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andrew lundwall
interviews michael rothenberg
michael, tell us a bit
about the history of
big bridge and
big bridge press...how
did it all begin and who are some of the writers that have been featured in
big bridge
in the past?...you've also been involved with
jack magazine...tell
us all a little bit about jack
as well as the
importance of electronic literary journals compared to print
I have had a bromeliad and
orchid nursery in Pacifica, California for the past 25 or more years. Big Bridge
Press began with the publication Bromeliaceae Andreanae, an annotated
facsimile reproduction of a classic bromeliad book that was impossible to find
except in Museum, written in French, and the taxonomy was out of date. I worked
with Robert W. Read, a botanist from the Smithsonian, and Doris Love, a
translator and plant authority. I found a copy of this book, Andre, and
thought it had beautiful illustrations and knew the information would be of
interest to bromeliad enthusiasts. Publishing this book was doing what I thought
was part of being a writer, putting something in to the culture you’re feeding
off of. Anyways, I went the way of fine print and limited editions. There was no
call for a trade edition of this book, and I have always loved books, fine
papers, and beautiful bindings so fine print was right up my alley. My friend
Don Gray, who published my first book of poems, What The Fish Saw,
offered to help me out with typographical things and teach me about how a book
was made. He let me work in the print shop of his small press, Two windows
Press, in San Francisco and I learned run a letterpress printer. I have
forgotten now but I remember it was exhausting. Don published people like Bill
Dickey, Douglas Blazek, Herbert Gold and others. He had a printing press in his
garage, you know that kind of thing, and so through him I was anointed in ink.
Before I knew it Don and I were working on doing fancier and fancier books.
Eventually Don got tired of this. He lost his arm many years earlier in a
motorcycle crash, so imagine him running a hand press with one arm. It got to be
a drain for him. So, Don retired and I continued, began working with all kinds
of letterpress printers, because I was a publisher not a printer. I ran Big
Bridge Press with Nancy Victoria Davis. We would conjure up book delicacies,
Nancy would design and illustrate them. I also had the pleasure of working with
Peter Koch and Andrew Hoyem, two great printers. Hoyem printed the Ginsberg
Scroll and Koch printed Book for Sensei. But then came the money issues
and distributions. The books I liked to make cost to much money. We couldn't
afford to publish letterpress any more. The libraries were running out of budget
for special collections and Big Bridge went dormant.
Then in 1997, I got a computer and found myself surfing for poetry zines. I was
totally tired of poetry print journals and the idea of publishing a literary
review seemed like a very bad idea. Not only did I not like the idea of being an
editor, I definitely didn't want to get involved in distribution problems. It
was better to just be able to give stuff away. And then, like I said, I found
myself surfing zines and I was totally thrilled. I don't know whether it was the
glow of the screen that caught my attention, psychedelic flashbacks, or the fact
that there were all these magazines I could reach, read and speak to,
immediately. I decided to start my own. I spoke to some friends and they joined
in to help and before I knew it Big Bridge online was up and running.
I want to add here that the
online journal is enormously important to me. We are not controlled by the
literary monopolies. This is just the thing that is driving the music industry
crazy, well, I am sure the poetry industry is not all that happy about the
internet. Though I see that so many people are writing poetry now and that for
only 25 dollars (oh my god!) you can submit to one of them literary reviews and
maybe among a thousand other submitters get a book published and win an award. I
don't think I will be winning any awards, but I'd like to. Yes, we can have
poetry and right here in our rooms, thousands of online zines to choose from,
samisdat, print it out, you choose!
I started to communicate
with hundreds of other editors and poets, crossing all kinds of social and
distance barriers. We're talking instant gratification, mostly unconstrained by
limitations of SCHOOLS OF POETRY, or GANGS OF POETS, or INSTITUTIONS OF POETS. I
felt Big Bridge had a chance online to "bridge" the varieties of writing that
might interest me at any given time and that I would not be bound by
pre-existing CLUBS and literary social orders. It was fantastic to see how
community oriented onliners were. And also how many poets there were who didn't
feel comfortable with established literary reviews, or who were excluded by
literary reviews, but were in fact waiting for a chance to play.
I can't imagine I would
have made as many friends and have learned so much about what people were
writing if I had not begun Big Bridge. And also, I could get published online
without sending out mail, I don’t know why postage made me a nervous wreck.
Online submission helped me out a lot. I got more confident. I was definitely
encouraged to write more.
For example, this answers your question about Jack. As I surfed around I found
Mary Sands at Beat Generation News and we struck up conversation. I was pals
with different writers she was interested in. The first issue of Big Bridge had
a chapbook of Philip Whalen. This was our first Feature Chapbook, a tradition at
Big Bridge. I am pretty sure Whalen was the first Beat poet to have a complete
original work online. Nancy Victoria Davis did the drawings for the chapbook.
The really interesting aspect of this that sort of supports where I have been
going with Big Bridge and why I like the internet, is that Philip was never a
public figure. He was loved, admired, and hidden away in a monastery. Through
Big Bridge more people could read his work than might have ever read a new book
of his in print. And we could send it right out of the monastery without going
through the GATES. I think it convinced some established poets that the internet
was not entirely an evil force of technology. I hope some day to have Philip’s
Big Bridge chapbook, Mark Other Place, in print, because there's no
replacement for having poetry in your hand, reading a book in bed, but then
again there's nothing like cyberspace for spreading the word.
Since Philip’s feature I have included Anselm Hollo, John Weiners, Renee
Gregorio, Jack Collom, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer, Ira Cohen, Michael McClure
in Big Bridge. But those were feature chapbooks. There are other great writers
like Bill Berkson, Duncan McNaughton, Ann Waldman, and Sarah Menefee who are
represented in the regular sections of Big Bridge. And then the writers who get
very little attention who deserve a great deal more consideration... But back to
Mary Sands, I sent her work from Philip Whalen and Michael McClure and other
beat writers, and documentarians of the "beat scene", like Larry Keenan and
Gordon Ball, and before I knew it Mary was saying she wanted to put up a
literary review, not necessarily history based like Beat News, and she named it
Jack. I think she said she always wanted to name a magazine Jack. So I agreed
and we did and so we continue. Mary came up with some great ideas for
departments for Jack, like Eco-Watch, Road Trip, and Path, etc., and I was more
of a contributing editor introducing her to writers I knew. Whew! that's a lot
of talking I'm doing here. I think that's enough of that.
|
The Paris Journals was published by
Fish Drum, Inc. in 2000 and is available on Amazon.com |
you're
a writer...what drives you to write?...do you feel that it is something
instinctual and do you believe that transcendence can be achieved through
the act of writing?
I have been writing since
I was about fifteen. That was about three hundred years ago. I don't know if
it is instinctual, I only know that it was something I wanted to do. I
remember sitting in English class at Miami Beach High, listening to my
teacher tell us about Shelley, Byron and Keats and then decided that's what
I want to do. But writing, the act of writing, that is very hard anddidn't
come easily and still doesn't. The journal is my saving grace. I made it a
point to write in my journal everywhere, in casinos, on trains, in crowds,
or totally alone, |
| whenever
I could, just to get to a point that I could learn to be writing fluidly,
and avoid block, to write out of a wide range of emotion and experiences.
When I was a kid I would write only when I was depressed. Joanne Kyger asked
me about writing out doors and I told her I couldn't, this was 20 years ago,
I told her there was nothing to write about OUT DOORS. There were only
clouds and stuff. Boy did I have it wrong. So she suggested I might practice
writing outdoors. Before I knew it I was writing in casinos. So be careful. |
I think writing poetry can
take you from one place to another so if that is transcendence I guess it will
work for doing that too. Some say that writing is a part of PRACTICE, buddhist
practice, getting present, speeding up and slowing down the mind, a way of
working with mind movements, and discipline. I believe that is happening, but I
am so out of control I find it hard to believe anything most of the time. Still
I keep writing. I love writing. I hate editing!
you seem to know
quite a deal of very important writers such as michael mcclure david meltzer
etc...do you consider any of these writers mentors to you?
Whalen is a major mentor of mine. But in his own way. He was a friend. It wasn't
about poetry in the "scene" or "writing of it" sense, it was about friends,
about focus, slowing down some, paying attention to what was in front of me,
“mindfulness”, he encouraged making better choices, and eating better.
Joanne Kyger taught me, and still teaches me a whole lot about being a writer,
as I have said in the forward to As Ever, Joanne's selected poems, Joanne
taught me more about poetry than any other poet. And I really mean it. She
really got me writing more regularly by her insistence that I work more, all the
time, in my journals. Joanne's intense attention to line and space was like
hitting me over the head all the time. It is a very difficult way to write and
think about writing, to bring mind, breath together in the act and experience of
writing, but Joanne is living Projective Verse, and her sense of humor and
vitality as a creator was home for me. Her reading recommendations always so on
target. A visit with Joanne is a history lesson, knowing about lineage and
community. I can't say enough about Joanne's influence.
Meltzer was my guide through my masters in poetics, a great friend, I focused on
poetry and popular song. Meltzer had a band Serpent Power, and he understood
what I was trying to do going out to Nashville to write country songs, and LA to
write pop. He encouraged me and helped me understand the tradition of popular
song and contemporary poetry, and helped me understand pop culture and "high
culture" better. Meltzer embodies the renaissance mind of his generation,
erotica, music, mysticism, politics, ecology, all of it in one world connected,
not departmentalized into some intellectual academic bureaucracy.
McClure, I met at my nursery in Pacifica, and that was entirely appropriate
since I had read his biology, ecology, Meat Science Essays, when I was a
teenager. We hiked together, looked at flowers together. We didn't meet over
poetry, we met over nature. That was the way it should be. McClure influenced
me, but philosophically. His essays suggested liberation.
|
His novel Punk Rockwell was published recently by
Tropical Press and available for purchase on Amazon.com
|
you
seem to be rather interested in the beat generation...what is it about the
beats that you so admire?
I would repeat myself answering this question. The "beat" writers, or the SF
Renaissance writers, or the avant garde, underground, Black Mountain
writers, they were all very important to me, though I have eclectic taste. I
thought Robert Frost's “Birches” is great, Sylvia Plath's “Tulips” and
Delmore Schwartz's “Ballad of the Children of the Czar”, all of Hart Crane,
the Chinese poets, were all in there for me, helping me learn, Pound and
Williams, and Patterson is beyond belief. I gobbled up poetry. But
Ginsberg woke me up with Howl. I heard him on a LP at a friends
house, followed by Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind. This
appealed to my already Romantic nature. I had already fallen in love with
Keats and so here were these contemporary writers who I felt were in the
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tradition. And San Francisco. I was a Miami kid who went to San Francisco in
the 60's and I think I may have misplaced the top of my head at that
time, and all the beats came rushing in. I bought into the 60's in a very
serious way. I understood ecology in an immediate and personal way. I had
been living in a vanishing paradise, Florida. I spent my weekends for ten
years in the Everglades, I saw it being developed into a mania. The beats
understood pop music. I consumed music like it was going out of style from
John Jacob Niles to Vanilla Fudge. My eclectic music tastes, my love of
nature, my objection to the war, my whole orientation towards art and social
awareness found a place, an encouragement, permission in the Beat writers
who were often spokesman for us “revolutionary” 60’s kids. They became our
mothers and fathers. It wasn't out of some aesthetic, it was the need for a
connection, and community. I remember William Stafford telling me Port
Townsend was the wrong place for me to go to learn writing. He suggested I
go back to San Francisco and meet "some of those people there". Stafford was
a great guy and I think he meant it as a friend and not in any negative way.
I don't feel as polarized as many do about styles of writing. I am mostly
aggravated by any self-righteous gang of anything, and that goes for even
avant-garde poets. Boy, I am dead meat now. |
are you in any way
related to poet jerome rothenberg?
I am not related to Jerome. He has been to the nursery and visited and are
friends. He'll be writing the introduction to the selected David Meltzer poems
(Penguin) I am editing now. That will be coming out next year. But no, we're not
related. Maybe we're a law firm. Rothenberg, Rothenberg & Meltzer. At least for
a season.
in january you are
to release a special issue of big bridge...a phil ochs tribute...what is it
about the folk singer that you find admirable?...has the work of phil ochs
changed your life in any way?...and do you feel that what ochs sang of long ago
is relevant in comparison to today's world?
When I first heard Pleasure of the Harbor I was hooked on Phil Ochs. The
purchase of his other albums followed. His voice is mesmerizing, so different
than any other voice, lucid and honest, melancholy but not depressing,
reflective, ringing. His lyrics are brilliant. Songs like Crucifixion and
Pleasures of the Harbor are the songs of a poet. These are the Howls and
Coney Islands of The Mind. He was influential to me like Dylan was, in
terms of showing the troubadour connection, the relationship and source of
poetry and popular song. Phil Ochs was political and that spoke to my concerns.
“Small Circle of Friends” and “I Ain't Marching Anymore” are rallying songs. I
agreed with what I understood of Och's politics. I don't know that he changed my
life as much as made me feel as if I was not so all alone. I have wanted to do a
tribute to Ochs for years and finally I have come around to seeing it as real.
This must have something to do with the political climate of the day. Ochs has
always been relevant for me, but now I guess I hear his voice even more
refreshing than ever, like he is venting for me. He has integrity. I really
can't say much more than that. I hope the feature at Big Bridge conveys what I
am feeling about him. And I hope the contributors to the tribute will answer
your question for me.
michael where do you
see yourself in 5 years, 10 years...what do you feel the future holds in store
for you and what do you hope to achieve?
That's a terrible question. I see myself older and balder. Hopefully I will be
less vain and a better breather. Yesterday I was at Fairchild Tropical Gardens
walking around looking at palm trees and iguanas and thought that I should spend
more time being where I feel good and spend less time chasing rainbows. I give
myself until next week, and hope within ten years I have it all right.
©
andrew lundwall
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