Nearly twenty years in the works, I am pleased to announce that my book, A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers is in the world. Here's a short description:
The publication of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry in 1960, as well as the Vancouver and Berkeley poetry conferences, sparked a poetic renaissance. It was an era rich in exploration and innovation that articulated a new relationship between form and content. Simultaneously, American artists began working with the book as a creative medium that rivaled the European tradition of the early twentieth century. This book is the first collection of interviews with some of the pioneers working at the intersection of the artists book and experimental writing that continues to this day.
Includes interviews with Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, Tom Raworth, Lyn Hejinian, Alan Loney, Mary Laird, Jonathan Greene, Alastair Johnston, Johanna Drucker, Philip Gallo, Steve Clay, Charles Alexander, Annabel Lee, Inge Bruggeman, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis, Aaron Cohick, and Scott Pierce.
I couldn't be more grateful to all of the individuals who generously shared their adventures in publishing with me, the editors who published excerpts from this book over the years, and Ugly Duckling Presse for their incredible attention to detail and ravishing design.
Megan Liberty's review, “A Window into the Workings of Small Presses” appeared in Hyperallergic and Joe Elliot's "Stop the Presses? Never." appeared in Boog City. My thanks to them both, as well as Matvei Yankelevich for interviewing me about the book in Boog City and David Wilk for interviewing me in the WritersCast Series.
There is also a special edition of A Poetics of the Press, limited to 100 copies, that includes a piece of ephemera from every publisher in the book available exclusively from Ugly Duckling Presse.
