12 or 20 (second series) questions with Teo Eve

Teo Eve is a poet, writer and workshop facilitator based between Nottingham and London. Teo's debut poetry collection The Ox House is now available from Penteract Press. The image of Teo provided was drawn by publisher and artist Alban Low.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I'm answering this a month before my debut (The Ox House, Penteract Press, 2022)'s official release date, so I'm not sure yet! But the hype online has been phenomenal and since its release was announced I've been invited onto reading teams for magazines, asked to deliver workshops and have been approached by editors and agents for other not-so-secret projects. Quite honestly sometimes I feel like I can't really keep up with all the things happening right now, but I hope this trajectory continues. Of course, there's always a chance that when the book's actually out people will think I'm a hack and lose interest...

Before The Ox House was accepted by Penteract, I had a few collections and pamphlets long- and short-listed for publication by other presses. These collections had some great poems in them but were marred by inconsistency. I think the biggest difference between The Ox House and anything I'd created before is its singular vision: The Ox House is all about the alphabet, celebrating its history, graphology and phonology. The more I write the more I'm becoming a concept-oriented, as a reader as well as a writer. A collection can have some phenomenal poems, but if it doesn't work as a whole then it won't excite me. It's like the difference between an 'album artist' and a 'singles artist', to me. A handful of catchy pop songs does not a good album make.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
 I didn't! I started writing fiction when I was in Primary School. I came to poetry much later, in Sixth Form - and even then, it wasn't something I took seriously for  years. I wouldn't say I have a preference of which form to write, but I find it much easier to fit writing poems around my job compared to the intensely sustained concentration span you need for a novel.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I've always been a quick writer of poems. I've had a few I've been churning over and chipping away at for months/years, but a lot of the time I write a poem, edit it there and then, and re-write it again until I'm happy. I handwrite first drafts more often than not so when I type them up they go through another round of edits, but I don't really plan my poems. It's more that I get a line or an image in my head and hammer it into shape. In terms of large-scale projects, I feel I wait frustratingly long periods of times between ideas but as soon as I'm set on one, the poems themselves come relatively easily.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I find it difficult to think in terms of individual poems. Between projects, I might write stand-alone pieces (usually a line pops into my head and I'm fascinated by the rhythm or image of it, so I churn it over in my mind and write it out to see where it goes...) until I finally settle on one piece I really like the form or theme of. Writing a poem I particularly love is an uncorking: afterwards, the ideas just flow. After finishing The Ox House I was pretty frustrated because I didn't know what my next project was going to be, but then I created two visual poems in one sitting. That two-page document quickly spiraled/blossomed into I Imagine an Image, my seeking-a-home visual poetry collection. I have tried combining already-existing short pieces into a larger project before, but all attempts at publishing them so far have been unsuccessful.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don't believe in the separation of 'page' and 'stage' poetry because I think a good poem is a good poem and a good poem should work on the page as well as the stage. Poems that are flat and lifeless on the page but come to life in performances due to affectations and emphasis are still flat and lifeless on the page. Having said that, as I lean more and more into visual poetry, just how I can perform my work is becoming increasingly challenging!

I get really nervous during readings, which is strange given that I'm a teacher by profession so I'm essentially performing all of the time. I suppose it's something about the immediacy of reaction you're experiencing your audience experience: I think I'd be nervous watching someone read my books, too. Having said that, nerves are really something I need to practise out of:  I'm always aware that I should be doing more readings.

On that note, I'm performing a collaboration alongside Anthony Etherin of Penteract Press as part of the European Poetry Festival, at 7:30pm Saturday the 25th of June [2022] in Rich Mix in Bethnal Green, London. It's completely free and we'd love people to come along.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I'm aware of how post-modernist and metatextual this will sound, but I really do feel like my poems are all about the possibility of language. I'm not much interested in poetry that feels like someone's diary, and language seems to be a universal topic almost all readers of poetry have an interest in. Even if I start writing a poem about a distinct theme, it often ends up becoming a poem about how the poem is writing 'about' that theme. I Imagine an Image is ostensibly a collection of love poetry - so many of its pieces are about togetherness and separation, romantically and politically - but really it's a collection exploring how we can express emotions, conflict and the rupturing of society in language. Would it be more striking to respond to these questions and themes with images alone? Is there a universal language, or a universal image, for love and thought, or are these bound by and can only be channeled through semantics?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think it's such an exciting time to be a writer! Language change has always been constant, but I do wonder if we are witnessing an acceleration of this in the internet age, both thanks to an increased exposure to global languages and the way that digital forms allow for a speedy and cheap dissemination of innovative texts that would have been near-impossible to distribute using traditional printing technologies. Moreover, we are seeing a greater social awareness, including in terms of how language is used to describe and prescribe gender.

I don't believe writers have roles as such, but we do have a responsibility to be attentive to language change and use language with sensitivity. Writers can write whatever they want, sure, but we must be aware to the fact that our writing will impact the world, in however a minor way. Writers should consider what type of world they want to live in, and how their writing can reinforce this.

Lately we've witnessed a bastardisation of language in mass media and politics, with simplistic and reductionist sloganeering fanning the flames of division. I very much believe in the Geoffrey Hill school of making language 'difficult' to resist against such tyrannical simplication. Part of the motivation behind The Ox House was considering what letters can do, rather than what they do do and have done. Looking around at a world marked or marred by increasing nationalism and far-right movements, I feel like it is my duty to interrogate the language that has allowed this.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I'm lucky I suppose to never have had a difficult experience with an editor. I like to think I'm open enough that if an editor suggests vast changes to my work, I'd respect their impartiality, professionalism and vision and take these into account. One of the benefits of studying Creative Writing at uni is you learn to let you guard down - you need to be receptive to constructive feedback, however critical.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When I was studying my MA in English Studies at the University of Nottingham, I enrolled on several Creative Writing modules. One of the set texts for our Fiction Writing Workshop was Ron Carlson's Ron Carlson Writes a Story, which essentially revolves around two pieces of advice: (1) when you're stuck, revert to physicality; and (2) don't. stop. writing. until. you've. finished. the. thing.

I remember some of my peers being frustrated with the book ('don't stop until you've finished writing? that's awful advice! tell me how to actually write!'), but I've found it incredibly useful. I love writing, yes, but it is discipline and it is work. Sit down, turn off your phone, and when the going gets tough carry on. It doesn't matter how messy or how skeletal the first draft is; as long as you've erected scaffolding, you've got something to work on or off afterwards.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I feel like I alternate between having a 'fiction brain' on and a 'poetry brain' on, and I rarely pursue a prose and poetry project at the same time. I think it's because I like being immersed in a project: I always have one dominant work-in-progress at a time and I might occasionally start sketches for future ideas but I've historically struggled juggling ideas. Every time I switch back from poetry to prose or vice-versa the first few weeks tend to be a process of re-learning, getting back into the swing of the genre. Having said that, I do feel like there's quite a lot of overlap between my poetry and prose, even if they're quite obviously different on the surface. My novel, currently titled What Will We Build From The Ruins? (for which I'm seeking an agent or publisher) contains some of the best 'poetry' I've ever written! I think sometimes I need to cleanse myself in one genre before I can re-approach another: I write more poetry than prose, but cleansing myself in fiction can help me approach my poetry with a refreshed pair of eyes.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I wish I had a routine! I work 9-5 so my life pretty much revolves around that. When I've got a big writing project on during the winter I usually find it easy to dedicate a couple of hours in the evening to it, but when it's summer and I just want to be outside after work, my writing admittedly takes a back seat. I steal snatches of time here and there and do what I can, but at the minute I'm enjoying putting life and pleasure over pen and paper. Having said that, these aren't mutually exclusive, and as soon as I properly start on my second novel I'm going to do my best to do a Ron Carlson and just sit at the desk til the thing is done.  

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I'm pretty vampiric so whenever I get stuck I pick up a book, flick through it and usually find myself inspired to write something. Much of my poetry is a response to something I've seen or read so I've never found myself bereft of inspiration. The bigger challenge is finding the time to write...

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Burning wood! My mother is from rural Italy and we tend to spend summers on the farm. Occasionally the early morning breeze will bring with it the scent of wood on a fire. Everytime I smell a bonfire or am at a fireworks show, I'm transported to that small village in Italy.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
After graduating from my BA in English, I was sick of books. I was sick of reading and I was sick of writing. I got really into visiting art museums and took up painting, but never developed the technical skills to match my vision.

I was a bad poet at university and hardly any of the poems I wrote between my BA and MA had any value, but when I took up writing again during my MA I was keen to integrate the aesthetic sensibilities I had started to learn from painting into my poetry. Around the same time I was getting into Imagism and pursued a portrayal of the concrete, but discovering visual poetry really was a game changer. After turning in a concrete poem I'd made as part of my MA Creative Writing course, a peer told me that she could 'see it in a gallery'. That became a new ideal for me: poems that had a visual, as well as a literary, sensibility. After all, is there anything uglier than a poorly-lineated poem!?

I think this is the reason why my debut poetry collection The Ox House (Penteract Press, 2022) became a book of two halves. It's a poetry book, yes, but each poem is titled after a large capital letter form that act as both homage to Medieval manuscripts' illuminated letters and as visual art works in and of themselves; and the lineation, graphology and typesetting of the individual poems became as or more important as/than any 'meaning' they conveyed.

I stretched my visual experimentation even further when creating I Imagine an Image. Assembling this collection, I set a test pieces would have to pass to be included. Each poem had to work as both a poem and a piece of visual art, or they wouldn't get a spot in the collection. Their forms and content often communicate, but even the more text-heavy pieces had to look pretty. Almost all of the poems in this collection are contained within a black ink border, designed to replicate the frames around paintings you get on gallery walls.

I really want my poetry to break out the boundaries of books and be everywhere. I want my poetry on mugs, on walls, on t-shirts, in galleries, on album covers and in magazines. To achieve that, it has to look nice. Visual immediacy of the form increasingly takes centre stage for me: if a poem looks like a mess and is uninviting to the eye, why should I bother reading it?  

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Oh, so many! I'll always be indebted to Nikki Dudley - she's a brilliant poet and a huge inspiration for my work, and as editor of streetcake magazine has always been a champion of my poetry.

Ali Smith is probably my favourite fiction writer, but the word play and sharp attention to the playful fluidity of language has really informed my poetry in particular.

It was the honour of my life to have The Ox House accepted by Penteract Press - not only has Penteract put out some incredible books, but Anthony Etherin has achieved, I think, the closest thing to formal perfection we'll see in 21st century poetry. Penteract have really attracted a whole host of interesting and innovative writers: listening to The Penteract Podcast while working a pretty monotonous admin job, and learning all about the practices of fantastic poets such as Christian Bök really expanded my idea of what poetry could be.

I've had some great exchanges with Sascha Engel (Breaking the Alphabet, Little Black Cart 2022) about the alphabet, Ancient Egypt and experimental writing, and I'm lucky enough to have made so many poetry people through Twitter and my MA who provide invaluable feedback on my work and are great friends besides.

I'll always be thankful to Vicky Sparrow, Lila Matsumoto, Matthew Welton, Spencer Jordan, and Thomas Legendre, my Creative Writing lecturers at the University of Nottingham for all of their guidance and support.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd love to write a children's book! I've already got a poetry book out, a non-fiction book coming out and a novel waiting for a home, but really I'd like to write at least one of each literary form. I guess I should probably have a go at a play, too, but there's something about writing solely dialogue that's so intimidating to me.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I'm fascinated by urban design and when I was younger I vaguely dreamt of becoming an architect, but I never had the mathematical skills to pursue that as a career. But how different is urban design and architecture from creating poetry, anyway? I imagine there's a similar attentiveness to form and structure. Some poems I've written that are more traditionally-lineated than my visual work explicitly reference or are influenced by architecture in their form and content, and I had great fun trying to evoke Nottingham's urban landscape in the poems I contributed to Writing Notts 2021: An Anthology of Nottinghamshire Poetry.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think I'm a frustrated would-be rock'n'roll star. I love doing karaoke and the over-the-top performance of singing and acting theatrically larger-than-life on a stage. Ironically I'm quite timid during poetry readings, but I think the compulsory pre-karaoke beers help with the nerves! Unfortunately I don't have the rhythm or voice for it. I actually started off by writing lyrics, which gradually morphed into poetry when I realised no-one would want to hear me sing them!

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently (reluctantly) re-read The Great Gatsby, which was my favourite novel(la) as a 17-18 year old and which I hadn't revisited in years. I was afraid to read it in case the magic had worn off for me, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I appreciated it arguably more this time around than when I was a kid. There's just something about its leanness, how nothing is extraneous and every word has been placed with the precision of a poet. It's amazing, too, how much emotion the whole thing has while not coming across as cliched or sickly-sweet. I maintain that The Great Gatsby is an ideal of the novel (novella?) form, and I'd love to aspire to its focus. I'm admittedly not very film literate, but Her (2013, Spike Jonze) broke me.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I just finished(!?) writing my visual poetry collection, I Imagine an Image, and I've recently been asked to write a book on the history of visual poetry so I'm slowly building myself up to researching and planning that. However ideas for my second novel have been brewing in the back of my mind lately and I'm very keen to make a proper start on that (really, a restart) while continuing looking for a home for my first novel, What Will We Build From The Ruins? At the minute I'm enjoying a much-needed pause between projects - I really did just finish I Imagine an Image less than a week before writing this - but I'm sure I'm going to feel the itch to write again soon. Besides from this, I'm currently in the stage of making final edits to my debut work of autofiction, On Shaving, which is set to be released by Beir Bua Press in March 2023...

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Franco Cortese

Franco Cortese is an experimental poet living in Thorold, Ontario. His poetry won the 2020 UNESCO / Brock University Sustainability Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and has appeared in Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, filling Station, ditch, and others. He has chapbooks out through above/ground press, no press, nOIR:Z, Simulacrum Press, Trainwreck Press, Gap Riot Press, The Blasted Tree and Anstruther Press, with others forthcoming from Timglaset, Hesterglock Press, and Serif of Nottingham. His full-length poetic debut, Lip, is forthcoming from Penteract Press in 2021.

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

Well, this question found a fortuitous slice of the-river-me in time, because my first chapbook (aeiou, published by derek beaulieu's no press in August 2018) and my first book Lip, illustrated by bill bissett and forthcoming from Penteract this month (and available for pre-order now!: https://penteractpress.com/store/lip-franco-cortese) are two ends of the same circle, and the publicational start and end of the same project, gestating for 3+ years and now birthpanging its way to worlding, sickly, beautiful and dirgelike.

The chapbook felt like an entry into a wondrous world of crazed kinfellows. A housewarming. Small press is a very beautiful, welcoming, playful place, and it’s where vergeminded poetry should want to be. It’s poetic experimentation’s prime real estate. It’s where I’d like to live, where I’ll likely die. It’s a good thought, not a bad one.

Meanwhile, the forthcoming publication of Lip feels very culmative. It’s a simultaneous birth and death. The thing is out of my hands now, and I can’t change it anymore. After having been a fifth limb for 3+ years, all of a sudden it’s done and gone. That’s both jubilant and frightening, and how it needs to be.

It’s also become a very special book, near the end. It’s got touches and timestamps of close friends, and even an icon or two: cover title text by Sacha Archer, a table of contents by Gary Barwin, a visuopoetic contribution to the backmatter by derek beaulieu, and 20 original illustrations by bill bissett, who made and mailed me all these drawings in dialogue with the work, which are appearing in the world for the first time via the vehicle of the book. It’s strange and beautiful to see a book that’s been a very constant presence in one’s life for several years suddenly become more itself in a comparative instant by outside hands. 

The extended project, and its definitively dissolutional culmination in Lip, is an experiment in lipogrammatic limit cases, presenting densely multilingual lipogramatic and palindromic poems composed exclusively of words, borrowed from a variety of languages, consisting only of vowels (and in its most limit-case moments, multilingual poems consisting of only a single letter).

What stories can be told, what moments excavated, what rivers frozen and what ideas bestilled through the use of words made entirely of vowels, or entirely of consonants, or, indeed, poems consisting of a single invariant letter or glyph, like its central suite of poems does? It's hopeless, insane and beautiful questions like these that compel me forward, and that make the book both possible and actual.

Lip makes these kinds of questions possible by transposing and transgressing lingual borders, borrowing from dozens upon dozens of different languages, finding phonic and sonic oddities within the world’s myriad tongues that share some invariant aspect of form, and bringing them together, putting them in dialogue with one another, in order to create poems that, for example, are exclusively composed of vowels, or exclusively made up of consonants, as well as other primal and minimalist fragments of language , and different recombinant shards of lettoral atoms – two and three letter combinations of vowels and consonants, etc.

Lip takes these forms of compositional and structural omission and constraint and uses it to map real world forms of constraint and omission on the broken frontiers of history, culture, ecology and economy, dictating not only the fundamental ontogenic and ontologic units of the poems, or what they are permitted to be (the use of certain letters, or certain invariant aspects of form on the level of the word), but also how they are permitted to be organized and communitize amongst each other, AKA, organizational constraint, such as the multilingual lipogramatic palindrome or the “emop” (poems consisting of words that share some invariant aspect of form on the level of the word, arranged in alphabetical order). In doing this, it’s my hope that the book speaks to themes and concepts that are both timely and timeless, encircling aspects of humanity that are evertrue: love, sex, death, theft, identity, war, empire etc.

In some ways the book is also an experiment in anti-translation, in the sense that there’s no actual translation taking place. I’ve used the verbatim literal English translations, or at times the technical and grammatical definitions of its poems constituent words, in composing each multilingual poem’s English counterpart. The ontological grammar of the book treats the words composing its poems to some extent as sovereign beings, and except for a very select few instances documented in the book’s notes, takes them exactly as they’ve been found, without synonymizing or editorializing them. In fact, the book synonymizes exactly one word (using “to piss” in place of “to urinate” for the sonorism as well as the impertinence).

It’s a project that not only revels in the beautifully ontogenic nature of language, but also one that attempts to interrogate the darker, ontologically prescriptive characteristics and potential uses of language as well, like the nature of the definition, the inherently insidious nature of lists and registers, the ills of tils, etc.

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

Glib but true, poetry found me, rather than the other way around. In the sense that I began writing and publishing poetry before I really read (or found a love for reading) poetry. I became drawn to it as the headiest edge where language splinters and where words are their most meltpearly and waxlike. Being a linguic machine (as all minds-in-universe are, necessarily), the attraction to language at its most anomalous, self-reflecxtive, and possiblational seemed like the most natural thing in the word. At the time (my late teens, I think), I was doing other things, and embroiled in other forms of intellectual work and play. Some science, a lot of philosophy, and some vagabond scholaring. Poetry is where I went to break (not just the sense of leisure, but also in the sense of fouling apart; of cracking oneself open and, halfdying, reveling in the starsplint shards).

I fell in love with (but hadn't yet read; not really) Finnegans Wake (which will always be more poetry than novel to me), which likely revealed this anomalous hallmark of language to me - that words can be plasticized, ectomized, and Frankensteined into worlds. This is probably the insidious spore that started it all. Hard to be sure; it's all ghostly mirrors-in-mirrors to me now (memory being the persistence of decay in the flensing lense of time), and like most of the frictions spectrating my inner haunt, more motheaten poem than statue, however ozymandaic.

When I decided to re-enter the world of poetry in 2017, I was fortunate enough to find several warm and welcoming guides and hosts close to home. By coincidence, two of my favourite poets happen to live and work within a 20-minute drive of my home: Gregory Betts and Adam Dickinson. I sought each of them out and cornered them, brandishing my crinkled envelope of manuscriptural sheaves, craze-eyed with animal tremor.

I found in each of them a generous and vigilant Virgil to my Dante, full of friendship and informal mentorship (I say informal because I haven't actually studied under them formally; in poetry, as in all else, I remain uninstitutionally trainéd). They've both given me more than my due of generous feedback on my ongoing projects, indulged my hermetic concerns and alchemical ravings, opened many warm doors, and tipped me off to the best local poetry shindigs both public and private. I remain deeply indebted to both of them, and cherish their friendships.

Poetry also lost me for a while, after it found me. There was a good few years after really getting into it where I didn’t write, or even read, any poetry. I was off doing other awfully burdensome and weighty things, trying to change the world for the better, as I had been before poetry (B.P.) and after poetry (A.P.), when it first found me. That foray (return, really) didn’t break me – the gleam and spirit is still there – but it did tire me.

All this isn’t to say that I don’t think poetry is important; for me it is vitally - even deathly - important. But in a different way. It’s not going to change human worlds, or affect very many human lives, but it pushes, breaks-anew, changes and innovates language in small, isolated, largely unseen but undeniably and factually existent (i.e., real) ways. It changes Plato’s world, not ours, and is more akin to the brightforge thunderpeal of a manmade rift in quantum spacetime, or the fleeting creation of a new subatomic particle, than a breakthrough in cancer treatment, or a cheap way to desalinate water. Its innovation, and it’s real, and fundamental, and has the potential to impact (however immaterially) those who chance a glance before it vaporizes, but it’s not going to make things better. And that’s okay, I think.

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

When I do poetry, I try to make it do what poetry does best: plasticize meaning at the borders of language. If I had to define poetry, I’d have to say that it’s words at their most. “Their most what?” is the right response to that statement, and precisely the point. Words at their most what.

Poetry finds, and makes, meaning in misreading. It’s its most elevatory and revelatory quality. It’s what makes it it, and what makes it worth it. Its power and draw likes in its generative ambiguity, and a thing whose power lies less in its lexic and semantic qualities as in its semiotics – not what it means, but the shifting interplay between authorial intent and reader interpretation. A poem is a thing that revels in its gaps, its ethers, and its simultaneous superposition of meanings, whose power and fundament of being is in what it’s not saying, or what it’s almost saying, or almost not saying.

Above all else, I’m trying to make it new, as the famous poundcake once spake. What experiments can I conduct that brings language to a brink no one else has frontiered before? What can be said there? What spaces and places can be sung for the fist time or revoiced there? These are the things I’m after.

For the most part, the majority of projects I cultivate lead themselves. I thrust myself into some overlooked nook of language, some combinatory or translatory suburb of the worlds inside words, and I explore, forage, and try to make space to allow things to make and reveal themselves. Often this takes the form of constrained lexicons – finding some invariant aspect of form that serves as walls for words, and limits the actual inventory of words I’m able to work with. A pinnacling example would be Lip, soon to become my very first book (and, by association, the first two chapbooks I had out in the world: aeiou through derek beaulieau's No Press in 2018, and uoiea, through your own above/ground press in 2019).

Other byways of my poetic practice try to vivisect possibilities of language by smashing it across the hard edge of our present technological moment, forcing (or allowing) meaning by using our many hypermodern artefacts to cut into language, letting it bleed the wons and zheroes lurking inside.

This is the world of technopoetry, which I would define as poetry which uses distinctly or emblematically modern technologies as part of its procedural or compositional process in such a way as to at least part of authorial agency into those technologies themselves.

At its best, technopoetry is ideally suited to use these very technologies to interrogate, document or vivisect our current technological moment, using omnipresent tools of hypermodern crisis to produce art from artifice.

I'm thinking here of projects like those encapsulated by my recent chapbooks no mỡ, no mo, no mò (nOIR:Z 2020), tú cu nǔ sù yù mù (Trainwreck Press 2020), and gó go gó (The Blasted Tree 2020), which use a densely multilingual lipogram as a starting point and, in the words of Kyle Flemmer, subjecting it to "various methods of manual and automated translation - including verbatim, machine, and text-to-image procedures, pull[ing] a seemingly nonsensical text through a series of sense-making operations, forging surprising new poems with each iteration." , as well as projects like Bark Ode, a chapbook that I had out last year through your own above/round press that uses a random, blind and somewhat violent gesture of the body (random, fast typing, as if in frustration or desperation) as the raw input for Google Translate, forcing an ever-present staple of our technological moment to interpret worldess, dumb, blind and violent bodily vestures as language.

Poetry's all translation anyway, whether you know, or like it, or not. ... Throughout all the projects at play in my poetic practice, however, is the idea of finding an unexcavated corner of language, living there for a bit, and trying to force something out of it that is both emblematically human and utterly alien, and truer for it, acting as a host for language to speak itself. I'm just a poet, which for the majority of my projects to date is less author than a kind of curator, editor, or space. The poetry is itself, and I try not to get too much in the way of that.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

God, none. Unless you find one that you feel fits, in which case good on you. Society usually needs to be the artist’s bane for anything to work in the first place, but maybe that’s an opinion tied up with my own ideational and aesthetic preferences.

It’s funny (in a hellish, Divine Comedy sort of way), however, thinking of the role of poetry today, rather than writing and writers more generally. I’ve already said above what I think poetry is at its best – a portal into the living void on the empty sides of glyphs, fuller than any sky, ready and ample to be applebitten and firstcontacted. But its role, well. It’s dying. This isn’t to say that it’s not more vibrantly alive inside itself in certain nooks and crannies than its ever been before – this is true. But no one reads it. You need to sell less copies of poetry to be a bestseller than any other genre – fiction, nonfiction, period-piece gothwestern Shrek erotica, you name it. And I can’t find a wealthy aristocratic patron for the life of me.

This is a fairly far fall from what it used to be (and the words already feel sheepish and clownlike in my mouth, despite their sooth), given that poetry started out as the thing that founded cultures. When you think about it for a moment, I think it's pretty clear that poetry was created as a very practical tool to make myth (cosmological, existential and moral narratives) more memorable and memorizable. The vehicle for soothing animal fear of death and the black maw of the night sky, for providing scary stories to deter social chaos amid rampant self-interest, and for keeping power, wealth and influence siloed where the last guy found it. A viral envelope to make otherfunctional stories more transmissible and recombinant. An expressly operant machine for founding civilizations, for cruxsake!

And now? Don’t ask me. I’m a poet, and can’t be trusted.

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

Sometimes difficult when there are fundamental rifts in terms of what the thing is, and wherefore the poem is, but on the vast whole net-beneficial. The overwhelming majority of editorial experiences I’ve had have made the thing better (and more often than not have editorialized macrostructurally, in terms of the order of poems and composition of poems, rather than the composition of poems – wait a minute…).

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

Learn to find joy in seconds.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

As you might be able to tell, whenever I’m writing in a form or venue that allows it, my prose consistently devolves into poetry. Just look at any one of my various chapbooks’ afterwords. I can’t help myself. It’s a problem.

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

None, whatsoever. Not by choice, but necessity. I find it hard enough to find time between a full-time dayjob and a bustling, burgeoning (but never burdening) family. I carve out minutes wherever I can, and it's almost always a halfguilty thing, but I can stay away. It thins me, existentially, if I do, and it always feels like an RSVP with death, sans chess.

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

When a project gets stalled I turn to another one. Time is way too scarce, and poetry much too important to my addiction-to-identity, to admit defeat in the face of flatlines. Luckily, I usually have too many projects on the go at a given time, and some substantial fraction of them often involve somatic deadweight procedural steps in them, and the necessity to do a lot of rote dredgework to familiarize myself with the landscape of a given project's nook in language. Often this involves the collection and curation (e.g, organization and classification) of some strangely inventory of words (some constrained lexicon), gathered by hand into a daunting, sprawling, biblic carcass of an encycloplegic thousand score-odd document. Lip was this, for a long time.

Anyweigh, what this means is that when the authorial ghost running my cordyceptic meatsack of a body-in-time tires, I can turn off, drop out, and cycle through these pressureless, vacant spaces, digging and dirtpiling grist for present and future millstones.

Other times I'm lazier, and I shuck off completely, go watch some Shakespeare and melt in sleepy sudz, or revel and gasp in the beauteous stacked singularities of time with my wife and son. These usually prove more effective, and rejuvenating.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My wife’s skin, and my son’s hair.

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

Writings, plenty. So very many of my small press contemporaries, who I won’t name because I’m going to forget to mention a lot of them, unfairly. However, writers themselves are more important both for my work and my life outside of work than writings. I find poetic friendships quite important to the existential endurance demanded by poetry, which involves hard work for little gain, shackled to the whethered rind of a dying genre. I’ve already mentioned a few, I think (Gregory Betts, Adam Dickinson, etc.). In my first life as a poet, before the intermission, I found this in longtime friend and exceptional poet Jacob Braun, who's working on one dusie of a manuscript right now (and who actually introduced me to Adam Dickinson once, in another life, both figuratively and physically, although I think neither Adam nor I remember it now). I still do, with Jake. These days, I find myself spending a lot of time with Sacha Archer (a brilliant if half-broken savant-guardist, whose friendship I cherish with raugged, mansome love), and find rejuvenating consort in a number of others (I’d be remiss not to mention Anthony Etherin and Gary Barwin here).

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

I really don’t know. I feel as though I’d be lost without it. I suppose I’d go back to what I was doing before, and during the intermission. Namely, blindly and fledgingly foraging in the rompic headlands of science.

Much like poetry, I have no formal training in the sciences (or the humanities, for that matter), but I did manage to teach myself a whole lot of science in my early twenties – enough to write up and publish a conceptual therapy idea I worked on over a period of roughly three years: Induced Cell Turnover (see here and here Subsequently, that paper found a few sympathetic ears, which scored me a gig working on a bunch of other cool projects and papers with a great band of scientists.

A selection, for anyone who might be interested (who am I kidding?):

Blood Biochemistry Analysis to Detect Smoking Status and Quantify Accelerated Aging in Smokers

Population Specific Biomarkers of Human Aging: A Big Data Study Using South Korean, Canadian, and Eastern European Patient Populations

Towards natural mimetics of metformin and rapamycin

Machine Learning on Human Muscle Transcriptomic Data for Biomarker Discovery and Tissue-Specific Drug Target Identification

The effects of donor age on organ transplants: A review and implications for aging research

RNAi mechanisms in Huntington’s disease therapy: siRNA versus shRNA

Whole-Body Induced Cell Turnover: A Proposed Intervention for Age-Related Damage and Associated Pathology

 

Induced Cell Turnover: A Novel Therapeutic Modality for In Situ Tissue Regeneration

Optimal Phase of Slow Wave Auditory Stimulation

Most of these are in the realm of the biology of aging and biogerontology, but an exception is a paper that I was lead author on which offered a roadmap of existing and proposed approaches for enhancing radioresistance (protection from radiation) for the purposes of space exploration and colonization: Vive la radiorésistance!: converging research in radiobiology and biogerontology to enhance human radioresistance for deep space exploration and colonization.

That project was probably the most fun, for a few reasons. Science, and scientific papers in particular, are almost always satisfying in the end, but they can be such long and stultifying slogs. This one was very (ahem) exploratory, which was a very nice change of pace at the time.

It also had a whole slew of authors (from NASA Ames Research Center, Environmental and Radiation Health Sciences Directorate at Health Canada, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, Belgian Nuclear Research Centre, Oxford University, Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Lethbridge, Ghent University, and on and on), 30 or more of them I think, and working on something with that many hands in the pot was really fun.

I also got to work with an awfully nice feller named Dmitry Klokov (a research scientist at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories) on a theoretical framework that uses a genetic and endocrine-mediated feedback circuit to essentially make my coming-of-age therapy idea (Induced Cell Turnover) adaptive to radiation exposure. Now that was a dusie – many moving parts (involving “the use of a radiation-responsive promoter that drives expression of a synthetic or a recombinant transcription factor that binds very specifically to a synthetic promoter that up-regulates a pro-apoptotic factor, wherein the radiation responsive promoter also control the transcription of an endocrine factor which activates and/or upregulates SCS or hPSC endogenous and/or synthetic or translational factors controlling SCS and hPSC proliferation and mobilization in a targeted manner (such that each distinct tissue-specific SCS and hPSC population is equipped with a specific promoter correlating with a distinct synthetic or translational endocrine agent)…”). That was nice, revisiting that idea after a few years to see how it might be made anew, for a different purpose.

The majority of them, however, were much more straightforward. Which is fine, if less compositionally fun.

And, indeed, often the ones with the greatest actual potential impact are the ones that are the least fun to make, the least exploratory, and the most straightforward. For example, I’m fairly certain that that my most lasting contribution to the field will turn out to be the project in which I served as one of five authors behind a partially-successful proposal to the World Health Organization during ICD-11 (the last round of revisions to their International Classification of Diseases system) that resulted in the WHO adding a new “extension code” for “ageing-related” (the official definition of which I helped write – which very much satisfied the poet in me), XT9T, which can be appended to existing and new diseases within the system. The ICD basically sets the standard for other specific nations’ drug regulatory bodies for what conditions are officially classified as diseases (if you’re looking to develop a drug or therapy that treats something, that something needs to be officially classified as a disease), and the WHO only updates it once every few decades (the last update was 1994). What we did there was bring the biological process of aging closer to being classified as a disease than anyone has before. In practice, this amounts to providing real financial incentive for drug makers to develop therapies for aging and age-related diseases, by having a regulatory peghole to place it in, so that they have the go-ahead to develop therapies targeting it. While only partially successful, it was still a big win.

Now, while I taught myself the science expressly to develop that first idea (Induced Cell Turnover) and publish that paper, as a pragmatic and starkly functional tool toward that end, in the hopes that someone adepter than me could take it and do something with it, I ended up very much falling in love with science along the way. It’s incredible. I mean, forget about the human organism (or any other for that matter), but even just the cell. My god. Myriads of nested universes. The strangest, most improbable, beautifully alien thing in the entire universe. So much stranger than the strangest Rube Goldberg fiction you could envision. And it takes a fair bit of slogging and fundamental gathering to really understand the vast complexity of it in its true and sheer enormity, but once you get there, its like drinking with god. It’s truly astounding.

Anywho, probably that. But I’d much rather do poetry, honestly.

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

There are a good half-dozen ideas I crafted and worked on for a long while a long while ago, which I was never able to push past the finish lie (i.e., publication). Mostly conceptual therapy proposals – a few preventive cancer therapies and so called “pre-emptory “ cancer therapies (essentially, biotechnological and or SynBio constructs that are intended to make cancer more treatable if and when it occurs), a unique method of multiplex targeted drug delivery that allows for more precise delivery of drugs (according to multiple cell or tissue-specific markers – e.g., gene profiles rather than individual expressed genes, etc. I still believe these ideas have merit, and I’d like to find the time (and energy, will and determination) to formalize them further, write them up and push them off into the world for other people to have a chance at picking them up and carrying them home, like I did for my first one (Induced Cell Turnover).

Being unpublished, existent only in my own skull and boxes of papers, they weigh on me, like errant ghosts. Ideas can do that. I feel a fair amount of guilt having let them rot for the past few years, and I’d like to at the very least dust them off and ship them out, if not to give them a standing chance at finding some scientific artisan to try them out or elaborate them further, then at the very least to stop them from Hamlet’s-fathering me so often.

All this lamentation probably sounds very indulgent and vain, but it’s true. There are other, less practical and functional ideas that I worked on and left likewise waysided (a few possibly novel ideas in the realm of evolutionary theory and evolutionary biology; a theory of freewill that attempts to undercut the fundamental impasse of causal determinism via the fact that the brain is a semiotic machine [which is what it is to be/signify what it isn’t] thus making it in some sense a causally-exclusive system with recursive partial overlap with the mutually causally-exclusive system of the scientifically determinate physical world, because the metaphysics of signs is a different thing than the metaphysics of atoms; etc. etc.), which weigh on me none because they have little to no capacity to actually help people, or improve anything.

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

I’m definitely the wrong person to be asking. I mean, I’m barley even myself, for the most part. How the hell should I know?

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

Issa’s Moth (book), and Carboy (film). Both by Sacha Archer, both unpublished. The cannibal joys of toodeep friendships with shifty, broken poets (as all are, I think). Wouldn’t trade it (©reddit bedamned).

20 - What are you currently working on?

 

Right now I’m embroiled in a project within the realm of technopoetry that’s completely kicking my ass because, for reasons of thematic and conceptual convergence, it requires me to complete certain sections of it within the bounds of seasonal time. Given the project’s scope, it was a monumentally foolhardy declaration, and I’m already failing. But, because the project is about the climate crisis, and other forms of modern brash (the omnipresent threat of human omnicide, the vacant existentiality of consumerism and globalism, the fact that we’re still embroiled in limbic holywars despite having gone to the moon, having sent robots to Mars, and having spelled out acronyms with atoms, etc.), that failure is only fitting, I think. What can I say, and what can I do? A poet’s gotta poet.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

an interview, a pamphlet + two new poems,

I was recently interviewed as part of a spotlight via the Ottawa Arts Council, had a wee pamphlet produced by Anthony Etherin's Penteract Press (selected from a work-in-progress from a decade or so ago), and had newly-composed poems (as part of the current work-in-progress, "book of magazine verse") appear via Train : a poetry journal and the Chaudiere Books, for the sake of #NationalPoetryMonth. Exciting!
 

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Anthony Etherin on Penteract Press

Penteract Press is a UK-based small press specialising in experimental poetry with an emphasis on structure. This includes formal verse, concrete poetry, and poems composed using constraints of varying complexity. It exists online at penteractpress.com.

Anthony Etherin is a writer of constrained, formal and experimental poetry. He tweets poems @Anthony_Etherin and archives his work online at anthonyetherin.wordpress.com. He runs Penteract Press, with his wife, artist and illustrator Clara Daneri.

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

We began in the latter half of 2016. I’d written a poem called “Wars of the Roses and Thorns”, and I had such a clear idea of how I wanted it presented that, rather than send it off for someone else to make, I decided to design and distribute the leaflet myself. Kind of as a whim, and because I thought it looked good, I added a penteract logo, with the name “Penteract Press” beneath it—but I wasn’t committed to starting a press. That came a few months later, after talking things over with my wife, Clara. We decided it would be a great way to meet interesting people, and to be more involved in the arts, in general.

As it happened, the “penteract” (which is the five-dimensional equivalent of the 2-D square, 3-D cube and 4-D tesseract) conveniently represented our taste in art: We like poetry that places an emphasis on structure, but which also has a radical and innovative edge. That is, we like works that, like the penteract, are an extension of familiar rules and forms into exotic, unfamiliar territory. We decided on this theme early on, and our goal, in this respect, hasn’t changed.

With respect to scale, however, our ambitions have certainly grown. When we began, we weren’t thinking beyond single-sheet leaflets. We’re now producing booklets and looking to produce full-length books. This is partly down to the fun we’ve had learning about book design, materials, typesetting, etc.—and all those other details that were, before we set out, so easily overlooked.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

Back at university, Clara and I ran a small record label for local bands, including my own. So, we’ve always enjoyed seeing works of art realised as material objects. Personally (being somewhat obsessed with control) I don’t like not being involved during any stage of the creative process!

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

Knowing how hard it can be to relinquish control of a poem, I feel a huge responsibility to present others’ poems appropriately, and in a manner that best highlights their unique qualities. Moreover, Clara and I know that each poem we publish represents the overall theme and aesthetic of our press, and, because of this, we try to be very selective…. So, there’s definitely a great deal of aesthetic responsibility involved.

Social or political responsibilities are less of a focus, given the generally abstract and conceptual nature of the work we publish. We select works that inspire us, and which fit our aesthetic. Politics stay out of it, mostly. If we’re publishing the highest quality work we can, then we feel we’re doing our job properly.

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

I wouldn’t say no one else is doing it, but it’s quite unusual for such a small press to have published predominantly international poets. Nearly all our poets are based outside the UK, which is likely a result of our very specific theme, and our selectivity—we have to cast a wide net.

In addition to planning for larger-scale works, we have recently begun reading submissions for a series of “nanopamphlets”—miniature (A8) leaflets. That’s not really something I’ve seen elsewhere. I like to think our introduction of nanopamphlets, at a time when we are also thinking of full-length books, says something about our commitment to a DIY aesthetic.

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

While our publications are purchasable from a small number of bookshops (bookartbookshop in London stocks our complete series: http://www.bookartbookshop.com/), given that most of our poets, and therefore our readers, are based outside the UK, we rely heavily on the internet, and on our online store, https://penteractpress.com/store/. For promotion, we depend on social media, and on the support of friends and collaborators.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

I rarely make suggestions on the content of the poems themselves—of course, any typographical and grammatical errors are brought to the author’s attention. Furthermore, I will often engage with the poets throughout the publishing process, relaying PDFs, to make sure they are happy with the design. It’s their poem, after all, so they should have the final say on all aesthetic decisions. I don’t like surrendering too much control over my own poetry, so I shouldn’t expect it of others!

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

We currently self-distribute through our site, penteractpress.com, although we intend to look at other options, when we start producing books. For the current, small scale stuff, most of our leaflets are printed at home, and are produced when a sale is made. On the day of publication, we’ll do a short run that includes a number of copies to be sent to the author as “payment”—normally between 15 and 25, depending on material costs.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

It’s just Clara and me; though, as I said, our leaflets are produced through close contact with their authors, who are the best judges of their own poetry. I like art with a clear vision, unmuddied by too many interfering voices.

The only drawback I can think of is that there are only two of us to do all the work of printing, folding and mailing the leaflets, on days when significant sales are made—but I can’t complain too much about that!

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

Whenever I write a poem, these days, I think of how it should appear in leaflet format—which typeface and font would suit it best, which paper, how much space it should occupy, and so on—in fact, there’s a definite “back and forth” between the poem and its potential presentations. They way it might look ends up affecting the outcome of its content, which is something I find fascinating. Symbiosis between content and form is really important in poetry, anyway, and an area I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with—moving into publishing has given these experiments greater scope.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

I believe in self-publishing, because I believe in overseeing a project from start to finish. Self-publishing is a good way of asserting individuality—and individuals always make better artists than committees.

Of course, it is also nice to see how other publishers interpret one’s work. Personally, I’ll self-publish those poems for which I have a definite vision, and I’ll submit elsewhere those for which I do not…. But, in general, I’m very much a fan of the art of self-publishing, since the few legitimate arguments against it are greatly outweighed by its virtues.

The one thing I’ll say from the contrary perspective, I suppose, is that self-publishing should never dominate a small press that has made a commitment to publishing other poets. To this end, Clara and I will never publish our own works at the expense of someone else: Our selection criteria for submitted works, and their likelihood of acceptance, remain unaffected by our personal projects.

11– How do you see Penteract Press evolving?

We’re now committed to producing lengthier works. This will start with a short book of my micropoems (my own poetry will be serving, here, as a guinea pig—that’s another benefit of self-publishing), and we’ll probably follow that with an anthology, before, all going well, taking submissions for full-length collections.

We’re also interested in pursuing more individualised, niche works: Handmade and handbound, strictly limited editions, and the like. We want to go in both directions: bigger and smaller. We want to reach a larger audience while retaining our idiosyncrasies and independence.

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

Presses our size are a labour of love, with little chance of making a significant profit—I guess that’s frustrating, to some extent, but we knew it would be the case when we started. I’m proud that we’ve been able to stay afloat, and are now in a position to build upon our work. I’m also proud of the positive attention certain of our publications have received—one, in particular, has reached an audience most poetry leaflets rarely experience. Most of all, however, I’m proud of the compliments we’ve received from fellow poets and publishers—from people we respect, and who really seem to understand what we’re trying to achieve.

As for what people have overlooked (and this is, of course, a frustration too), it never ceases to amaze us how many submissions come from people who have, apparently, never been remotely near our submissions guidelines….

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

We have been hugely inspired by Derek Beaulieu’s No Press, and we were fortunate enough to get advice directly from Derek, when starting out. Ken Hunt’s Spacecraft Press and Kyle Flemmer’s The Blasted Tree were early models, too, and I’ve remained in contact with both Ken and Kyle.

14– How does Penteract Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Penteract Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

Having published mostly international poets, when I think of our “immediate” literary community, I think of likeminded poets and publishers, before I think of geography. The internet is Penteract Press’s true home. I’m a habitual tweeter, and I’ve met many poets and publishers through my Twitter account.

The presses I’ve had the most contact with are, unsurprisingly, those operating on a similar scale, and exploring similar corners of the avant-garde. I’ve mentioned No Press, Spacecraft Press and The Blasted Tree. Another I’d like to add is Sweden’s Timglaset, run by Joakim Norling.

Dialogues with presses such as these are very useful—we exchange publications, suggest poets to approach, and, occasionally, discuss the more practical aspects of putting a publication together. More importantly, we, either directly or by our actions, provide each other much-needed encouragement.

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

Given our location, and the international nature of our press, we rarely hold readings and launches. This is unfortunate, and something that will certainly change, when we make the transition to full-length books. We already have several locations in mind.

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

We rely heavily on our Twitter accounts and website. We are also in the process of setting up a Patreon account, and exploring other internet-based means of promotion and distribution.

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

We are currently open to submissions for our leaflet and nanopamphlet series (details here: https://penteractpress.com/).

As a publisher of constrained, concrete and formal poetry, the simple answer to what we don’t want is, “free verse”. In terms of content, we tend to prefer the extrospective over the introspective (in fact, we rather enjoy poems that have no subject at all). Poetry about science, history, and the arts are most welcome. But it’s unlikely we’d publish poems that fixate on identity, or which promote a specific political stance. Poetry overly concerned with feelings isn’t really our sort of thing, either, though we are happy to consider it….

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

I’ve already mentioned our miniature ‘nanopamphlets’, most of which we are likely to give away, rather than sell. I don’t know how many of these we’re going to produce, but it’s a format we love working with—they’re not too costly to produce, present an interesting design challenge, and, as something anyone could make, reflect our love of DIY arts. The most recent nanopamphlet we’ve published is “Neith Cursive”, a small visual poem by Derek Beaulieu.

As a stepping stone towards producing books, we have recently published two booklets, which we had printed by a third party. It’s been an interesting experience, and fun adapting to designing larger formats. The first one was “Broken Light”, by Gary Barwin—a 16-page booklet of visual poetry based on the Hebrew alphabet. The other is the long poem “A Nocturne for Eurydice” by Christian Bök, which appears in a more delicate, A6-size, 8-page edition. We’ve been really pleased with how both have turned out—it augurs well for the future.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;