Charles Bernstein

Provisional Institutions: Alternative Presses 
and Poetic Innovation

[Originally  Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association 
on December 29, 1993, in Toronto, at a session of the institutions of poetry, organized 
by Robert von Hallberg. First published in Arizona Quarterly Review 51:1 (1995)
Revised version in My Way: Speeches and Poems.]


            In our period, they say there is free speech.
            They say there is no penalty for poets,
            There is no penalty for writing poems.
            They say this.      This is the penalty.

                      -- Muriel Rukeyser, "In Our Time", The Speed of Darkness


Imagine that all the nationally circulated magazines and all the trade presses
and all the university presses in the United States stopped publishing or
reviewing poetry.  New poetry in the United States would hardly feel the blow.
But not because contemporary poetry is marginal to the culture.  Quite the
contrary, it is these publishing institutions that have made themselves
marginal to our cultural life in poetry.  As it is, the poetry publishing and
reviewing practices of these major media institutions do a disservice to new
poetry by their sins of commission as much as omission -- that is, pretending
to cover what they actually cover up; as if you could bury poetry alive.  In
consistently acknowledging only the blandest of contemporary verse practices,
these institutions provide the perfect alibi for their evasion of poetry; for
if what is published and reviewed by these institutions is the best that
poetry has to offer, then, indeed, there would be little reason to attend to
poetry, except for those looking for a last remnant of a genteel society
verse, where, for example, the editor of The New York Times Book Review can
swoon over watered-down Dante on her way to late-night suppers with wealthy
lovers of the idea of verse, as she gushed in an article last spring.<1>
Poetry, reduced to souvenirs of what was once supposed to be prestige goods,
quickly gets sliced for overaccessorizing, at least if the stuff actually
talks back.  If poetry has largely disappeared from the national media,
nostalgia for poetry, and the lives of troubled poets, has a secure place.
      One of the cliches of the intellectual- and artist-bashing so
fashionable in our leading journals of opinion is that there are no more
"public intellectuals."  The truth of the matter is that writing of great
breadth and depth, and of enormous significance for the public, flourishes,
but that the dominant media institutions -- commercial television and radio,
the trade presses, and the nationally circulated magazines (including the
culturally upscale periodicals)  -- have blacklisted this material.
Intellectuals and artists committed to the public interest exist in
substantial numbers.  Their crime is not a lack of accessibility but a refusal
to submit to marketplace agendas: the reductive simplifications of
conventional forms of representation; the avoidance of formal and thematic
complexity; and the fashion ethos of measuring success by sales and value by
celebrity.  The public sphere is constantly degraded by its conflation with
mass scale since public space is accessible principally through particular and
discrete locations.
      Any of us teaching college will have ample proof of the frightening lack
of cultural information, both historical and contemporary, of even the most
searching of our new students.  These individuals have been subjected to
cultural asphyxiation administered not only by the barrage of network
television or MTV, but also, more poignantly, by the self-appointed keepers of
the cultural flame, who are unwilling to provide powerful alternative
programming, prefer to promote, as a habit and a rule, a sanitized and
denatured version of contemporary art, debunking at every turn the new and
untried, the edgy or the cutting, the odd or unnerving; --that is those works
of contemporary culture that give it life.  Could I possibly be saying that
the crisis of American culture is that there is inadequate support and distri-
bution of difficult and challenging new art?  Does a tire tire without air, an
elephant blow its horn in the dark, a baby sigh when the glass door shatters
its face?
      The paucity of public funding for the arts has done irreparable damage
to the body politic.  Arts funding is as important as funding for public
education.  It's time for our federal, state and local governments to consider
linking arts funding with education budgets: a percent for the arts!   & if
that seems farfetched, it goes to show how far afield our educational
priorities are.  Every dollar spent on the development and distribution of new
art will save thousands of dollars in lost cultural productivity over the next
fifty years.<2>

At the community ("free") clinic I worked for in the early 1970s we sold T-
shirts that said, "Healthcare is for people not profit."  Not that we were
ahead of our time.  Times are just behind where they could be.  Whenever I go
into a Barnes & Ignoble Superstore or Waldaltonsbooks (If we don't have it it
must be literature!), I'm reminded that our slogan for healthcare applies to
poetry too.
      Does anybody wonder anymore what the effects will be of the
consolidation of publishing and book distribution companies into large
conglomerates?   Let them read cake.  This month's bestseller list contains
the perfect symbol for the current state of affairs as the two top slots are
occupied, in effect, by the publicity machines designed to promote "cultural
product".<3>  What sells, in this purest form of hype-omancy is the apparatus
of publicity itself: for here we have self-consuming artifacts par excellence
-- no external referent need apply.  Meanwhile, in the upscale journals that
condescend to the truth bared by H. Stern and R. Limbaugh, no book has been
more attended to than a memoir by one of the originators of this phenomenon,
Willie Morris, formally editor of Harper's: for what better subject for
promotion than promotion?

There is a world outside this semblance of culture.  In poetry, its
institutions go by the name of the small press and the reading series.
      Along with small press magazines and books, poetry reading series are
the most vital site of poetic activity in North America.  Readings provide a
crucial place for poets not only to read their new work, but also to meet with
each other and exchange ideas.  Readings provide an intimately local grounding
for poetry and are commonly the basis for the many regional scenes and groups
and constellations that mark the vitality of the artform.
      Despite the fundamental importance of readings in the creation of North
American poetry over the past forty years, very little attention has been
given to this medium either in the press or by scholars and critics.  While
reading series are more concentrated in New York and the Bay area, many
American cities have long-running local reading series.  The best source of
information about readings in New York City area is The New York City Poetry
Calendar, which has been publishing a monthly broadside of poetry events since
1977 (60 E. 4th St #21, New York, NY 10003).  The calendar lists about 300
different readings each month, has a printrun of 7500 and a readership of well
over 10,000.
      Poetry readings range from small bar and cafe and book store and
community center series, with audiences ranging from ten to a hundred to
poetry center readings that can draw from twenty to several hundred people.
Community reading series differ in several crucial ways from university-
sponsored series.  These series often offer a forum for new and unpublished
local poets through "open mike" and scheduled readings.  The organizers of
these series rarely receive any compensation for their work -- and often can
run a series for incredibly little money: the money from the door going to the
poets plus a few hundred dollars a year for publicity.  State and local arts
agencies will sometimes provide such series up to a few thousand dollars for
featured readers, which allows for some out-of-town poets to get travel money
or a small fee of fifty to a few hundred dollars.  Poets & Writers, Inc., is
particularly helpful in these contexts, providing matching money for poets's
fees.  A community reading series can run a year of readings on less than many
institutions spend on a single cultural event or speaker.  That effects the
spirit of the event.  The atmosphere at a local reading series is often
charged and interactive.  In contrast, university series often suffer from a
stifling formality.  Unfortunately, English departments have been slow to
include and support local readings series in their areas -- despite the fact
that these series can often provide a lively point of entry into poetry for
students new to its forms and formats.
      Despite the striking vitality of poetry readings, readings are never
reviewed in any of the nation's daily or weekly newspapers, even though these
papers routinely review theater and dance and art events whose scale is
comparable.  I suspect the reason is that cultural editors, like most literary
critics and scholars, wrongly assume that the book is the only significant
site of a poet's work.  Contemporary North American poetry is realized as
significantly in its performances in live readings as it is in its printed
forms.  Critical response to contemporary poems that fail to account for its
performance are, for the most part, inadequate.
      For the scholar, the audio archive of poet's performance has become as
fundamental as manuscripts, publication history, and letters; indeed, it is
equal in importance only to the published text.  Yet studies of the
distinctive features of the poem-in-performance have been rare.   In contrast,
the drift of much literary criticism of the past decade has been away from the
auditory and performative -- and therefore material -- aspects of the poem,
partly because of the prevalent notion, commonly attributed to Saussure, that
the sound structure of language is relatively arbitrary.  In contrast,
cognitive linguists such as Reuven Tsur, following Roman Jakobson, have
recently emphasized research that demonstrates the expressiveness of sound
patterns, at the same time, the "phonotext" -- or acoustic dimension -- of the
poem has begun to receive some scholarly attention.   This work, combined with
the range of new work on performance theory, suggest a crucial new direction
for literary studies.

The past thirty years has been a time of enormous growth of small press
publishers.  According to a Loss Pequeno Glazier's statistics in Small Press:
An Annotated Guide, the number of magazines listed in Len Fulton's
International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses has gone from 250
mostly poetry magazines in 1965 to 700 in 1966 to 2,000 magazines in 140
categories in 1976 to 4,800 magazines in 1990, of which about 40 percent were
literary.<4>  The importance of the small press for poetry is not restricted to
any aesthetic or indeed to any segment of poets.  According to a recent study
by Mary Briggs, independent noncommercial presses are the major source of
exposure for all poets, young and old, prize winning or not.<5>
      The staple of the independent literary press is the single-author poetry
collection.  Douglas Messerli, publisher of Sun & Moon Press, a high-end small
press comparable to Black Sparrow, New Directions, and Dalkey Archives,
provided me with representative publication information for a 100-page poetry
collection:
      Print-runs at Sun & Moon go from 1000 to 2000, depending, of course, on
likely sales.  Messerli notes that print-runs of less than 1000 drive the unit
cost up too high and he encourages other literary presses to print a minimum
of 1000 copies if at all possible.
      Sun & Moon titles are well-produced, perfectbound, and offset with full
color covers.  The printing bill for this runs from $2600 to $4000 as you go
from 1000 to 2000 copies.  Messerli estimates the cost of editing a 100-page
poetry book at $300: this covers all the work between the press receiving a
manuscript and sending it to a designer (including any copyeding and
proofreading that may be necessary as well as preparation of front and back
matter and cover copy).  Typesetting is already a rarity for presses like Sun
& Moon, with authors expected to provide computer disks wherever possible.
Formatting these disks (converting them into type following specifications of
the book designer) can cost anywhere from $300 to $1000, one of those variable
labor costs typical of small press operations.  The book designer will charge
about $500.  The cover will cost an additional $100 for photographic
reproduction or permission fees or both.  Publicity costs must also be
accounted for, even if, as at Sun & Moon, no advertising is involved.
Messerli estimates publicity costs at $1500, which covers the cost of
something like 100 free copies distributed to reviewers, postage and packing,
mailings and catalog pages, etc. The total cash outlay here, then, for 2000
copies, is around $6800.  (For the sake of this discussion, overhead costs --
rent, salaries, office equipment, phone bills, etc -- are not included; such
costs typically are estimated at about 30 percent more than the cost of
production).
      If all goes well, Sun & Moon will sell out of its print run in two
years.  Let's say Sun & Moon prints 2000 copies of the book and charges $10
retail; let's also say all the books were sold.  That makes a gross of
$20,000.  Subtract from this a 50 percent wholesale discount (that is, most
bookstores will pay $5 for the book) and that leaves $10,000.  Subtract from
this the 24 percent that Sun & Moon's distributor takes (and remember that
most small presses are too small to secure a distributor with a professional
sales force).  That leaves $7600.  Now last, but not to be totally forgotten,
especially since I am a Sun & Moon author, the poet's royalty; typically no
advance would be paid and the author would receive 10 percent of this last
figure, or $760.  That leaves $6840 return to the publisher on a cash cost of
about $7000.
      As James Sherry noted years ago in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: a piece of paper
with nothing on it has a definite economic value.  If you print a poem on it,
this value is lost.  Here we have a vivid example of what George Bataille has
called general economy, an economy of loss rather than accumulation.  Poetry
is a negative -- or let's just say poetic -- economy.
      But of course I've stacked the decks a bit.  Many small presses will eat
a number of costs I've listed.  Copyediting, proofreading and design costs may
be absorbed in the overhead if they are done by the editor-cum-publisher,
proofreader, publicity department, and shipper.  Formatting and production are
commonly done on in-house computers.  But these costs cannot be absorbed away
-- 600 dpi laser printers and late-night "poofreading" can cause some serious
malabsorption problems for which your gastroenterologist has no cure.  Then
again, if a book generates enough of an audience to require reprinting, modest
profits are possible, allowing the publication of other, possibly less
popular, works.
      The situation for the independent literary magazines is similar to
presses, and indeed many small presses started as little magazines.  o.blek, a
beautifully produced magazine edited by Peter Gizzi and Connel McGrath, was
started on borrowed money in 1987.  One thousand copies of the first 148-page
issue cost $1000 for typesetting, $2700 for the printing, and $400 for
postage.  That cost has remained relatively consistent, although a switch to
desktop halved the typesetting cost. That first issue, with a cover price of
$5.50 (and with the distributor taking 55 percent), sold out in a year and a
half.  After one year, o.blek had about 75 subscribers; after six years, that
number is 275 (a figure that does not include libraries, who mostly subscribe
through jobbers).  o.blek's most ambitious publication (edited by Juliana
Spahr and Gizzi) is just out: 1500 copies of a two-volume set, 600 pages in
all, collecting poems and statements of poetics from mostly younger poets,
many of whom participated in the Writing from the New Coast Festival held at
the University at Buffalo last spring.  Compare this to Sulfur, edited by
Clayton Eshleman, who reports that there were 1,000 copies printed of the
first issue in 1981 -- "maybe 50 subscribers at the time the issue was
published, with perhaps 300 to 400 going out to stores.  Now, 2000 copies per
issue; around 700 subscribers, with 800 to 900 copies going to stores."<6>
      Of course, many small presses and magazines produce more modest
publications than Sun & Moon, Sulfur or o.blek.  Indeed, the heart of the
small press movement is the supercheap magazine or chapbook, allowing just
about anyone to be a publisher or editor.  In this world, marketplace values
are truly turned upsidedown, since many readers of the poetry small press feel
the more modest the production, the greater the integrity of the content.
There is no question than many of the best poetry magazines of the postwar
period have been produced by the cheapest available methods.  In the 1950s,
the "mimeo revolution" showed up the stuffy pretensions of the established,
letterpress literary quarterlies, not only with their greater literary
imagination, but also with innovative designs and graphics.  In 1965, 23
percent of little presses were mimeo, 31 percent offset, 46 percent
letterpress, according to Fulton's Directory.  By 1973, offset had jumped to
69 percent, with letterpress at 18 percent, and mimeo only 13 percent.  As
Loss Glazier notes, the mimeo in "the mimeo revolution" is more a metaphor for
inexpensive means of reproduction than a commitment to any one technology.
Indeed, poetry's use of technology often has a wryly aversive quality.  For
example, as offset began to dominate the printing industry in the early 1970s,
letterpresses became very cheap to acquire, so that presses like Lyn
Hejinian's Tuumba and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop's Burning Deck could produce
books with little other cash expense than paper costs and mailing, given the
editors willingness to spend hundreds of hours to handset every letter and
often enough handfeed each page.
      In the metaphoric sense, then, the mimeo revolution is very much alive
in the 1990s, with some of the best poetry magazines today -- such as Abacus,
Witz, Mirage #4 (Periodical), The Impercipient, Interruptions, lower limit
speech, Letterbox, Situation, lyric& and Object<7> -- consisting of little more
than a staple or two holding together from 16 to 60 sheets of paper that have
been xeroxed in editions of 50 or 100 or 150.  Yet the new mimeo revolution
for poetry is surely electronic.  Because the critical audience of poets,
mostly unaffiliated with academic institutions, does not yet have access to
the internet, attempts to create on-line poetry magazines remain preliminary.
& technical problems abound; computers actually make reading and writing
harder than previous technologies -- but it's just the difficulties that make
for poetic interest.  Still, the potential is there and a few editors have
started to propose some basic formats for creating virtual uncommunities.  In
1993, the first three electronic poetry magazines I know about were founded --
We Magazine, collectively edited in Santa Cruz, the Bay Area, New York City,
and Albany (c/o cf2785@albanyvms) -- which in its active periods sends out one
short poem per post to a list of subscribers; Grist, edited by John Fowler
(fowler@phantom.com), which has produced two full-length issues so far<8>; and
Rif/t, edited by Ken Sherwood and Loss Glazier (e-poetry@ubvm), which produced
an ambitious array of material for its first issue a few months ago: the main
body of the magazine featuring poems by 16 poets (the equivalent of 50 pages),
plus a series of associated files of translations, poetics, a set of
variations on a poem, and a chapbook.  Also online is Luigi-Bob Drake's, and
friends', Taproot Reviews (au462@cleveland.freenet.edu), an heroic effort to
review hundreds of small magazines and chapbooks committed to "experimental
language art & poetry."  Experiments with poetry and poetics "listserve"
discussion groups have also begun, with Joe Amato's pioneering Nous Refuse
(Jamato@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu), but as yet the intriguing mix of newsletter, group
letter, and bulletin board has not yet found its place.  It seems certain,
however, that the net will be a crucial site for the distribution of works of
poetry, especially out-of-print works, as well as for information on obtaining
books and magazines, and, I suspect, for long-term local, national and
international exchanges of ideas and work in progress.
      The new computer technology -- both desktop publishing and electronic
publishing -- has radically altered the material, specifically visual,
presentation of text.  No doubt a new aesthetic will emerge.  But at this
point, the absence of visual aesthetics in the production of many desktop
magazines is discouraging.  Simply having access to a laser printer does not
mean an editor has any idea how to design type.  Ironically, many of the
typewriter and mimeo publications of the past thirty years were visually
richer than some of the more poorly designed desktop products.  In the case of
e-space, editors have, as of now, little control over the visual appearance of
the text.

Distribution remains the most serious problem for the small press and one of
the least understood parts of the process.  While larger independent presses
have distributors with sales representatives to visit bookstores, most small
presses must rely on mailing lists and informal contacts to circulate their
books and magazines.
      Small Press Distribution (1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702) is
the most important source for alterative press titles published in the United
States.  With the recent demise of over half-a-dozen alternative press
distributors, it is also the "sole remaining noncommercial literary book
distributor left in the entire country."<9>  SPD, which must take 55 percent of
the retail price of a book (bookstores will typically take 40 percent or more
of this), now distributes about 52,000 books a year, from over 350 presses,
with net sales of $360,000.  Their quarterly catalogs and annual complete
catalogs are fundamental resources.
      From 1980 to 1993, Segue Distributing published an annual catalog that
offered a curated selection of small press titles that could be ordered
through a central address.<10>  Segue, unlike most distributors, was able to
articulate an aesthetic commitment with its choices, as well as being able to
include presses and magazines too small to be handled by other distributors.
In addition, Segue included selections of small press books and magazines from
the UK, as well as New Zealand and Australia.  Segue Distribution was
discontinued this year after losing its government grant support.  I suspect
that in the future activities such as Segue's will best be handled through
electronic bulletin boards or similar formats.
      One of Segue's most useful assets is its mailing list, which it makes
available to affiliated presses.  The mailing list keeps track of a shifting
community of readers, with special attention to the local audience who wishes
to receive notices of readings as well as the national and international
audience who wishes to receive notices of book and magazine publications.  I
say community because audience is too passive a term to describe this matrix
and because there is a tendency to speak of community when referring to a
small press readership or, especially, the local "scene" for a reading series
or a magazine.  But I resist the term community as well, since it is more
accurate to think of constellations of active readers interested in exchange
but not necessarily collectivity.
      While much distribution of poetry takes place in the mail, we all owe a
great debt to the few remaining independent bookstores that make an effort to
keep in stock a full range of poetry titles.  There is no substitute for
flipping through new books and magazines in a bookstore, and such bookstores
themselves are crucial sites of whatever a poetry community might be.
      We also owe a debt to those publications that are committed to reviewing
and discussing small press publications, since one of the most involving
aspects of the small press is the intensity of interchange that takes place in
reviews, letters, correspondence and conversation.  This is what makes The
American Book Review so much livelier than The New York Review of Books.  At
their best, reviews and essays in the alternative poetry press are less
concerned with evaluation than with interaction, participation and
partisanship; in this respect, the prose of the small presses offer a
refreshing alternative to the evaluative focus of newspaper and mainstream
magazine reviews as well as the often stifling framelock of academic
discourse.  Indeed, the literary small press provides a forum not just for
innovation in poetry but equally for innovation in prose, in the process
demonstrating that a free press means giving writers stylistic freedom, not
simply the freedom to express their opinions in mandated forms.

The power of our alternative institutions of poetry is their commitment to
scales that allow for the flourishing of the artform, not the maximizing of
the audience; to production and presentation not publicity; to exploring the
known not manufacturing renown.  These institutions continue, against all
odds, to find value in the local, the particular, the partisan, the committed,
the tiny, the peripheral, the unpopular, the eccentric, the difficult, the
complex, the homely; and in the formation and reformation, dissolution and
questioning, of imaginary or virtual or partial or unavowable communities
and/or uncommunities.
      Such alternative institutions benefit not just from the support of their
readers and writers, but also from contributions from government, individuals,
and foundations.  Recently, such large foundations as the Lila Wallace -
Readers Digest Fund have committed substantial funds to independent literary
presses, but they have done so in ways that are often destructive to the
culture of the institutions they propose to support.  Rather than provide
funds to directly support the production of books and magazines, or, indeed,
editors or authors, such institutions insist on primarily funding
organizational expansion, for example, by providing money to hire new staff
for development, publicity, and management.   While any money is welcome, the
infrastructural expansion mandated by these foundations -- defended in the
name of stabilizing designated organizations -- makes the small press increasingly
dependent on ever larger infusions of money, in the process destroying the
financial flexibility that is the alternative press's greatest resource.  By
pushing the presses they fund to emulate the structures of large non-profit
and for-profit institutions to which they stand in honorable structural
opposition, these foundations reveal all too nakedly their commitment to the
administration of culture rather than to the support of poetry.
     
Literature is never indifferent to its institutions.  A new literature
requires new institutions, and these institutions are as much a part of its
aesthetic as the literary works that they weave into the social fabric.  The
resilience of the alternative institutions of poetry in the postwar years is
one of the most powerful instances we have of the creation of value amidst its
postmodern evasions.  When you touch this press, you touch a person.  In this
sense, the work of our innovative poetries is fundamentally one of social
work.


Notes

Presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association on Dec. 29,
1993, in Toronto.

1.  Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, "Hell Night at the 92nd Street Y," in The New York
Times Book Review, 98:31 (May 9, 1993), p. 31.  "For some" ("We lucky few" is
the last sentences of the article) "there was to be a post-poetry spread laid
on by Edwin Cohen (a businessman and patron of literature) back at his
apartment at the Dakota, a Danteesque menu announced in advance: roast
suckling stuffed pig stuffed with fruit, nuts, and cheese; Tuscan salami;
prosciotto and polenta, white beans with fennel."

2. "The budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, which has not changed
appreciably in the last 12 years, is smaller than the Department of Defense's
budget for its 102 military bands," according to an article in The New York
Times, 3/13/93, p. C13.

3.  Rush H. Limbaugh 3d, See I Told You So (New York: Pocket Books, 1993) and
Howard Stern, Private Parts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

4. Loss Pequeno Glazier, Small Press: An Annotated Guide (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 2-3.

5. Mary Biggs, A Gift that Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and Publishing of
Contemporary American Poetry (Wesport, CT: Greenwoood Press, 1990); cited in
Glazier, p. 38.

6. Clayton Eshleman, letter to the author, 11 January 1994.  Information on
Sun & Moon Press is based on an interview with Doulgas Messerli in November
1993; information on o.blek is based on an interview with Peter Gizzi in
December 1993.

7.  Abacus, edited by Peter Ganick (181 Edgemont Avenue, Elmwood, CT 06110) is
the longest running of these magazines; in February, 1984, they published
their 80th issue, Cornered Stones Split Infinites by Rosmarie Waldrop. Witz,
edited by Chritopher Reiner (P.O. Box 1059, Penngrove, California 94951), is a
newsletter feauturing poetics, reviews, and listings of recent publications;
it is published three times a year in associaton with Avec, a magazine
comparable to Sulfur and o.blek.  The other magazines mentioned feature new
poetry, often by younger or infrequently published poets: The Impercipient,
ed. Jennifer Moxley (61 East Manning Street, Providence, RI 02906); Letterbox,
ed. Scott Bentley (379 Latimer Place, Oakland, CA 94609); Mirage #4/
Period(ical), ed. Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy (1020 Minna, San Francisco,
CA 94103); Situtation, ed. Mark Wallace; object, ed. Kim Rosenfeld and Rob
Fitterman (229 Hudson Street #4, New York, NY 10013); lyric &, ed. Avery E. D.
Burns (P.O. Box 640531, San Francisco, CA 91640-0531); lower limit speech, ed.
A. L. Neilsen (1743 Butler Avenue #2; Los Angeles, CA 90025); Interruptions (a
magazine of collaborations), ed. Tom Beckett (131 North Pearl Street, Kent, OH
44240).

8.  In Febrary 1994 Grist announced its first electronic book, Gleanings:
Uncollected Poems of the Fifties by David Ignatow, including many poems
"published here for the first time." Cost is $25 on diskette; the text is also
available online.

9. Letter, dated October 22, 1993, to affiliated publishers from Lisa
Domitrovich, Executive Director, SPD.

10. During much of this period, I worked as editor of the catalog.