Eliot Weinberger responds to Andrew Schelling (and, secondarily, to Curtis Faville) in a new email on the subject of New Directions. I should note that I take the history of New Directions to be of total relevance to many of the social issues surrounding poetry, if only because this is the one press that has kept Pound and Williams in print, however badly, for some seven decades. Weinberger’s assertion that it was a mistake for Robert Creeley to leave New Directions for UC Press is at least a plausible interpretation, even for someone, like myself, who thinks that Creeley’s decision was clearly a no-brainer. The bureaucratic structure of a large university press has its pros and cons, no doubt, but I have a lot more faith in UC Press being here in 20 years, and in keeping the likes of Creeley & Olson in print, than I do New Directions. When we consider how much change is upon with regards to publishers, one index just might be bookstores. The main trade association of independent book sellers has lost two-thirds of its membership in the past 20 years precisely because so many have not adjusted to the dynamics of the new world. As someone will no doubt point out, poetry is only indirectly related to the publishing industry, as say the ad manager of the New York Times Book Review thinks of it. New Directions is the one small press to have survived since the 1930s in anything even remotely approximating its original form. And some on its list have been among the very most influential poets of the past century. Which is why these questions are not idle gossip. The ellipses are Eliot’s.

Dear Ron –

I thought I should respond to Andrew and some of the other correspondents...

Women: My original list was impromptu, and mainly limited to those ND published regularly. There were also various women published during this period, but they tended to be non-avants given single books (Deborah Larsen, Carol Bangs, Stevie Smith, Mary Karr, and others). Laughlin's last wild enthusiasm was for Anne Carson, but after her first book of poetry she decamped for Knopf.

I don't see the usefulness of retro-demographics, but it cannot be said that if Black Sparrow (and later North Point) inherited the mantle from ND, this had anything to do with gender. BS had, as I remember, two women poets (Wakoski and Wanda Coleman) and they were publishing many more books of contemporary US poetry than ND. North Point had Scalapino, did a small posthumous Niedecker, and had – who else?

I'm surprised no one mentioned race. Until their commitment to Brathwaite in the 80's and, recently, Mackey, ND had published only three books by black writers: two by Bob Kaufman and one by John Keene. BS had one black writer: Coleman. Did North Point have any?

I omitted many others from the period, including Jimmy Baca, Toby Olson, various Irish, Scots, and Brits, and single books by Thomas Lax, Emmett Williams (a very thick and fancy selected), Bronk (in the 60's), and Paul Hoover, to name some.

Nearly everything that your correspondent Curtis Faville writes is untrue. His essential narrative – Laughlin was a "gentleman publisher" who lost interest circa 1960, and everything, even the quality of the books, went downhill-- seems to be derived from a New Yorker profile that was written by a young neo-formalist poet who had no interest in any ND poets after Delmore Schwartz, and who was completely bamboozled by Laughlin's old-fashioned WASP patrician self-deprecation.

In his later years, Laughlin was less involved in the day-to-day operations of ND, and no longer read all the fiction manuscripts being seriously considered by the staff. But he personally initiated or approved every poetry book until a year or so before his death in 1997. To say that he was "almost certainly unfamiliar" with Palmer, Antin, Rosmarie Waldrop, etc., is completely false: he chose them. To say that if he were alive today, he'd be publishing Billy Collins and Ted Kooser, is ludicrous: old Modernists like Laughlin were hardly, shall we say, populists.

Before 1960, ND published beautiful books (with Valdonega, Stinehour, and others) and many cheap books. After 1960, they published beautiful books (with Valdonega, Stinehour, and others) and many cheap books.

ND did not publish Oppen, Rakosi, and Snyder when they were already well-known. Oppen's "The Materials" (1962): first book since "Discrete Series" (1934) and his famous silence. Rakosi's "Amulet" (1967): first book since "Selected Poems" (1941 - and published by ND) and his long, less famous silence. By the time of  Snyder's "The Back Country" (1968), it's true that he wasn't obscure, but that was his first trade edition (previous chapbooks by Origin, Four Seasons, etc.).

Other factoids: People recommended by Rexroth included: Everson, Snyder, Tarn, McClure, Rothenberg, Antin. Dubravka Ugresic is Croatian and not Moslem. Antonio Tabucchi is an Italian who lived in Portugal for many years and wrote only two of his many books in Portuguese (one on Pessoa and a great novella, "Requiem: An Hallucination).

It should also be said that among the foreign poets published by ND during this period are: Neruda, Montale, Dunya Mikhail, Christensen, Paz, Lorca, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shabtai, Jaccottet, Guillevic, Bobrowski, Pacheco, Parra, Lihn, Aygi, Eugenio de Andrade, Supervielle, Lleshanaku, Bosquet, Char, Faverey, Gustafsson, Kusano, Shiraishi, Michaux, Valery, Cendrars, Chinese translations by David Hinton, Greek translations by Guy Davenport, and so on. No other publisher comes close. (I think Black Sparrow had one poetry translation chapbook.)

Finally, Creeley: Regardless of what one thinks of ND, it is undeniable that they are very good at handling estates: keeping the books in print, bringing out new editions and spin-offs, dealing with permissions, etc. If one is thinking of posterity, as Creeley reputedly was, there's no better publisher. UC Press is a giant bureaucracy where editors come and go. There's no guarantee that the inevitable successor to the editor who persuaded Creeley to switch will be equally enthusiastic about his work. It's nobody's business, but most people I know who've mentioned it think it was a terrible mistake.

Apologies for going one so long, but misinformation on the internet has a way of replicating.

all best –

Eliot