The Matter of the ‘Small’ in Small-Press Publishing

Author(s):  
Nick Thoburn
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Eunsong Kim

The Archive for New Poetry (ANP) at the University of California San Diego was founded with the specific intention of collecting alternative, small press publications and acquiring the manuscripts of contemporary new poets. The ANP’s stated collection development priority was to acquire alternative, non-mainstream, emerging, “experimental” poets as they were writing and alive, and to provide a space in which their papers could live, along with recordings of their poetry readings. In this article, I argue that through racialized understandings of innovation and new, whiteness positions the ANP’s collection development priority. I interrogate two main points in this article: 1) How does whiteness—though visible and open—remain unquestioned as an archival practice? and 2) How are white archives financed and managed? Utilizing the ANP’s financial proposals, internal administrative correspondences, and its manuscript appraisals and collections, I argue that the ANP’s collection development priority is racialized, and this prioritization is institutionally processed by literary scholarship that linked innovation to whiteness. Until very recently, US Experimental and “avant-garde” poetry has been indexed to whiteness. The indexing of whiteness to experimentation, or the “new” can be witnessed in the ANP’s collection development priorities, appraisals, and acquisitions. I argue that the structure of the manuscripts acquired by the ANP reflect literary scholarship that theorized new poetry as being written solely by white poets and conclude by examining the absences in the Archive for New Poetry.


This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.


1985 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-35
Keyword(s):  

1981 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 111-112
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Berry

This article takes as its subject the project of British author and editor Aidan Chambers to set up a small press dedicated to publishing modern European children’s literature in translation, 1988–92. Positioned within Gideon Toury’s framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, this paper outlines the history of the firm and its founding ideology to publish children’s literature “with a difference” for a British audience. As a result, preliminary norms (relating to text, author and translator selection) and operational norms (relating to translation strategies) for four novels by Maud Reuterswärd, Peter Pohl and Tormod Haugen are identified and analyzed. Fundamental to the article’s methodology is the use of bibliographical, archival and oral history primary sources. The principal focus of research interest is Chambers’ use of language consultants in addition to his commissioned translators in an unusual and sometimes challenging professional collaboration of editor-translator-consultant within a Nordic-British setting.


2018 ◽  
pp. 189-196
Author(s):  
Jaime Harker

The conclusion considers some of the legacies of the Women in Print movement and the Southern lesbian feminists who animated it, by considering contemporary examples of small press publishing and queer distribution networks.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Anne Thurmann-Jajes

Established in 1999 within the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, in Bremen, the Studienzentrum für Künstlerpublikationen (Research Centre for Artists’ Publications) is today one of the most significant institutions worldwide in the field of artists’ publications, with holdings of more than 200,000 items, and important programmes of exhibitions and publications. The Research Centre traces its roots to the Archive for Small Press & Communication (ASPC), founded in 1974 by Anne Marsily and Guy Schraenen, and incorporates more than 40 individual archives and special collections, including the PLG Friesländer’s Mail Art Archive, the Klaus Groh Collection and the Kunstradio Archive.


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