trenchart monographs hurry up please its time, eds. Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place

We started Les Figues Press in 2005 to publish the TrenchArt series. In other words, the idea of the Press was the idea of the series. Or, simply put: we wanted to publish books as a conversation or group curation. As writers, we frequently discussed our work in terms of other people’s writing, even as our individual efforts were writing into, or against, a larger social inscription or text. This larger text could be what Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary,” defined as “the ways people imagine their social existence,” including their expectations, relationships, and the “deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23). To Taylor, the social imaginary is held together by the stuff of the imagination—images, stories, legends. If, as writers, we are making texts (poems, prose bits, novellas) in an increasingly networked world, what might our individual works, placed side-by-side, reveal about a social imaginary, which is also in/forming these individual texts? Fred Moten, in a talk at the University of Denver, refused to talk about writing “beginning,” because writing, he said (and I’m paraphrasing) is simply a way our ongoing sociality sometimes emerges. Writing, in other words, is a form of sociality. Writing never comes from one alone.

When we founded Les Figues, we (or to be exact, I) did not have this language for writing. Yet demonstrating this intuitively-held relationship between individual texts—and the larger social text—felt worthy of publishing. Vanessa Place, Pam Ore, and I had been talking about this “something” we wanted to make for a few years, and one afternoon we imagined a publication structure: TrenchArt. (Teresa Carmody, “For What Reason Is This Writing: Publisher’s Preface”)

I’m amazed by the remarkable anthology trenchart monographs hurry up please its time (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2015), edited by Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, an anthology collecting nearly a decade’s worth of publications created as part of the TrenchArt series produced by Les Figues Press. As Carmody’s introduction explains, the original TrenchArt essays, grouped together to be published as short monographs, were the origins of the press itself: to present work as a conversation, and works that would have no home anywhere else. Moving beyond those first, small publications, Les Figues is a press that has evolved over the past decade-plus to be one of the leading publishers of innovative, experimental and conceptual writing in North America, producing book-length works by Jennifer Calkins, Vanessa Place, Redell Olsen, derek beaulieu, Sophie Robinson, Timothy Yu, Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, Colin Winnette, Sawako Nakayasu, Doug Nufer, Urs Allemann, Dodie Bellamy, Sandra Doller and multiple others, as well as producing another important anthology: I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012) [see my review of such here].

Depictions of the present are complacent; depictions of the future are implausible. For this reason, depictions are generally unimportant, unless they are made by important people like economists or real estate agents. These important people describe only the future, which they make sure is boring and plausible. A plausible future is just more of the present. The Empire never ends because the people in it are more important than the world that they deserve. Better to have a world that exists than a world that is better but might rock the boat: this is a good general view. Because if you rock the boat, the boat will take on water, and it might well sink. There are already people drowning in the bottom of the boat. Poetry succeeds as if the boat can lift off from the water and become an airy structure, with a few words surrounded by wide open space where the sun gleams off-white. This is not an important thing for the world to be able to do; it is not an important thing to be able to do with the world. Turn it into an essay where the dead things of the present are nailed to a bulletin board: that is at least a little bit useful. I’ve nailed every dead bit of my ego to this bulletin board that you have just read, and illustrated each one with a corny metaphor. Enjoy. I’ll see you in the future, or else in an extrapolative satire, or else I won’t see you. You are too important to be able to get out of this present world that wants to be with you till death. (Stan Apps, “On Unimportant Art”)

Originally solicited for publication in annual limited editions sets of four or five authors submitting an essay each, the anthology collects the entirety of the series in a single volume, with essays on writing, art and thinking by Harold Abramowitz, Danielle Adair, Stan Apps, Nuala Archer, Dodie Bellamy, Sissy Boyd, Melissa Buzzeo, Amina Cain, Jennifer Calkins, Teresa Carmody, Allison Carter, Molly Corey, Vincent Dachy, Lisa Darms, Ken Ehrlich, Alex Forman, Lily Hoang, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Alta Ifland, Klaus Killisch, Alice Könitz, Myriam Moscona, Doug Nufer, Redell Olsen, Pam Ore, Renée Petropoulos, Vanessa Place, Michael du Plessis, Frances Richard, Sophie Robinson, Kim Rosenfield, Mark Rutkoski, Susan Simpson, Stephanie Taylor, Axel Thormählen, Mathew Timmons, Chris Tysh, Julie Thi Underhill, Divya Victor, Matias Vieneger and Christine Wertheim. As editor Place writes to end her introduction: “And so, the TrenchArt series followed the sound-sensical manner of Alice’s Queen of Hearts—sentence first, verdict afterwards. Which is an admirable way to run anything, especially sentences.” The pieces gathered in this anthology breathe a collective sigh in a multitude of directions, ways and purposes, each asking, why are we continuing to create in the same ways we have already done?

What of the making of things together? Collaboration. We get together to make a thing, a thing that will trigger an uncanny shift of perception in those who see it. This shift will expose a particular societal delusion so ubiquitous as to have been previously invisible. This object we imagine will perpetuate an act of radical haunting, that awakens the viewer to the world around it, but its success depends wholly on our collaborative BOO. I show up as Boris Karloff but my collaborator was hoping for a more Henry James-like spooking. Her laugh is not fiendish enough. He thinks my cape ridiculous. There is always a gap. We mind the gap fastidiously, obsessively. It is not what I had envisioned. My collaborators have deprived me of the sight I’ve grown used to. They have haunted my haunting … generously. “Have you ever really looked carefully at the thing we are making?” they ask. (Susan Simpson, “Untitled Aesthetic”)

As Place points out in her introduction, “[…] Les Figues Press was also born from a women’s art salon, Mrs. Porter’s, held most regularly from 2004 until 2013 or thereabouts. Everyone who attended presented some item for aesthetic contemplation (one’s own or another’s) during the first half of the evening; the second half was devoted to teasing out connections and distinctions between the works. To a consideration of how these scraps of writing or bits of art might tat together, not a telos, but an essay. As in essaie, as in try. Try as in trial. The trail, of course, in the TrenchArt series, was the work itself.” An anthology of this sort functions as a curated montage of divergent ideas on approaches to writing, attempting to prompt new ways of thinking about how writing is created, presented and absorbed, and there is a great deal within that can’t help but to startle the attentive reader into seeing writing in a potentially new way, whether their own, or simply writing in general. A book such as this wants to shake the complacency out of so much of what is currently being produced, disseminated and absorbed and somehow called “writing.” The possibilities are far larger than what most writing might suggest, and perhaps more (including myself) should be better at paying attention to the writers who are working to continuously push at the boundaries.

My art is guided by history: art history, social history, political history, and personal history. The historical and the personal are inextricably linked, like two sides of the same sheet of paper. My work is about how memory itself is political, and the process by which the political is transformed into memory.

I am driven by an urge to retrieve something lost or something that will soon be lost. Walter Benjamin has written about this impulse to return to the past in order to rescue it from disappearance. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History he says, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” In uncovering the historic in my work, I don’t mean to tell the story, but rather I am interested in telling a story—something highly constructed and subjective. In rescuing and remembering the past, the work allegorically reinvents meaning—a new story is told. (Molly Corey, “Aesthetic/Politic”)

One of the more intriguing of an already-impressive gathering of exploratory pieces is Lisa Darms’ erasure essay, “½ EARTH ½ ETHER,” a piece she attempts to salvage through the process of erasure. As she writes in her “Postscript: Under Erasure” (dated 2014):

When I was asked to republish this essay, I thought of it in terms of my job as an archivist. I knew I’d probably be embarrassed by my writing, but that it would be a way to enact my belief that the highest function of the textual archive is to preserve mistakes, imperfections and failures.

And then, I re-read it.

The archive documents failure, yes. But it doesn’t have to perpetuate it. This is the voice of someone who, after three vaguely demoralizing years in a studio art graduate program, has spent a year unable to find work, reading only holocaust memoirs and back issues of Artforum. The original essay’s stylistic pomposity and its humorlessness are qualities I’ve spent the last eight years trying to purge from my writing (and life). My first inclination, when I saw this essay in proofs, was to kill it.

But instead, I decided to retun it with extensive redactions—a sort of faux-bureaucratic disavowal of the more facile ideas, and an homage to the sharpie marker sous rapture of riot grrrl zines. I’ve found that the essay now expresses its stuttering logic more accurately. Because we don’t want to stop time; we want to reanimate it.

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz on eohippus labs

eohippus labs is a literary micropress located in Los Angeles, California.


Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz are co-publishers and co-editors of the press eohippus labs. In addition to their individual works, they also write collaboratively as part of the projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and U.N.F.O. (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization). Their collaborative work has appeared in a variety of publications including Area Sneaks, String of Small Machines, A Sing Economy, Source Material: A Journal of Appropriated Texts, Abraham Lincoln, and as an Arrow as Arrow chapbook, Sin is to Celebration. In 2011, Harold and Amanda, as part of U.N.F.O., co-organized Explanation as Composition, a collaborative audio text project, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

1 – When did eohippus labs first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

 eohippus labs started in 2006. The original goal was to give writers we knew a venue for work outside of their normal practice. Our goal has not shifted since then. We’ve learned that asking people to access or articulate another part of their thinking can be a difficult task.


2 – What first brought you to publishing?

 The desire to publish work that we love and felt would have no other home.


3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

 We can only speak for ourselves, but see the above answer. We also try to work with different economies to make our work more accessible.


4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

 We’ve been doing a a pamphlet series, a greeting card series, and most recently an innovative narrative series.


5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?

 In our experience, chapbooks get out into the world in grassroots way: at readings, through word of mouth, the internet.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
 We can be very involved as editors, depending on what the work calls for.


7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

 A usual print run is about 120 books. We also feel it’s important to keep books in print, so we do reprints.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
 The editing involves just the two of us. We’re lucky because we get along and work well together. We could imagine it being a very difficult process if we didn’t.


9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
 Being editors/publishers has made us more sensitive to understanding the need for communication throughout the publishing process. Nobody likes to have long periods of silence when waiting for work to be published.


10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
 This issue depends on the goals of each individual press. The idea for eohippus labs actually got started because Harold wanted to publish a piece of Amanda’s writing that he thought was great.

11– How do you see eohippus labs evolving?

 The bottom line is that eohippus labs will evolve along the lines of what we can afford to produce.


12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

 We are proud of everything we have published and love that these pieces of writing exist in the world. Our biggest frustration has been learning how to design and make the books. Also, we’d love to devote more time to the press, but the day jobs do get in the way.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?


We were inspired by our friends’ presses in Los Angeles – Insert Press, Les Figues Press, and Make Now Press.


14– How does eohippus labs work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see eohippus labs in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
 Engagement with our immediate literary community and the community at large is integral to everything we do. We think those dialogues are crucial and ongoing. There would be no reason to engage in this project otherwise.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

 

Yes, we do. Readings are very important.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

 

We don’t what life is like without the internet.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

 Right now, we solicit work and do not take submissions. However, we are planning to change this process in the future. The one thing we are not looking for is pieces or excerpts from larger projects. We want the press to be part of a generative process for writers: either by publishing small, self-contained pieces that they would not have been written otherwise, or by seeding what might become bigger projects.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
 Recently we have published a pamphlet by Cara Benson titled The Secret of Milk, and an innovate narrative piece by Allison Carter titled Sum Total. They are both great writers and their work speaks for itself. We think you should read them.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Cara Benson, The Secret of Milk

I want to distract you from my primary purpose in penning this pamphlet. To do that I will create a space for an abject lyric, not in the sense that the lyric is abject, per se. Its core/content. Perhaps lyricism is the distraction.

The story goes like this: I made a poem. Which according to Robert Duncan was more than singing; but according to Johannes Goebel music is beyond and came after language. Either way, I made a piece of writing that slides along a continuum of music and language in its lyricism. Language here being signs attempting to indicate referents (which can be misunderstood), and music viewed as patterns of sound without intended referents.

There are a few versions of the poem of which I write. All of them include pre-text curated from an article on agri-business as well as lyric stanzas written in response to an advertising slogan. Here is the first, condensed, for space (think originally more floating or white):

“Does A Body Good”

As the product, myself, of generations of Eastern Ontario dairy farmers (and where I also worked and grew), I find I'm reacting even before opening poet Cara Benson's chapbook, The Secret of Milk (Tract Series #5, eohippus labs, 2011), referred to by the poet Kate Greenstreet, in her interview with Benson, as “a treatise on the possibilities of lyric advocacy within the tainted world of agribusiness” in Bookslut. What does it mean to produce for one body, by putting another in danger? There is an element of Benson's writing that deals very much with the consequences of the things we make, as writers or as humans, whether in our literary production, or here, specifically, the dairy industry, asking the difficult questions that are usually, deliberately, overlooked. And in certain sections, is she talking about writing or milk production? Possibly, and beautifully, applying a single morphing strain of argument to both. I've always liked the approach, forwarded over the years by writers such as Erin Mouré and Lisa Robertson, of blending literary writing with the formal essay, genres bleeding and folding in and over each other, and, when done properly, each element adding significantly to the other.

We want the reader to enter to produce her poem from the poem so that we don't replicate anti-democratic syntactical strategizing. But what do you put on your cereal? How do you open the carton? At some point the door of the refrigerator is closed and one will hurt her hand thinking otherwise. Abstracting the physicality of shut.

Produced out of Los Angeles, California, eohippus labs is self-described as “a short form literary project and press, co-edited and co-published by Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz.” The author of the trade collections (made) (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) and the forthcoming Protean Parade (Black Radish Books, 2012), New York poet Cara Benson has also produced a number of chapbooks over the past few years, including Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2008), which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Sources:

Milk: It Does A Body Good: Advertising slogan

[Lori Lipinski. Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2003, https://www.westonaprice.org/news/259.html]

That is the first version, sans picture. I submitted it for market consumption to a few literary journals, and though other work from that batch was published, this poem wasn't. Maybe it's not a good [sophisticated, ambiguous, artful, musical, image-filled, allegorical, metaphorical, speechy infused/refused] poem. Too sentimental. Littteral. Processually neoliberal? The picture was cheating. Or the whole composition was too difficult to format online. I tried a second version; actually, once I submitted two versions together so there could be a choice. I operated on the [pre-text] more. I'll give just the changes, for space:

[The majority of commercial dairy cows are kept …, forced to … months out of the year, in an overcrowded ….]

The Secret of Milk reads as a poem/essay/treatise on the mistreatment of animals-as-product, on forcible containment, even including information I didn't previously know, such as the fact that “It is illegal to expose animal manufacturing / practices through photographic images or reporting in thirteen / states in the US.” In their Bookslut interview, Greenstreet addresses the issue of art and advocacy directly, asking:

Where do art and advocacy meet? I hear this question in all of your work and you address it directly in The Secret Of Milk...

This is such a huge consideration in my life, and for so many poets/artists I know. I spiral around it. Some days I feel so strongly that poetry, with all its ineffability and particularity, is perfectly suited to effect something like a paradigm shift. Other days it seems like we’re spilling out of a thimble into a sea of disinterested scrawl and sprawl and commerce. Then of course I don’t want to demand of the writing or making that it has to tackle, well, anything.

What is the balance between individual and society? I want to consider larger concerns, and yet I am not in a position to speak for others. I can only speak to things/ideas/issues and for/from myself, such as I am -- even if I’m working with all source material and thinking the author is dead. That’s not the whole story even when the work I’m sporting says it is. Besides, I need to value myself. Should I not do any of that publicly? Should I not make the poem of the slender stem in my hand because it doesn’t tackle oppression? Just a silly example, but I think resisting an economic or systemic or political or post-structuralist -- an ideological -- read/requirement of the poem can be a radical, er, ideology. I’m definitely not after solipsism. Then -- and here is more of the spiraling in action -- I’m all too easily of a mind where playing with syntax or fabric seems like the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Or, to switch vehicles, an ignorant neutrality on the moving train, which of course isn’t neutral at all, is it. If you’re “against theory” it’s really just because you haven’t looked at what’s underpinning your own work/status. More than that, though, doing nothing “beyond” the art to address the incredible inequities piling up on the planet also isn’t neutral. There are days when I get really mad at artists with their complicit and precious galleries and personas or theorists or writers who think because they’ve read Lacan or whoever that they are somehow avant or radical anything. What’s at stake? Even the installation artist. Or blog posts that say “but is it art?” -- they’re such bullshit.

And they’re not, right? Or at least not categorically. Critique is needed on all fronts, I know. Holding the space for conscious cultural/artistic creation is crucial, I know. Without theoretical considerations we’re sunk, I know. So this is some of what I’m tackling in The Secret of Milk. More specifically, can lyric language take on factory dairy farming? Should it?

Sin is to Celebration, Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz

Pastoral

in the arm pulsate the heart forming
a triangle against his palm; blue,
and a paneless window vacant
waiting for a seagull above his body

Finally out as a full-sized chapbook is the poetry collaboration Sin is to Celebration (arrow as aarow #8, House Press, 2009) by Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz, part of which I first saw in the House Press anthology string of small machines (2007). What makes a good collaboration? What makes one good text come through out of another? Cited as a project of erasure of A.E.T.’s Sinestro and Celebration (1956), as Ackerman writes in her brief introduction:

Erasure is not a wrestling match. Nor is it a fight over the most green and promising – or abandoned – turf. And although a lead pencil is a wheelbarrow, and is circular and diamond-cut, an eraser is not a knife, surgical implement, shovel, or up-rooter of any kind. Here, no bodies are being cut or raked apart, up, or into, and no hand is being cupped over the vessel of anybody’s mouth. So is the state of erasure idealized. And so is the idealized state of erasure. An ideal itself being, of course, that which is made by a broad heart: wholly meant, imperfect, obtainable and breathable. Which is to say, erasure idealized, and idealized erasure, is the location where destruction is creation, but rightly timed, with accurate allowances made for rest and regeneration.

For their collaboration, produced as part of a series published by House Press, I like the way the poems open up across the range and the field, moving further and further out, yet keeping an anchor, a thread working through the poems that somehow hold the collection together as a single unit; contained through the flutter of further.

Train

the specific
is a railroad train
on three legs carrying
men
hither
at tremendous speed

somebody keeps shifting
the train
crosses
in circles
a blind gopher
a carrot
a turnip patch
the specific

I like the ease through which the poems move, but would have preferred more of a mix, instead of working, it seemed, poems from the same texts grouped, to make the book as a whole stronger, and more of a weave, as opposed to the near-sectioned. Repeatedly working over the same text and the same ground until it can’t help but be made, remade and reformed, new and originally theirs, the echoes only come through sitting further apart.

Train

the specific
is a train
hopping along
on three legs
carrying
business men
hither
and
thither
at tremendous speed
but,
somebody keeps shifting
the rails
around
while the train
criss crosses itself
in circles
like a blind
carrot
in a turnip patch
the specific
carries
business men.

But this might be but a minor quibble. This is a strong collection, and much of the writing is impossible to distinguish between authors, although each make a strong case here and there for who it might be. But a good collaboration, still, refuses the individual, writing instead the imaginary third that exists between two, and this one, certainly, achieves. But the collection makes me wonder, who are these two authors, and why don’t they have any biographical information included? Have either of them ever published anything else, or do they only publish together?