It is 2024. I am 37 years
old. I have been writing poetry seriously for some two decades, and for most of
it I have also been engaged in some form in the world of the small press
(whether as a reader, a poet, an editor, a publisher, a researcher, a bookseller).
And yet, even after twenty years, it feel like I am just beginning in this
world. (Cameron Anstee, SOME SILENCES: Noes on Small Press)
As part of his “NOTES / ON APT. 9 PRESS / AT FIFTEEN YEARS” to open his checklist, Anstee begins: “The origin of the name of the press is unsurprising—I lived at 328 Frank Street (Ottawa) in apartment 9 at the time. I considered Frank St. Press, I think I may even have registered an email address, before my partner suggested Apt. 9. I loved it; it rooted the press in the room in which I would be doing the work.” I am amused at the thought that he nearly took Frank Street as his press name, especially given he offered the same title to the first chapbook of his poems published through above/ground press, Frank St. (2010). The specificity of place follows a fine trajectory of other presses named for their locations, whether Mansfield Press named for the editor/publisher’s home address on Mansfield Avenue, Toronto, the myriad of Coach House affiliations (Coach House Press, Coach House Books and Coach House Printing) set in an old Coach House behind Huron Street, Toronto, Alberta’s Red Deer College Press, which emerged out of Red Deer College (renamed Red Deer Press once the university affiliation had ended), or even Montreal’s Vehicule Press, a publisher that first emerged in the 1970s out of the artist-run centre Vehicule Gallery. We named our Chaudiere Books, as well, with a nod to the historic falls. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples. Anstee’s imprint, “St. Andrew Books,” as well, is a project begun after Anstee and his partner relocated from Centretown into the Byward Market (on St. Andrew Street, itself named for the Patron Saint of Scotland).
Across fifteen years, Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press has produced work by a flurry of contemporary poets, from the emerging to the established, centred around the beginnings of his own public literary engagements through Carleton University’s in/words (titles by Justin Million, jesslyn delia smith, Dave Currie, Leah Mol, Ben Ladouceur, Jeremy Hanson-Finger, Rachael Simpson and Peter Gibbon) to encountering the wider Ottawa literary community (titles by Michael Dennis, Sandra Ridley, Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Phil Hall, Stephen Brockwell, Marilyn Irwin, Rhonda Douglas and Christine McNair) and further, into the wider Canadian literary community (titles by Leigh Nash, Nelson Ball, Stuart Ross, Beth Follett, Michael e. Casteels, Barbara Caruso and Jim Smith), and beyond, into the United States (a title by New York State-based Arkansas poet Lea Graham). His bibliographic checklist is thorough, and certain entries include short notes on each particular publication, offering history on both the publication specifically and the press generally, each of which provide, in Anstee’s way, short notes as teasers toward a potential heft of further information. I quite enjoyed this note he includes for Ottawa poet Dave Currie’s chapbook, Bird Facts (November 2014): “Dave somehow convinced CBC Radio to have him on the air one Saturday morning to discuss this book, which is comprised of made-up facts about birds. A handful of very confused customers came to the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair and purchased copies.”
The history of Apt. 9 follows a trajectory that coincides with Anstee’s personal interests in writing, including his own critical and creative explorations, from the short, dense forms of poets such as Nelson Ball and Michael e. Casteels, wider community engagements across the scope of his own ever-widening landscape, to bibliographic and editorial projects he worked on, including around the work of the legendary and since-passed Ottawa poet and musician William Hawkins (a bibliographic folio, a chapbook reprint and editing a volume of his collected poems). While Anstee’s work with the press can be separated and is impressive on its own, as with any poet-run press, his creative and critical work are essential to his work through Apt. 9 Press and vice versa; to attempt to fully understand one element requires an understanding of each element in turn (and how they relate to each other). Early on, as he writes in the essay-chapbook SOME SILENCES: Notes on Small Press:
In the earliest of those years, when I was 18, during a second-year CanLit survey, Professor Collett Tracey introduced me to Contact Press. I was immediately taken with the idea of Raymond Souster quietly working throughout his life writing poems, and then for a decade or two in middle of the twentieth century, from his basement, making mimeographed books and magazines that re-shaped how poetry was written and published in this country. Shortly thereafter I began learning how to make chapbooks during my time working with In/Words, the little magazine and press Collett ran. There were earlier moments too, such as when I was a teenager and gradually came to understand that my father’s collection of books was astonishing—books by Beat and San Francisco and New York School writers filled the corners of our house, books that were published by small presses run by editors who did it mostly because they felt these books should exist (though I couldn’t have identified them as small presses yet).
The lesson I took from these earliest encounters with books I found I cared about was that the act of writing can involve quite a bit more than simply writing. To write, in the sense of a lifelong practice embedded in a particular literary community, means so many other things. I couldn’t have defined those other things when I first encountered them, and honestly still struggle to articulate them today. In fact, through my first two decades doing this, in each overlapping role right up to today, I have never been entirely at ease with the term small press. It has always felt elusive because it can mean so many different things to so many different people, entirely dependent on the contexts of the conversation and its participants. That is something I confront anytime I try to speak about the small press or about what a writing practice is (about what my writing practice is), given how intertwined and unstable the two are.
Anstee’s prose recollections are sharp, detailed and thoughtful; they are quite moving, articulating an essay-sequence of prose sections around elements of engaging with small press, and his thoughts on small publishing generally, and his work through Apt. 9 Press specifically. “These silences are pressing for living writers and accompany the dead ones.” he writes, further along in the essay. “You can only let the work go I think, and hope that it finds the right hands in the future, that is, someone who will be sympathetic to it, who will open it and read it through and for whom it may spark a response, and who may come back and read it again.” Anstee’s prose through this piece, this chapbook, are comparable to his chapbook production—sleek, carefully-honed and deeply precise—offering meditations around and through publishing. I know he’s already sitting on an as-yet-unpublished critical manuscript around small press (it seems criminal that such a work hasn’t yet seen book publication), but one might hope that he sees enough orders for this particular title that it manages a reprint; it deserves to be read. Or, possibly, expanded upon. I could see this piece expanding into something full-length, an essential read on the specifics of literary engagement. Although, knowing the precision and density of Anstee’s poems, perhaps everything he needed to say is already here, set in a text that deserves even my own further engagement.
Books are great—of course they are!—but the idea of living a life in the small press or in poetry is something else. There is no moment when you will have made it, no finish; there is just the ongoing work of making poems, or books, or organizing events, or whatever part of it you’re putting your own energy and resources behind. Maybe that work occasionally gets some attention, but it will pass so, so quickly. Publish books, and chapbooks, and leaflets, and weird little magazines, yes, as often as you want and are able to, but my feeling is that it is best to try to do so with a hopeful eye on the much longer history you’re engaging with—the full scope of which is forever out of sight—and with an understanding that your moment in that history is both very small and totally essential, rather than on some immediate pay off in public recognition or success (critical, financial) or whatever other short-term validation is occasionally available.
So—and this is too easy
to say—don’t be resentful that you didn’t get enough reviews, or didn’t win
that award, or weren’t published by that magazine. It matters a great deal and
it doesn’t matter at all.
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