12 or 20 (second series) questions with Bridget Huh

Bridget Huh is a queer Korean-Canadian poet from Toronto. She holds an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and her poems have appeared in The Walrus, Gulf Coast, The Margins and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award and has been recognized for awards in North American Review, Fugue Journal, and Palette Poetry. Her debut collection of poetry, Fugue Body, was published by Véhicule Press in 2025.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I had to learn how to stand behind my work. Publishing a book meant I had to change how I see my work, especially older work, which feels so easy to dismiss. I’m no longer the same poet who wrote the poems in Fugue Body (though it hasn’t been very long) but I’m trying to be tender towards my younger self who was new to poetry and hadn’t yet figured out what her concerns might be.

I met so many people in the writing of this book who believed in it. That’s obviously life-changing, to learn that my work might connect with both people I care deeply about and complete strangers.

I think my most recent work is very different from Fugue Body. It's more playful. A little weirder, I hope. And most importantly it’s gayer.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

A high school teacher introduced me to the work of queer poets like Kai Cheng Thom, Vivek Shraya, Leah Horlick, and Hieu Minh Nguyen, and I remember feeling so seen by the recommendation and their work. I wrote poetry throughout high school, but that was the first time I felt like my writing could have a kind of purpose, as a way to understand my identity and my relationship to whiteness and and heteronormativity. I came to poetry through reading other poets who were brave and vulnerable, who were honest about who they were and their experience in the world as marginalized. I had no idea you could do that.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I try to start as soon as an idea comes to me. I like riding the excitement of exploring a nascent project. I wouldn’t say I’m a fast writer, but I’m not particularly slow, either. I don’t self-edit as I write. My work rarely comes out of notes. If anything, the work is the notes.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I still don’t know exactly where poems begin for me. I think my poems begin in my experience of language, of being in between languages. The strangeness of being between languages or being stranded by language is always exciting to me.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings! I find them incredibly energizing. I also think the cadence of a poem is so reliant on the breath. Reading out loud, privately or publicly, brings out the musicality that poetry is always reaching back towards. Public readings also help me figure out who the audience for a particular poem is.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Can language repair? How can defamiliarizing language sharpen our attention to our lives and loves? What is the utility of nonsense?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

To pursue their own curiosities. To be present.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Working with an outside editor or reader has helped me become aware of my own intent much more quickly. I struggle to articulate my intent on my own, and I appreciate being pushed to develop it fully.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Open the shop, even if no one comes in.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a strict writing routine, but I usually write in the evenings.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

            I’ve been turning to other languages when I get stalled. In our workshop last year, we were asked to write three new poems a week, which I found difficult. I would often draft poems in Korean or Spanish and then translate them into English. I found the formal constraint of my poor vocabulary freeing, and it introduced an element of strangeness that I really enjoyed.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of parking garages.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music, always. I was obsessed with the Sibelius Violin Concerto and that formed a significant part of Fugue Body. I was also thinking about the fugue, the baroque musical form, as a model for the form of the title poem, where three different themes (music, race, desire) were threaded into each other at the site of the speaker’s body.

Recently, I’ve been working on an ekphrastic series looking at Caroline Monnet’s Pizandawatc. It’s such an exciting way to think about sound and speech and materiality.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

            The writers I will always return to for my work are Kim Hyesoon, Anne Carson, Marina Tsvetaeva, Christina Sharpe, and Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha.

My friends are so important for my work not only in their attention and insight but also in the hilarious things they say. I have at least three poems in my new manuscript that are built on things they said that I wanted to remember and noted down. (Shoutout Mai Mageed and Aishvarya Arora.) And my poetry cohort-mates, Gerardo Azpiri Iglesias, Ella Shively, and Sam Samakande, are so singularly talented and have helped my writing grow so much.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would love to publish a translation.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would attempt visual art. Whenever I watch my visual artist friends work, I’m jealous that they get to make something material and real. And so much more immediate, for the viewer.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Being aware of my relationship with language. And I love language as a material.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a new manuscript! I’m still figuring it out, but I’m excited to see where it’ll go.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Asa Boxer

Asa Boxer’s debut book, The Mechanical Bird (2007), won the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry, and his cycle of poems entitled “The Workshop” won first prize in the 2004 CBC Literary Awards. His poems and essays have since been anthologised in various collections and have appeared in magazines internationally. Boxer is also a founder of the Montreal International Poetry Prize. He presently edits The Secular Heretic, an online magazine for the arts and sciences. His latest book is The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book got me out there into the writer’s world. I won a couple of prizes and wound up at events and readings meeting a lot of people. That early success deceived me into believing poetry was a viable plan of some sort, that I could make a living at teaching and writing.

I took more time with my most recent book. The first one, The Mechanical Bird, was a strong book. I’m proud of it still. My second, Skullduggery, was rushed. There’s an expected schedule in CanLit, maybe in the Anglosphere, that you should have another book out every four years or so. That might be okay for short chapbooks, but I think a collection should take time—see what holds up over the years. This present collection, The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle, has poems going back as far as 2009 and as recent as 2020. I had strong guidance from Michael Harris and Eric Ormsby with the first book. Everything came together well, including the cover. Skullduggery wasn’t a bad book, but some of the poems were butchered in the editing process and there was no vision for the overall project—I mean other than my preoccupations, those themes to which I return: lies, technologies, love, bizarre paradigms, deep pain offset by humour.

The Narrow Cabinet feels different from the previous books in the way it holds together as an historical and psychological evolution from murderous exile out of Old Europe, through myths of origin like the “Iron Crow” that taught us “mental prying,” the impulse to adventure and risk with characters like geologist Chuck Fipke who speaks of “a readiness to trade / my shirt, trade my pants for dear life / and stand buck naked in the back-bush of New Guinea” (in contrast to our present safetyism) and our struggles with love and our inner lives, down into a sinkhole of corruption, disillusion and despair where we are “captured. . .among its shadows,” and finally into the zombie present of mass production of “soul resistant material” and globalist same-same. The book ends on a sort of positive note with a poem called “Four Quartets for Zombies,” an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and a poem that’s a kind of euphoric fusion and DJ inspired interleaving of snippets from other poets from Gerard Manly Hopkins to Leonard Cohen, with an eye on reconciling science with the mystical core of religion.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My father Avi Boxer was a poet in the 1950s-70s, so I come by it honestly—so goes the cliche. He was a student of Irving Layton’s, friends with A. M. Klein, Louis Dudek, Leonard Cohen, Milton Acorn, Seymour Mayne and others of that period. Poetry was a big deal in my household growing up because those days when my dad was active were truly inspiring, both in the US and Canada. Until the late 1960s, early 1970s it wasn’t unusual for poetry readings to net a crowd of 400 people.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The more I write, the closer initial forms have come to resemble final forms, but I always work a great deal on the language and form. I can’t say “projects” work out too well. For poetry to work, for lateral thinking to truly have its way, it’s a bad idea to define a project ahead of the writing. There are many kinds of poems of course, but the ones that really endure, that retain their relevance are not project-driven. Every age and period requires its own approach and sometimes it’s good to have something urgent to say. But then there are those poems that evade capture or are captured and recaptured and find new meanings like pure lumps of the world, poems that have no obvious tenor, like Blake’s “The Sick Rose” or Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” or Ted Hughes’s “Pike” or anything by Hopkins. No doubt we are most drawn to urgent messages and well stated conclusions, but the best stuff manages to reach beyond itself or beyond the poet’s preconceptions. Surprising insights emerge from that creative impulse of repurposing and revitalizing old hat and dead metaphor. That said, working with themes and writing a sequence often yields a few good poems, like studies in painting that result in breakthroughs.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I think the answer above covers this question. All I’d add is that once a collection of generally short pieces seems to come together, I will often feel inspired to round off the book with some poems that draw the whole together.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes. I enjoy public readings. I write with an audience in mind. By and large the work I do is performative and aims at holding the attention of my listeners. I’m not sure what the point of writing would be if it were not aware of its need to appeal and tickle the ears of an audience. I mean it has to strike an audience as relatable and hopefully do some entertaining.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think poetry like all art is a shamanistic practice that works to connect us to the world, to reconcile our outer and inner existence (as Ted Hughes put it in his essay “Myth and Education”). The great challenge of our times is that we are disconnected and can’t tell the difference between our imaginings, our impositions upon the material world, and the material world itself. Likewise we have no idea when we’re dealing with our emotional life, and when we’re being detached and objective or what we feel is scientific. In other words we’re in the grips of a dangerously irrational  mentality that couches its claims in rational terms. The smart phone is a fine example. We mediate experience via a flattened, Euclidean screen, losing all dimensionality, and believe we’ve captured more and shared more by posting an image of a meal than by telling a friend about it in person. By posting we reach more people, but we sacrifice the human connection we would have by telling a single person and connecting on an individual and authentic level. We thereby lose touch with experience, with true sharing, with true joy. . . and life turns into this pseudo-experience emptied of quality. We quantify qualities like happiness as though a % makes our experience more real. But in fact the more we operate this way, the further we stray from reality, the more abstract life becomes, the less we make contact with ourselves, the less touch we have with our actual experiences, and this spills over into how we respond to others, to their ideas, their loves and hates. We hear talk a lot these days about “social constructs” but there seems little understanding of what that might actually be, never mind how we ought to deal with it. At the moment the idea is that one group should be able to impose its construct on another. That’s not working out too well. I mean it’s the same old barbarism as colonialism and wars of religion but with a new excuse.

There’s this bizarre materialism at work that leads folks to believe they can change themselves outwardly like a hair colour, and that this will in fact represent true character or represent true self-realization and fulfilment. A humorous observation is the weather forecast: what’s 15% chance of rain compared to 28%? I mean who actually reads that and thinks it means anything other than “maybe.” We live in this world full of illusions that we’re being practical and scientific because we put this funny looking symbol (%) next to a number, when all we’re doing is fooling ourselves. That’s the humorous side; but there’s a profound issue here, and it’s how we rely on essentially unreliable technologies to tell us what to do. How many times have you decided against making plans because of the weather forecast, only to find that on the day-of the weather is beautiful? When it comes to the weather for a given day, we can learn to assess for ourselves and likely be at least as accurate as the forecast. But most of us surrender our instincts because these technologies and our present day science demand such a surrender. And we lose trust in ourselves, or worse never develop trust in ourselves, awaiting the commands of authorities. This sort of behaviour always signals the collapse of an historical period.

So art needs to intervene like a naked avadhuta and make everyone stop while it does the dance of reconciliation with its stories, its re-presentations, its cannibalising and reimaginings. But most of all for our moment, it needs to directly challenge the oppressive strategies at work in our society; the bourgeois safetyism, Lululemon outrage, Twitter twaddle, shallow, white-shoe identity/. If art isn’t actively offending shallow materialism and cheap politics, if instead it’s a voice for that, its just cosmetics and propaganda and has no claim to being art. Poetry offers a path to the Tree of Life instead of to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; the latter leads to death, to finger-pointing recrimination and expulsion from the concerns of the heart-life, while the former reminds us of who we are, where our hearts lie, how alike we all truly are in our struggles, how we might relate to the inert and the animate worlds, how reconcile the subject to the object in an I/Thou relationship. . .  and in its best moments, a poem of value elicits a meaningful chill, a kicking up of the feet along with a deep breath, restoring us, returning us to our true selves and to a state of harmony.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I definitely covered this above…

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Editors are essential. But beware. Not all editors are suited to all poets. There has to be a familiarity with the poet’s work at some level or it’ll wind up being superficial (which isn’t necessarily all that bad) or at worst, an imposition. At best an editor is a sympathetic reader who will take the time to grasp the poet’s vision (if there is one) and base edits on that understanding. I feel there’s something deeper going on in this question, a kind of advice to poets that I’m not quite sure how to give. Early careers require more input from the right sort of mentors, while those who feel they’ve got their craft sorted out, require less meddling.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Advice to a poet? Write what you want to read. Make sure the first line is memorable.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m philosophically inclined, so writing critically is essential to my process. I used to write poetry criticism, but feel I outgrew that once I’d decided what I liked and why and what I disliked and why. Now I’m more focused on writing about those philosophical issues that strike me as most urgent: things like brainwashing, cultural and social pressures, and metaphysical concerns.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Wake up at 5-5:30. Have a coffee and start a project or reread something and do some editing. Get in a vigorous workout around 7:30 if I haven’t been sucked into something entirely. And then see whether it’s more writing or working at something that pays the bills or running errands or whatever is next on the priority list.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Physical labour and crafts are therapeutic. There’s nothing better than doing landscape work, home renos, DIY projects. I love bookbinding, so I’ll do that as well to clear my head. Nature walks. Camping. Fishing. Travel. I have to put my mind elsewhere entirely and let all the mental work go. Lateral thinking and poetry come from being, working and relating in the material world, so it’s essential to get away from abstractions and anchor oneself in the demands of life.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The chlorophyl odour of freshly cut salad or juiced greens or similar mixed with clay and dust (a dash of dogwood maybe) along a country road. And there’s the odour of freshly sawed wood in a workshop or lumber yard or house being built or renovated.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Relationships and the interplay with how I enjoy or detest my experiences. Good food is great alone, but how much more enjoyable when shared with others? I have some musical friends and when music gets played and you have that good food thing going—hard to imagine life getting much better. I’m equally stimulated by scientific and philosophical ideas, but usually this too is best enjoyed when I can share ideas with receptive folk. Nature is recurrent in poetry and represents a grounding for me. Goethe had this idea of “active seeing” which I associate with Hopkins’s “inscape”—the idea of connecting with objects and living things to the point of almost becoming them, a process of communing, you might call it. I’ll take inspiration from anywhere I can get it.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a big fan of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis. Also love Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard Cohen, David Solway, Eric Ormsby and Michael Harris. I’m just spewing here. I read a lot, and I like junky detective stuff too. Raymond Chandler is fun. I read works on the Kabbalah and the occult. Gary Lachman has written some great books on all kinds of topics and persons deemed “occult.” I’m a fan of William James. Enjoyed neuro-imaging specialist Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary a critique of western civilization from the perspective of right-brain / left-brain forms of thought and behaviour. David Berlinski’s critiques of New Atheism and Darwinism are fascinating. Henri Bergson’s works continue to captivate me. There’s a great book by Bergson-scholar and AI developer Stephen Robbins called Time and Memory which puts together a pretty impressive picture of how conscious perception works. I’ve recently returned to Jeffery Donaldson’s Missing Link, which I think is a wonderfully poetic take on the evolution of consciousness. I’m pretty voracious. Richard Holmes—the Coleridge biographer—has written some great historical books like The Age of Wonder, which explores the connection between the emergence of present day science and the Romantic movement. Presently I’m reading William Least Heat Moon’s 1982 travel novel Blue Highways, full of great stories from American small towns as they were when he visited after losing his job during that great depression period. The list goes on: I suppose I ought to mention Northrop Frye as an influence, and The Rattle Bag, edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney as a favourite poetry anthology. Love the way that book is organised alphabetically according to title rather than author, giving more prominence to the poem than the writer. I’d say all these books and writers are “important” insofar as they do in fact impact my sensibility in some way or other and likely find their ways into my writing.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Sometimes I think skydiving or hang-gliding. There are some travels I have in mind. Hard to say. Time travel would be neat.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would have been an astrophysicist or archaeologist, maybe an engineer. These are my areas of interest aside from history and literature.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I suppose it was my dad’s early death when I was 13. It was also bad science teachers at college. I would have pursued that avenue had the teachers not been truly vacuous, empty-headed technician types who saw it as their duty to turn out more sleepwalkers like themselves. There was literally zero substance to their curriculum. I needed more.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Great is a tall order. Was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Never saw the film. I’m just not into murder. But this was a damn good book. Picked it up at a book fair for three bucks and it was a first edition. So I started flipping through and couldn’t put it down. The complete prose works of Edgar Allan Poe was stylistically great. Ted Hughes’s translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus was great. William James’s collection of essays The Will to Believe was truly great. Only got to those in the past few years. Now I’m listing too many and I’ve already covered a bunch above.

Last great film? Again a tall order. Pig with Nick Cage (weirdly) was damn good, maybe great. The Joker might have been great. I certainly left the theatre feeling that way.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve got another collection of poems. Maybe I’ll call it Don’t Be that Way. In many ways it’s a continuation of my themes but I’m always looking to achieve new effects, to touch readers in ways I haven’t managed before, find new avenues into the creative zone, to express that vital impulse. I’m also working on a prose book—a cultural critique—maybe I’ll call it Science Misbehaving, or Science as Bad Religion. I’m not too happy with the clericalism affecting the sciences today. Every field other than engineering is soft with dry rot if you pick at the facade. I can’t believe we live in a world that believes in dark matter, dark energy, wavicles and settled science. I think we’re in a dark age of institutionalised science posing as The Science. There’s a quotation from William James I keep disseminating at every opportunity:

“I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.”

I think everyone needs to hear that. The idea that the science is settled is so harmful to us culturally, I can’t begin here to explain exactly how, but it leads to nihilism (or worse—just thoughtlessness), suicide, or death wish upon others (who are destroying the planet for instance), a deep apathy among some, and for those who nonetheless display empathy, an inability to manage human suffering, let alone understand it. The idea is that we can just medicate, get a new body, or obtain assisted suicide and check out. Oh, and we can’t talk about it because the science is settled.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jim Johnstone, Infinity Network

 

Two Sleep Through

the night, the lowering
balloon that stills
the chop and spill
of the lake, one awake,
or awake enough
in dream to follow
the stink of a fox
through the trees,
two asleep where the last
of a bonfire burns
the beach, balloons
into thought
without articulation,
without speech,
one awake, brightening
behind the bathroom
door while the other
waits, listens to the tap
foam foam foaming
at the mouth, white noise
drowning out the fox,
the fire, the balloon
inflating until it pops.

Toronto poet, editor and publisher Jim Johnstone’s sixth full-length poetry title is Infinity Network (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2022), a book that works to articulate elements of violence that ripple beneath the skin of culture; the ways in which infinity turns on itself and consumes its own tail, writing the ouroboros of deleted scenes, dehumanizing corporate culture and the echo chambers of social media, amid strains of isolation, self-harm and truthiness. “The problem is permission,” he writes, to open the poem “Trompe L’Oeil,” “and I told you / I don’t like to be touched. // The problem is / self-harm— // knuckles aligned to read: / HATE / LOVE.”

There are ways in which I hear echoes of Halifax poet Matt Robinson’s work [see my review of his latest here] in Johnstone’s poems, as though the two are sides of a similar coin, akin to a period of the 1960s, when John Newlove and Patrick Lane were crafting lyrics that held similar counter-echoes—a roughneck, intellectual lyric that saw Newlove leaning further into the intellectual, and Lane leaning further into the roughneck, and the conversational. Both Johnstone and Robinson, it would appear, craft portraits of inhabited space—of communal, community and individual narratives—carving their individual poems articulating intimate thinking, cultural moods and dark impulses. Leaning more meditational than Robinson’s physicality, Johnstone offers a collection of poems on how we relate to each other. “If you cut / through my line of sight,” he writes, as part of “Speaking Distance,” a poem subtitled “Queen’s Park, Toronto,” “the pages between us will fall / like artillery, like the spears that frame the southern wall / of the Assembly.”

There are long threads being composed by Johnstone through this collection, with his individual pieces and longer stretches feeling akin to a narrative shorthand, able to see the trees for the forest, but also the larger picture of how each of these different elements cohere into something larger, connecting the world to all that live within it. “Sober again. Don’t listen to me,” he writes, as part of the fifth in the ten-poem sequence “Deleted Scenes,” “in this state. // Conscious enough to develop / fever, blister from sheer depravity.” He writes as a pragmatist, or even an optimist, but one who aims to shine a light in dark places. Or, as he writes to end the poem “Identity as a Wormhole in a Hotel Window,” “One day everyone / who rents a room in this town will be different.”

CrossCountry – a magazine of Canadian-U.S. poetry/CrossCountry Press (1975-1983): bibliography, and an interview

this interview was conducted over email from November 2021 to January 2022 as part of a project to document literary publishing. see my bibliography-in-progress of Canadian literary publications, past and present here

Jim Mele is a journalist and writer living in Connecticut.  He was co-editor of CrossCountry, a Canadian/US literary magazine and publisher, and also served as general manager of the New York State Small Press Assn., a non-profit created to distribute literary and artistic publications. He has traveled broadly both as a journalist and as a curious private citizen. His journalism has been recognized with numerous awards including three Neal Awards for op-ed commentary, and has published four collections of poetry and a critical study of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction. He holds a BA in English from Stony Brook University and an MA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York.

Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. For thirty-three years he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Maine. His latest poetry title is South China Sea: A Poet's Autobiography (Guernica Editions, 2021), and he’s published nine chapbooks with above/ground press, including three in 2021. He currently resides in Toronto.

Q: How did CrossCountry first begin?

Jim Melé: Ken and I met as freshmen at Stony Brook University on Long Island about 60 miles outside of New York City. We remained close all four years, even hitchhiking across the country to California one summer and sharing a house in our last year.  We also both discovered a passion for poetry at Stony Brook although through slightly different paths. Ken found his enthusiasm through the classes of Louis Simpson, a Pulitzer winning poet and Yeats scholar, and me though a younger lecturer named George Quasha. But for both of us poetry was an exciting world.

When we graduated in 1972, Ken moved back to NYC to pursue music with a band and I went on to the creative writing program at the City College of NY, studying with the beat poet Joel Oppenheimer. By 1974, I’d moved on to my first job on a strange newspaper for merchant seamen and Ken had taken off for Montreal to study at Concordia and then McGill. Poetry still consumed us, and we began an active correspondence.

For me, I was beginning to read and then meet many of the young non-academic poets that filled NYC bars and other venues as well as discover the non-traditional poets that inspired them, poets like Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, William Bronk, Ted Berrigan. And Ken was quickly finding his cohorts in the young Montreal poets like Artie Gold and Endre Farkas, as well as other Canadians like bp nichol and George Bowering.  Few of the Canadian poets were being read in the US, and most of the Canadian ones were somewhat removed from the active young poetry scene I was finding in NY. To Ken and me it felt like there were unnecessary parochial boundaries dividing two vibrant poetry cultures along meaningless national lines. Naïve on our parts, yes, but also true to a large extent.

And that’s how Cross Country started. We decided there was room for another small magazine that presented Canadian and US poets on a single stage.  The hope was to introduce both groups to broader audiences. We published the first issue in 1975.

Q: How did you get the word out for that first issue? Was all the work within solicited? Did you send out a call? And, given you were working with systems on both sides of the border, how were issues distributed?

Ken Norris: I THINK I was still in New York as we started to put the first issue together. I must have sent a letter to George Bowering, because he’s in the first issue (I think). And the Davinci chapbook poets are in it (Ezzy, Farkas, Ferrier, Lapp). I wrote an essay about Atwood. I’m pretty sure all the work was solicited, and that would have been by mail. I think there were distribution networks on both sides of the border to plug into. We recruited institutional/library subscriptions, and got about 100 of them, I believe.

JM: Yes, all the work was solicited.  Ken and I simply wrote letters to poets we admired and told them that we were starting this US/Canadian small magazine, and most sent us contributions. We ended up with a really diverse mix, probably the most diverse in the entire course of the magazine.  Besides Bowering and the Davinci group, it included Robert Kelly, Eve Merriam, Muriel Rukeyser, Tom Konyves, Phillip Lopate, William Bronk among others.  Established poets who had no idea who we were were incredibly generous.

Distribution was a problem, as it was and is for almost all small magazines. I took the magazine around to all the bookstores in NY that I knew. The important literary independents like the Gotham and St. Marks were open to taking a few, but also a number of others did as well, if with a bit of reluctance. The big boost came from library subscriptions, which we solicited by direct mail using some lists we managed to scrape up.  And we did the same with review copies, which began to bring us some individual subscriptions and submissions. I believe we also listed the magazine with some of the writers’ resource publications. 

Q: You both mention “the Davinci group.” Could you explain this reference? It isn’t one I’m aware of.

KN: Eldorado Editions. Four chapbooks came out in 1974, by Tom Ezzy, Endre Farkas, Ian Ferrier, and Claudia Lapp. Not that much was going on in Montreal, publishing-wise, at that time, so these were a big deal. I think they were an offshoot of Davinci magazine, which was edited by Allan Bealy.

Q: What kinds of response did you receive for those first few issues? Were there any responses you weren’t expecting, whether in terms of straight response, or even potential submissions?

JM: I don’t have any specific memories, but after the first issue we started attracting a large volume of unsolicited submissions at the US address.  And if I remember correctly, Ken had the same response in Canada. Subscriptions and single-issue sales were much slower building.

The second issue, published in the Summer 1975, represented a big step forward in my mind.  On a superficial level, the production quality was much improved over No. 1, which had been typeset on an IBM electric typewriter and printed on remanent paper stock.  More importantly, it was entirely work Ken and I had solicited personally and reflected the poetry that was exciting us. For my part, the poets I approached were enthusiastic about the idea behind establishing a Canadian/US poetry platform.

The next issue pushed things to an entirely new level.  It was focused solely on Montreal and was largely Ken’s baby, so I’ll let him talk about it.  But I do remember that we doubled the print run from our usual 500 copies and even so it was the first issue to sell out. Also by that time was I was involved in the New York Small Press Fair, an annual event that drew nearly 100 small literary presses as exhibitors and large crowds. Our Montreal issue attracted a lot of attention, selling every copy we’d brought to an audience we’d never have reached relying only on direct mail and limited bookstore sales.

KN: We’d get in trouble with poets like Robin Mathews soon enough. Some “Canadian nationalists” didn’t like what we were up to.

The Montreal issue (#3/4) was a lot of fun to put together. We built a bridge to the les herbes rouges poets—so there were ten Quebecois poets in the Montreal issue, including Claude Beausoleil, Yolande Villemaire and Nicole Brossard. The Vehicule poets would continue to collaborate with les herbes rouges poets for years.

Right from the get-go, I asked a lot of Canadian poets for poems, and they rarely refused. I remember the time I asked Al Purdy to send me a few poems, and he sent me the entire manuscript of Piling Blood. He told me to take the ones that I really liked. Frank Scott invited me over to his house and we dug up a couple of unpublished poems. In the Montreal issue we published a section of John Glassco’s long poem Montreal. Interesting things happened with just about every issue.

Q: The basic argument for the journal, as I’ve always understood it, is simply poets from either side of the border engaged in a larger conversation with each other. How could anyone have a problem with that? I suppose the next question to ask: prior to this, how easily was writing travelling across the border? How easy or difficult was it for someone in either country during those days to purchase a book from a poet in the other country?

JM: On a personal level poets on either side of the border would trade books with each other, but Canadian poets were largely unavailable in bookstores unless like Leonard Cohen they also had a US publisher. And I believe it was the same in Canada, at least for any poet not with a major commercial publisher. I think the interest was there, but there were practical barriers that went beyond unfamiliarity.  Sending even a single box of books across the border into Canada or into the US was an expensive, long and complex process that required paying duties and hiring a customs broker to handle all the paperwork.  If you didn’t follow the rules, it was likely the shipment would be seized. That happened to us with Lionel Kearns’ Ignoring the Bomb. Ken sent me a box of copies to distribute that never emerged from US Customs.  Literary presses in the 1970s and 80s just didn’t have the resources or experience to navigate customs. The one exception might have been Coach House since I do remember seeing their titles in a few major NYC literary bookstores.  For the most part we relied on my car trips to Montreal to bring CrossCountry across the border.

KN: Those were different days. Xenophobia could masquerade as nationalism. Lionel's book got seized because they thought it was anti-nuclear propaganda. Weird things happened sometimes.

Globalization changed all that. We wound up being on the right side of history.

JM: In Lionel’s case that was probably true, but the legal correspondence with US Customs and the proposed bills from customs brokers as well as warehousing bills were awe inspiring.  The big publishers on both sides supported and promoted those trade barriers as business strategies.  No exceptions for small literary publications unless they were small enough to slip under the regulatory gaze.

Q: You mention Eldorado Editions. What other publishers or publications were around during those days? What publications did you see CrossCountry in conversation with, if any?

KN: I was an editor at CrossCountry and CrossCountry Press while also being one of the poetry editors (along with Endre Farkas and Artie Gold) at Vehicule Press. So there was that.

In a time of Canadian nationalism, we kind of stood out. I think there was a magazine called New that was also publishing Canadian and U.S. poetry. And I always had a soft spot for Unmuzzled Ox. And I liked what 52 PIck-Up was doing. And, of course, Coach House.

At that time I was also the Quebec regional rep of CVII.

Through Artie we came into contact with Geoffrey Young and The Figures. I became a big fan of Stephen Rodefer’s poetry. And we had a bird’s eye view of the language poetry scene, which we liked and didn’t like.

I can’t remember if we published any poetry by Stephen Rodefer and Lyn Hejinian in CrossCountry. I certainly wanted to.

JM: NY was swarming with literary presses in the 1970s and 80s, and CrossCountry was in the mix through things like the NY Small Press Assoc and the Small Press Book Fair.  But there was little Canadian content beyond what we were publishing.  We did have loose connections with Unmuzzled Ox, publishing a chapbook by its editor Michael Andre and a collection by Larry Zirlin, one of the editors at SOME/Release Press.

Q: What moved you into publishing chapbooks and books as an extension of the journal?

KN: Grant money. We were eligible for National Endowment of the Arts grants.

But the first two chapbooks were one of mine and one of Jim's. We were able to get them printed cheap, so why not do them? Under The Skin was my second publication, after Vegetables.

JM: As Ken said, we became eligible for grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Arts Council.  And a production/printing organization subsidized by the NY council was created to help support literary and arts publishers, which gave us access to typesetting facilities and low cost quality printing, so we started expanding into chapbooks first and then full-length books to complement the magazine.  We eventually published 15 books along with 16 issues of CrossCountry.

Q: It is one thing to run a journal with a border between you, but how was it running a publishing house? I know of at least one book that disappeared through the mail. What were the difficulties in attempting to produce chapbooks and books?

KN: As I remember it, most of the CrossCountry Press titles were produced in the States. So there really wasn't a border between us. The funding for the books was in the States, and the book production was in the States. There were a few exceptions. Artie’s some of the cat poems and John McAuley's Hazardous Renaissance and Mattress Testing were printed at Vehicule. I remember typesetting some of the cat poems AT Vehicule. 

Ignoring The Bomb was a co-publish with Oolichan. They had the title in Canada and we had it in the U.S. Oolichan produced the book.

All the rest of the titles were produced in the States, with Jim overseeing their production.

So, at the time, I felt like book publishing was working like a dream. But I wasn't doing most of the work. Jim was doing most of the work.

JM: Yes, most of the resources – money and physical production capability – were in the US so that’s where most of the books were produced.  The major hurdle wasn’t the border – it was distribution in both countries.  The book distribution business was set up to accommodate large publishers with sales, promotion and fulfillment staff.  Unless they were really committed to giving visibility to small literary presses, bookstores didn’t have the resources or will to deal with them.  And to be truthful most of us running small presses didn’t have the experience or will to address that side of publishing.  So we had to rely on direct sales to libraries and interested individuals that managed to find us.  We had a few successful titles – the Baudelaire essays and McFadden’s chapbook The Saladmaker were two I recall offhand, but for the most part even the good reviews many of our titles got were not enough to attract the audiences they deserved.

Around 1981 I began working part-time as the general manager of the NY State Small Press Association, which was created with public and private grants specifically to distribute literary and art books.  At its peak it had titles in stock from well over 100 presses.  But it never evolved into an operation that could stand on its own and compete with major publishers, so once the grants ran out it faded away.  That’s also when Ken and I moved on from CrossCountry to other projects.

Q: Did either of you notice a difference in response to books from either side of the border? A couple of years back, Jay MillAr at Book*hug mentioned a stretch of time when the books they published by American writers did well in the United States, but not in Canada, and the books they published by Canadian writers did well in Canada, but not in the United States, despite their entire catalogue having equal distribution and marketing in both countries. Had you a version of the same?

JM: Pretty much.  Among the Canadian titles, Artie Gold’s cat poems and David McFadden’s three attracted the most interest from US readers.  And when we participated in US book fairs, there seemed to be a lot of curiosity about both the magazine and the Canadian authors.

KN: Hmm. I think I would say No. We were small press. Responses to small press tend to be quirky. Individuals on either side of the border would chance upon a title and register a response to it. We weren't being swept up in large-scale cultural trends.

Forty-three people across North America would discover and respond to David McFadden's A New Romance. We were really presenting a North American argument. At that time, we were trying to dissolve the differences between U.S. and Canadian poetry.

The Tish poets and the Coach House poets made the most sense to me of the poets in Canada, and they were cut more from North American cloth rather than from Canadian cloth.

Readers. My old friend Burt Hatlen used to say that we have more readers than we think we do. Poetry circulates in a really unusual fashion. I think borders and nationalities tend to be meaningless, and these days I think we concede that every poet establishes their own tradition that has nothing to do with nation-states. But the most influential poet in my life since I was seventeen is the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. And after him it's probably Lorca. I'm a Canadian poet who reads a lot of Canadian poetry, but it isn't all that I read, and the local isn't maybe even all that important much of the time.

CrossCountry was an invitation to discuss how poetic tradition works. Again, I would say that we were making an argument for North American poetry, and in a way that American poetry doesn't subsume Canadian poetry. We were interested in a mode of presentation in which Robert Creeley and George Bowering, say, would be seen as equals.

JM: That was certainly our intention with CrossCountry, magazine and books both.

Q: What prompted your movement into special issues, whether the postcard issue, the detective issue or the “New Romantics” issue?

KN: The first special issue was the Montreal issue (#3/4). We got a grant to do that one.

The Postcard issue gave me a chance to work with the designers at Dreadnaught Press. Coach House specialized in “visual arts” postcards, and there were some other poetry postcards making the rounds.

The Postcard issue was 20 postcards, 10 Americans and 10 Canadians. Margaret Atwood sent us a poem for that one, George, David McFadden. The Vehicules got into the mix: Artie, Tom, Endre, myself. I think there was a William Bronk poem. Jim and I were BIG fans of William Bronk.

The postcards got a lot of use. Back then, a writer’s life took place in the mail. It was all letters, submissions, acceptances and rejections. The postman was my favorite person.

JN: The detective issue was just fun. I was reading a lot of pulp noir from the 1930s and 40s (with enthusiastic prompting from Artie Gold) and other poets responded to the proposal so we commissioned an art director I knew to create a pulp cover and deco initial caps, and we were off.

The New Romantics was a response to a trend we saw among the poets we admired, a modern take on the romantic movement of the 19th century and a reaction to the abstract, cerebral work that predominated the academic journals.

Q: Your Montreal issue included a section of poems composed in French, with a French-language editor on the masthead, alongside a selection of poems composed in English. What were the interactions between the English-language and French-language poets in the city at that time? How was the issue received?

KN: The collaboration with the editors of les herbes rouges was a one time event. But it established that my crowd, the Vehicule Poets, was interested in working with their crowd. Claude Beausoleil, one of the poets in the Montreal issue, went on to be the French “editor” of the poetry on the buses project. With Lucien Francoeur and Claudine Bertrand, Endre Farkas and Ruth Taylor and I edited Montreal Now, a mag/reading series in the mid-1980s. In the early eighties, Michel Beaulieu and I used to go out for a weekly lunch in Chinatown, to discuss what was going on in poetry in the entire city. Michel took me to vernissages, where I had the opportunity to talk with poets like Gaston Miron and Nicole Brossard. I was very interested in the Quebecois scene.

Our generation of Montreal Anglo poets probably had more contact with our Quebecois peers than Klein’s generation did, or Dudek’s generation did. A number of the Vehicule poets had books that were translated into French. And most of the les herbes rouges poets had books appear in English.

JM: This was really Ken’s project so I don’t have much to add. We talked a bit about it being impossible to do something that claimed to capture poetry in Montreal without participation by Québécois poets. But we also recognized why some might not want to be included in an Anglophone magazine no matter how good our intentions. Ken did a great job of handling that conundrum.

Q: Tell me about the les herbes rouges poets! I know absolutely nothing about them.

KN: At the time (mid-70s) they were the young avant garde, like we were. The Hebert brothers (editors) also included Nicole Brossard in their selection. There are books translated into English by Claude Beausoleil, Yolande Villemaire, Andre Roy and Francois Charron. I think also by Philippe Haeck and Roger Des Roches. They’re all old now, like we are. Claude passed away recently. Guernica Editions published quite a number of translations of their work. As you know, many of Nicole Brossard’s books have been translated into English.

Q: In hindsight, what do you see as the takeaway from your time together doing CrossCountry? What do you feel the journal and press most accomplished, or made possible?

KN: Jim and I were friends at university (SUNY at Stony Brook) and we were also poetry friends. So, CrossCountry gave us a way of making our enthusiasms real. Running CrossCountry, the magazine, gave us a way of proselytizing for the poetry that we loved; it also got our names out there, as editors and as poets. So, there was a bit of career-building.

And running the press REALLY gave us a way of getting behind the poetry that we loved.

It’s hard to explain how “insular” Canadian literature could be back in the early seventies. I think we let in a lot of fresh air, and also backed up the Tish poets and the Coach House poets in seeing American poetry as a valid influence upon Canadian poetry. Robin Mathews chastised Raymond Souster and me for cultivating American influences. I thought that was really stupid at the time, but his line of argument got some traction among the nationalists.

JM: At the time US poetry was exploding (in a relative way) beyond the traditional voices as small presses began aggressively popularizing a much broader and more diverse perspective on what poetry could be. For the most part Canadian poetry was not part of that new mix, maybe because there were so many new voices competing to be heard.  Opening a venue in the US for the vibrant new poetry scene growing in Canada was exciting. And consciously choosing to downplay, if not ignore, nationalistic claims to relevance was both our reason for creating CrossCountry and what in the end I consider our real achievement.

Q: What was behind the decision to end the journal and press? Were the two shuttered simultaneously? Was it really just a matter of the two of you wishing to move on to other projects?

KN: Things were winding down around 1983 or 1984. By 1985, I was moving back to the U.S., to teach Canadian Literature at the University of Maine. That put us both on the same side of the border.

The magazine ran sixteen issues. Those that make it past twenty usually make it to a hundred. We didn't have that kind of energy.

And the press had made its statement, with twenty-something titles. We wound up not being in it for the long haul. I edited at Vehicule Press for six years and at CrossCountry Press for eight. In 1984, Leonard Cohen suggested to me that I focus on my own work, and when he said that I was ready to hear it.

JM: As Ken said, it wound down slowly over a few years.  He’d moved from Montreal to Maine, and I’d moved from New York to Connecticut. I’d also taken on a new job at a business magazine that proved highly immersive and more than full time. And I was a new parent.

We’d had a good run with both the magazine and press, and it was time to make room in our lives for the next stages.

 

CrossCountry – a magazine of Canadian-U.S. poetry bibliography:

No. 1. Winter 1975. Editors: Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Contributing Editor: Robert Galvin. Poems by Terry Stokes, Tom Konyves, Mary Morris, Carmen Vigil, Frederick Feirstein, Robert Kelly, Jim Mele, Thomas Danisi, Eve Merriam, George Bowering, Marguerite Harris, John Hollander, Ken Norris, Phillip Lopate, Robert Galvin, William Bronk, David Lehman, Richard Elman, Muriel Rukeyser, Claudia Lapp, Ian Ferrier, Tom Ezzy and Andre Farkas. SURVIVAL IN THE WRITINGS OF MARGARET ATWOOD by Ken Norris. Art Work: Debbie Creamer, Ruth Bauman and Simona Oelbaum.

No. 2. Summer 1975. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Poems by Barbara Holland, David McFadden, Artie gold, Janet Marcus, Ken Norris, Jim Mele, Dan Gabriel, richard sommer, Matt Tolland, Robert Galvin, George Jonas, Alden Nowlan, George Woodcock, Claudia Lapp, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Souster, Kathleen Chodor, Fraser Sutherland, Len Gasparini, Monica Raymond, John Robert Columbo, Janet Sternburg, David Bromige and Terry Stokes. Review: Jim Mele on Terry Stokes. Artwork: Debbie Creamer, Allan Bealy, Ken Gugliolmo, Paul Adam and Bill Luddy.

No. 3/4. 1975. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Editeur français: Marcel Hébert. Editorial Assistants: Tom Konyves, Jill Martinez. Art Direction: Faigy Fudem. Layout & Typesetting: Si Dardick, Guy Lavoie. Special Issue: Montréal. Poèmes en français: Claude Beausoleil, Yolande Villemaire, Renaud Longchamps, André Beaudet, Normand De Bellefeuille, Phillippe Haeck, André Roy, François Charron, Roger Des Roches and Nicole Brossard. Poems in English: Stephen Morrissey, David Skyrie, D.G. Jones, Artie Gold, Morgana Fair, Tom Konyves, John McAuley, Matt Tolland, Claudia Lapp, Gary Livingston, Gertrude Katz, Louis Dudek, Andre Farkas, Richard Carson, Martin Newman, R.G. Everson, Richard Sommer, Carol H. Leckner, Shulamis Yelin, Ken Norris, Tom Ezzy and John Glassco. Reviews: Joanne Harris Burgess on Hutchman, Glassco, Gordy, & Sutherland; Michael Springate on Yelin, Thornton, Leckner, & Katz; Carol H. Leckner on Metcalf, Woods, & Kent; Tom Konyves on Gold, Burgess, Solway, Van Toorn, & Plourde; Ari Snyder on Ferrier, Farkas, Ezzy, Lapp, Norris, & McGee. Art Work by Daniel Pearce, André Desjardins, Jill Smith and Allan Bealy.

No. 5. 1976. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Poems and prose by George Bowering (a serial poem, an interview, a review), David Ignatow, Ralph Gustafson, Peter Cooley, Opal L. Nations, ken Norris, David McFadden, William Bronk, Louis Dudek on Ezra Pound, Terry Stokes, Rochelle Ramer, Richard Elman, D.W. Donzella, Jim Mele, Artie Gold & Goeff Young, Barbara Holland and J. Michael yates. Reviews: John McAuley on Seymour Mayne, Jim Mele on William Bronk & Peter Cooley, Tom Konyves on J.B. Thornton McLeod. Short Reviews & Excerpts. Graphics by Debbie Creamer, Leavenworth Jackson and Bill Luddy. Cover photo by Scott Bowron.

No. 6/7. 1977. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. A Special Reprint Issue. The Lady Poems, by Terry Stokes. The Saladmaker, by David McFadden.

No. 8/9. 1977. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Poems and prose by Steve McCaffery, Colette Inez, Jared Smith, Morgan W. Nyberg, David McFadden, Jean Berrett, Artie Gold, Al Purdy, Shulamis Yelin, Opal L. Nations, Anne McLean, Lionel Kearns, Arthur Stone, Constance de Jong, Wilbur Snowshoe, Tom Konyves, F.R. Scott, Earle Birney, Murphre Roos, George Bowering, Patrick Lane, Andrew Suknaski, Vladimir Banjo, Jim Mele, Rochelle Ratner, Ken Norris and bpNichol. An interview with bp Nichol by Jack David & Caroline Bayard. Reviews: Colin Morton on John Pass & Brian Brett; Ken Norris on Tish; Elliot S. Glass on poetry in the Barrio and Pedro Pietri.

No. 10/11. 1978. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Murder, Mystery and Poetry – A Special Detective Issue. Contents: “The Black Mountain Influence,” George Bowering; “IF They Hang You,” Murphre Roos; “Danger Came on Rainwet Streets,” Eugene McNamara; “A Reading of Rex Stout,” Mona Van Duyn; “For Raymond Chandler,” John Love; “The Dead Line,” Larry Zirlin; “Detective Work,” Abigail Luttinger; “The Investigator,” Joseph Bruchac; “The Private Dick,” “Moonlighting,” Jim Mele; “A Man From The Water,” David Young; “Whodunit,” Florence Trefethen; “Private Eye,” Artie Gold; “Gruber,” “There Was No Knock on the Door,” Andre Farkas & Ken Norris; “Poem ‘Murder’: A Scenario,” steve mccaffery; “A Theater Piece,” Rene Magritte; “Nat Pinkerton,” “The Surrealists’ Use of Detective Fiction,” Rochelle Ratner; “The Occupant,” steve mccaffery; “Some Evidence of Foxing,” Paul De Barros; “The Case of the Missing Secretary,” Arden Kahlo; “Archer,” Sydney Martin Dore; “Motive, Opportunity & Weapon,” Ken Norris; “The Glass Key,” “Missing Persons,” Mark Jarman; “The Chaplin Kidnap,” Opal L. Nations; “Murders in the Welcome Cafe,” Andre Farkas.

No. 12. 1979. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Special Postcard Issue. Poems on postcards by Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, William Bronk, Siv Cedering Fox, Tom Clark, Andre Farkas, Robert Flanagan, Artie Gold, Anselm Hollo, Tom Konyves, Patrick Lane, Gerald Malanga, David McFadden, Jim Mele, Ken Norris, Murphre Roos, Terry Stokes, Peter Van Toorn, Geoffrey Young and Larry Zirlin.

No. #13-15. 1982. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Poems and prose by Lew Welch, Gloria Frym, Artie Gold, Stephen Rodefer, Christopher Dewdney, Geoffrey Young, Liz Lochhead/John Oughton, Ken Norris, Jim Mele, Paul Kahn, George Bowering, Richard Elman, Gerri Sinclair, Tom Hawkins, Diana Hartog, Robert Galvin, Stephen Bett, Lyn Lifshin, Norman Fischer, Penny Kemp, Susan Mernit, Rochelle Ratner, Jim Smith, Peter Brett, Erling Friis-Baastad, jack Hannan, Peter Van Toorn, bill bissett, Louis Dudek, Frank Davey, bp Nichol, John McAuley on Philip Whalen, Artie Gold on Gloria Frym and Ken Norris on a Baker’s Dozen Poetry Books.

No. #16. 1983. Editors: Robert Galvin, Jim Mele, Ken Norris. Special New Romantics issue. Contents: Jim Mele, “The Art of Discovery” (essay), David McFadden, “Night of Endless Radiance” (poem) and Ken Norris’ “Acts of the Imagination” (poem).

CrossCountry Press (books and chapbooks) bibliography:

Ken Norris, Under the Skin. A CrossCountry chapbook. 1976.

Jim Mele, An Oracle of Love. A CrossCountry chapbook. 1976.

Terry Stokes, The Lady Poems. A CrossCountry chapbook. 1977.

Ken Norris, Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. A CrossCountry chapbook. 1977.

David McFadden, The Saladmaker. A CrossCountry chapbook. 1977.

Jim Mele, The Sunday Habit, 1978.

Artie Gold, some of the cat poems. 1978.

John McAuley, Mattress Testing. 1978.

John McAuley, Hazardous Renaissance. 1978.

Endre Farkas, Romantic at Heart and Other Faults. 1979.

David McFadden, A New Romance. 1979.

Larry Zirlin, Awake for No Reason. 1979.

Ken Norris, Autokinesis. 1979.

Michael Andre, Letters Home. A CrossCountry chapbook. 1979.

Murphre Roos (Jim Mele), Sonnets & Other Dead Forms. 1980.

David McFadden, My Body Was Eaten by Dogs: Selected Poems, ed. George Bowering (simultaneously published by McClelland and Stewart). 1981.

Charles Baudelaire, Fatal Destinies: The Edgar Allan Poe Essays. 1981.

Lionel Kearns, Ignoring the Bomb: New & Selected Poems (co-published with Oolichan Books). 1982.

Jim Mele, The Calculation of Two. 1982.

Paul Metcalf, Louis the Torch. 1983.