Charles Alexander, “Chax Press, Poetics, & …” continued

were taken in a Comp Lit department, a fact that was not universally appreciated by my English professors. In my specific experience, historical categorization of literary studies had been the only possibility in the English department until a genre-study track was introduced. I was the only person in a fairly large program to choose the “Poetry-Genre” option, which required a study of poetry in English, starting with the "The Seafarer" and moving forward all the way into mid-twentieth century poetries that included work by Lowell, Auden, and a sampling of Objectivist poets. Some of my attempts to study contemporary poetry, however, were blocked by this anti-theory graduate-program environment. For example, one professor let me know he would not work with me to study Louis Zukofsky, he said—because Zukofsky was "too difficult" and "not worth the trouble." The same professor told me that the works of Paul Blackburn, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer were "too easy" and "not worth the time." 

 Trouble and time…I think we need more of both, then and now.

*

“Poetics” in that late ‘70s/ early’ 80s period for me meant reading Aristotle and the historical tradition of poets' essays, manifestos, and explorations. It was beginning to mean explorations within the poems themselves, with a growing awareness I had about the possibility of founding a literary press, particularly a small press, that would manifest what was essentially a “poetics program.” By “program,” I mean, this is what we think of poetry, and these are the poets with whom we think (and of course, the collaged history of how those poets and that poetry came to think in such ways). Such a “program” would be cognizant of writers active at that moment, including Charles Olson, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Creeley, David Antin, Diane DiPrima, Robert Duncan, bpNichol, Susan Howe, Bev Dahlen, Kathleen Fraser, and others. However, I did not advocate a complete break from poetics as practiced by non-poets; so my concept of a “program” also had a strong bias toward what seemed to me less academic, more philosophical and politicized contributors, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigiray, and others from the current European theory movement. These women’s names would lead to the strong interest in poets involved with the HOW(ever) group on the West Coast. It would eventually lead to the publication of books by Bev Dahlen, Kathleen Fraser, Myung Mi Kim, among others, including a selected-poetry collection of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, which is currently forthcoming.

Certainly, Language Writers and others of a generation just a decade or so older than me contributed to my growing sense of a fully active and various practice of poetics—whose heart and physical address in that era were not in or at the university. Journals such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Tottel's, This, Acts, Apex of the M, and presses such as Tuumba and Membrane, were at this time publishing such experimental poetry work that inspired my development of Chax Press.

Out of these parameters—loose though they might have been—I discovered through the fine arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison the possibility of making books by hand. This possibility came to me and to Chax of creating books whose content might participate in this poetics “program,” in which the form of books—shape, structure, materials, methods of making, inclusions—would also be a part of that literary-material content. I wanted the reflecting poetics to generate a physical and thought-based practice at the same time. Certainly Olson, whose notions of a poetics of space were of particular impact at that time, might be viewed as one of my distant mentors, behind and endorsing such practice. But more radical page and performance practices by writers like Steve McCaffery and others would literally break language and the page into maps of linguistic exploration. These certainly played a role as well in the poetics underlying the Chat Press experiment.

My discovery of handmade bookmaking came at a time very near the point in which I would make a break from the university and the academy entirely—a break that would last some twenty years. To some extent, that rupture would remain with me and with Chax many years longer.

So "the university" to me—going back to this early experience—has always been in crisis. I saw it as protecting itself from outward, contemporary ideas, creating an isolated and limited think tank about literature and literary concerns. That does not mean I did not learn a great deal through university course work. And I am most appreciative of many of my teachers. And while I have always been interested in ideas that seemed to expand discussions in the university halls, I realize that a combination of funding issues and of a concentration on literary theory (which includes a different sense of poetics) has left many institutions poorly prepared to teach a full component of literature courses. To me, poetics without reading literary works is a little like faux apple pie made with Ritz Crackers. More people seem to be graduating from English departments with excellent credentials in literary and cultural theory, and fewer who have read the “great works,” contested though they may be (and should be) of literary history. Already during my time inside the university, poetry was being considered as a kind of "enemy" to many students, in some ways a victim of the divided historicism and genre studies emerging at that time. It meant that far more graduate students chose the nineteenth-century novel over sixteenth-century poetry to focus on in dissertations, as but one example. Or, to put it bluntly, even by the late 1970s, the notion of a well-read student was just that: a notion somewhat lost to history. To me, that loss itself was and is part of the crisis. I do not challenge the necessity of specialization, though I do think it has been, in many cases, carried a bit too far, sacrificing a breadth of learning that seems present in the best of scholars and poets of a time just preceding. I know there is a risk of sounding old-fashioned and even authoritarian here, though along with a breadth of classical reading, I fully support challenging such canons and practices. Radical contemporary literary reading should be viewed as the beginning. Works of historical significance should not be excluded from our lists.

I also observe that the university as I have experienced it has seemed particularly unfriendly to the poetry challenges offered by the then-considered radical American writings of the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School (uptown and downtown) poets, the Nuyorican poets, the Black Arts movement, and other contemporary activist movements that have found their impact and strength outside the university. This, too, was part of the crisis of the university. 

Hence, I see the contemporary 2021 crisis of the university as, in part, one of the university’s own making. It has long been in crisis, as far as literary studies goes. Due in part to its recalcitrance when the academy comes to accepting new practices, as well as its attempt to protect some particular visions of literary studies from some sense of postmodern chaos (the real kind rather than the theorized kind), to seem to “conduct business as usual “ and maintain the status quo (I do mean "business," and I remember that “business” orientation of the university leading to teaching assistant strikes as early as 1983), the university has had little cognition of itself as an actor in our contemporary world. It has “acted” more as a protector of its own privileged position, as if that lies somehow outside that world. And literary-studies departments have become as a result a kind of weak step-sibling to those university departments who conduct the “business in the world.” which STEM subjects manifest. The notion in any humanities university education of the Ivory Tower has never disappeared, although it has involved now a rather austere and jargonistic critique of that tower—and that tower has not done a very good job of making itself relevant to contemporary poetics.

So I see contemporary poetics, indeed, as best existing outside university confines, much more relevant to and involved in contemporary life. For example, I live in a community in which a university center, called the "Poetry Center," exists primarily to display and protect a relatively complacent body of poetry and poetic practice of the last sixty years. This center is sometimes recognized as the primary, even "only," poetry organization in a city rather rich with poetry and poetic practice—all of which exist outside the university. I will say that the relationship with this center has fluctuated over the thirty-six years, ever since Chax began in Tucson, Arizona. And I will say that this relationship has never been more difficult or more fraught than at present. I take this to be, in part, “the university” as an institution responding to its own crisis by—as if I have never seen happen before—circling those wagons.

Now I must circle back to beginnings. 

Before Chax Press began, but after I became involved in printing works by publishing poetry on broadsides and in small letterpress editions—and in submitting and seeing my own work published—my models lay largely outside the university. Some of them I can name are Woodland Pattern Book Center (Milwaukee, WI), St. Mark's Poetry Project (New York, NY), Just Buffalo (Buffalo, NY), City Lights Bookstore (San Francisco, CA), L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (New York, NY), Tuumba Press (Berkeley, CA), Caterpillar (East Lansing, MI), Sulfur (East Lansing, MI), HOW(ever) (San Francisco, CA), Bookslinger (Minneapolis, MN), Rolling Stock (Boulder, CO), The Toronto Research Group (Toronto, Canada), Coach House Press (Toronto, Canada), Black Sparrow Press (Los Angeles, CA), Jargon Books (Highlands, NC), Membrane Press (later to become Light & Dust Books, Milwaukee, WI), The Perishable Press Limited (Madison, WI), The New York Small Press Book Fair, and more—too many to name—alternative publishers and groups. And of course there are the inspiring individual practices of literally hundreds of poets, writers, and editors in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Europe—and a few beyond those bounds—that have offered models of support.

That is to say that prior to my Chax beginnings, the possibility of a practice of poetics outside the university seemed entirely plausible. To be sure, there were partners to what I considered to be this movement in the university system. But they were rather few, and primarily included the Poetics Program (which did not yet have that title) at the State University of New York at Buffalo; and the Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Boulder, CO); as well as the robust poetry education program available at Bard College. Very little else existed.

People involved in these movements, at these presses, in these educational spaces, became or had already been my friends, mentors, and colleagues. Chax Press arose in this environment.

Officially begun in 1984, Chax has primarily occupied a series of warehouse spaces in Tucson, in addition to a Downtown Center for the Arts in Victoria, Texas. In such spaces, and in nearby cafes, bars, black-box theatre spaces, dance studios, and other venues, we have been a press seeking to articulate a poetics of innovation (defined quite broadly), of collaboration and community-building. Our efforts through books have included the kinds of books that are unusual in their use of space and materials, and later, thoughtful use of design, as well as the literature presented in these books. We have tried to work in direct collaboration between the two. But we also have wanted to talk about such poetics, and we did—in presentation talks, in essays, in the organization of symposia, in collaborations with visual artists and dancers, as well as the presentations of reading series and talk series (the Magritte Sessions being one major effort in downtown Tucson), and more. Over time, we were invited to present such talks beyond our own locale, from San Francisco to New York, Vancouver to Toronto to New Orleans, eventually expanding to France, the UK, Mexico, and China. While we certainly gave a handful of such presentations in university settings, the majority of these have not been on college campuses. Our attention has been to an activist, physical poetics that would not only present arguments for the value of innovative literature, but would challenge ways of reading and experiencing literature. Some day I would like to catalogue all of these activities. But until then, I would like to acknowledge some very special collaborators in the efforts of Chax Press with the following members of our community: Cynthia Miller, Tenney Nathanson, Steven Salmoni, Trace Peterson, Will Alexander, and all of our authors.

*

For quite practical reasons, like the support of family, I started needing more income than that which came from building a small, non-commercial press of poetry, as I desired to practice this activity. I eventually took teaching jobs, first at a community college, then at the University of Arizona, limited-time teaching at Naropa University, and eventually a full-time faculty position in Texas for several years. Even while I may have been teaching, the work of the press remained mostly outside the confines of my academic teaching career. It never sat comfortably on the inside while I worked teaching in the academy, in spite of some rather special support and friendships I made there. 

*

To begin to summarize: the junction in our March conference on issues of “Poetics and The University” was not entirely comfortable to me, as I speak as an outsider, although one who began as inside, then projected out, and has had flirtations with the “inside” from time to time. Most recently I had such a flirtation with the University of Houston-Victoria. From 2014-2018 Chax was a “press in residence” (and I as a resident artist faculty member). There in south Texas, a very brave dean, Jeffrey DiLeo, worked hard and intelligently to protect a few artists and presses like Chax; he helped protect a publication program from the general crises of the university and of that particular university. This university has been home to American Book Review, Huizache, Fiction Collective Two, Cuneiform Press, Symploke, and Dalkey Archive Press, as well as Chax during those years. Sadly, half of those entities are no longer there. To Chax, this university was most supportive, even creating a Downtown University Center for the Arts, where Chax and I, as well as my artist-spouse Cynthia Miller, could be located. There we taught classes, and ran reading series as well as art talks. There we were creating new art in a space that was physically outside the university, although supported by it.

I sometimes have wondered if they (that big “they” of the university) wasn't more comfortable with Chax and me being a few miles away, rather off on our own. And our audience in Texas was about half-composed of community members who also lived and worked outside the university. When a more business-minded management style took hold at that university— students as customers, education as content-delivery service, student recruitment farmed out to a professional recruiting service—the big “they” did not hesitate to close that Center for the Arts. And Di Leo is no longer dean, and other programs he helped to foster have gone, shrunken, or significantly changed. This university did not make the most verdant home, although I have to say I loved it for a while, and will always owe a debt of gratitude to Dean DiLeo and to Professor Kyle Schlesinger teaching there, the latter of whom continues to carry on the mission with grace and independence. It wasn't bad at all to have an academic-based job; and I wouldn't turn one down now.

So if “poetics/university” is a difficult nexus for me, then the "crisis" that I view as involving the two is not a “concept” I can quite get my arms around. But I do I recognize a growing “crisis” impacting poetry and poetics both within and without the halls of academe. That crisis has been going on throughout the long professionalization and academicization—the appropriation— of poetry and poetics. Ron Silliman once spoke of the "AWP-icization" of poetry. And this is a process which leaves much of the practice of poetry and poetics that clearly lies outside such professionalization to be poorly tended, poorly funded, poorly recognized by a serious and wide readership that is, increasingly, a product of such a university, of such a crisis.