Counterpath Press

The absence of audience is the ground or province of the small press, to play this game that can't be "won," to enter a dialogue with, essentially, futility that has been and perhaps always will be where writing itself is found. For if our audience is such a small one, so randomly arrived at that by placing one of our books on the floor of the local kennel, we could expect more cats and dogs to gravitate toward it than readers do in the general populace, even given all the marketing and reviews, then ultimately more than anything, we are talking to ourselves, holding up the value of using the voice for its own sake. We are the ones who will do this. We are the ones who will not attempt to move away from this reality. The one and perhaps only thing a press does is model this behavior. This is our culture; this is our community.

What a small press models is that futility is the generator of art. Increasingly this is becoming true of the book itself, as reading moves to other formats. As an object, it models an anachronism, one the small press emulates. This is true because there's a presupposition of importance about a press and about a book that simply does not hold true. But the small press does not need to insist on the book to embrace futility; it doesn't need to and shouldn't be praised for throwing money after the "book arts" in such a world. Futility can just as well be embraced in the new media, and your share of it may be all the greater if you conserve your resources.

But the question too is whether we can possibly approach true futility if in the end we feel we're getting somewhere. Are we finding a kind of release? We land in the domain of language, of the impossibility of escaping all that has already been predetermined. The small press sets out to combat a narrowness of culture, producing its own narrowness. In some way, it insists on being included, if only on a dusty, perhaps nonexistent, library shelf, perhaps only as a search term, one preemptively keyed for deletion on entry. Indeed, this is a level beyond which no one goes, large or small. This is not the level of the complete lack of audience for what we are aware of as important work. We are back at the level of the impossibility of speaking, the level of the futility of the written word.

The press mirrors contemporary writing itself; it shares the same domain; it shares the same objectives, the same directive, the same forces. It consistently helps writing itself to see its own sources. They both stare at futility. They both stare at silence, at their own uselessness in the contemporary world, a uselessness nowhere more perfect and therefore nowhere more liberating. The devotion on display in the creation of writing, as with the creation of books or venues in which this writing is promoted, is stronger and more real than what is in evidence in any other profession. Writing—we could use the term "poetry"—and the small press help create and keep alive the aesthetic that has been the most substantial over time, the aesthetic of bottomlessness, of finding the point of not just least resistance, but no resistance, the point of futility. Without futility, our substance is empty. We face down the loneliness of the night sky. It is not "cool"; it is not "beautiful"; it is simply of this moment. The work the small press publishes ties itself to this fact, phenomena, this trait of our existence. The more we move away from this confrontation, the less we have to say. The small press refuses to move away.

How does a small press survive? If no one supports it, if no one wants the work it makes, what is there to let it remain in existence? We don't really ask. It takes fewer resources than ever before to create something that looks like it might like...