Abstract
That the small press scene is larger and more heterogeneous than critical narratives can absorb has become something of a truism. Far beyond the carefully staged debates taking place on the pages of American Poetry Review teems a self-publishing industry that has peeped only glancingly over the critical horizon of American poetry. The indeterminate and uneasy categories of the “small press” have been frequently acknowledged but only rarely explored in the critical narratives of postwar U.S. poetry.
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Notes
Loss Pequeňo Glazier, Small Press: An Annotated Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 63.
Maria Damon, “Post-Literary Poetry,” Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies and the Public Sphere, edited by Amitava Kumar (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 46.
One important exception to the prevalent neglect with which small press poetry has been treated is Maria Damon’s, The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Len Fulton, Directory of Poetry Publishers (Paradise, CA: Dustbooks, 1990). Interestingly, baseball, martial arts, ornithology, and Star Trek are all assigned numerous poetry journals while socialism only one.
Mary Biggs’s work A Gift that Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and Publishing of Contemporary Poetry (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) also provides an important account of the working of the small press.
Len Fulton, “Anima Risin’: Little Magazines in the Sixties,” American Libraries 2, no. 1 (1971), 25.
Michael Basinski and Robert J. Bertholt, “From Concrete Poem to Zine Display,” Robert Lax and Concrete Poetry, edited by Anthony Bannan (Buffalo: Burchfield Art Centre, 1991).
Michael Warner, Publics and CounterPublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 192.
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 4.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxxii.
John Held, Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1991).
Stephen Perkins, Approaching the 80s Zine Scene and Subspace; International Zine Show (Iowa City: Plagiarist Press, 1992).
Stewart Home, The Art Strike Papers (Brighton: Authority, 1991).
Karen Elliot, Censorship: Existence as Commodity and Strategies for Its Negation (Dialectical Immaterial Press, 1990), unpaginated.
Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 97.
Harry Polkinhorn, Photostatic, 40, December (1989), 1502.
Johanna Drucker, “Feminism, Theory, Art Practice,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory and Criticism, edited by Mira Schor and Susan Bee (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000).
Ruthann Robson, “Sugar,” Slipstream 10 (1990), 88.
Kathy Acker, “Critical Languages,” Kathy Acker: Bodies of Work (London: Serpents Tail, 1997), 82.
Kathy Acker, “Devoured by Myths: An Interview with Sylvere Lotringer,” Hannibal Lecter, My Father, edited by Kathy Acker (New York: Columbia University, 1991), 2.
Linda S. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 221.
Kathy Acker, Implosion (New York: Wedge Press, 1983).
Kathy Acker, “Proposition One,” The Artist in Society: Rights, Roles and Responsibilities (Chicago: New Art Examiner Press, 1994), 38.
Carla Harryman, “Acker Un-Formed,” Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, and Avital Ronnell (London: Verso, 2006), 36.
Kathy Acker, “POLITICS (My First Work. Written When 21 Years Old,” Hannibal Lecter, My Father, edited by Kathy Acker (New York: Columbia University, 1991), 25.
Kathy Acker, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula (New York: TVRT Press, 1975), 133.
Lauren Berlant, The Queen ofAmerica Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 67.
Cheryl Townsend, Pseudo Cop (Chicago: Mary Kuntz Press, 1995), 2.
Lyn Lifshin, Wormwood Review 26, no. 3 (1986), 103–109.
W. Gregory Stewart, “For Lyn,” Plastic Tower 31 (1998), 23.
Lyn Lifshin, Offered by the Owner (Cambridge, NY: Slohlm, 1978), 14.
Lyn Lifshin, Cold Comfort (New York: Black Sparrow, 1996), 18.
Lori Melton McKinnon, “Ms.ing the Free Press: The Advertising and Editorial Content of Ms. Magazine, 1972–1992,” The American Magazine: Research Perspectives and Prospects, edited by D. Abrahamson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995).
Generalissimo, HE WANTS HIS MEAT IN THE WOMAN WHO IS DEAD (Forth Worth: Homemade Icecream Press, 1992), unpaginated.
Seth R Friedman, ed., The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: The Best Writing from the Underground World of Zines (New York: Three River Press, 1997), 10–11. These rather catholic self-definitions at least partly arose from the fact that this writing was concerned to explore the possibilities of cultures of independent publication that could extend beyond those that had supported poetry. Most obviously, the zine community was disdainful of the conventions of most poetry, especially that of the mainstream. The zine Bad Poetry Digest, e.g., is censorially critical of what it calls “private writing,” cynically noting that “NO ONE CAN BE BUSTED FOR BAD POETRY / WHICH IS UNSUPRISING / SO MUCH UNECESSARY VERBIAGE / PRINTED SPOKEN EMAILED FILMED FUCKED AND FRITTERED AWAY,” Daniel A. Russel, “Editorial comment,” Bad Poetry Digest, 6.1 (undated). Alternatively, this resistance to poetry seemed the result of a desire to radicalize minority forms of cultural production in ways that sat uncomfortably with the high points of American twentieth-century poetic production that appeared, by the 1980s, to have failed to offer political choices to the zine’s self-elected constituents.
Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zine and the Politics of Alternative Culture (New York: Verso, 1997), 3.
Johnny R., Shouldn’t You Be Working 5, 3624 Conn. Ave. NW., Washington DC 2008.
Pagan Kennedy, Zine: How I Found Six Years of My Life and Finally … Found Myself … I Think (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1995).
Mike Goldberg and Janice Gunderloy, The World of Zines: A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1992); The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, edited by M. Karp and Debbie Stalker (New York: Penguin, 1999).
Emily White “Revolution, Girl Style, Now,” Rock She Wrote, edited by Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers (New York: Delta, 1995; first published in LA Weekly, July 10–16, 1992), 396.
Neil Nehring, Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 1997), 156.
Ednie Kaeh Garrison, “US Feminism-Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub) Cultures and the Technologies of the Third Wave,” Feminist Studies 26, no. 1 (2000), 141.
From Leah Angstman, ed., The Literature Collection: Poems from Some of the World’s Greatest Unknown Authors (Mason: Propaganda Press, 1999), 3.
Mary Celeste Kearney, “Don’t Need You: Rethinking Identity Politics and Separatism from a Grrrl Perspective,” Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, edited by J. Epstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
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© 2007 Nicky Marsh
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Marsh, N. (2007). Go Grrrl: Democracy and Counterculture. In: Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607156_5
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