PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE
RETICULATED DAYS IN THE LIVES OF A REGULAR MAN
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 CHAPTER 2
Most of the time the mail arrives around 3. I learned the joys & tribulations of mail back in 1980 when i started producing an underground literary arts magazine, & began my own career as a writer waiting for word back on my manuscripts. Mail can make or break a day. I've accumulated near 15 years of fairly steady mail, & sometimes, tho I published only 4 issues of NORTHERN PLEASURE ceasing in 2 years, I still receive submissions for the magazine. People have been sending me their poems & stories all this time as if I'm a Publisher. Also the shit-brains at POET'S MARKET yearly twenty buck book of publisher listings keeps including my TRANSLUCENT TENDENCY PRESS blurb tho I have NOT ok'd its inclusion for a couple years, so people are taking TRANSLUCENT seriously & fuck I don't have time to breathe my own breath let alone going thru & sending all the shit back no matter how good or bad the writing is I scan & stack & sometimes steal their self-addressed stamped-envelope for my own communications. I usually respond back to submissions if they serenely inquire. Sometimes I'm able to dump a load on somebody else, some new Publisher I meet, but most Editors aren't that naive, or generous. Plugging TRANSLUCENT in POET'S MARKET was a stoned reverberation of self-induced Fate, that's all.
Much has happened thru the mail thru the decades.
Postal Phenomenon.
My mail-list is about 50. I send things in spurts of activity. New correspondents, new connections, new friends grow year after year. Others disappear back into the void & noise. I am directly affected by happenings in the mail, & things materialize because of it.
A lot of things & changes & mysterious serendipity. Psychic Angels like Cheryl & Gabrielle, Psychic brothers like Nimmo & Weber. I'm not sure where the term "Beasts" originated to describe us as Poets & Writers & Editors in the 90's, but we've also been labeled "Meats", & a possible Anthology is in the works. It's a play on Beat, the Beat movement, since of course our grand-daddies are guys like Kerouac or Bukowski. Freedom in & from the 50's onwards. I was born in 1954. I read NAKED LUNCH in 1969. I started continuous marijuana smoking in 1972. I had my first "real" poem published in 1973. CHIRON REVIEW is running a feature of my work, plus an interview by Oberc, a photo of my face drunk, in this fall issue. Answering Oberc's interview questions thru a 12-pack of Genny Cream Ale & pipes was perhaps not such a good idea, & then I mailed it off next morning so hung-over, I have no copy of that interview, yet. Doubtful literacy. The poems the Publisher, Michael Hathaway, is printing, are old wild ones heavy on descriptive sex, drugs, booze, & factory work. Funny, because I'm a quiet, regular guy, sober.
I drink too much, smoke too much, & drown under thousands of books & papers & photographs & poems here in my tiny writing-room upstairs. It's Saturday morning. Diane bought me a book of stamps yesterday, so there's mail to mail, letters to write, poems to send as requested. Tolek wants some for his XIB magazine, but I'm out of typing cartridge to print some newer ones from the files on disk. & shit I don't keep track of submissions, I'm not sure where I send what & for why. Surprising to find somebody's published something you forgot you even wrote. I have to get off my ass & get some poems to Tolek in San Diego. We met in Chicago at The Underground Press Conference at DePaul University last month. I felt an instant brotherhood tho the cat's just 23. 23! I like his slick-covered Art-at-the-edge magazine. He's youthful Generation X energy genius.
The Underground Press Conference was an astounding time. People came from all across America. I hung with Basinski, Nimmo, Dean, Jay Marvin, Tolek, & other Poets likewise astounded such an event cld occur at all after all these decades of relative nothingness, of mere mail.
I will kiss Batya Goldman's feet if she asks, how she organized the Conference, along with Gabrielle & friends, is sheer determination. She got guts & vision. I don't doubt Batya anymore. She's got balls.
Nimmo's gotten balder & more resembles his age now at 42. I first met Kurt in 1984. He was an angry, poor fuck in leather. Now he wears J.C. Penney shirts like an uncle, bald, like a normal middle-aged man. For some goddamn reason he wants to argue literate propositions about the silliest nit-picking shit going on in Underground Politics & Theory. I give a whole fuck less. I have my big black graying castro beard back, long pony-tailed, & still dress in dirty jeans & flannel shirts, cowboy boots & an old blue-jean jacket.
I say let it all happen as it happens, & be cool. So what. What Literary History will remember is not our work, not our books, but our life-styles as caged beasts in 90's America. As long as the writing is meat & blood to verify our legitimate angst & Humanist condition, our screaming rants against smothering media society; how can we bitch.