the fine thread made visible in the rhetorics and legacies of Tuumba and Toothpaste, presses who made use of the same printing technology to different ends, that I'd like to pull out and untangle further, to understand how small press has changed and is changing.

Small Press Slumming, 'Alternative' Culture, and the Gentrification of Literature

By the end of the twentieth century, the letter-size, side-stapled format, like the single-signature, stapled chapbook, had become a marker of small-press belonging. Evoking a direct line of inheritance to avant-garde poet-publishers and their politics and aesthetics of "authenticity," rudimentarily bound and cheaply repro'ed poetry magazines (or "zines," to use the DIY parlance of the time), from a variety of poetry scenes and geographical locales proliferated in the 1990s and early 2000s. Their "cheap" aesthetic was also translated to the web, where early online poetry journals like Can We Have Our Ball Back? (edited by Jim Behrle) sported a deliberately rudimentary html design, eschewing a more savvy, professional look even with improvements in user-friendly web design interfaces. These production values were in part an homage, exhibiting a luddite-like nostalgia for the "authentic" engagement with poetry, while invoking the "gift economies" that served their modes of distribution. Yet, this kind of publishing was still empowered to make a statement through its embattled marginality, newly necessary in the face of new mainstreams and new media.

The poverty of means and unadorned aesthetics identifiable in 1990s poetry publications affected marginality in opposition not toward the artisanal, high-brow, politically conservative private press that Davidson and Hejinian allude to, but rather to the "mainstream" literary establishment of the time (Poetry magazine, APR, and the many perfect-bound, university-affiliated "reviews") and the politics expressed by their production values, modes of distribution, and the selection of poets they published. Editor-run, community-based publications—like Big Allis, Explosive, Combo, Skanky Possum, Lungfull!, Abacus, San Jose Manual of Style; Potes and Poets, Krupskaya, Leroy, Meow Press, Paradigm Press, Subpress, 811 Books, and hundreds of others—proliferated at the end of the century. Ragged, unprofessional, far-flung and decentralized, proclaiming a variety of aesthetic positions, sometimes contradictory ones within the same issue or series, often in heated debate or supportive sympathy with each other, they had one thing in common—their projection of a vibrant autonomy, of adamant outsiderness. They proclaimed their politics in their editorial notes, in their choice of poets and of paper, in the design of their covers and bindings, through the selection of small press books they reviewed, through the networks and reading series and the gift economy by which they circulated, continuing to tell a different and still evolving story of poetry and prose in the US.

Meanwhile, the small press tradition of autonomous publishing that connected poetic invention to subversive production and distribution strategies was being relegated to history. The New York Public Library's 1998 exhibit "A Secret Location on the Lower East Side" gathered under the glass of its vitrines an impressive collection of mimeo-revolution materials of the 1960s and '70s. In his preface to the show's catalog, Jerome Rothenberg historicized the proliferation of poet-run and poet-produced publications (small press books and little magazines) as a resolution of the dichotomy of "mainstream" and "marginal" literature, suggesting that such publishers nurtured a "vibrant" American poetry "in the margins," making literary history while remaining independent from institutional or mainstream publishing, marketing, and distribution practices. Rothenberg's assessment of American poetry as being "mainstream and margin both" assigned value to the historical small press—"the creation of those poets who have seized or often have invented their own means of production and of distribution"—while simultaneously canonizing its productions and anti-institutional ethos. The show and the catalog were a necessary corrective to mainstream literary history and served to legitimize a sub-cultural literary field. But this legitimization had the paradoxical effect of paving the way for a de-politicized cooptation of "alternative" small press models by the mainstream itself. Now, the exhibit suggested, the strategies and rhetorics of the marginal small press movement was history; it belonged to the past.

Contemporaneous with this historicization, the available space on the fringes of the institution and in the margins of mainstream literary culture inhabited by small presses (in their "secret locations") was undergoing development by a professional class. Emerging from Creative Writing MFA circles and "indie" commercial ventures, Verse, Fence, Conduit, Rattapallax, jubilat, Tin House and many others, took advantage of new technological opportunities to attain a glossier, professional, market-friendly appearance, both undesirable and financially impossible for many small presses. These new publications positioned themselves for wider channels of distribution (through Ingram, etc.) for shelf-space at chain bookstores as well as independents, next to authoritative literary periodicals like The Paris Review and Granta, and new "indy" publications like McSweeney's arising from zine culture.

There was a niche to fill, and they had seen "independent record labels do it"; they could take the DIY framework, as Verse editor Matthew Zapruder said in a 2014 interview, "start with no money, no distribution, no nothing," and if the work "was good it would carry things forward." The new publishers were sure the market would fairly arbitrate "quality" ("what was good") in their favor. In fact, because a new consumer base, hip to the indy labels but exposed to very little (if any) small press poetry in their MFA programs, was looking for alternatives, they were right.

Proffering idiosyncratic editorial stances, unbound (for the most part) by institutional affiliation and academic funding, the newcomers took up the torch of the "alternative" label—seen as a stigma by independent publishers like Toothpaste Press 20 years earlier—as a signifier of a marketable authenticity. They assigned value to their eclecticism and included the "edgy" or "idiosyncratic" work of writers previously published only in small press publications, validating these voices by pairings with the more "professional" and MFA-accredited authors given ample space in "stuffy" establishment journals. Tin House, founded in 1999 as the "singular lovechild of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine" committed to "stake out new territory" by showcasing "not only established, prize-winning authors" but also "work by undiscovered writers," indicated a valuation of idiosyncrasy and irreverence, yet gave no indication of a particular community or aesthetic to the content it would publish. Such editorial practices—portrayed as progressive, inclusive, or even risky—took experimental poetry out of the "low-end" small press context which had made legible its authors' aesthetic and political positions.

It was the professional printing, full-color cover, perfect binding, and explicitly pluralist editorial stance of the magazine Fence that caught the eye and ensuing invective of poetry critic and modernist poetry scholar, and co-editor (with Jennifer Moxley) of The Impercipient Lecture Series, Steve Evans. His essay, "The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprises," circulated by email in January of 2001, took issue with Fence's editorial stance and its origin story, penned by editor Rebecca Wolff and published in issue 12 of Jacket. Evans implicated Fence as one of the new publications staking out territory by the "selective appropriation of radical poetic techniques, shorn of their contexts and motivating commitments" and outlined the post-poetry-wars cultural situation that made it possible for such appropriations to go unremarked by readers and for editors themselves to be oblivious to the politics implied by their own positions. Evans used Fence as a foil (pardon the pun) for a critique of a larger issue: "The resistible rise of Fence magazine and its ideology of merge and market says a lot about ... the times we are 'with'—a time of market conscious opportunism, mystified individualism, and symbolically profitable pseudo-pluralism."

Without going into the vicissitudes and in-fighting of the ensuing "Fence Debates," and not meaning to pick at old poetry-world scabs, it is important, however, to underscore and understand (in a historical sense) Evans's desire to (re-)draw a line in the sand, and why Fence desired to obscure it. The lack of an identifiable ideology behind Fence's aesthetic choices (except the dismissal of ideology as odious) or any stated support of particular poetry movements or positions (while poo-pooing the idea of movements and positions) was indicative of a trend among the journals emerging in a new MFA-affected and (post-)Clinton-era liberal culture. And Evans saw that the small press and the little magazine as he knew them were threatened. In fact, he saw in Fence a preview of an insidious—though often well-meaning, "democratic," and populist—anti-intellectualism that, joining forces with market frameworks, would gentrify the margins and push out radically positioned literatures. Evans puts it this way:

Unlike its more radical counterpart, which is collective and contentious, liberal pluralism is the spontaneous thought form of the marketed mind, a sort of unavowable dogma of the undogmatic that excels at neutralizing distinctions and defusing contradictions in a disingenuous game of anything goes (so long as it sells). It is by tendency eclectic and apolitical, allergic to commitment and against principles on principle. Savvy about individual situations, it is invincibly ignorant about structures, exhibiting a mixture of innocence and experience that calls to mind Aimé Césaire's generous counsel of 'pity' for 'our omniscient and naive conquerors!' Never having encountered a limit, it thinks reality holds none in store; having witnessed the inflexibility real struggle sometimes requires, it rationalizes compromise as inevitable and, moreover, enjoyable; observing integrity to be inconvenient, and in certain extreme circumstances even unsurvivable, it finds excuses for expedience and is relieved when a chorus of like-minded souls assures it there's 'no need to apologize, we'd have done the same thing.'

Evans's assessment of "liberal pluralism" and the "marketed mind" as leading to a rationalization of compromise as "inevitable" and "enjoyable," and an antipathy toward the "inflexibility real struggle requires" is echoed in Sarah Schulman's 2012 book, The Gentrification of the Mind. Schulman's treatise mourns the "replacement" of artists and bohemians killed or traumatized by the AIDS epidemic by a professionalized class of artists, and the erasure of the struggle and the demands for accountability that AIDS activists mounted against the cynical powers that caused many so much death and displacement through homophobia, supremacist thinking, and basic disregard for life. "There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking," Schulman writes about the ignorance of the structures that have led to the gentrifiers' illusion of having earned or deserved their supremacy. "It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility." Describing how the newer tenants in her East Village building do not participate in "organizing for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways," she notes "a weird passivity that accompanies gentrification. ... [T]he gentrified tenants do not have a culture of protest even if they are paying $2,800 a month for a tenement walk-up apartment with no closets. It's like a hypnotic identification with authority. ... [T]hey do not want to ask authority to be accountable."

Back in 1969, in a pamphlet called I Accuse This Liberal University of Terror and Violence, Fredy Perlman (of Black & Red and the Detroit Printing Co-op), bemoaned the complacency and fear of taking action in the liberal professoriate who may reject racism, imperialism, and capitalism in words, but not in actions, which would make them "outsiders." Perlman came to the conclusion that "[t]he mere presence of the radical exposes the ‘neutrality’ of the Liberal. HE CHOOSES TO ACCEPT THE DOMINANT BUREAUCRACY." [All caps in original.]

The pluralist stance of magazines with no politics erased the difference between liberal and radical positions and reasserted institutional values over outsider values; that is, the same hand that brought the outsiders in also upheld the dominant literary establishment, and embraced the cultural capital that came with the bargain. In the turn-of-the-century rise of anthology-size journals with their market-ready exteriors, Evans saw a bid by a new generation for hegemony in the wake of crumbling ivory towers:

... it would be inaccurate to think that the dominant will look exactly the same after this changing of the guard. It won't. It will be younger, hipper, and weirder; more into "ambiguities" (including sexual and gender ambiguity); flashier on its surface; much less patriarchal (though not necessarily less misogynist or more feminist); and a little less illiterate about past avant-gardes. Stegner Fellows will be able to read Susan Howe and Michael Palmer without jeopardizing their MacArthur chances, and Walt Whitman Awards will go to works that make reference to cultural commodities the judges will be too embarrassed to admit they do not know.

Much of Evans's 2001 projection has come true: things have loosened up to make space for the "weird," because—and only when—there's (cultural) capital to be made on what doesn't at first glance seem to fit in. All those coterie magazines with their staples, stances, unprofessional aesthetics, and small circulations were apparently making too much of a mess—too many critical positions, factions, communities—they had to go to make way for consolidation, homogenization, and, in the sense that Sarah Schulman has outlined, gentrification. The small press culture of the avant garde had "its anti-capitalism and its insistence on autonomous intellectual/poetic production and evaluation" written on its tattered sleeve—its unadorned design, its second-hand materials, its low circulation, its volunteer workforce. It was easy to dismiss with standardized, quantifiable measures provided by institutions, which, as it turns out, were necessary to determine and enforce "quality" or "excellence"—or "what is good"—terms that need no ideological framework beyond market success. By the early 2000s, the line in the sand was being re-drawn, dividing anti-political aesthetics from anti-aesthetic politics. The "low-end" small press culture could expect to have a smaller portion of the privatized beach while politically positioned work would be drowned in diluted contexts that had a position of no position.

One cannot fault either side of the Fence debate for taking the positions they would, by dint of formative cultural forces, inevitably take. There are historical precedents for both positions. A desire to publish poems regardless of the political-aesthetic positions of their authors and execute idiosyncratic editorial preference can be traced back to The Little Review, Others, and the early days of Poetry, and even their mainstream antagonists, like The Dial which cherry-picked from the "little's" novel findings, reframing modernist provocations for a wider bourgeois readership. The poems themselves, however, seen in the light of what surrounded them (other poems, advertisements, magazine covers, editorial statements) changed their colors, adapting to their environs. The recalcitrant desire to preserve the anti-institutional power of embattled, marginal groups with autonomous aesthetics was just as "natural"—its origins have a similar lineage, the same modernist sources. And this group, founded on and forged in community-minded publishing practices, demanded recognition that they were here first and, like an East Village bohemian artist watching the neighborhood change, needed to disambiguate their values from those of the newcomers.

Autonomy Aesthetics and Its Discontents

It's not surprising that the Fence debates have been forgotten, that they are rarely if ever invoked in MFA workshops, or anywhere in the academy. They occurred in an era when poets were wary of compromise with institutions, before the literary marketplace gentrified the margins; some stayed and moved on up to join the new professional class through work at MFA programs or professional literary associations, others were moved to the margins. Far from democratizing the field, access to publication and readership has been narrowed due to the high price tag of the MFA—what Schulman calls "a necessary socialization if you wanted connections"—without which new writers (purportedly) cannot find literary community and (de facto) entree to publish. "As damaging as these programs are," writes Schulman, "when they codify or elevate ruling-class perspectives and middlebrow practitioners, they become the only hope for outsiders to have a chance to be let in."

At the same time, literature's reach has diminished to its professional class—professors and students of Creative Writing writing for each other—and has become, as sociologists Thomas Franssen and Giselinde Kuipers conclude, "an object of cultural consumption for dwindling and aging publics." The rise of poetry's popularity the poetry world imagined upon seeing the ballooning of participation at the annual AWP conference in the aughts and inclusion of chapbook and poetry presses at its book fair is an institutionally fabricated myth. As Juliana Spahr reports in her recent book from Harvard University Press, the fact is that within a decade of 2002, poetry reading in the US fell by 45%, while after the turn of the century the number of novels published per year rose by a factor of 5.

In Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment—an attempt to understand the history of the relationship of literature to politics and power—Spahr concludes that "literature has been sequestered into irrelevance. The FBI no longer has to develop files on writers because the terms on which literature is written, who it is written for, and where it is possible to write it have changed." Spahr finds the source of this irrelevance in the institutionalization of literature promulgated by MFAs, but also in nonprofit organizations which attempt to diversify the professional field, because "they argue for inclusion and support (rather than overturn) the institutionalization that defines contemporary literary production," and "are part of and are formed by this era of institutionalization, not a resistance to it." The current political strategy, she argues, is quite different from the program of Amiri Baraka's Black Arts Repertory Theater/School with its credo to "Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked."

When the small press had no power within the institution it was against institutions; when it viewed itself as political it was seen as political; and when it was connected to (or was born of) existing political movements, it was watched and targeted for infiltration by state agencies precisely for its access to marginalized communities. It also had been more diverse, whereas, despite significant changes since the 1990s in the higher-education canon and the diversification of writers invited to give readings on college campuses and of those campuses themselves through new hires and mindful admissions policies, during "this era of institutionalization," as Spahr calls our time, "U.S. literary production is in the aggregate about 95 percent white."

Now, the normalization of compromise with institutions that Schulman associates with gentrification is a reversal of Diane di Prima's call for "power to the people's mimeo-machines" or Gwendolyn Brooks's decision to abandon Harper & Row in favor of Broadside Press and other Black publishers. As it turns out, the de-politicized aesthetic of the new professional literary class with its MFAs and glossy magazines did (and does) signify a politics—one that implies or concedes that the market will decide. It assumes we can all get along and fight the good fight: the growth of an institutionally qualified readership, the consolidation of a class with access for credentialed insiders, while further alienating others to make space for a vague "us" with vaguely defined liberal politics and consumer identities.

As for the outward appearance of this de-politicized aesthetics that defined and defended its compromise, what caught Evans's eye and scared the old-school politicized post-moderns, was its anemic consumability: a look that says it’s supposed to look like what it looks like. Or, it looks like power, and so it is. It's a look I recognize in Schulman's description of the changing neighborhood around her: "To add insult to injury, these very square new businesses that were culturally bland, parasitic and very American, coded themselves as 'cool' or 'hip' when they were actually the opposite. When they were in fact homogenous, corporate, boring, and destructive of cultural complexity." Now that the MFA-affiliated journal and those indies jockeying for relevance at AWP have moved through the gentrifying phase of homogenization, their editors may search out (as have commercial publishers seeking to attract the gentrified hipster class) a shabby-chic look that references small presses of yore: uncoated papers, one or two color printing, embossing meant to simulate letterpress, and other markers of "authenticity," thus simulating a look of autonomy.

The Resistable Rise of 6x6, or Cutting Corners at a Secret Location in Morningside Heights

It is a cliché of the highest stupidity that four poets living in late twentieth-century New York, neither very young, nor in middle age, and enamored of modernist and subcultural traditions, with no MFA credentials or professional connections and few publications save for their own self-published chapbooks, would imagine starting a little magazine to stake out their own eclectic and cosmopolitan aesthetics, and to find a community of like-minded writers. The little magazine had been and remains, at least for a time, the single most efficient path to the deictic claim that says "we're here, too." It is a drug that rewards its dedicated users with a palpable mirage of independent aesthetic evaluation and judgement in flagrant contradiction to the controls of high-minded teachers, businessmen poets, literary bureaucrats, vested editors, know-it-all curators, ivory-tower scholars, the police, and all the other finger-wagging, key-wielding authorities.

In 1999, two years after Fence's first issue, four members of the nascent UDP collective—Julien Poirier, G. L. Ford, Filip Marinovich, and myself—embarked on the publication of the poetry journal 6x6. Much to its founders' surprise, it ran for 17 years and 36 issues. Somehow, perhaps subconsciously, but also totally predictably, 6x6 responded to the paradigms I've discussed above, though those who got it going (myself included) may have only been partially, intuitively aware of what their choices signified. We had seen the new journals at (now defunct) St. Marks Books, but some of us had also seen—and been inspired by—the NYPL's "Secret Location" show of mimeo mags and chapbooks, and if we hadn't seen the show, we had each had experiences with modernist, avant-garde, and mimeo-revolution periodicals. We took stock of our finances and looked to the technological means available to us: typewriters, a desktop computer and consumer-grade printer, employers' photocopiers, and a 10"x10" paper cutter appropriated from a human-rights nonprofit I worked for, where it had been forgotten on a dusty shelf. We chose legal-size paper (I'd used it for the Ugly Duckling zine)—an inexpensive standard that would go through a desktop printer, folded to 8.5" x 7", and trimmed to a square. We would pool our money—approximately $250 per editor per issue in its early days—and go to an offset place on the corner of 110th and Amsterdam, just a block away from two of the editors' apartment in Morningside Heights. It was named after its owner, a guy named Orlando (originally from Peru) who specialized in church newsletters and small copy jobs for the neighborhood. We noticed he had a Heidelberg windmill letterpress crammed into a corner of the tiny storefront, long dormant; Orlando got excited about firing it up for our bohemian project.

Orlando had a press, but he didn't have type, so an aging man named Isaac Joseph (or Joseph Isaac, we were never sure), who was usually napping for lack of work at his desk in the back of a paper supplier and offset printer on West 28th Street, provided us with Ludlow slugs for the issue title (the first line of the first poem), and author names and price for the back cover; we chose the typefaces from his diagonally-slanted Ludlow cases, most likely scrapped by now. Once they had cooled to a solid state, we'd take the lead slugs to Orlando who would letterpress the covers and offset the interiors from our camera-ready printouts. We hauled paper up to his shop (by subway or cab) from Shulman Paper in Chelsea, one of those paper brokers with connections to the mills that mostly dealt in business letterhead paper, envelopes, etc., which sometimes had deals for us if we found odd-lot or discontinued stock in the back. A trophy, plaque, and stamp shop off Park Avenue South made our rubber stamps with the issue number—photocopied and enlarged from a French "Ombrés" type specimen sheet we found reproduced in a novelty typeface book. The binding—inspired by a zine from Lubbock, TX—was to be a rubber band that we had trouble sourcing: it had to be just under seven inches long and a quarter inch wide, something akin to the bands on broccoli. (I recall a sketchy loft near the Public Theater on Lafayette, or perhaps Bond Street, maybe a warehouse connected to NYU—it felt like we were getting hot goods off the back of a truck.) The difficulties in procuring the necessary materials from such a variety of sources seemed a deliberate part of the adventure and served to make an object very different from any other poetry journal available at the time. By and by, contact with these purveyors and craftspeople taught me—a xerox-zine kid—a lot about print and paper.

Orlando had little space in his small shop to collate the magazine, and we could save money if we assembled the sheets ourselves in the tiny living room of Julien and Greg's Morningside Heights apartment; so what the heck—it was only 56 pages, i.e. 13 sheets, times 1000. We folded the interior pages and covers, then hand-stamped the covers, then cut the corners, then bound it all with the rubber bands. It took several days with help from friends and a lot of beer and coffee to make enough for the release party (July 4, 2000), and weeks to finish the rest. The corner cut added a lot of time since we had to do it separately for the cover and for the interiors, which we split in half so that the blade would go through them: 3000 chops for the 1000 copies of the first issue. We joked that we were "cutting corners"—in fact we were adding further labor—and that the 7" x 7" dimensions were sufficiently altered to be identified as 6" x 6". With the corner placement of author names, one had to be careful not to cut them off—poets closer to the centerfold suffered some close calls, due to what printers call "creep."

The days and nights of assembly that accompanied the making of the early issues of 6x6 were the root of our "Presse Days," now nearly 20 years running, when volunteers (friends and strangers alike) come to the studio to help bind chapbooks or pack subscriptions. These get-togethers recall Hettie Jones's description of the making of Yugen in the early 1960s (from a 2014 interview given to Stephanie Anderson and published in Chicago Review):

... when we got the early issues they were just in pages, so we had parties—stapling parties. ... LeRoi and I really organized those parties—set people up so that they would pass pages to one another and then somebody did the stapling on the spine—we got a long stapler. ... And we got drunker as the night went along. But it’s amazing, those little magazines—they survived!

Such reminiscences abound in the chronicles of the mimeo-revolution era, and of course are just like the experiences of chapbook publishers to this day. It's altogether absurdly nostalgic—the idea of connecting with peers and forging friendships over this repetitive physical activity, with breaks for cheap beer and rolled cigarettes, in service of a new magazine—precisely, perhaps, because it is also hilariously real. The idea of all these hands touching each page, each cover—it's so sentimental on one hand, yet it remains undeniably powerful. The output of a binding party is a drop in the barrel compared to the number of pages collated and bound in an hour at the printing plant for an issue of your typical literary journal, not to mention a commercial novel or biography; yet the difference in cultural impact, especially for the immediate community involved, has little to do with print-runs.

I have been exhaustive in recounting the production process of 6x6 not out of nostalgia for cutting corners, but because it echoes the use of available means that pervades ideas of small press "authenticity," and also points to a network of suppliers and craftspeople now mostly priced out of New York City. I now understand our whimsical inventions as a dialogue with the small press of our past. The corner cut was an homage to Vasiliy Kamensky's 1914 magazine, Tango with Cows and the rough-shod aesthetics of Russian Futurist books. The emphatic handwork (the corner, the typewritten names on the section pages, the rubber stamp associated with mail art, the rubber band) were a sign that the editors were physically involved with the journal's production. The choice of textured and toothy papers underscored the material aspects of reading at a time when our contemporaries were increasingly enamored with technologies of the screen and the internet, and desktop publishing allowed a mimicry of commercial feel at little cost. The cover price of $2 for the first issue of 6x6 and the print run of 1000 copies conveyed our desire for democratic access and underscored the absurdity of any thought of recouping our investment. (The price went up slowly, barely in step with NYC's cost of living: $3 at issue #3, and later $5, and $6 in the last third or so of its life.)

Editorial decisions were also, it turned out, politically signifying. The title emerged from a conversation held while throwing dice against the wall of St. Marks Church during a characteristically languorous break between readings at the Poetry Project. Julien had been using the dice to compose poems, so the title was also a nod to aleatory techniques of avant-garde poetry from Mallarmé to Jackson Mac Low. These arbitrary numbers determined the parameters of the magazine: Each of six poets would be allotted six pages, whether for a longer poem or sequence, or for six discreet poems. At the time most of the popular poetry magazines we encountered featured upwards of 40 names and frequently made space for just one to three poems for most of the contributors. 6x6 granted the author's name (and the title of the series or long poem, if there was one) a whole spread, as well as ample white space around the poems themselves.

Refusing notions of career advancement through publication, and eschewing the legitimization of its editorial choices, 6x6 did not print a masthead, nor contributor biographies, unlike the "journals" coming out of MFAs or the independent magazines of their graduates, where contributor pages were chock full of the names of ivy league schools and Creative Writing programs. Even avant-garde-aligned Ron Silliman once complained (on Silliman's Blog) of the inconvenience that the lack of author bios created; we were happy someone noticed our recalcitrant stance, our invocation of modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy. (We were in fact so autonomous that none of us took part in, nor really even knew about, the Fence debates when they were happening.) In addition to "missing" bios, other aspects of commercial recognition were suppressed: the title of the magazine was never printed on its cover (causing no doubt some headache for librarians and bookstores), and its editing body was never mentioned, nor was a designer; only the printers and sources of materials were credited. At some point, adamant about the vaguely anti-capitalist element of freely given time, we added to our colophon some variation on the awkward phrase "corners cut and rubber-band bound by volunteers."

Altogether, these strategies, if one can call them such in hindsight, imbued 6x6 with an air of mystery. The peculiar shape and binding, the absence of a legible title, the lack of barcodes, ISBN, or ISSN made it impossible to convince even indie distributors to represent the magazine to the trade. It had to be peddled by the editors at readings and book fairs and sold to indie bookstores on consignment. Most of its sales occurred during release parties held at artists' lofts, in basements, and music clubs, almost exclusively outside of venues that programmed poetry—where readings by 6x6 authors punctuated a variety show of experimental music, free jazz, performance art, DJs, and alternative bands.

The editorial bias of 6x6, if there was any, was probably hard to get a read on; during its 17 years there were times when the number of editors matched or exceeded that of the contributors to an issue which helped it become a rather diverse magazine geographically, ethnically, in age and gender, aesthetic inclination, and political belonging. The magazine published many poets that weren't appearing in the thick periodicals and anthologies of "younger poets." It included poets who had never published before and those who were not published widely outside of the little magazine scene associated with avant-garde poetry. A smattering of elders appeared in its pages, including some poet/publishers important to our lineage (Lyn Hejinian, Keith Waldrop, Lewis Warsh), and there was usually one poet in translation (dead or living) in each issue. We did not shy away from printing our peers and friends, including three of the four original editors, but we had a rule never to run an author twice. Submissions came to us the old-fashioned way, by paper & postage stamp, with SASEs for correspondence despite that fact that (almost) everyone we published was on email. In dandy-like, anachronistic spirit, our rejection notes, often personalized with un-asked for edits and criticisms, were handwritten or banged out on typewriters for much of the magazine's life.

Like UDP itself, 6x6 could be either criticized or lauded for its eclecticism, as it straddled the fence that was still partly standing, though increasingly broken down, between various American poetry camps. Unlike the bigger journals, however, 6x6 could, because of its brevity, be curated to hang together as a whole; our goal was for each issue to move musically through its disparate materials. My personal hope was that this manner of editing put poems as well as poets into conversation with one another, letting the work speak to readers, bypassing the who's who of contextual information. Moreover, 6x6, especially at the beginning, was for me, having had little formal education in it, a school for learning what contemporary US poetry was, what I liked and didn't, and why.

I recall people referring to 6x6 as a book, a chapbook, a pamphlet, a zine—rarely a journal. Its form and genre were illusive and aversive to the prevailing magazine culture of the early twenty-first century. At the time of the Fence debates and the emergence of online magazines, 6x6's appearance was a little peculiar in that it emphasized poetry's materiality and marginal cultural status. From the cut corner and the hand-stamp, to the lack of bios, 6x6 symbolized for its editors a desire to reaffirm and recreate what Rothenberg suggested in his preface to the Secret Location catalog about the actual mainstream of American poetry living in the margins, where poets published poets by any means necessary in order to engage in an uncensored and unmonitored exchange of ideas, free of professional jockeying and commercial expectations.

A Note on the Persistence of Staples and Negative Capability

6x6 was of course—as I hope I've made clear above—not alone in its recapitulation of the aesthetics of autonomy and reenactment of small press "authenticity," even if its editors were aware only of a sliver of the wide margins of contemporary literary production at the time of its founding. And similar recapitulations emerge still, with subtle differences. For instance, the tried and true homespun provocation of the side-stapled format has been recently resurrected by outfits such as TRY (Oakland, c. 2008-2013, edited by David Brazil and Sara Larsen), Poems by Sunday (Brooklyn, c. 2011-2015, edited by Daniel Owen and Sarah Anne Wallen), and Big Bell (San Francisco, c. 2008 to 2015, edited by Jason Morris, a proponent of "new sincerity"). On the surface, save for the presence of rust, it's hard to tell how much time separates these magazines from those that they pay homage to, like Clark Coolidge's Joglars from the 1970s, for example.

Like their 1990s predecessors, their gesture does not pretend to be new; its strength resides rather in the knowing repetition of technological limitations, of what a stapled short-stack of paper means in a time of MFA journals and online magazines. Appearing in May 2008, the Oakland magazine TRY had more than 50 issues within three years, and continued until circa 2013. It was circulated for free, passed out at readings by its editors, and barely left the Bay Area. In 2010, in an interview with CAConrad, the editors described the impetus for their magazine as follows:

We've (re)discovered that one can certainly be super-broke and still create something like this. You might struggle, but it's possible. Not only is it possible, it's an imperative. It's (part of) why TRY is called TRY! ... We wanted something that reflected the more or less immediate concerns and poetics of the multiple communities we know of or have access to. We wanted circulation that didn't take months to come out, that we could all use and talk about immediately... and we wanted HARD COPY EVIDENCE THAT STICKS AROUND, i.e. not something floating around the bowels of the internet. something we could touch.

In 2009, twenty-five years after Hejinian closed up the Tuumba chapbook series, another Bay Area poet, Michael Cross, started Compline out of his home in Oakland, California. He prints books, chapbooks, and ephemera on a Heidelberg windmill letterpress (manufactured in the 1950s, acquired in 2011) in a shed in his backyard. When Compline's productions were exhibited in "The Smell of Ink in the Kitchen: Small Press Letterpress"—a show I curated with Aaron Cohick at Colorado College in 2015, focused on the productions of small presses that used letterpress printing (Burning Deck, Tuumba, Coracle, alongside contemporary publishers)—Cross summed up his project for the wall text:

Compline is not about me, my personality, or the personality of my imagined engagement with the world. It’s not about producing precious book objects because I am not a book artist. Compline receives no funding, makes no money, and totally rejects non-profit status. Because I do everything myself, the books materialize as they enter into the rhythms and exigencies of my lived experience. As a result, sometimes they appear quickly, and other times there’s nothing at all. The form of the book and how it ultimately materializes is determined almost solely by my lack of resources. In short, when I begin making a book, I enter into a relationship with privation. Compline does not advertise, it has a very modest presence on the internet, and mostly circulates through word of mouth. The books themselves can be intransigent, and the distribution and production models represent a similar willfulness. This negativity, I suppose, is one way to resist our culture’s demand for convenience and immediacy. It’s a kind of holding out. Insisting on silence and difficulty, which to me is truth."

It's easy to see that Compline reinforces values inherited from presses like Tuumba and re-stages the intransigence (what Bernstein would call "aversiveness") of small press in relation to the marketplace while emphasizing the connection of small press activity to daily life and community. As a "relationship with privation," Cross's modesty echoes the "supercheap magazine or chapbook," that, according to Bernstein, is at the heart of small press because it "allows just about anyone to be a publisher or editor." In a "market turned upside down" a reader can expect that "the more modest the production, the greater the integrity of the content." These evocations of a "poetic economy" outside the market bring us back to di Prima's colophon to Revolutionary Letters: "This is a free book. These are free poems and may be reprinted anywhere by anyone... Power to the people's mimeo machines."

Yet, while Cross upholds the importance of modest production and the resulting feeling of integrity in the work, he expresses the "willfulness" of the small press publisher-cum-printer as a kind of negative capability. In an interesting rhetorical turn away from the mimeo-revolution's desire for "speed" and Tuumba's pamphleteering of "news," Cross identifies a contemporary counter-desire for "holding out." Against post-Fordist, internet-minded "convenience and immediacy"—an era of Amazon Prime, downloadable content, instant approbation, and virtual friends—Cross's resistance resides in an assertion of "silence and difficulty."

***

Continue with this series for Part 2 "Autonomy's Compromise and the Professionalization of the Small Press," Part 3 "The New Normal: How We Gave Up the Small Press," and Part 4 "'Fervent and Utopian': Small Press at a Crossroads."