MOVING ON: 41 YEARS OF BIG SCREAM / NADA PRESS
DAVID COPE INTERVIEWED BY JIM COHN
Jim Cohn:.As the mimeo machine and the xerox machine were the tools of the 20th Century, so the digital revolution gave poets the technological means for quick publication in our time. But until those digital tools arrived, poets such as Cid Corman (Origin), Robert Creeley (Divers Press) Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka (Yugen/Totem Press), Dave Haselwood (Auerhahn Press) and Laurence Ferlinghetti (City Lights Books) provided poets leading up to and including the Beat Generation a way into print through their own small presses and publications. Younger poets in their circles were directly influenced by these efforts. We think of Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh (Angel Hair), Ed Sanders (FUCK YOU: A Magazine for the Arts), D.A. Levy (Renegade Press), Ted Berrigan ("C" Press) and Ira Cohen (Bardo Matrix Publications) as examples. I know that during your years doing Nada Press, you've seen any number of friends carry on the technical pursuits related to getting poetry into print. Before getting into the specifics of Big Scream or Nada Press, what, if any, micro press magazines influenced your getting into publishing in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan? What other influences, if any, got you into the small press biz?
David Cope: In high school and college, I first saw classic examples of indie or self-publishing as means to get the word out, including William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience with the poet's drawings and color by Catherine Blake, as well as the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I edited a junior college lit mag, and the editing role was pleasant, but I also remember buying local poet Robert Vandermolen's first chapbook, Blood Ink, which was published by Zeitgeist Press in East Lansing in 1967-and it made a real impression. There were many "underground" magazines and journals in Ann Arbor during my years at the University of Michigan, and when I came home to start my life as a college dropout, I took a job in a factory, won a local poetry contest twice and saw my work appear in print in the chapbook featuring the winners.
I had, of course, thought of City Lights Books as a kind of indie publishing house, and I carried The Beat Scene, edited by Elias Wilentz with photos by Fred McDarrah (Corinth Books, 1960) around like a rebel's bible for years. I was turned on by Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960, Paul Carroll's The Young American Poets (Big Table, 1968), Padgett and Shapiro's An Anthology of New York Poets (Vintage, 1970), and All Stars, edited by Tom Clark (Goliard/Grossman, 1972). These were all big productions that obviously had money and publishing know-how behind them, but they were presenting models of a poetry culture more innovative, earthy, visionary than the staid academic stuff that the colleges were pushing.
After the famed National Poetry Festivals came to Allendale in 1972 and 1973, featuring Bly and Creeley, Ted Berrigan and a whole crowd of New York poets, Ken Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, the recently reunited objectivist masters (Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi), Ted Enslin and others, I not only had clear examples of friendships among poets, but of a sense of real poetic community. There were also indie press materials going the rounds, and while there I picked up on an issue of Dan Gerber and Jim Harrison's Sumac, featuring a William Blake drawing on the cover. I eventually got to know works by Allen Kornblum's first indie press, Toothpaste, and Morty Sklar's The Spirit that Moves Us Press, which presented the poets of "Iowa Actualism" in its classic The Actualist Anthology.
Locally, Eric Greinke and Ronnie M. Lane were publishing books through Greinke's Pilot Press and Lane's Free Press-they had published both anthologies and collections by single poets, and looking back, I think the Pilot Press book, Face the Whirlwind: Anthology of Black Michigan Poets, edited by Lane (1975), was probably their finest effort at that date. Greinke was already making a name for his work, which grew out of a kind of symbolist base with clipped phrasings and tight images. When I met them, I was working as a night shift school custodian in a local ghetto school, learning to craft poems via the objectivist methods of Charles Reznikoff, whose work had showed me how to build a foundation for my own poems. I was also without any funds, half-crazed from working three years in a spray paint factory which gave me an immense fund of experiences to write about, but little sense of how to find my way into print, much less publishing. When I voiced a desire to publish not only my work, but the works of others, Eric showed me some basics of small press publishing, and encouraged me by giving me a signed copy of Reznikoff's self-published Five Groups of Verse (1927). Lane went even farther, publishing a small chapbook of my poems, The Clouds, which helped me sort my best work from the stuff that needed further editing and gave me an understanding of a collection as a visionary whole built of its discrete parts.
I first published Big Scream in 1974, with four local poets and one who had sent work as a result of a Small Press Review notice. The magazine was printed with a ditto machine and the covers were made of green construction paper with a primitive screamer whose image was built by making one section of hair and a second "face section" in a cubist madhouse scream, all done via cutouts on two sections of a huge potato and generous slaverings of poster paint-100 handmade copies in all, rough and raw. I did not know then what I had started, but the ship had pushed off and I was away.
All during these 41 years, I have been following exemplary small press magazines, indie self-publications that ranged from the untamed and down-to-earth (Andy Clausen's Shoe-Be-Do-Be-Ee-Op) to experimental efforts (Chris Funkhouser's We published as a CD), to those elegant publications that deliver their goods with a grace that belies their wildness. I never went in for the academic journals with committee selections lacking the stamp of a visionary editor, and their subsequent cardboard cutout ironies. I wanted the proles, the chance-takers, the outriders.
As Scream grew in scope during the 80s and 90s, those years featured some great magazines. Both of your mags, Jim, were the brotherly complements to mine, calling and answering each other for decades: Action, out of Rochester and brimming with the energy of the deaf poetics renaissance and the clarity of that local community, and later Napalm Health Spa, which began as a print journal with homemade paper covers, individualized artwork and all handsewn bindings, in its later incarnations a premier online journal associated with the Museum of American Poetics. Other great mags influenced me during these years: Renegade: the West Coast Review of Unlimited American Literature and Art, edited by Linda Clausen, Andy Clausen, and Michael Wojczuk; James Ruggia and Mark Rogers' Ferro Botanica; Long Shot, edited by Eliot Katz and Danny Shot; Mike Selender's Lactuca; Dave Roskos' proletkult Big Hammer; Joe Weil's Black Swan Review; and Ahnoi, edited by Cheryl Fish. There were also Paul Mariah's Manroot, Michael Wozcjuk and Tom Swartz's New Blood, Kurt Nimmo's Planet Detroit, Michael Hathaway's Chiron Review, The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual, edited by Arthur and Kit Knight, Norm Davis's Hazmat Review, and Indefinite Space, edited by Marcia Arrieta. These are just a few of the outrider mags that gave me friendships and connections, and made me scream with joy during the horrors of the Reagan and Bush years. They gave their hearts to all, and formed a large and crazy set of sibling poets and poetry communities that made up the postbeat outriders of my generation. Each also contributed to my expanding sense of production, editing, and many gave me new poets to add to later issues.
JC: So, the year after Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War, you inaugurated Nada Press with Big Scream #1. As you began to evolve or expand your sense of production and editing, you suggest that poetry provided a kind of balance to the generational and intergenerational horrors. Was that a shared belief in what was otherwise a largely invisible community of poets you were starting to publish? Do you think that belief became an ideal of the kind of magazine you wanted Big Scream to be? What were the early years like?
DC: I suppose it's best to put it in context. I'd lost one childhood friend in Vietnam and another came back unable to talk to any of us; another was stunned when he received severed Vietnamese fingers in the mail from his own brother. While at Michigan, we lived through almost weekly strikes and protests, including one in which my girlfriend Suzy was given a concussion by the cops and one in which students protesting the Chicago 7 conviction were beaten by police and dragged off in vans. Allen Ginsberg read Howl in his 1969 Moratorium Day reading to 3500, bringing many in that audience to tears, and we went crazy with the Rolling Stones at the Olympia in Detroit only weeks before their fateful Altamont concert, where a young black man, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death by Hell's Angels and a generational dream died. I quit school just short of graduation and did not contemplate finishing my degree until much later.
When Suzy and I returned to Grand Rapids, we were exhausted, deeply alienated, and we needed grounding. We married and I found a job in a spray paint factory which allowed us to live quietly and gave me the experience of an ordinary, anonymous working life; on my breaks, I finally read Walt Whitman in his entirety, resting atop skids of parts at my work station. With some local recognition of my poetry, I had some sense that the work was making progress, and I embarked on a life of learning all the poetry I could get my hands on-Neruda, Lorca and Vallejo followed Whitman, and when we landed at the 1973 National Poetry Festival, I not only had direct experience of many poet masters, but also access to whole libraries of books-both their own and the books that moved them. After that festival, I changed directions, quitting my factory job and picking up night shift school custodial work, which gave me time to dream in solitude, to observe and learn from lives very different from my own, to develop my writing and to plan for the first issue of Big Scream.
When I came to start the magazine, all of the above was in play. I had to make decisions quickly: initially, I thought I'd publish 5-6 poets per issue, as that was all I could afford. The magazine would feature poetry and cover artwork-and later photographs; there would be no advertising, no bios, as I wanted it "pure." As I knew nothing of grants and other funding sources-and really didn't care anyways-I decided to fund it via my own savings. The magazine would later be, as James Ruggia once remarked, poets as "guests eating at Cope's table." The first issue went out to friends and the poets I knew then, and Eric supplied me with some editors and poets to send it to; I had gotten Allen Ginsberg's address at the National Poetry Festival, and began sending these handmade editions to him as well. Strangely enough, I began receiving poetry in the mailbox, and one poet wrote, saying he was impressed with my "persistence with the potato" on the cover. Suzy and I discussed what to do about printing, and we wound up buying a $120 hand cranked mimeograph machine at Sears, and all but one of issues 2 to 30 (1974-1991) were printed via this method. Covers featured my untutored cubist-surrealist artwork, with screened photos of the poets becoming the norm in issue 18 (1984); at that time, I thought that putting one or more of the poets on the cover would give a face to associate with the poems; Bob Rixon, a gifted but little-known poet whose eloquent work on New Jersey's cutthroat industries, its ordinary people, boardwalks and seashores, was the first I featured in this way. I began publishing more poets from across the nation, and initiated a set of short chapbooks-early on, several of these featuring my own work, plus Ripening for Heaven by Pennsylvania/Maine poet Michael McMahon.
Issues 1-11 followed a pattern of including more and more poets and a gradual refining of my own tastes and perceptions as an editor and organizer of the magazine, as well as learning to work with the great varieties of psychology and intensity among the poets I published. Major hurdles included how to handle political poems-finding a way to encourage the strong voices grounded in particulars and leaving the reader enough room to understand the work on his or her own rather than being pulled around by the nose via mere propaganda. A second problem was the fact that hardly any women poets were sending work, something that would only be resolved when I first met and worked with Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman and, when I began teaching, gifted women poets like Carmen Bugan showed up in my classes. Also, I had not yet thought much about the idea of my work with it as building a poetic community-that perception came later.
Allen's work had given me a sane perspective hundreds of times since the first time I encountered his "Howl" as a raging teenaged punk; when my Stars chapbook (1976) was finished, I realized that I'd found my own foundational vision, writing familial, work-related poems about ordinary lives as well as touching on the great events of our time through neo-realist lens in the lineage of Whitman's Drum Taps and the work of Reznikoff and Williams. I sent the chapbook to Allen as a thanks, also requesting Charles Reznikoff's address. Allen wrote back, bought 10 copies of the chap from me and sent them out to poets and editors, saying too, "alas Reznikoff died about 2 months ago-82 years old," recalling their last meal together 12 floors above Manhattan. These letters were the first steps that would develop into a written correspondence that lasted from 1976-1990 and on the phone as long as Allen lived. Most importantly, this friendship led to Allen's invitation to meet my peers in Boulder in the summer of 1980, where I taught the poetry of Reznikoff and Marsden Hartley, read my own poems, and met the poets who would be the core of the communities of poets I would nurture over the rest of my career.
JC: I wonder if Allen had some kind of transmogrification experience--reading your poems and letter. It's as if he observed in Reznikoff's recent passing a transmogrified poetics in the appearance of your poems. At Naropa, he showed a deep commitment to your work--so much so that my main job, as one of his teaching assistants in 1980, was to assemble, under his editorship, the final hard copy manuscript of your poems, a third of a book-- the poems of Antler and Andy Clausen forming the other two-thirds--that was going to be published but never was. As we're speaking of Big Scream for now, more on Nada Press later, can you talk about what happened in 1980, at Naropa, that opened the door for change at Big Scream. How did things change overall after the poets you met at the Kerouac School, in terms of the poets and the poetry in Big Scream?
DC: Allen first responded to my Stars in March, 1976, saying it reminded him of his own Empty Mirror. Reznikoff came up on occasion in our correspondence, as he was exploring my poetic roots, what I knew, what I did "for money," etc. I don't think he had a transmogrification experience-he saw my work as heir to the realist/objectivist lineage. He had an endless curiosity about the concept of lineage, as if poets were related in spiritual poetics families; Antler thus carried his own and Whitman's lineage, and Andy Clausen picked up where Neal Cassady left off, for example. Allen's kindness is of course legendary, from his work with you, Jim, editing what became my first book, to the 1980 invitation to Naropa, his inclusion of my poems in his still-unpublished Clear Seeing Poetics anthology, and his teaching of my work to students in China there in 1984.
His efforts to build a poetic community of what some now call "outrider" or "postbeat" poets began with the selections he placed in New Directions #37 (1978) and City Lights Journal #4 (1978). The New Directions "condensed anthology of younger character [Allen] chanced on," his "recognition fixed on genius I could understand, imagist-objectivist" included work by Antler, Andy Clausen, me, Walter Fordham, Robert Meyers, Marc Olmsted, Ron Rodriguez, Michael Scholnick and Tom Swartz. The City Lights group featured Marc Olmsted, Robert Meyers, me, Ron Rodriguez, John L., and Eileen Myles, but the volume also featured, apart from Allen's selection, Robert Borden's "Meat Dreams"-published without the two preliminary poems-as well as work by Antler, Andy Clausen, Michael Wojczuk, Neeli Cherkovski. Most of these would be published, sooner or later, in Big Scream, and some would be lifelong friends, but the important point then was that when I came to meet my peers at Naropa or NYC, New Jersey or Rochester, most of us were aware of where we began. Yet when Allen called me in 1980 to ask if I'd read at Naropa, this was really the beginning of an entirely new phase of my life, both personally, as a poet, and certainly as an editor.
I was still working as a night-shift custodian and used my annual two-week vacation time to make the trip to Boulder. I was 32 years old, a proverbial "hick from the sticks," and this was the longest road trip I'd ever taken. The plan was to give two talks on Charles Reznikoff's poems and read my own work, and it turned out that Allen had also invited Andy Clausen-then living in Austin-as well as James Ruggia and others. I was barely in my townhouse door when many of the younger poets turned up and wanted me to read-apparently Allen had talked me up in classes, but with road sweat and grime still on my skin, I was initially abashed by this quick demand, at least until Andy picked up my "Further News from Nicaragua" and began reading it in a deliberately sing-song voice, a wicked glint in his eye. I was intrigued by this backdoor way to get me to come out of my corner, so I picked up the poem and read it with the proper gravitas.
I got to know Diane di Prima, my next-door neighbor, as a dear friend on that trip. When I threw a big party in my apartment, to really meet this great horde of young and old poets and students, Bob Rosenthal and I were having tea on the walkway in the quiet-time sunlight the next morning, and Diane came out. Embarrassed, I apologized for the late night noise; she was gracious, and in years to come would send not only her own new poems, but those of her students. I later got into it with Gregory Corso, who took over my reading-lecture on Reznikoff, saying he was going to throw me out the window. I waited while he sat on the table in front of me, and when all the gas went out of him, I began again, eliciting an emotional thanks from Allen after reading Charles' "Kaddish" for his mother. Allen later showed me a copy of poems by the artist Marsden Hartley, pointing out that "Daily Library Visitor," "Window Cleaner to Nude Manikin," "'Lewiston is a Pleasant Place,'" and "Family Album in Red Plush" all fit with the "objectivist" work of Reznikoff and others, so I changed the topic of my second lecture to a study of Hartley, and eventually would write an essay on his work for The Poetry Project Newsletter at a time when all his work was out of print.
Ed Sanders once said that Allen gave us all marching orders to seek out "the best minds" of our generation, and I think this must've been the beginning of what would be the greatest outcome of that visit. I collected manuscripts from many of the younger poets I'd met and made friends with, and when I got home, I realized for the first time that the magazine should nurture a community of poet friends whose experience and wild spirits were akin to mine. I also thought that, though my preference for outsiders and those whose visions intimated lives different from the grey futures offered by elders at home, I would not be limited as an editor by any "school" or "poetic manifesto," or by the constrictions of mere academic irony. It was the gallimaufry for me-Big Scream would reflect a wide variety of poetic voices, including some who were taking chances that sometimes didn't work out. Some poets would drop off in time, led in other directions as poets sometimes are, while others became invisible brothers and sisters whom I could always count on for new and significant work. Issue #12, Big Scream Goes West, began that process of building and nurturing this new community, even as some of the others were working on their own magazines, returning to their local scenes.
It's hard to sum up all the echoes that came out of that first meeting in 1980. The key for my publishing efforts was that I moved from a solitary editor-based approach to a sense of building this community of poets. Such efforts involve the gathering of a great variety of gifted writers, each of them not only utterly committed to their own idiosyncratic visionary poetics, issues and vocabularies, but also endlessly curious about the great historical and cultural movements of the times, sharing their loves and their ideas freely in ongoing open-ended dialogue. Friends and connections I made there have continued to produce moving and poignant work, given me openings that appeared in their poetry lives as I have done for them, and we have sustained each other through personal crises, and the horrors of national and international changes. Andy and others gave me a skeptical introduction to the crazy wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism, and through them I read Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and the famous biographies of Marpa and Milarepa; I never became a Buddhist-I'm not a joiner-but these books were important milestones in spiritual orientation. Andy's knowledge of Mayakovsky and Esenin led me to Soviet era poetry, which culminated when I first thrilled and sighed to the work of Voznesensky and the great Anna Akhmatova. Like me, Andy had years of difficult manual labor and blue-collar rowdiness at his core, but he has been and remains the great late night bluesman and bearer of the latter day basso profundo internationale, the visionary of Gokyo Lake breaking up in the sun.
Jim, you showed me another path, turning me on to the deaf poetry renaissance of Rochester, to disability writings and criticism, and when I visited you in Rochester, I met Sam Abrams and Fin Drury, the great jazz poet bobby johnson, and masters of the deaf poets' signing space, Peter Cook and Debbie Rennie, among others. I returned your favor with approaches to Whitman, Williams, Shakespeare and Dante. Our poetry, correspondence, and magazines-though very different in their ways-have been in lock step for almost four decades at this point. We explored cultural diversity and women's literature together during the following decades when I completed my education and moved from custodial ranks to a professor job, designing a multicultural literature class and an introduction to women's studies for my college.
By contrast, James Ruggia brought his surreal, romantic, psychologically complex work and an East coast tough tenderness to this community; he and I sang "My Girl" to each other amid groping poets at a Kerouac Conference party, reveled together in hitting used bookstores in Hoboken, in visiting Asbury Park, Paterson Falls, and Yankee Stadium. We were both teaching poetry writing to elementary students at about the same time, and More Places Forever, a book he edited with Sharon Guynup and Mark Rogers, brought the work of wild young Hoboken kids into print just as my Hall School Poems did in my home town. Importantly, he connected me with Bob Rixon, with Michael Pingarron's careful work borne of Spanish surrealism and a proletarian heart, and eventually I came to know Eliot Katz, whose epic "Liberation Recalled," written long after we first met, is one of the finest meditations on the horrors of the death camps, the life of an Auschwitz survivor, and a very deep tribute to his own mother.
Finally, though Antler, author of "Factory" and Last Words, and his lifelong companion Jeff Poniewaz-both of them living, talking and writing ecopoetics before the term became current-knew of my work and I of theirs, they came on board at Big Scream a bit later; Antler, Andy and I would read together in March of 1983 at the 67th Street YMCA, which was also an impromptu book launch for my first book, Quiet Lives. The first major gathering of this growing community of peers, however, had to wait until 1988, when I edited and published Nada Poems as issue #25 of Big Scream.
JC: Nada Poems was one of the earliest compilations of poets coming of age who had crossed paths at Naropa. The issue also served as an expansion upon ND #37, which Ginsberg guest edited--something he would take up again to encourage a younger cadre of poets in Randy Roark's FRICTION #5/6, the "Obscure Genius" issue (Laocoon Press, 1984), and later, in Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, a collection Allen was working on at the end of his life and which was completed by Andy Clausen and Eliot Katz (Seven Stories Press, 2000). Did you have any kind of criteria involved in the selection of poets and poetry for Nada Poems? Looking back at your selections, what do your choices signify for you today? And what was the impact on Big Scream issues thereafter?
DC: First, Allen didn't guest edit New Directions #37 or City Lights Journal #4;he edited a selection of young poets who were included as a section of the larger volumes. That said, he stated his preference for accessible poetry with an imagist-objectivist base which guided him in his selection, and he led off his chosen poets in CLJ #4 with "Some Different Considerations in Mindful Arrangement of Open Verse Forms on The Page," which included ten different methods of composition in mindful free verse, "form" being "what happens" and the discipline itself involving "conscious appreciation and awareness of the humours of line arrangements on the page, intelligence [in] relation to the mental conception of the poem and its vocalization." He notes the variety of lines, involving count of syllables, count of accents, measurement of vowel lengths as in classical quantitative measure, "breath stop" meaning "new breath, new line," mouth phrasing-"pauses within the same breath" such as are found in his own long lines, divisions of mental ideas, and a variety of other considerations when weighing what a poem does-even "typographical topography," "heartbeat," and such things as the conditions of original notation and even "chance."
I myself grew up with the imagist manifesto found in Pound's "A Retrospect"-the demand for "direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective," the importance of using "no word that doesn't contribute to the presentation," and rhythm that involves the "sequence of the musical phrase, not the sequence of a metronome." I swore by his notion of "absolute rhythm" as learned in the wild metric variations of Lear's "strike flat the thick rotundity of the world" or the pounding spondees of Dante's "Per me se va ne la citta dolente," the rolling rhythms of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Williams' immense variations-from the open ended lines of his quatrains, as in "The Last Words of My English Grandmother," to the off-balanced rhythmic thunder of "In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess" and the exquisite line breaks and mental leaps of "For Eleanor and Bill Monahan"-these were my school, as was his insistence on the variable foot in the triadic poems of his later years.
I was also interested in the concept of juxtaposition, in its simplest form the placement of two images next to each other, which Pound learned from Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry [see note with citation on the controversy aroused by this text]. In poetry, the placement itself generates two initial meanings, suggesting further implication or meaning in the relationship of the two, as in "hydrogen jukebox"-the simple teenaged sexual rituals at the 1950s jukebox imbued with the implications of the hydrogen bomb testing that marked the age, the two inseparable. The concept could be adapted to the placement of poems next to each other in a manuscript either as contrast or complement, the two "talking back and forth" in their proximity, or in an even more radical use of the idea, placing two whole manuscripts by different poets together for the same purpose, generating a "talking manuscript" of poets talking back and forth to each other, commenting on another's poems or providing an alternative perspective to that taken by one who came before or one who came after.
At the same time, there was that subjective sense that, for all the artistry, the poet must also have a vision that somehow speaks to the time in which she or he lives, speaking to the reader as if telling the story of one's time and experience to someone hundreds of years in the future, removed yet curious to hear the voices of this time. I was also aware enough that these ideas were all guidelines, that none of them is sacred, that excellence should never be narrowly defined. I wanted poets whose voices were idiosyncratic, individual, willing to take chances, but whose poems were carefully written within their own frames.
Having said that, the process of editing Big Scream has always involved an initial selection for excellence, "living with" each manuscript for a time so that I feel as though I can honor what I see as the heart of the author's vision, and choosing specific poems that reflect my perception of the author's work. There is no one way to determine either excellence or visionary heart: each poet's work is written in a way that best expresses his or her singing lines and voice, and that must be honored in selection and editing. Most issues begin with no specific theme or approach in mind-one poet sends me work that excites me, and that is the starting place. A second poet sends something that may contrast with the first in an interesting way, or whose poems complement the writings of the first, and at that point the issue begins to take shape. The issue "builds itself" gradually through the work that comes in and my own intuitive sense of how to arrange it.
Nada Poems, of course, was a kind of exception to my usual approach via spontaneous appearance and intuitive choice. I had won a $5000 award in literature from the American Academy/Institute of Arts and Letters for my second book, On the Bridge (1988), and I decided that I would build this anthology of the poets whom I'd spent the last eight years publishing, getting to know as vigorous writing presences in my life, and as friends. I wanted to publish the anthology in a large enough edition so that the poets could sell copies at their readings and perhaps make a little money for themselves, too. I knew that I would need work from Antler and Jeff Poniewaz, Andy, you, James Ruggia and Bob Rixon, as well as Tom Swartz and Elizabeth Kerlikowske, and I thought to include Nina Zivancevic, a Serbian exile poet and former member of the Living Theatre whose work first appeared in Big Scream in issues #15 (1982) and #17 (1983).
I was particularly keen to get Robert Borden's "Meat Dreams," too, which I felt was the finest work of poetry from the Vietnam War, a long poem with two preliminary proems, 31 objectivist vignettes of the soldier's life from basic training to the horrors of combat, culminating in a savage fugue of despair in the 32nd section. The work of Billy Burroughs, Jr. was also quite important for this anthology-he had been on the lips of all the young poets in Boulder when I first came there, heroically sharing his own struggles with the death he knew was coming; Tom Swartz and Mike Wozcjuk had published his "Last Poems" and sections from his prose, "Fury Is a Sign of Life," in New Blood, and I chose a selection of his work to present him as one of the lights of our generation.
Other poets turned up along the way, either in Boulder (1982, 1986, 1987) or in visits to New Jersey and New York, and among these was Eliot Katz, one of the editors of Long Shot. I was moved by his empathy for a homeless man, his quirky humor with serious subjects, his radical consciousness. I met both Katz and Janet Cannon, whose terse meditations on the difficulties of romance and quick portraits of life in New York had impressed me, at the 1982 Kerouac Conference. By contrast, Bob Rixon and Michael Pingarron were among the poets I met when I visited New York and New Jersey in March of 1983, when my first book, Quiet Lives, was published. Queens gave me Al Sgambati, whom I also recall meeting in 1982, and I took a chance that Anne Waldman would join us, given that she was close enough to us in age and treated us as peers-she obliged with a fine selection of shorter works-tight, terse, and savage.
These were among the best poets I had gotten to know, published during that eight years after my first Naropa summer, and I gathered them together in an initial generational statement: we bore a relation to our beat elders, but our work also had its own concerns borne of pressures and experiences peculiar to those of our age. I organized the Nada Poems manuscript, you came to help me with the initial files, and two younger poets, Joel Kuszai and his friend Chris Ide, gave all four of us access to the Michigan State University computer lab, where Kuszai's father tutored us in how to build a big file of poems with a bank of MacIntosh computers. We were up all night, working our tails off on the anthology manuscript, drinking way too much coffee and yakking outside the computer lab door in the late night of East Lansing-with 128 pages all assembled in a professional manner by morning. I organized photos of many of the poets for the cover, and had it printed at a shop outside Ann Arbor; within a few weeks, I was shipping it out to the poets and its journey in disparate scenes began then. Eventually, I would distribute free copies to my creative writing students at the college, and we would study the poems of the fabled Antler, Andy Clausen, et al each semester. I wasn't able to duplicate this sort of printed trade paperback for years, primarily because I still didn't have money, but it gave me a model for such work. Most importantly, it did give me the first measure of the poets I considered peers in my generation of non-academic poets, those more comfortable on the margins, each with his or her own intensities and wild love of words.
The American Academy/Institute of Arts & Letters award in literature and Nada Poems were two major events in my career, but other changes were also at hand. I had ripped a calf muscle on my custodial job at Grand Rapids Community College, and the dean, recognizing my work in poetry, asked me to begin teaching as an adjunct instructor in the English department. My daily routine changed from an eight hour run of heavy manual labor and work with crews of howling men to both that and an evening course or two teaching composition. I was also researching efforts to save the planet, environmental science and legislative efforts to address the problems of environmental devastation, as were Antler and Jeff Poniewaz over in Milwaukee, and in time I came to Anne Waldman with the idea of an ecopoetics conference at Naropa. After I sketched out a plan for such a gathering and wrote a first draft of what eventually became a "Declaration of Interdependence," Anne took it to the Naropa Poetics Department, where it was modified and refined to include ecologists, eco-activists and earth-firsters, as well as poets ranging from Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, Anne and Joanne Kyger, to many others.
For my part, besides my reading with Antler, Jeff, and Montana poet Greg Keeler, I presented a draft of the declaration, and Christopher Funkhouser and I spent four days taking suggestions from the poets, scientists and activists, rewriting it each night and presenting revised copies for further review the next morning, until the Thursday night before it would be presented to the press. Allen Ginsberg and I stayed up quite late that night, going over the language and revising it. Chris and I made the changes in the morning and printed out the final copies; everybody signed it and I asked Anne to do the presentation, as I was utterly exhausted. The declaration and acknowledgment of my part in conceiving it would later be published in Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School, but the result for me as editor was an enhancement of my emphasis on poetry with a sensitivity to planetary conditions and the degradation wrought by greedy corporations and their political puppets.
I brought this back to GRCC, and later in 1990, I developed a committee to address environmental concerns. Still a custodian/adjunct, I designed a college-wide paper recycling system which operates to this day, and we addressed many other issues; I wrote a college bylaw making environmental efforts a priority, and after some administrative revision, it was adopted. In 1991, I was hired full-time to teach composition, creative writing, and a multicultural literature class which I had designed. The multicultural literature class grew out of two to three years of discussions with Allen, who was developing black literature courses at Brooklyn College, and the first real gift in my own class was having Carmen Bugan, daughter of a famous Romanian dissident, as my student.
Carmen was a superb young poet, and after a distinguished college career culminating in a doctoral degree at Oxford, she has gone on to win the 2011 Bakeless Prize for her memoir of growing up in Ceausescu's Romania, also publishing two books of poetry and a fine study, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Carmen was the first of many students who would produce good work even while in their undergraduate years, and many of them would join the seasoned poets and elders in the magazine. When she matriculated to the University of Michigan, I'd come over to Ann Arbor so we could share Allen's springtime readings at Hill Auditorium on behalf of Jewel Heart Community, an annual pleasure that also allowed me to see Allen at a time when both he and I were essentially strapped to our career demands. Carmen and I continue our dialogue to this day, and I have published her work throughout all the intervening years, including her featured poems in the 53rd issue, printed in 2014 and officially released in 2015.
The college job also gave me the opportunity to bring in Anne Waldman and you, Jim (1992), Allen Ginsberg (1993), and Antler and Jeff Poniewaz (1994) to give readings and talks about their work, and as a consequence, I was exposed to a variety of other poets who contributed to the magazine during these years, adding to the core group from the 1980s. Issues during these years featured work by Allen and Anne, Antler and Jeff, Nina Zivancevic, Carmen, Marc Olmsted, Charles Bukowski, Richard Kostelanetz, the surrealist/minimalist poet Marcia Arrieta, Vietnam veteran poet Andrew Gettler, and Detroit's M. L. Liebler. The 1992 issue (#31) with Anne Waldman on the cover was the first to be printed, and of course I never went back to mimeo after that-this change not only reflected my desire to improve production, but also the fact that the professor job paid me a much better salary than I had earned as a custodian. This pattern continued right until Allen's death in 1997, which initiated yet another sea change in my career.
JC: Allen was teaching at Brooklyn College from the late 80s through the early 90s. He left Naropa. Often, classes were taught by guest poets. It was a series that highlighted the diversity of poetic genius in this land. The overall thematic effect was the diversity of American Poetry & Poetics. I've also seen files of Allen's course notes at Stanford. In particular, Allen's African American literary history notebooks.
You no doubt were absorbing new positions, new speech weighted with political and cultural and aesthetic and spiritual traditions along the experimentation spectrum., Did your multicultural studies work, late 80s, early 90s, have any influence on you as editor at Big Scream? If it did or did not, would you begin by discussing diversity in Nada Poems and then describe what was going on, from the editorial vantage point, with Big Scream over the years. Equally important, describe what you did then and what you do now, 41 years later, as a white male editor and publisher, as a poet and teacher, as a husband and a father to foster a climate for diversity. Have you ever been accused of being racist, sexist, biased? How do you work with that energy?
DC: Martin Luther King, Jr. was a hero of mine when I was still a child-his courage, clarity, and immense speaking ability came to me through his appearances on the nightly news. During my years at school, lit classes featured two black poets-Phyllis Wheatley and Langston Hughes, and two or three women poets-Wheatley, Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore. World literature was heavily weighted on work by Europeans and on the Bible; there was little from Africa, the non-biblical Middle East, India, China, Japan (with the exception of Basho's haiku), or South America. Ezra Pound was responsible for opening me to Chinese literature, and Allen made me aware of literatures from around the globe, from Buddhist sutras to 12,000 year old Australian aborigine song traditions.
My first personal experience of diversity was during my undergraduate years at Michigan, where I got to know a great poet as a man and genius, not simply as representative of a culture. Robert Hayden was my creative writing professor, a deeply private man who taught me how to edit my poems and showed us the proofs of Words in the Mourning Time with his own editing marks and corrections. That book and his earlier Selected Poems had a very deep and lasting influence on me, both for their eloquence and for Hayden's great poems, "Middle Passage" and "Runagate Runagate," for his superb "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz" for Malcom X, "Words in the Mourning Time" for King and Robert Kennedy "and for America, self-destructive, self-betrayed." Perhaps he moved me most deeply in the reflectiveness of "Monet's 'Waterlilies'":
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
Each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
My custodial years gave me the most direct understanding of cultural diversity, however. My years working in ghetto and barrio neighborhoods gave me direct observation of the stresses endured by the people who lived there, their struggles and the struggles of dedicated teachers to help them find a way to deal with the twin evils of poverty and racism. The schools where I worked were also libraries of the literature never taught in school when I was young: at Jefferson Elementary School, the teachers' lounge had a good collection of books by African American authors, and it was here that I first encountered the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, which made me see the truths of slavery only hinted at in history courses, as well as Ida B. Wells' famed Crusade for Justice and W. E. B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk.
At Hall School, I encountered populations of Puerto Ricans, Mexican immigrants, some Cubans and Venezuelans, and the descendants of Irish and German families who had settled in that area two generations before, to work at the now-defunct Kelvinator factory down the street. While I was there, Rose Santana brought me a big anthology of Spanish American literature, and Fátima Nieves gave me copies of Tuntun de Pasa y Griferia by Luis Palés Matos and Fortunato Vizcarrondo's Dinga y Mandinga, celebrating the African culture and descendants of Puerto Rico, plus Las Cien Mejores Poesias Liricas de Puerto Rico, including José Gautier Benítez's great romantic celebration of the island itself. Eventually, I would pick up on Cuba's national poet, José Martí, in Sus Mejores Paginas and the little known classic, En Los Estados Unidos. In retrospect, I was very lucky to experience all these writings while absorbing contemporary cultures directly from the people in their own neighborhoods.
Thus, when I first realized that Allen was working with African American literature, it was a ready-made topic for me, trying to understand what kinds of approaches he took to it. He was in the fortunate position of being able to bring key living poets and cultural representatives to his classes, so his approach would necessarily be different from anything I envisioned. He encouraged me, however, and I designed and got an OK for a course where I would teach Black Elk Speaks and contemporary First Peoples' poetry, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait with its classic "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Hayden's "Middle Passage," my own translation of Benitez's poem, Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club and a variety of other authors. I was initially concerned that, as a white male, I should not teach this course, but a wise administrator, Elias Lumpkins, assured me that I should certainly do it, and he and two faculty members, Veta Tucker and Carol Redwine, proved to be superb resources when I had questions about representation, cultural appropriation, and other concerns that haunt the margins of various cultures. I was never accused of racism, though I felt it best that, should this happen, I'd defer to folk like Elias, Veta, and Carol as a way to explore how to address it, and whether I'd made a mistake requiring attitude adjustment. I was fortunate enough to see that racism is a slippery thing that can infect folk on all sides of a question and in very subtle ways, that sometimes it's best to "see ourselves as others see us," that my purpose should be to build bridges among people, to encourage open discussion, respect, and resolution, not the sort of defensiveness that has crippled our nation's dialogues for centuries.
My main concern was to represent these authors as examples of literary excellence in and of themselves, and to allow cultural differences and perceptions to emerge in class dialogue. Discussions would grow from student perceptions of the text; I would not present an agenda other than introducing the author and context, but would follow and contribute to emerging discussions. I felt it was important to develop trust to the extent that this was possible, given the power differential between students and teacher, and in some students' perceptions of me as a privileged white male and in my own questions of how to address issues of racism and exclusion as openings for their perceptions. My task was to bring an educated person's critical perspectives to the discussion, and to suggest further perspectives that would give them ways to extend or modify their own. I taught the class for three years, moving beyond American borders to masterworks such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Nadine Gordimer's examination of privilege and terror at the margins, July's People, and the famed Tibetan biography, The Life of Milarepa, then handed it on to others so that differing approaches to the field could emerge gracefully.
Later, I was involved with the college's Feminist Reading Group, and together we designed an entire Women's Studies program with classes; my major part was to develop an Introduction to Women's Studies, a course built by studying the approaches to similar classes at major institutions. The course was team-taught, and my part included leading students to the local Domestic Crisis Center on the second night of class, a three hour stint where 25 students and three professors would do service work on behalf of the women residents, giving all an opportunity to understand that this course would be an exercise in engaged learning. I also taught sections on sexual harassment and the law and on workplace parity. Perhaps my best contribution was designing an extensive website with hundreds of links to Women's History sites, Women and Psychology sites, as well as sections on Women in the STEM Fields (this site was later archived by the college for their inscrutable reasons, a shame because it had given students quick access to subjects they'd need to know). Finally, our group presented a Women in the Arts Conference and a Women in STEM Fields Conference, and I helped fellow professor Nora Neill in the development of the college's first LGBTQ Literature course.
I found my commitment as a professor was best for cultural service work out in the world, and I put an enormous amount of energy into it for two decades before I retired. All of this informed my work as an editor and publisher, at first with middling success; later, as more and more women came on board, I have often come close to genuine parity in representation. African American poet Mursalata Muhammad, a dear friend whose "Diallo's Door" and "Haiku Middle Passage" should be in all the anthologies, has been a regular presence in the magazine, and I published some of local vocal master Azizi Jasper's poems in my 2013 anthology, Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century. Otherwise, African American poets have had an occasional presence, and I certainly welcome more. My recent successes have involved the influx of Middle Eastern and Muslim authors, and the beginning representation of poets from China and such Chinese American masters as Wang Ping. The magazine is open to all; all I require is clarity of vision and discipline in execution, as noted earlier.
JC: I believe Allen called you just before he died. I know Nada Press did a publication for Allen called Sunflowers and Locomotives. How did Ginsberg's death radiate, and what does his death mean to you as a person, a poet, a publisher, and an editor?
DC: I had known about Allen's progressive heart failure from around the time when I first proposed that Naropa should do a celebration for him like the one they gave Robert Creeley-likely during Anne Waldman's and your visit to GRCC on May 1-2, 1992, possibly during Allen's visit on February 19, 1993, or on a retreat with Gelek Rinpoche and the Jewel Heart Community at Yankee Springs, about a half hour from my house, in August of 1993. Anne said that if we were going to do this, it should be soon, and others concurred. The Naropa folk quickly took over the project, which emerged as Beats & Other Rebel Angels, a huge conference held in the summer of 1994-what turned out to be a last rendezvous for the surviving Beats even as it was a celebration of Allen's career. This both a high and low point for me-I could see that Allen was exhausted, besieged by crowds of poets, well-wishers, students who wanted to meet the famous poet, and I deliberately decided that I would keep the socializing to a minimum, concentrating on the reading I would give with Sharon Olds, Ed Sanders, and Galway Kinnell, and on the workshop I was to teach on Allen's later poems and some poetic analogues. There were some fine readings at that conference-Corso was particularly good, as was Sharon Olds, whose presence also gave voice for the hundreds of women there-I remember them lining up at the autograph tent to tell her their stories and share grief, and her gracious-ness and tenderness with them was inspiring. As finale, you and I, Antler and Jeff made our way up to the Continental Divide on the 4th of July trail, a hike that recently came back to me in the photo of Antler and Jeff, who died in December of 2014.
After the conference, my relationship with Allen became something of a yearly reunion. He gave annual readings at Hill on behalf of Jewel Heart Community in the spring of 1994, 1995 and 1996-the last times I saw him perform "Howl" and "Kaddish," and the first time for "Ballad of the Skeletons," and his version of "Amazing Grace." Our meetings backstage were shared moments of quiet reflection; one of my last letters to him, written on 17 February 1995, responded to his concern that he'd let his emotions get ahold of him in the reading of "Kaddish"; I recalled his early advice to me that one should breathe deeply in the pauses between phrases, not to hurry the performance so that it comes naturally. He had planned to do another Hill Auditorium reading with Patti Smith in 1997, but it was not to be.
I had gone to bed early on a quiet night in April when Allen gasped his final message into my telephone answering machine, my daughter Anne racing downstairs near midnight to shake me awake: "Dad, Allen's on the phone, and he sounds terrible!" Allen had always been quite literally generous to a fault, taking calls all through the night-arranging his poetry ambassador trips to exotic destinations on the far side of the globe, arguing with neurotic fame worshippers or catching up with a favorite heart-son who had moved him to tears with a youthful lament. In the final years, his doctor had insisted that he shut the phone off and route the calls to a machine-his sleep was too important, his health too fragile. As a result, I sat through much of the night with his last answering machine message, his personal farewell, delivered in a voice that sounded so unlike him that I found myself pacing my floor, wondering what had become of him.
The phone rang early the next morning: Bill Morgan, his bibliographer, asked if I was sitting down-and I knew then what had happened. Would I be willing to serve as a contact person for the press when they began calling? I'd spend my day fielding calls, at the same time musing back to the first days when his poetry had awakened me from teenage rages to an awareness that might not have come so clearly and so quickly. I found myself talking to reporters from around the nation, ensconced in my office with the phone while my multicultural literature students, once the situation was explained to them, taught themselves in my classroom. After this, friends were sending obituaries of Allen from these papers, each article quoting me as one who knew him as a friend. This was the prologue, however: elegies and mementos from friends, poets, students and others appeared in my mailbox. Having already run my issue of Big Scream for the year, I asked Suzy if we could spend the bucks for a special issue, Sunflowers & Locomotives: Songs for Allen. She agreed, and I immediately wrote requests for poems from Carl Rakosi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman and my old friend Diane di Prima. Their work and poems by you, Andy, Bob Rosenthal, Jeff Poniewaz, Eliot Katz, M. L. Liebler, and Marc Olmsted followed, along with many other poets whose work poured in from around the country. Christopher Funkhouser sent his elegy and a superb photo of Allen taken on his 12th Street fire escape, and I was able to get a photo portrait of Allen with a very young Peter Hale, shot by Steven Miles in 1985; there was also a xerox of Allen's handwritten transcript of William Blake's "Nurse's Song," with chord and tempo notions, "Music by Allen Ginsberg."
The editing work took up most of the summer, but before I could conclude it, I had other business to attend to-Jewel Heart and the University of Michigan decided to go on with the May 24 Hill Auditorium show that Jewel Heart had scheduled before Allen passed. It would now be a memorial, and I was selected to read after Anne Waldman. Patti Smith headlined the show this time. The Gyuto Monks led off with chants, then a local professor representing Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi greeted us & gave numerological & mystical reasons why this date was auspicious for Allen's closing the bardo & for our coming together; he then recited the Kaddish. The first portion of the program ended with "Amazing Grace" sung in soaring cadences by a young woman.
Poets came next: Anne read first, working tornadoes of syllables, her poem rising and rising to crescendo, never letting us off the hook-and the audience of 1400 jumped right with her. Then she introduced me, and I read my elegy composed on the morning he died, "passing burden & light from Walt thru Williams you & Jack / thru those who remain / to new nippled generations / struggling even now to be born." Bob Rosenthal, who was both the great poet's close friend and office manager, read Allen's last poems-his final poem "Gone, Gone Gone" like a blues mantra, stately. Next was Natalie Merchant, who did several songs at a grand piano, followed by classical musicians who'd often accompanied Allen doing an instrumental "Father Death"-eerie violin taking the lead where Allen's voice would've been. Patti Smith and her band concluded the evening with her reading of her own elegy for Allen, Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," Dylan's "Wicked Messenger," and Patti's own tune and arrangement of "Footnote to Howl," which brought the house down. Finally, there was a giant video of Allen doing "Meditation Rock" two years before at Hill, a generous salute in which Allen himself called back to us, if only on film.
Sunflowers & Locomotives: Songs for Allen would come out in the fall (1997), with poems by 31 poets, the two photos and Allen's Blake song transcription, a big 8.5" x 11" 60 page chapbook anthology that memorialized Allen's influence on four generations of poets who came after the beats. This, like Nada Poems, was a watershed moment in my life. I was close to the final effort in my pursuit of a Ph.D. and the loss made me see that teaching with a heavy work load while raising a family and driving myself to complete the academic cycle was just too much. My poetry had not suffered and the magazine was still coming out regularly, but I realized that I needed to go another way-and the first concern would be to find and define what that might be. I visited the Naropa summer program in 1998, and quickly saw that they had begun to go the way of institutional academia, that this once-wild scene had become as tame as any other academic creative writing program. As I came home, I swore to myself that I would keep that wild spirit alive in my Big Scream, yet for a time it seemed all that bright community would fall apart, as I noted in one of my poems from that time, "Yeah, an' here he was":
singers of my generation
disappeared like evening rain when he left, burrowed
into silent meditation in moonlit mountain cabins,
working on dreams deferred, hands rough now
building invisible stone towers & tearing them down,
learning the meaning of silence.
As I emerged from this time of retreat and reflection, you had begun work on the online Museum of American Poetics, your Napalm Heath Spa had become an online zine, and of the old crowd of magazines, only yours and Dave Roskos' Big Hammer remained. I realized that the best way to honor Allen's presence in our lives was not to slavishly follow the patterns or styles of the beats, but to attend to a few basic principles: continue seeking out the best minds of each generation and fold them into the community, honor the elders, respect the varieties of genius and, going back to the foundational poetics of Allen's elders, demand clarity in the writing. I continued publishing Big Scream annually, though there were real differences in those who appeared in it. I made it a priority to publish elders such as Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Janine Pommy Vega, and continued following Anne Waldman and my former student, Carmen, as her career blossomed on both sides of the pond. Old friends Andy Clausen, Antler and Jeff Poniewaz, James Ruggia, Marc Olmsted, Peter Marti, Eliot Katz and you, Jim-all of these poets "Allen-alumni"-still appeared in these pages, all of them maturing as poets with age-burnished work, still producing at a high level. Others came on board and enlivened the gatherings-Mursalata Muhammad, Richard Kostelanetz, Sam Abrams, Herschel Silverman, Lesléa Newman, Ali Zarrin and Wang Ping. Others will doubtless turn up tomorrow.
The mature versions of the magazine coincide with the movement to annual issues of 78-82 pages in length, produced in a 6" x 9" format with the layout and design genius of my son-in-law, Scott Baisden. With forty-one years of continuous publication, Nada Press has published fifty-three issues of the magazine, nine chapbooks, two brief commemorative anthologies published as thanks for the visits of Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman and you to my college, a teaching anthology for my seminar on Allen Ginsberg's later work, and Sunflowers & Locomotives: Songs for Allen. This work has been funded from my own personal savings each year, except in the case of Nada Poems.
Finally, though this interview is a "retrospective," I have no intention of slowing down or calling it quits. The magazine is an integral part of my own writing as a poet, and I cannot imagine having that life without a community of poets to nurture as friends. I have never sought grants or funds, and I still absolutely refuse to do advertising. The magazine features poetry-no reviews, no bios-and I have never turned a profit on it. Indeed, most of the issues are distributed free or at cost to poets and editors, and only sold to libraries, well-heeled institutions, and at readings. The magazine, manuscripts and correspondence are archived in The David Cope Papers at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library, and substantial collections of its issues are found at the New York Public Library and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Library. Most importantly, I have been fortunate enough to publish over two hundred poets throughout the life of the magazine, giving the poems a platform for whoever comes who may.
[January-February, 2015]
Resources
The David Cope Papers at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library: sections related to Big Scream / Nada Press include all my extant papers (manuscripts, correspondence, editing notes, proofs, etc.) for the magazine and press, as well as complete correspondence with Jim Cohn, Allen Ginsberg, and others. UM SCL also has the most complete collection of all my publications. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=sclead&idno=umich-scl-cope
The Dave Cope Sampler: my career website, with some works important as background to this interview. http://www.poetspath.com/Dave_Cope/
Citations
Q. 1 Early Influences
Gerber, Dan, and Jim Harrison. Sumac http://www.poetryjett.com/pages/books/4087/jim-harrison-dan-gerber/sumac
Greinke, Eric. Pilot Press http://ericgreinke.com/#Biography many books, but importantly, Face the Whirlwind: Anthology of Black Michigan Poets, 1975.
Kornblum, Alan. Toothpaste Press and mag
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/business/media/allan-kornblum-independent-publisher-dies-at-65-.html?_r=0
Lane, Ronnie M. The Free Press: The Clouds by David Cope
Sklar, Morty. The Spirit that Moves us Press:
http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20120526/OPINION01/305260028/Revisiting-Actualists-Iowa-City-1970s and http://www.worldcat.org/title/actualist-anthology/oclc/3239632
Q. 2: Early Years
Ginsberg, Allen. Postcard message to David Cope. From Paterson, N. J. April 13, 1976. [Allen's letters to me are housed in Box 2 of my archive:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclead/umich-scl-cope?rgn=main;view=text ]
McMahon, Michael. (Ripening for Heaven, 1977). Bio:
http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/McMahon__Michael.html
Q. 3: 1980-1988
Antler. Last Words. New York: Ballantine, 1986. [includes "Factory," but the poem was also published by City Lights as #38 in their Pocket Poets Series (1980).
Cope, David. "Congratulations." Best Minds: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg. Bill Morgan and Bob Rosenthal, eds. New York: Lospecchio, 1986.
- - - - . "Marsden Hartley: Forgotten Classic." The Poetry Project Newsletter 116.
James Ruggia, ed. November 1985. Page 1+.
.- - - - , ed. Nada Poems. Grandville: Nada Press, 1988.
"David Cope-Letters from Allen Ginsberg." The Allen Ginsberg Project. June 23, 2011.
http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/david-cope-letters-from-allen-ginsberg.html
Ginsberg, Allen, ed. Clear Seeing Poetics. Unpublished anthology for Allen's classes. c. 1992.
- - - -. "Ginsberg's Choice." New Directions in Prose and Poetry 37. Ed. J. Laughlin, with Peter Glassgold and Frederick R. Martin. New York: New Directions, 1978.
Guynup, Sharon, James Ruggia, and Mark Rogers, eds. More Places Forever: Writings And Drawings from Hoboken's Grammar Schools. Hoboken: Steel Garden Press, 1982.
Hartley, Marsden. Selected Poems. New York: Viking, 1945.
Katz, Eliot. "Liberation Recalled." Unlocking the Exits. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1999.
Lhalungpa, Lobsang P., trans. The Life of Milarepa. Boulder and London: Shambala, 1984.
Monsanto, Mendes, ed. City Lights Journal #4. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1978.
The Nalanda Translation Committee, dir. Chogyam Trungpa. The Life of Marpa the Translator. Boulder: Prajñā Press, 1982.
Trungpa, Chogyam. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Boulder and London: Shambala, 1973.
Q. 4: 1988-1997
Bugan, Carmen. Burying the Typewriter: A Memoir. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2012.
- - - - . Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Oxford: Legenda, 2013.
http://www.legendabooks.com/titles/isbn/9781907975646.html
Burroughs, William Jr. (III). "From Fury is a Sign of Life." New Blood 1.1. Michael Wojczuk, Tom Swartz, and Niko Murray, eds. Boulder: Artz Press, 1980.
- - - - . "Last Poems." New Blood 6. Eds. Niko Murray and Tom Swartz. Boulder: New Blood Press/Michael Wojczuk, April 1982.
Cannon, Janet. The Last Night in New York. Berkeley: Homeward Press, 1984.
"A Declaration of Interdependence." Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School. Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, eds. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico, 1994. 466-471.
Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound.. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Critical Edition. New York: Fordham U P, 2008. [Pound first published this essay in 1919, but this critical edition presents an understanding of how it has shaped modernist western poetry and fundamental misunderstandings of Chinese Though sinologists now ridicule Fenollosa's understanding of the Chinese lan-guage, the essay remains important for both the concepts of imagism and juxtaposition, which are fundamental to 20th cy. and contemporary poetry.]
Ginsberg, Allen: "Some Different Considerations in Mindful Arrangement of Open Verse Forms on the Page." April 2, 1977. Printed in City Lights Journal #4 (1978) and reprinted in Composed on the Tongue. San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1983.
In City Lights Journal #4, "intelligence in relation" is printed as "intelligence relation"-an editorial oversight. The line is printed correctly in Composed on The Tongue and in Allen's classroom text, Poetics Practicum. I have inserted [in] in the quotation, both to be true to my first exposure to the piece in CLJ #4, while also noting the definitive phrasing elsewhere.
Pound, Ezra. "A Retrospect." The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968.
Zivancevic, Nina. "About Nina Zivancevic." Nina Zivancevic: Poet, Writer, and Scholar. http://ninazivancevic.com/ .
Q. 5 Diversity
Benitez, José Gautier. "Puerto Rico!" Las Cien Mejores Poesias Liricas de Puerto Rico. Ed. Dr. Jorge Luis Morales. Rio Piedras: Editorial Edil, 1979.
Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks. John Neihardt, trans. and ed. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska, 1988.
Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York: Collier, 1962.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage/Library of America, 1990.
Hayden, Robert. Words in the Mourning Time. New York: October House, 1970.
Jasper, Azizi. Poems. Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century. Ed. David Cope. Roseville, Mi.: Ridgeway, 2013.
Martí, José. En Los Estados Unidos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1968.
- - - - . Sus Mejores Paginas. Ed. Raimundo Lazo. Av. República Argentine, 15. Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1978.
Muhammad, Mursalata. Poems. Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century. Ed. David Cope. Roseville, Mi.: Ridgeway, 2013.
Palés Matos, Luis. Tuntún de Pasa y Grifería. Rio Piedras: Editorial de La Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2000.
Vizcarrondo, Fortunato. Dinga y Mandinga. San Juan: Instituto de Cultural Puerto-rriqueña, 1983.
Wang Ping. Ten Thousand Waves. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2014.
Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells.. Ed. Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago and London: U of Chicago Press, 1972.
Q. 6 Allen's Death and Sunflowers & Locomotives
Cohn, Jim, curator. The Museum of American Poetics. http://www.poetspath.com/
Cope, David. "Allen in Memory." Paterson Literary Review. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, ed. Late Summer, 2006.
- - - - . "for Allen." Silences for Love. By David Cope. Totowa: Humana Press, 1998.
- - - - . Letter to Allen Ginsberg. 17 February 1995. . Selected Letters: 1992-2001. By David Cope. Unpublished.
- - - - . Letter to Jim Cohn, 25 May 1997. Selected Letters: 1992-2001. By David Cope. Unpublished.
- - - - . "Yeah, an' here he was." Turn the Wheel. By David Cope. Totowa: Humana Press, 2003.
- - - - , ed. Sunflowers & Locomotives: Songs for Allen. Grand Rapids: Nada Press, 1997.