Michael Korda: "technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it"

 

 

The dire predictions that doom the future of the printed word seem to mount daily. Not to worry: book publishing will adapt in ways undreamed of, and with a quickness that will be astonishing.

 

That's the hopeful forecast in this interview with Michael Korda, author and former editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, who's well aware that the book business will respond to the commercial expectations of readers as it always has, even as the idea of "the book" itself changes. He thinks that the role of small-press publishers, always precarious, will benefit from technology in the next five years with "a media that's open to everybody ... how they'll make money, I don't know. But then, how do they make money now?'

 

Korda offers a future business model based on the recent history of the music industry: "Nobody would have guessed that people would be downloading individual songs onto their computers and that record stores would disappear. So, you know, a very similar thing is going to happen to reading." The complete online interview by Rob Couteau, excerpted here, is in Raintaxi.

RC: You were saying the form itself is not so important; it’s the book that’s important, and we can’t compare the book in its present form to an electronic book, like the Kindle, but we have to apply our imagination to it much further, in that it might become something that’s just beyond anything we can imagine today.

MK: Well, I think that that’s true. You know, you’re looking at the Model T Ford and trying to predict what road transportation will be like in 2010 . . . ultimately, it’ll still have four wheels, and some form of propulsion, and a steering wheel, but beyond that, you’re trying to imagine something which is beyond imagination, if you see what I mean.

Now, there are two important differences. One is that the speed of progress is now so rapid, and transition is so quick, that the next step in reading-technology will come very rapidly, rather than very slowly. So that there’s not going to be a long lag between its inception and its development, and any changes that take place. Already, the iPad is a huge step ahead of the Kindle. Although whether it’s a useful step ahead for readers remains to be seen. ... it’s a rather large and cumbersome device, which needs to be replaced with something altogether different. But that is going to happen with such incredible rapidity that we really can’t forecast what it will look like. ...my guess is that, in ten years time, it will be in place and that nobody will have a problem with it. It’s just amazing the degree to which things are changing rapidly.

RC: There are a lot of people who say, “Well, I would miss the feel of the book.” But if you really unleash your imagination, it’s actually quite easy to imagine how digital book producers could appeal to the tactile sense; it doesn’t have to be just a visual innovation.

MK: Yeah, no doubt. But you know, I don’t have a clue. The person to talk to about that is Steve Jobs. [Laughs] Because unless he dies first, he’ll probably be the one who will invent it. But it’ll be something quite different. But I don’t think that that’s in any case something that one should be afraid of. People react the same way about a whole variety of things, ranging from smoking cigarettes to using typewriters or fountain pens. But nevertheless, the technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it. ...

RC: But other things, other businesses, will be created.

MK: Right. ... The book will continue to be a major factor for as, certainly as long as I live, and maybe as long as you live. But eventually it’s going, in the form of something else.

RC: What about the future of publishing?

MK: It will have to be reinvented with that in mind. Already, I think it’s evident that the major publishers are looking to find a partner in Apple, (and it) will become, in effect, a kind of publishing house. How that will work remains to be seen. There isn’t anyone in the book publishing business who can tell you, because nobody knows at this point in time. But that’s what everybody is clearly attempting to move towards. ...

The Codex Seraphinianus: "the most mysterious book in the world."

"Luigi Serafini is an Italian graphic artist famous for his unusual and obscure works such as the Codex Seraphinianus. Born in Rome in 1949, Serafini began his career as an architect before creating the Codex Seraphinianus; he also authored the Pulcinellopedia Piccola. Serafini has also worked with the media of industrial design, film, and theater, and has also written stories for Italian magazines." (Luigi Serafini's Wikipedia entry, in full.)

The "Codex Seraphinianus" has been published in a new edition by Rizzoli.  The book first appeared in the 1970s, a phantasmagoria of strange images and the artist's own made-up language, and has since created a reputation as "the most mysterious book in the world."  The website Dangerous Minds has posted an interview with Rizzoli's Charles Meyers, who confirms that the author is still very much alive with homes in Rome and Milan. He also confirms that Luigi Seraphini is "absolutely a real person and he speaks very good English," and that he is still drawing his mysterious images.

Seraphini (his website is currently a blank page, whether by artful intent or mythic accident) contributed new drawings and text in the new edition, as well as a DeCodex, in which he states that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the book in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and “wrote."

The wild party: Hart Crane and Black Sun Press, Dec 7, 1929. "Death is our marriage"

There's always interesting history over at Thomas Christiansen's Right Reading site. Here's one entry for December 7: "Hart Crane gives a party for his publishers, Harry and Caresse Crosby of Black Sun Press (publishers of Crane, Kay Boyle, James Joyce, Rene Crevel, and T.S. Elliot, among others). William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, e. e. cummings, and a group of drunken sailors attend. The euphoria doesn't last: the thirty-one-year-old Crosby kills himself and his mistress."

One has to admire the detail of Crane inviting sailors to a publishing party: oh, you kid! 

Behind that literary squib is a Jazz Era scandal that would have intrigued Scott Fitzgerald: a sudden revelation of romantic entanglement, money, suicide, and Boston society mortification at its own excesses. The murder / suicide of Harry Crosby and his lover Josephine Rotch -- he was the eccentric publisher of the  Black Sun Press with his wife Caresse -- inspired headlines that thrilled to the combination of love and death. Even the New York Times was in a giddy mood, reporting the day after the couple's suicide pact on December 10:  "COUPLE SHOT DEAD IN ARTISTS' HOTEL ... BUT MOTIVE IS UNKNOWN." 

Such discretion among the Brahmins of Boston society was probably required -- the Crosbys' Black Sun Press had published exquisite books in limited editions, and some for good reason; Crosby and his wife seemed intent on giving Scott and Zelda some heady Jazz Age competition. Here's one 1928 volume described in a 2009 article:

"One of their most beautiful books was the Hindu Love Manual which they first found while on holiday in Damascus. They reprinted it in October 1928 in a release of only 20 copies. Bound in navy blue leather, the cover was stamped with gold to reflect the style of ancient Persian manuscripts. The inside pages were printed on handmade paper colored a distinctive shade of gray and decorated with a gold border. Each illustration in every copy was hand-colored."

Black Sun had serious literary ambitions as well. The Crosbys published letters by Proust, as well as Faulkner's scandalous Sanctuary; works by Hemingway and Pound, and James Joyce's Tales Told of Shem and Shaun which was later integrated into Finnegans Wake. The party on December 7, 1929 was one Hart Crane -- with  his Navy friends as companions -- arranged in celebration of The Bridge, which Caresse would eventually publish in 1930.

The Crosbys had returned from Europe, and what happened then has the inevitability of a bohemian love story. In December the Crosbys returned to the United States for a visit and the Harvard-Yale football game. Afterwards Harry arranged for Josephine to meet him in Detroit, and they checked into the expensive ($12 a day) Book-Cadillac Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crane. According to one Caresse biography, the secret lovers took meals in their room, smoked opium, and made love for four days. 

On December 7, Harry and Josephine returned to New York. That evening Crosby's friend Crane threw a party to celebrate his completion (after seven years) of his poem "The Bridge." Black Sun Press had announced plans to publish, and Crane wanted to bid Harry and Caresse bon voyage since they were due to sail back to France the next week.

On December 9, Josephine, who had stayed in New York rather than return to Boston, sent a 36-line poem to Harry Crosby, who was staying with Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem read:

Death is our marriage.

If this was a challenge to Crosby to prove his love, Harry, the romantic, seemed willing to accept. On the same day, Harry Crosby wrote his final entry in his journal:

One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved.

On the evening of December 10, Harry was a no-show for dinner before the theater. Caresse called their friend Stanley Mortimer; his studio was the one Harry used for his meetings with Josephine. Stanley found Harry and Josephine dead. Harry had a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple and lay with his arm around Josephine, who had a matching hole in her left temple. The police, uncovering the trail of notes, determined the deaths be a suicide pact.

True to her word Caresse Crosby published "The Bridge" in Paris, 1930 in an edition of 283 copies. It contained three photographs by a previously unpublished 27-year-old named Walker Evans. 

In 1932 Crane himself committed suicide. He was on a ship bound for New York. The ship had made it to a point in the Gulf of Mexico when, after a morning of drinking, he made sexual advances to one of the crew. Witnesses reported that his intentions were probably suicidal when Crane climbed on the railing of the SS Orizaba and hailed the passengers by saying "Goodbye, everybody!" His body was never recovered. 

[Photo of Hart Crane by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Images of the 1930 Black Sun Press edition of The Bridge with Evans photographs at the Modern American Poetry site.]

Poet and publisher Jonathan Williams: "presentable, always presentable"

"Jonathan, you can't call a book Palpable Elysium in the America of 2002. Nobody knows those two words anymore. You have to call it Heaven in Yo Hand."

(Robert Kelly of Bard College to Jonathan Williams)

Jeffery Beam interviewed Jonathan Williams for RainTaxi in an article that appeared in the issue of Spring, 2003. Like many of Williams' indirect verbal ambles the conversation, as they say, takes the long way round.

In 2002 Mr. Williams had published A Palpable Elysium, his book of photographs featuring artists of all stripes. The book included portraits from an astonishing variety of folk from Williams' social circle: San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, the Georgia folk artist Eddie Owens Martin a.k.a. St. EOM, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, Father Thomas Merton, and a large selection from more than three thousand photographs.

There are also graveside visits to artists Williams admired and whose work Williams wanted to support, among them H.P. Lovecraft, Wallace Stevens, Erik Satie, and James Thurber.

Eddie Owens Martin (St. EOM) by JW

The full RainTazi interview can be read at the Jargon website and is worth a long, leisurely read and a porch sit on a hot August afternoon. Here is a small extract of JW's meandering style where he discusses his time at Black Mountain College, his early career as a publisher, and ultimately why his interests take flight in so many directions. But first a comment about JW's style of dress, which has almost always included a suit and tie since the 1950s:

JB: Somehow the tie and everything else confuses people....

JW: Oh yeah, I’ve had that happen. I went into The Cedar Tavern in the Village one day in 1958 or whenever. That’s where a lot of the Black Mountain people who lived in New York hung out. And I had been out trying to sell our Zukofsky book, our Robert Duncan book, our Denise Levertov book, and I think maybe The Test of Poetry. I was going around to places like Scribner’s and Brentano’s and some of the bookshops on Madison Avenue, and I was tired of carrying this heavy briefcase.

For the purpose I had set out to do, I was wearing a brown worsted suit, a beige Oxford cloth shirt, a striped tie, black socks, and brown shoes (well polished). So I walked into The Cedars, and way in the back was, of all people, Gregory Corso. I’d never met him, and he’d never met me, but before he shook hands he said, “Why are you wearing those silly, awful clothes?” (laughter) Well, that was all I needed to hear from him (more laughter), so I went back to the bar and left them to it.

So, you’re right, clothes can be misleading. Take Jack Spicer, who was gay as three grapes. I had not met Spicer and I wanted to. This was 1954 in San Francisco. Somebody with me said, “Hey, it’s Halloween, let’s go to The Black Cat.” It was right next door to the police station, interestingly enough, but they didn’t hassle the gays. I asked, “How will I know Jack?” My friend said, “He’ll be the only guy wearing a business suit!” (laughter). I really liked that. People ought to dress they way they want to, unless it frightens the police sergeant.

Charles Olson writing the "Maximus Poems"

at Black Mountain, by JW

JB: I think of your photograph of Charles Olson at Black Mountain where he doesn’t have his shirt on. When you were at Black Mountain did you continue to dress – had you already developed this formal way of dress? And while you were there did you stand out as someone who was less relaxed in the way they presented themselves?

JW: Well, I was the only person at Black Mountain who had, you know, been to prep school and gone to Princeton and spent time in New York and all that. I didn’t dress any differently than anybody else did, I don’t think, at Black Mountain. Certainly, none of the faculty made a thing of it …

Lou Harrison was rather dressy, but nobody else. Lou had a long-time San Francisco / New York background. I don’t think anyone wanted to stand out, particularly, at Black Mountain. I often wore a blazer on Sunday morning in case people got religion and somebody needed to pass the collection plate.

JB: Like a good southern boy.

JW: Yeah. (laughter)

JB: Presentable. (laugher)

JW: Presentable. Absolutely. Always presentable.

JW, by Rueben Cox (2001)

JB: Is there an easily defined artistic aesthetic that describes what, and how, and why you do what you do?

JW: Uncle Remus says: “Hit run’d cross my min’ des lak a rat ‘long a rafter.” I have a mind like that. It darts and shimmies all the time. It thinks of six things (besides sex) all at once. So the trick is to slow down, focus, concentrate. Someone said that craft is perfected attention. I like making well-crafted books, and poems, and images. Because it pleases me so to do. And it’s nice to please some of one’s friends now and then. I have never cultivated a commercial audience. I try never to do anything just for money — I seem to have been quite successful at that.

My things are for one or two people at a time. My old friend, Ephraim Doner (whose father had been an Hassidic rabbi in Poland), once told me about “The Lamed-Vov.” In the ancient Hebraic tradition the Lamed-Vov were the 36 great souls of the earth. Wonderfully, they never knew they were great souls, but Yahweh knew. If suddenly they dwindled to less than 36, then Yahweh would pull the plug and go to work on a better animal. As long as we can sell 36 copies of a Jargon book, we will keep at it.

The 1970s mysterious "Codex Seraphinanus" gets a lavish new Rizzoli edition

"Luigi Serafini is an Italian graphic artist famous for his unusual and obscure works such as the Codex Seraphinianus. Born in Rome in 1949, Serafini began his career as an architect before creating the Codex Seraphinianus; he also authored the Pulcinellopedia Piccola. Serafini has also worked with the media of industrial design, film, and theater, and has also written stories for Italian magazines." (Luigi Serafini's Wikipedia entry, in full.)

The "Codex Seraphinianus" has been published in a new edition by Rizzoli.  The book first appeared in the 1970s, a phantasmagoria of strange images and the artist's own made-up language, and has since created a reputation as "the most mysterious book in the world."  The website Dangerous Minds has posted an interview with Rizzoli's Charles Meyers, who confirms that the author is still very much alive with homes in Rome and Milan. He also confirms that Luigi Seraphini is "absolutely a real person and he speaks very good English," and that he is still drawing his mysterious images.

Seraphini (his website is currently a blank page, whether by artful intent or mythic accident) contributed new drawings and text in the new edition, as well as a DeCodex, in which he states that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the book in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and “wrote."

Inventing the 60s: an excerpt from "Fug You," Ed Sanders

Calling Ed Sanders a "lion in winter" these days (he's 73 now) would probably solicit more a laugh than a growl from the one-time publisher of a review called "Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts." But then he liked to add a gleam of mischief to his creative mix of ideas even in the heady 1960s. 

Musician, writer, bookstore-owner, publisher -- and, occasionally, all at the same time -- Ed's still out swinging the hammer as the online publisher of The Woodstock Journal: "working for an organic food supply, safe air, nonpolluted water, a total end to poverty, national health care, personal freedom and fun." America needs his voice as much as ever (and maybe more: his recorded projects include Thirsting for Peace, 2005, and Poems for New Orleans, 2007). These days boutiques, high-rises, chain caffeine and furniture stores have replaced the storefront mimeograph-revolution barricades. Ed's 1991 self-produced "Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side" is a poetic retelling of an even older East Side history -- New York isn't what it used to be, either. 

His memoir Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, The Fugs, and the Counterculture in the Lower East Side (DaCapo Press) is a freewheeling history of a creative era that has pretty much disappeared into legend and myth. Here's an excerpt.

The Founding of My Magazine

I founded Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts in February 1962 after a bunch of us, mostly friends from the Catholic Worker, went to see Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees at the Charles Theater on Avenue B. I was there mainly because the ad for the film in the Village Voice stated that my hero Allen Ginsberg was in it. For years I had avidly read Jonas Mekas’s weekly Voice column, “Movie Journal,” which mainly focused on the struggles and delights of the world of underground films.

I sensed from reading Mekas’s weekly columns that he was a person of great generosity and communality of spirit. That is, it wasn’t all Me! Me! Me! as in so much of the avant-garde. I thought he had a genuine will to help other filmmakers thrive and survive. I later learned that Mekas had paid for the printing of Jack Smith’s filmFlaming Creatures.

Mekas had just founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and lived nearby on Twelfth Street, although I didn’t know that while I was watching Guns of the Trees. The Lower East Side in those years was a Do-It-Now zone, and you knew maybe only a snippet of someone’s history or scene, if anything at all. All I knew is that the first thing I read each week in the Voice was “Movie Journal.”

I was particularly fascinated by the appearance of Allen Ginsberg as a narrator in the film. I had not yet met Ginsberg, although I had memorized “Howl” when I was still in Missouri in 1957, and I had seen him at Beat/New York School readings, such as one in November 1959 where he read at the Living Theater with Frank O’Hara. Wow. As I sat fascinated in the Charles Theater that February night with my pals, I never could have dreamed that the author of “Howl” and “Kaddish” would become a close friend.

At one point in Guns of the Trees Ginsberg chanted one of his poems with the sentence “I dreamt that J. Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hall of the Capitol.” It was a fragment that opened up such huge vistas of possibility in my mind! I transformed the fragment into the dedication for my soon-to-be-published magazine.

Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Just as Allen Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926 (and not near the Dniester River in Russia) because the pogroms in the Russian Pale, first in the 1880s and later around the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1904, drove his mother’s and father’s families to the American Dream, so, too, were Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, driven from Lithuania to the United States, this time in their case by the Nazis. In the early 1940s Jonas and Adolfas put out a mimeographed anti-Nazi newspaper, cutting stencils on a typewriter in a woodshed behind their house in Semeniskiai in Lithuania. Later they escaped from a German slave labor camp.

In 1949 they arrived in the United States, where both of them became filmmakers. In 1955 Jonas founded the magazine Film Culture. In the fall of 1958 he began his very influential weekly column, “Movie Journal,” in the Village Voice. In the summer of 1960 the Mekas brothers purchased some out-of-date film stock and began their feature-length film Guns of the Trees. Jonas wrote the script.

Mekas formed the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in early 1962 after another film distribution operation refused to screen a film by Stan Brakhage, Anticipation of the Night. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative practiced no censorship at all, and 75 percent of the rental fees for showing a film went directly to the filmmaker. And so in early 1962 the Charles Theater on Avenue B near Twelfth Street began showing underground films. Some of us from nearby streets eagerly attended.

Across the street was Stanley’s, a packed bar frequented by poets, civil rights activists, filmmakers, painters, and oodles of others from the nearby rent-controlled buildings. After Guns of the Trees my friends and I adjourned to Stanley’s for conversation and fun. Inspired by the film, I announced that evening that I was beginning a magazine and I solicited manuscripts. The name I tossed out among the revelers made them laugh. It had been in my mind a number of years.

Excerpted from "Chapter 1: The Glories of the Early ‘60s" in Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side, by Ed Sanders. The book is published by DaCapo Press.

"Letters to the editor, wearing a bowtie": the literary wars in Poetry magazine

Given all the time in the world, the astounding amount of reading you could do would still leave gaps in your education. That's why I enjoy reading letters in small magazines like Poetry. By reading -- glancing, really -- through the "Letters to the Editor" section, I get to witness the workings of entire literary universes, many of which I have no critical knowledge. That may indeed be my loss, but how vast is the knowledge of my ignorance!

And fun, too. There are mighty storms, no small tempests, raging in the simple black-and-white type of this small magazine, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe (first publisher of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land") and currently edited by Christian Wiman. There is titanic struggle in the give-and-take of letters on every page: the opposing schools of thought, the defender and the challenger of the writer (and reviewer) in question. Seldom do I see such erudite name-calling in such well-chosen words as in the "Letters to the Editor" section of Poetry magazine.

If one wasn't reading carefully, one could be hurt by the flying bouquets and brickbats being tossed about, and never know it. Up where the air is thin, I get the giddy feeling of learning much more than I should ever know about the clockworks of poetry. Without more ado, and without further comment:


My experience with Zbigniew Herbert is, I suspect, much like the majority of readers who have struggled over the years simply to find the work of this great poet. The narrative detailed by Michael Hoffman in the May issue of Poetry ("A Dead Necktie") is reminiscent of my own. ... For all our similarities in our background as readers, however, I feel confident that Herbert's long-time advocates will find less agreement with Hoffman's vituperative review of Alissa Valles's new translation of the Collected Poems. ...
(Todd Samuelson, Houston TX)

I applaud Michael Hoffman's review of Alissa Valles's Zbigniew Herbert translations. What he says supports my own dismay, but more importantly I think it's a masterpiece of literary reviewing -- highly intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful. ... I also learned a great deal about translation from reading a review by someone so intimately familiar with the process himself. ... If there were a Pulitzer for reviews, I think this should get it.(Sharon Bryan, Clinton WA) 

Michael Hoffman describes the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert:"There was a novelty, a surprise, an unpredictability, an ongoing untangling as one read ... The poem remade itself -- squeezed itself as out of a tube -- before one's very eyes. It is like reading something still wet, not set, not combed."In my opinion, Michael Hoffman is also describing the prose of his essay. Incomparable!(James R. Wilson, San Francisco, CA)

Hoffman reminds us that we can no longer take for granted Seamus Haney's assessment of Herbert in translation -- that "what convinces one of the universal resource of Herbert's writing is just this ability which it possesses to lean, without toppling, well beyond the plumb of its native language."(Jeff Frank, Plainfield NJ)

... But now I find in the May issue a lengthy review of a translation of the Collected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert, and that review was written by someone who says (nonchalantly? shamefacedly?) "I can't ... read Polish," while at the same time he has the chutzpah to assert that two Polish Nobel laureates are "of, as I see it, manifestly lesser gifts and importance." ... I hope that in the future you will be able to find reviewers who, if not linguistically competent, are at least modest enough to realize their limitations.(Elias L. Rivers, Coral Gables, FL)


I know Michael Hoffman about as well as he knows Polish, which is to say, in translation; but I do know Peter Dale Scott ... if Hoffman doesn't know who Peter Dale Scott is, it's not because his work is obscure, nor obscurred. ...(Joshua Weiner, Washington, DC)


Writing not only as an avowed fan of Morri Creech's Field Knowledge, but also as a graduate student of comparative literature frightened to death by the paths that criticism and poetry have taken over the last few decades, I cannot help but respond to Ange Mlinko's discussion of Creech's new book. ... Mlinko is not only a voice from the stands speaking in unison with all that is current and cliched in the realm of both poetry and criticism, but her response is an absolutely shocking display of what she herself is criticizing. She has responded to an "old fashioned text" by citing the most old-fashioned of artists. Ashbery is her paradigm of contemporary poetry? Who else could be more canonical? ...(Dafydd Wood, Austin, TX)


Although I liked the idea of two critics from two different schools of poetry arguing over books, your recent staged battle between David Yezzi and Ange Mlinko fell into that same old bloated diatribe. Before even reading it, I had a feeling it would be one Language poet fighting with one "traditional" poet, and, of course, Yezzi didn't like the experimental Girly Man and Mlinko thought the Hecht-like Creech was too boring. If I had a nickel for every time I heard this argument, I wouldn't have to beg for fellowships. It seems to me that what this boils down to is just the right to say "I told you so" in a hundred years. Maybe Charles Bernstein will survive the ages, maybe Morri Creech will -- who knows. At the moment it may be fun to argue about it, but this debate just seemed like a "Letters to the Editor" section, wearing a bowtie.(Jordan Rome, Yonkers, NY) 


All of the excerpts above appeared in the September 2007 issue of Poetry magazine.

Crawdaddy! editor Paul Williams: "the total budget was less than $40"

Paul Williams (1948-2013)

A year before Rolling Stone published its first issue, a Swarthmore College freshman named Paul Williams created Crawdaddy! on mimeographed pages in January, 1966. The entire first issue was written by Williams, and he would go on to write 25 books and write extensively  on Bob Dylan, Philip K. Dick and Neil Young. Williams passed away March 27 from complications dating back to a bike accident he suffered in 1995. 

From The Crawdaddy! Book, his memoir of a life in rock journalism, Williams remembers the point at which his focus shifted from a Top-40 tip sheet to the deepening rock scene happening mostly off the charts at that time.

. . . I’m still embarrassed by the fact that most of the reviews I wrote to fill the pages of those earliest issues of Crawdaddy! were concerned with whether or not this particular 45 would be a “hit.” Although my vision was of a magazine where young people could share with each other the powerful, life-changing experiences we were having listening to new music in the mid-1960s, I was heavily influenced by the trade magazines I was reading at the college radio station, Billboard and Cashbox; and since I didn’t have a way to get my new magazine into the hands of thousands of young music lovers immediately, my short-term focus was to get the attention of the radio station and record company people to whom I planned to mail complimentary copies of the first issue. 

And in truth I really was interested in whether a record would be a “hit” or not and whether that was something I could predict or influence. I had been fascinated by Top 40 artists since I was 10-years-old and impatiently bicycling to the record store every week on the day the local radio station’s new Top 40 handout sheet would be available. (“Where’s ‘Charlie Brown’ by the Coasters this week?”)

Worlds in collision:

 Page & Burroughs discuss cosmic forces, 1975

We printed 500 copies of that first issue, on light brown mimeographed paper (8 ½ by 11 inches, standard magazine size). I carried the sheets in a cardboard box on the subway back to David’s place, and assembled and stapled them (three staples down the left side).

The first copies were mailed from New York (five cents apiece for first-class mail then) on Monday before I hitchhiked back to Swarthmore carrying the rest of the magazines, many of which I soon mailed to music business names from Billboard magazine’s annual directory. The total budget for the first issue, including postage, mimeograph stencils, paper, ink, 15-cent subway fares, peanut butter sandwiches, and the one album I bought and reviewed (Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence), was less than 40 dollars.

The most noteworthy response to the new magazine came later in the week when Paul Simon called me at the freshman dormitory to say that my review was the first “intelligent” thing that had been written about their music. Perhaps he also gently corrected my false idea that Garfunkel was the guitar player of the duo (I’d figured he had to be, since Simon wrote the songs and sang the leads). I was invited to meet them on my next trip to New York. They introduced me to their manager and brought me along to a concert and a radio interview.

"Poetry" magazine and the missing spoken word

Patricia Smith

Poetry Magazine is such a puzzle. The magazine (and now the Poetry Foundation) serves as a well-funded venue for contemporary poets, an honored and recognized voice for poets since Harriet Monroe began publishing in 1912. Yet I'm mystified these days by most of what the current editor, Christian Wiman, selects: many of the poems seem academic, and word usage almost seems archaic. I won't name names here -- but the room needs some air. I've subscribed infrequently but never submitted a thing to Poetry, although I've thought about it from time to time.

I'm just not on the magazine's track, apparently, but that's the immediate thing about poetry itself: it either moves you or it doesn't. And, as the young Elvis once slurred into the microphone after one false start at a rocking little tune, "that don't move me, fellas. Let's get real gone for a change."

What's missing in Poetry Magazine for me is the spoken energy of poems. They are meant to be read, and not spoken, most of them. Jonathan Williams, the erstwhile wordsmith of Scaly Mountain, NC, had it right when he commented that to be appreciated poetry should be read out loud, and (more importantly) written to be read that way as well. Chaucer's Tales read by a roaring fire with wine-cups at the ready, the Six Gallery reading in 1955 with Kerouac urging readers to "go! go! GO!": the spoken poem has to have an engine that drives it, and that's what often lacks in the pages ofPoetry.

Not that the magazine doesn't have its interests for me. A recent issue has a nice interview article by Jeremy Richards titled "A Shifting Sense of Place." Patricia Smith, Todd Boss, C.D. Wright, and Frances McCue are asked what place their poetry has in the world, where it belongs. Todd Boss comes right out of the gate with perhaps the most itchy, American reply: here’s the sad truth: I’ve resented every place I’ve ever been. It isn’t “me,” or I don’t “fit in,” or it’s “too close to home,” or my wife isn’t happy there, or it’s not where I’d have chosen to live, or whatever.

Boss's first book was called Yellowrocket, and his cinematic video (for motionpoems.com) is posted on YouTube. It's no surprise that his poem "The Sticks" is filled with stuttering, stumbling, don't-wanna-hang-out-here-long energy:

my mother still mutters whenever

she remembers where we lived,

reciting then her one life sentence

of overlush underbrush, neighbor trash,

shoddy farms and fallen fences

and filthy Herefords knee-deep in

barnyard shit. ...

Now, that moves me like a twitchy needle in the groove of a 45 rpm record. Why doesn't Poetry publish more poems like that? Patricia Smith -- her 2008 book is Blood Dazzler -- doesn't write nature poetry ("concrete and glass were the order of the day ... why should I strain towards something that's so alien to me?") and sounds more at home around the jukebox rhymes of rhythm and blues: here's part of her poem, "Hip Hop Ghazzal":

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat,

swinging blue hips,

decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie,

bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas

throat the heartbreak,

inhaling bassline, cracking backbone

and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent,

seeping ’tween floorboards,

wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee,

clinging like glue hips. ...

That is poetry that jumps and wiggles itself off the page, and it's full of an energy that reads just as well as it can be spoken. "As a poet, you search for whatever gives a place its muscle and bone," Smith writes, and she could just as well be talking about its animation.

It's an energy Poetry Magazine could use more of, more of Eliot's elegant, intelligent Shakespherian rag: 'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?' The editors of Poetry ought not to be alarmed. There's still plenty of space in the room for the women who come and go speaking of Michelangelo.