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  • Introduction to Focus:A Company of Companies: Essential Micropress Reading
  • Ted Pelton, Focus Editor (bio)

One had the company

—Robert Creeley, Autobiography (1990)

"The company," as phrased by the late Robert Creeley, was comprised of one's fellows in writing. For Creeley, this might have meant, at different moments of his career trajectory, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Susan Howe—or any dedicated student he happened to be talking to at the moment. Writing and poetry, particularly by innovative artists, create networks of like-engaged people, who may be at different stages of lives or careers, and whose work may create dissonances and contrasts as well as likenesses, but who are nonetheless united by that shared activity.

Is it too easy a pun, too light a formulation, to say that in the past decade various constellations of what Creeley called "the company" have shared the activity of forming companies?

The small presses here highlighted (or "micropresses," to distinguish them from their larger, often institutionally supported sistren) are generally the brainchildren of founders who are writers themselves, who have formed presses for the purpose of publishing not themselves but writers whose work they believe in. Or maybe they started by publishing themselves, but now it is the publishing itself that has to a great extent become the signature creative act. They theorize this act as artistic strategy—"kitschy" (Action Books), "anarchic" (Belladonna Books), "weird" (Chiasmus Press), "small" (Futurepoem), anti-"war" (Les Figues Press)—rather than as an economic or market-driven enterprise.

Publishing poetry, innovative fiction, hybrid prose, and text and image assemblages, these presses did not get seeded by federal or state grant or foundation money, and are not generally funded by academic institutions (even, in some cases, when the director or publisher is herself an academic). They are mostly volunteer organizations, captained by single persons or couples, perhaps nonprofits, perhaps just non-profiting, and they measure success by continuing to survive and produce books. They have all known crises and continued to survive, drawing a quixotic strength from defying the tremendous odds against them. Indeed, "The Permanent Crisis," to borrow the title of an old Ronald Sukenick story—the never-ending, grinding sense of economic and cultural "futility," as Julie Carr and Tim Roberts of Counterpath Press term it, is perhaps the mitochondria of micropress identity. Everywhere, American culture tells these presses that they are irrelevant, don't matter: that people don't read; that the younger today's citizens are, the less likely they are to bother with books, and so there's no future in publishing; that there are too many books out there anyway (according to both Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie, among others); that the books that really matter are those reviewed in periodicals with "New York" in the title, and published by companies located in the skyscraperland that still imagines itself the capital of publishing; that even this industry is dying, so how could some kitchen operation in Buffalo, Denver, Queens, or South Bend claim to know better?; that e-books are the future, or text on multimedia devices that will make reading less boring; that there's a recession, and so people really aren't interested; that there are too many creative writing programs in the US, producing too many writers, too few readers, and far too much Internet blather; that such meager resources as used to fund the arts have been cut; that other types of nonprofits are more essential than are new publishers in these hard times; that, for relevancy's sake, isn't it time they did something else?

But I myself recently witnessed something I had only read about in St. Gertrude of Paris, who wrote, the creator of a new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between.

The outlaw creator, in the case I saw firsthand, was not me but one of Starcherone Books's authors, Zachary Mason. Lo, in March 2009, Mason's novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey was selected as one of five nominees for the prestigious Young Lions Prize from the New York Public Library, a prize given...

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