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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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