new from above/ground press: Norris, Ross & Camlot, Currie & MARTIN, Melançon, Straumsvåg, Mohan, Cone, Shafer + Planting Seeds : Fletcher Garden Poems, ed. O'Meara,

TRAVELLER, Ken Norris $6 ; Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office, Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot $6 ; Planting Seeds : Fletcher Garden Poems, ed. David O’Meara : w new poems by Laurie Koensgen, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Anita Lahey, Conyer Clayton, Sneha Madhavan-Reese, David Stymeist, David O’Meara + Blaine Marchand $6 ; This Guy Gets It, David Currie & IAN MARTIN $6 ; avoice be heard, Jérôme Melancon $6 ; THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN: prose poems, Dag T. Straumsvåg $6 ; Pillars of Sand, Mrityunjay Mohan $6 ; NO VIBRATO HARD TRANSCENDENCE, Jon Cone $6 ; I found looking, Emily Shafer $6 ;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May-June 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). See the prior list of recent titles here (and the one before that), scroll down here to see a further list of various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

With forthcoming chapbooks by: Katy DeCoste, Lori Anderson Moseman, Jason Heroux, Lea Graham, David Phillips and probably others! (yes: others,

AND 2026 SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE STILL AVAILABLE (but you probably already know that,

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part four, : Charlotte Nip, Jesse Eckerlin + Ayaz Pirani,

[left: Ken Norris + Jay MillAr in conversation ; see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here; see part three of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. I am frustrated I missed last weekend’s fair through The Ampersand Festival! But there will certainly be other fairs, I’m sure (and Christine did a fine job running proxy at the above/ground press table). And don’t forget the thirtieth anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair is November 16, yes?

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: The chapbook debut by Vancouver poet Charlotte Nip is Acne Scars (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), an assemblage, the author notes at the end of the collection, was a “decade in the making [.]” Nip’s poems offer themselves as a sequence of collage-sketches, observations, first-person commentaries and scattered lines, held together as a kind of scrap-book lyric accumulation. “Eliot said it was the cruelest month,” she writes, to open the poem “April,” “but he lied. It’s where I find / myself again, and again, and again. I never get lost because April / births like a malignant tumour. I turn 24.” There’s something intriguing about watching this particular emerging writer feel her way through lyric form, from first-person descriptive commentary and observation and staccato phrases, composing pieces leaning closer into prose poems, more traditional open lyric and even hand-drawn lines connecting thought to thought. Or, as the poem “Persimmons” begins:

we are
a soft bird
a man
with no taste

Montreal QC/Toronto ON: From Montreal poet Jesse Eckerlin, following We Are Not the Bereaved (2012) and Thrush (2016), comes ALMOST NOTHING (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), a sequence of a dozen short, dense lyric bursts. The chapbook-length sequence opens with a couplet on the first page—“Fire in the province— // A car without brakes”—and continues along that same slow unfolding, offering precise and specific language. Each self-contained koan offers a sheen of haiku, composed of lines that might connect but on the surface seem, potentially, disconnected, allowing the reader to fill in certain spaces. “Chisels in my mouth,” the third page/section reads, “Extracting the wisdom teeth // Your lost disciple [.]” There is a certain clarity provided by these poems that is quite intriguing, offering small twists and turns, some more effective than others, but enough that I am intrigued to see what and where Eckerlin lands next.

Conversations like rooms

filled with empty music stands

Toronto ON: The latest from Tanzania-born and California-based Canadian poet Ayaz Pirani (an expat poet comparable to Ken Norris, who also spent years publishing predominantly or even exclusively in Canada while living and working in the United States), following the full-length poetry collections Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016), Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) and How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as at least one chapbook, Bachelor of Art (Anstruther Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook NECROPOLISBOROUGH (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). NECROPOLISBOROUGH is made up of eight short first-person lyric narratives, offering a plain speech of uncomplicated language woven through narrative wisdoms. “Even the ones I didn’t reach.” he writes, speaking of teaching and being taught, attempting to mentor and being mentored, across the poem “Beloved Infidel,” “Perhaps not reaching them / reached them and / was what they needed.” There’s a quiet power to and through Pirani’s lines, and one can’t help but be charmed by the opening line of “Smart Car,” that reads: “My car drove away honklessly / to live with another family.”

Camus’ Door

My door is plainspoken
without if or but
or doubt. No squeak or yawn.
Puritan by nature
my door is best wide open
or fast shut.
Ajar is too fanciful
for my door.
Door-pain is real
and there’s loneliness
finding yourself
two-sided. Grief too
in the phallic bolt.
My door hangs on
ancient purpose.
A look then a lock
between yes and no.
Swing then swing
between right and wrong
is my door’s fate.

And, according to the author biography at the back of this small collection, Pirani has a collection of short stories forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press, which is pretty exciting.

Ongoing notes: TIFA’s Small Press Market (part two: Lannii Layke + Janette Platana,

the moment Ken Norris met ryan fitzpatrick

[see part one of my notes here] Here’s another accounting of some of the titles I picked up at the most recent fair in Toronto!

Toronto ON: I’m fascinated by the debut chapbook by Toronto-based poet Lannii Layke, their Os (knife|fork|book, 2022), a gracefully-sleek collection of exploratory poems. There is an intriguing narrative layering to Layke’s lines, offering line upon line upon fragment, a hush, and a halt. Their author biography at the end of the collection offers a couple of intriguing details: “They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. In French, os is bone.” The poems here are crafted but not precious: precise, and deft in their resolve, offering eight first-person poems that seek, seek out. “we have those secrets that stick us,” the poem “Sister” offers, “like our / talk  and hate  and / waxing piss onto our man [.]” There is such graceful, absolute beauty in Layke’s searchings, one that sparkles not just through discovery, but revealing and remarking upon what was already known.

Plum

                    My frequency
  factors  in the cloning of plums
The rib of plum
in the posture of plum line    a smaller Sweat
       is that same salt    collecting so

Toronto ON: There’s a wonderful sense of play and language across the nine poems of Peterborough writer Janette Platana’s chapbook New Fairious (Anstruther Press, 2023), each offering short narratives, akin to character studies, to a list of alternate fairies, from “The Shame Fairy” and “The Literary Fairy” to “The Fairies Feify & Deify” and “The Truth Fairy.” “They are not twins, these two,” the poem “The Fairies Reify & Deify” begins, “but reciprocating parasites who // rfuse to play host. / Yet each outstrips the other // in unxious luxury.” There’s a delight of sound and meaning through her word choises throughout these poems, offering an unexpected richness line by line by narrative line, all of which rolls along into a sequence of impossibility. How Platana is a writer I hadn’t heard of previously, although her author biography offers that her short story collection, A Token of My Affliction (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2014), “was a Finalist for the Ontario Trillium Book Award.” Oh, how I wish to see more poems by Janette Platana.

The Shame Fairy

Her dust encauls you in nausea.

Until the ignosecond of Her enclaspment
you did not even know
She was a thing. Now, you are filled
with Her shitty gift. Now, you bob
inside Her gassy bubble
like you are the grinning bonhomme
in one of those oversized inflatable snow globes
in the parking lot of the biggest big box store
when your anchor cable has sprung
and you bounce between parked cars,
legless, footless, as well as entrapped,
head blog
indignant and indistinguishable
from bottom blog.

It would be funny if it weren’t forever.

 

SOME: seventh issue,

 

Creeps

Old creep

staring at blooming,
solid flesh,

remembering home. (Rae Armantrout)

I’m always interested to see the latest issue of Vancouver poet Rob Manery’s SOME magazine, and the seventh (summer 2023) landed on my doorstep not that long ago. Compared to the issues he’s produced-to-date [see my review of issue six, issue five, issue two], this issue appears to focus on literary elders (each of this list began publishing their work in journals in a range that extends from the late 1950s—as with George Bowering—into the 1970s). One might say that experiment without attending our influences can lose foundation, so the acknowledgement is one appreciated, and this issue includes extended poems, sequences and prose by Rae Armantrout, George Bowering, Phil Hall, Lionel Kearns, Ken Norris and Renee Rodin. There is something of Rae Armantrout’s work that I’ve always found reminiscent of the structures of poems by Ottawa poet Monty Reid, in the way they both extend small moments, stretching them out further than one might think possible. Reid does this in part through the physical line, which Armantrout breaks for the sake of slowness, pause, extending moments into a particular kind of simultaneous extended and sharper focus. She writes in portions, in sections, and her contribution of five poems are incredibly sharp. As the second half, second section, of her poem “First Born” reads: “To be present / is to start, // to feel a flash / of dread // when opened. // Dead the eldest / child of what?”

George Bowering gets a pretty hefty section in this issue, a sequence of twenty-four short lyrics under the title “Divergences” that feel reminiscent of some of the poems in his Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Could Be (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], and even through his collection Smoking Mirror (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1984), through the use of the short, lyric burst, although one that extends across short stanzas as a loose narrative thread down his usual seemingly-meandering but highly purposeful cadence. Although, one might say, there’s a calm resoluteness to these poems that differs from his other work; the electrical energies of his prior lyrics are quieter here, seeking a kind of intimate calm. Ever since working his one-chapbook-a-month-year-long-manuscript, My Darling Nellie Grey (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2010) [see my review of such here], Bowering appears to be more overtly working sequences of chapbook-length sequences, each of which he seems to attempt to each get into stand-alone publication before the publication of the full-length collection; given the reluctance of literary journals to publish such long stretches across a single author, he’s focused on chapbook publication, so this sequence, whether it be part of something larger or not, does appear to be one of those rare journal placements. As Bowering writes as a kind of afterword to the poems: “Each of the sequence’s 24 sections begins with a line or two from the start of a Romantic poem of the 19^th century, then diverges into something from the mind/soul/mood of the present old poet. You may notice that Goethe gets pilfered from twice. That was an accident. It takes, they say, nine accidents to kill a cat. Which is odd, because curiosity means carefulness. It is also the last word of the poem. Poems, the old poet thinks, are made through accidents and carefulness.” His first poem in the sequence “Divergences” reads:

Open the Window

Open the window, and let the air
freshly blow from treetops to faces
that care not.
                        They are turned
heedless away from the blue sky
they will never glance while some
they do not see are lowering
them beneath fresh air’s reach.

Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s contribution to this assemblage are three poems from his forthcoming collection Vallego’s Marrow (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2023) [see my review of his 2022 title with the same publisher, The Ash Bell, here], a title that should be out somewhere in the next couple of weeks. The poems here offer a continuation, a furthering, of Hall’s unique blend of lyric first-person essay, swirling through memoir, memory, literature and what I’ve referred to in the past as a kind of “Ontario Gothic” almost folksy charm. Hall’s straight lines are never straight; his lines have a way of turning, moving, altering in tone and shape while retaining direction, akin to white light through a prism. There is such a scope of length to Hall’s ruminations, one that seems to extend with, and even through, each new poem, each new collection. “I see my dead parents as characters in fables / or extinct creatures trapped in an old story,” he writes, as part of the first of these three poems, “there is no memory that has not savaged or been savaged / a tongue is eaten & thumb grease sees through a page // now here comes my own little train / the doors of its empty boxcars rusted open on both sides // black fields black fields black fields black fields / I can see through each clanging frame [.]” Lionel Kearns is one of those Canadian poets that I don’t think has ever been given his due, in part, I’m sure, through the fact that he doesn’t publish books terribly often. An early experimenter with form (his author biography includes the note that “His most anthologized work, Birth of God / uniVers, first published in 1965, stands today, in its various forms and formats, as one of the earliest examples of digital art.”), his contribution to this issue sits under the umbrella title of “Selections from Very Short Essays,” each of which sits, stand-alone, as text within a box shape. The poems read akin to koans, offering compact lyrics and twists in the language.

Of the eight poems included by Ken Norris—originally American, then Montreal, back to Maine and now retired in Toronto—the first two offer themselves as projects, responding to the works of poetic influence: “The Wordsworth Project” and “The Shakespeare Project.” “To realize the full variety of humanity.” the second of these begin, “To get it all down in a cast of characters.” Each of Norris’ poems in this assemblage are slightly different than where his poems often go [see my review of his 2021 Guernica Editions title, South China Sea, here], offering a broader overview of thinking, reading and response. After some thirty or forty-plus poetry collections since the 1970s, there is something of Norris once again seeking out origins, even legacy, perhaps, through these short narrative lyrics. Or, as he offers as part of the poem “Cultural Marginalia,” a poem dedicated to Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, “Louis [Dudek] said we were kibitzers, / and I guess that’s true. My poems have never been / broad cultural statements. // Someday someone will realize I was speaking / to them, for them.” Vancouver poet Renee Rodin is another poet too often not given her due, and for reasons similar to that with Kearns: her biography references her Talonbooks published in 1996 and 2010, respectively, as well as a chapbook with Nomados in 2005, now long out-of-print. Her two-page prose piece included here is “Here in the Rainforest – The Lighter Version,” a piece composed “during the invasion of Ukraine and the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria” that begins:

Suddenly the morning is dark, hot water cold, no heat, no stove. My phony landline doesn’t work, cellphone almost dead. The last text is from a friend, also in Kitsilano, asking if my electricity is out too.

Cut off from communication I panic. My kids are long distance calls away, there’s nothing closer that the sound of their voices. Now I’m scared they might need me and won’t be able to get through. I find this thought unbearable.

Here in the rainforest we’ve had a severe drought, I loved the months of sunny, warm days. To not enjoy the beautiful weather would have only compounded the waste. Today we’re having an atmospheric river, a lovely sounding name for prolonged pelting rain.

Rodin has long utilized the prose lyric, similar to the work of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch [see my review of Hindmarch’s 2020 collected, published by Talonbooks, here], as a way in which biographical threads are offered as the structure through which she is able to comment on all else. Similarly to Hindmarch being a prose counterpart to the 1960s TISH poets, Rodin’s work feels akin to emerging as a prose counterpart to the poetry experiments in and around Vancouver of the 1970s and 80s, all of which made Rodin, and Hindmarch as well, literary outliers. There is a seriousness to Rodin’s work, an ecological and social engagement, that underlies much of her work as well. One would hope we might even see another collection at some point, hopefully soon.

The colophon to the issue reads: “Contributions and email correspondence can be sent to somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com / Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.”

rob’s clever substack : Lecture for an Empty Room

For those unaware, I’ve been posting weekly-or-so over at a substack I began back in November, constructed to prompt further thinking into a potential book-length essay, “Lecture for an Empty Room.” I had started scratching note-fragments somewhere across those first two years of Covid-19 lockdown, thinking upon literary community, reviewing, notions of work, connection, responsibility and various other scattered thoughts. I’m attempting to post something weekly, with every third or so as a paid-subscription-only piece, with the rest offered gratis to anyone who signs up (free subscriptions are the bulk of the subscriptions, which is fine also). I’m aiming to post self-contained fragments of this work-in-progress as I attempt to move forward, interspersing these with occasional other pieces, whether short stories, possible fragments of this novel work-in-progress as well as a chapbook-length essay I worked across the same original lockdown period, a kind of notebook on a call-and-response poem collaboration that Denver poet Julie Carr and I were working on. I had thought back to an essay I saw once by George Bowering, composed as journal entries during a period he was working a novel (I can’t recall which book this was in, or which novel, naturally; was this an essay on/around composing Caprice?), or even Robert Kroetsch’s The Crow Journals (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1980), a book-length journal composed around the composition of his novel, What the Crow Said (1978). I’d always envied that particular form, wishing to echo an element of it somewhere, somehow, and there are some wonderful observations through that particular non-fiction work (I would recommend you find a copy and go through it, even if you haven’t read that particular novel of his, which is actually still in print, by the way).

Here's one of the recent fragments of “Lecture for an Empty Room” I posted over at my clever substack (sign up here for free (or for a wee bit of coin), if such interests). I am curious to see where this project might end up, myself.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

A conversation. All these little echo chambers.

At the end of December, 2022, Matthew Walther’s “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month” appeared in The New York Times. Why is it so important for opinion writers to return, once again, to declaring the death of poetry? Perhaps they wish to claim credit, whether through a kind of critic-assisted end of literary suffering, or wishing to be seen to have the clarity of childlike wisdom, akin to “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Walther speaks of modernism, a contemporary dearth of MFA programs churning out literature professors, and an endless array of chapbooks. Nothing useful since TS Eliot; remember TS Eliot? TS Eliot was cool, right?

Circa 2001, Ken Norris suggested to me that MFA programs throughout the United States had caused the death of American poetry. Given my broader reading experience since, I’d say I disagree with that statement, but I don’t know what he might have seen since 1985, the year he landed to teach at the University of Maine. I’m sure writing programs everywhere churn out an array of unremarkable writers producing semi-publishable work that later end up littering the landscape of journals, chapbooks and trade collections, but I don’t see American programs doing this with any greater percentages than their Canadian counterparts. It might simply be a matter of scale. Layli Long Soldier emerged from a program. Megan Kaminski emerged from a program. Sarah Mangold emerged from a program. Jericho Brown emerged from a program. I don’t think the issue, if there is one to be discussed, is that of the MFA program.

But still: given so much activity, productivity and production, why declare the state of the union, as it were, past tense? Oh, Matthew Walther, literature isn’t there to do what you think it should, or you heard once that it might have. It isn’t there to obey your rules. Literature remains in constant motion. It evolves, just as much as language and culture, from pop to human. We should never think of any of these as absolutes, or fixed. Stagnation, not evolution, is what causes the death you are in such a rush to declare. But I want things to be as they were, they say. This creature is already dead. Instead of bothering to understand the art on its own terms. Matthew Walther, have you a difficulty with an art that includes both Rupi Kaur and M. NourbeSe Philip?

Every article on the death of literature, whether poetry or the novel, exists as a variation on the same: the misunderstanding that any art is not a fixed point, nor is it meant to do, whether solely or otherwise, what it is that you wish. Adaptability, for both the reader and the practitioner, remains key. What was American poetry before Walt Whitman? What was Canadian poetry before bpNichol? What was literature before Dionne Brand? Each of these changing the very foundation of how the literatures they lived in was heard, written and seen. Arguably, every poet writing shifts the foundations and boundaries of literature, even if only a little, so the very notion of the fixed point. Declare your intentions! the traditional poets blast at the avant-garde. They counter: We can’t declare what won’t stand still.

Alice Notley, Jordan Abel. Lisa Robertson. Fred Wah. Anne Carson. Margaret Christakos. Andrew Suknaski. Stephen Collis. Jack Spicer, Lorine Niedecker or Robert Creeley. Ron Silliman. And then those in the nebulous between-states, working experimental texts across more subtle landscapes: Judith Fitzgerald, Kathleen Fraser, David Donnell. The long sentences of between of Monty Reid.

Call this a mantra, if you wish: my literature includes difficult work. To comprehend the centre one has to examine the edge.

Rupi Kaur: she seems an easy and lazy target for literary archers. I don’t care for the lyrically uncomplicated statements of her poems, but she might have allowed more young readers into literature than most of us combined. Maybe?

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.