Introduction to Focus: Poetry without Walls

What happened after modernism? That's what I was dying to know when I was a kid growing up in Providence. It seemed as if American literature stopped at Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (there was never any mention of Gertrude Stein). The local retail bookstore had only the most banal mish-mash of poetry and glossy magazines featuring advertisements for predatory vanity presses and Foetry "prizes" that seemed to only echo and endorse that mediocre mish-mash.

Walking downtown, I stumbled upon Cellar Stories, a large used bookstore above a bar in the theater district. I went to the poetry section, not knowing what I was looking for. An alluring bright yellow book caught my eye: Precedence (1985) by Rae Armantrout. While I found the first few lines baffling, I felt challenged to rise to the complexity of the writing. I noticed that the book was published by Burning Deck Press and that the publisher's address wasn't far from home. A week later, I returned to the bookstore and rustled up all the Burning Deck books the shelves held, including works by Jackson Mac Low, Marjorie Welish, Kenward Elmslie, Harry Mathews, Oskar Pastior, Elke Erb, as well as several self-published titles by Burning Deck founders, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop.

From Fluxus to Oulipo to the New York School and beyond, these books taught me a lot about what happened after modernism in the US and Europe and introduced me to some of the major contemporary writers that continue to interest me and inform my own writing. I also learned that self-publishing isn't self-deprecating, but a virtuous and expedient way to usher new writing into the world while sidestepping the vultures who prey on the insecurities of inexperienced writers. Another important lesson learned from the "Burning Deck Curriculum" (as I call it now, with half-seriousness): a good publisher is one that you can trust, respect, and even constructively disagree with. Although they didn't know it at the time, the Waldrops became my teachers, and their catalog became my syllabus in a school without walls.

In A Century in Two Decades: A Burning Deck Anthology 1961–1981 (1983), the Waldrops describe their early years as publishers:

Since being eclectic is not always taken for virtue, we would note that our eclecticism—besides simply reflecting personal ranges of appreciation—is based on an inability to believe that the history of, for instance, poetry can possibly be clear before the poems are written. It is not denying the importance of "movements," to insist that there is another importance in moving beside or apart from them.

A few years ago I was asked to write a short article about the history of small press publishing in America. When I turned in my article, the editor told me that I needed to make a stronger correlation between presses and literary movements: Jargon Society is to Black Mountain as Sun & Moon is to Language or Black Sparrow is to Deep Image as United Artists is to Second Generation New York School, etc. I thought this logic was flawed and told the editor that I strongly disagreed. My conviction is even stronger today. Reading the complete corpus of any attentive publisher is the best way to break up the rusty paradigms and assumptions we often inherit about schools of poetry, their histories and attributes. Read all of the books published by Adventures in Poetry, BookThug, Burning Deck, Chax Press, Equipage, Factory School, Faux Press, Granary books, Krupskaya, Palm Press, Roof Books, Salt, The Rest Press, Zasterle, or any of the other maverick publishers featured in this issue of American Book Review and you will see that it is impossible to align any press with a particular coterie, clique, school, or institution. In fact, a devoted reader will likely discover new relationships, cross-pollination and even develop an intimate understanding of the qualities and tendencies celebrated by the editor. Locating the publishers one likes is to navigate the uncharted waters of new writing, a vital means to filter the staggering quantity of books published every year (since Larry...