interview with Scott Pierce/Effing Press & Tony Tost
nh: did you choose these writers (Tony Tost & Jim Goar)?
Scott Pierce: I chose the manuscripts over the writers, really, though they are both people whom I have come to like personally since producing their chaps. In Tony's case, somewhere I read something I liked and asked him for some work. He was interested in writing something specifically for the press so we spoke about it minimally and he went to work on World Jelly
Effing Press. In Jim's case, he flipped me the Whole Milk Effing Press manuscript when I was looking around for something a little different, something fun and small that could be illustrated with full bleeds. Timing really is a big factor with the projects I choose. If I had more arms and time I would make more books. For now I just take on projects as they come when the resources and energy are there. There's no creed, no school, and no stripe - it's a grab bag out there of exciting stuff and I just dip my hand in when I can.
nh: why does effing have a clear commitment to the book as object?
Scott Pierce: Well, paper books are where it's at for me and a lot of others. I prefer reading books rather than websites and I enjoy the process of producing books over web coding. I'm convinced that printed work is still taken more seriously than work on the internet and certainly makes its way onto public and private bookshelves in a way that digital publications cannot though of course the printed books can't reach near as many readers. Limited print runs means the books are for people that give a shit about our corner of the lit world. There's simply not enough copies to flood our little market or even spill over to the larger markets so there's no mistaking who we'd like to read the books. The books are for people who like these kinds of things. Plus, I enjoy the physical work. It keeps me out of trouble. And besides, you can take a book into the bathtub with you.
nh: do you consider the history of small press publishing? do you see yourself in terms of the mimeo-revolution, but making nicer books because the technology is available, or is it more of a desire to be viewed as a fine press?
Scott Pierce: I definitely consider the history of small press publishing. I'm fascinated by it and collect what I can get my hands on from it. I wouldn't call what is being done today part of the mimeograph revolution even though what we are doing today comes out of the same spirit and love for poetry and the people that write it and read it. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call our current time a renaissance of the mimeograph revolution? Different circumstances and technologies and attitudes. The web alone renders such a revolution (politically) obsolete because it used to be about speed and putting the literature out cheaply and under the radar of governments. Depending on what was being published, there was some danger involved. Today there are many ways to publish and it's hard to imagine anyone in the US being hassled or arrested for what they write or read or publish. But with the conservative course we are on perhaps that could change?
It was a real underground with consequences for getting caught then. Some of the fervor of the mimeograph rev is still here of course (same budget!) but in our generation's way we have found ways to commercialize our lo-fi printed goods. But like the earlier indie presses, I beg, borrow, and steal materials and printing and most of the bindery is still done by hand. If I had a mimeograph or a proofing press I would probably use it. Other than the machine I use to print the guts of the books, the rest of it is put together old school. The covers are offset printed on 1 color AB Dicks or are pressed with cut rubber or linoleum, and the books are still folded and stitched and cut by hand. I do use software to layout the text but I could just as easily do it with a typewriter and some glue and a xerox. I wouldn't consider effing books finely printed though, not by any means. They look clean and trimmed and colorful but they are still, at their core, basic printed paper folded into a single signature.
nh: what do you consider your role as a publisher to be?
Scott Pierce: Like with most small press of this nature I am financier, editor, designer, and distributor though I do get help in each of these aspects when I can. My role changes with each step of the process but for the most part it is the same as any other publisher: Publish compelling, interesting literature in a cost-effective manner that allows the press to sustain itself and more books to be produced. Treat the artists and the readership with respect and do what can be done to get the word out and the books under some eyes and a conversation started over the work. Find the money and use it wisely and then find more money. Hopefully publish something one day that will get me arrested. It's a nice thought at least.
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nh: reading the 'primer' that accompanied 'World Jelly' it is clear you draw from indie-rock & i remember seeing Anselm Berrigan in buffalo and he talked about being inspired by sonic youth, for you, is it the attention (or deliberate crassness which may not really be all that different) in the lyrics or music that leads you to find it such a fertile ground for poetry?
Tony Tost: Music -- classic rock, country, and to an extent indie rock -- has probably built the majority of my emotional inner life, substituting for the kinds of things probably a lot of people learn from other sources (family, girl/boyfriends, church, tv, etc). I've found myth (Dylan, Cash), emotion (Tanya Tucker, Van Morrison), ideas of community/collectivity (the Band), stoicism (Nico, George Strait), notions of manhood (Springsteen) and so forth.
Part of writing for me is simply tapping into that inner life that's been built up a song at a time -- the only real difference with World Jelly from other instances is that I included a notes page that points to some elements of that inner life. I could write similar notes for just about everything I've written, basically pointing at echoes.
nh: sure, any artist uses the material(s) world, and it would be hard, if not impossible to separate what is 'yours' versus what is an echo as you put it. some of that anxiety (if that isn't too strong a word) regarding knowledge crops up plenty in this book. ranging from the animal planet snippet (which echoes modest mouse humorously enough) to your 'realization' of how much langpo seems to inform this book. do you find learning/knowledge liberating or nerve racking? or is it not an either/or?
on a separate note: 'Prom king grill work' is just a great four words, i feel like i know *exactly* what that's getting at, which i probably don't and am only inventing.
Tony Tost: Thanks on the prom king, etc -- my attempt to approximate Guided by Voices titles . . .
I guess it depends on the context on the knowledge/learning thing -- anxiety can definitely be the right term in my first year or so in the English Department here at Duke, where it seems everyone had mastered Foucault, Derrida and Lukacs by the time they
finished Junior High. But then when the issue of poetry comes up, as to what makes for the good stuff, I'm borderline cocksure -- a good poem, like a good song or good guitar solo, doesn't need to be rationalized, it can be felt. I'm an autodidact at heart, and end up on weird tangents/wild goose chases that sometimes end up being detrimental to my schoolwork but are probably good for my writing/bodily health.
I'm not sure how other people go about their learning/knowledge-gathering, but for me it's not so different from music, or movies for me: I get emotionally attached to certain figures, and become if
not a completist then an obsessive. And I'll have a handful of texts and/or ideas that end up being totemic, that seem to contain worlds of knowledge within them -- with these texts, there's no anxiety, but mostly comfort, warmth, inspiration. So to make a
quick list: WCW's Spring and All, Gertrude Stein's Lectures in America, Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, Sartre's St. Genet, Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Rosmarie Waldrop's The Reproduction of Profiles & Reluctant Gravities, Aby Warburg's lectures: these all operate on the same plane for me as Springsteen's Tunnel of Love, or Tanya Tucker singing "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of
Stone)," or the Band's first two albums: works of art that magically contain most of what I know about the world.
So, with these texts, no anxiety. But heading out into unknown territories, I get freaked out. Or sometimes, with my note on Language poetry in World
Jelly, I'll notice that I've been reading the stuff without being aware I was internalizing or becoming emotionally attached to it -- I don't see how I can claim a spot on any post-Language family tree, but I do have a soft spot for the works of Bruce Andrews,
Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, etc. But other than Hejinian and McCaffery, and some Silliman titles, most Language things strike me as 'out there' as opposed to
things I've claimed for 'in here'. I guess, to be general, I find knowledge sustaining, but not necessarily liberating -- I find sports much more liberating.
nh: i like where you're coming from. schooling generally doesn't like guts because they're harder to deconstruct (don't smell as clean as brains). the poet/sports thing is funny too. when i first was in dc, tom orange said the biggest dividing line amongst poets isn't anything like language poetry, its watching sports.
on this idea of knowledge and where you can get it (classic rock through derrida) page 10 of the book begins to set in motion (unless it is prior and i missed it) a connection between childhood and cruelty. this, in art, is by no means new, but it is always engaging (for me). there seems to be built upon that connection an inherent freedom to being cruel (wounding donkeys, skinning rabbits) and something that should be mourned when/if it is lost. can you expound upon this as it relates (or doesn't) to your book?
Tony Tost: I think with World Jelly, it being the first sort of completed poetic unit after Invisible Bride, my first book, it was written in a kind of response to the distance between the sensibility that wrote IB and the one currently faced with still wanting to write stuff.
Childhood is quite the topic: everyone has to go thru it, and I found it rather horrifying and awful and that was without having abusive or alcoholic parents. Just the power dynamics of childhood, especially if a child has any kind of self-awareness of his/her physical and psychological vulnerability and the often un-self-aware and arbitrary agents that regulate your actions -- all that can feed into and eat at your mindset pretty well. That can all also feed into some pretty self-pitying writing -- perhaps in writing World Jelly I thought I overplayed the vulnerability card in my first book, and wanted to balance out the ledger and admit to the free viciousness of childhood as well.
As an only child in a very rural context (we moved around a bit, but the majority of my childhood was spent in Cumberland, Washington, which had about 300 people in it -- a gas station and a tavern -- and was surrounded by woods) . . . in this context, I feel now that a portion of my childhood occurred outside of socialized spaces, while the other portion was intensely regulated: my parents were very busy, both working full time as the day and night janitors at my elementary school (about a half hour or so drive), plus both were volunteer fire fighters, my dad the president of his union and my mom the secretary, my mom heading the local Red Cross, etc.
My grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and great grandmother (my adopted father's family) all lived in Cumberland, so I could just stay behind at home at a pretty young age and just roam around when my parents weren't home -- there were other kids in the town, but all younger or older than I was. All this created what I realize now was a pretty strange space since we lived outside of town, it was too much of a hassle apparently for me to participate in school activities or play little league, etc. And as my time at school
was also under the pretty intense supervision of my parents, as were the times when they were home, these long periods under the more permissive supervision of my grandparents, and later just on my own, were these golden durations of freedom; for a kid like me with a lot of pent-up angst and bitterness, that freedom also led to bursts of cruelty and violence, as well as creativity and exploration.
So there was this strange double-life that I'm sure most children experience -- there was the (in my opinion) ridiculously strict and overbearing supervision of my parents both at home and at school where it seemed every action and reaction was controlled or commented upon, and then there was these other periods that could compensate for that
powerlessness. One favored memory of mine was when my grandparents' neighbor Jack released some of his chickens and let some of the kids track them down and
then bring them back and chop off their heads – first time to see a chicken run around with its head cut off. Or I'd spend hours in the woods behind my grandparents woodshed and old outhouse (now used for dumping cooking grease, etc) setting up traps for
whoever would walk through, usually my grandpa, who could always spot them. Some of these traps were both ingenious and vicious -- I would make a trip wire out of twine, but make sure that it was fairly visible, and just on the other side of the tripwire I'd have a
hole dug out with rocks and other sharp debris in it, covered up with twigs and then maple leaves and then dirt and pine needles sprinkled over it to try and disguise it.
Anyway, so I'm basically now just going on in nostalgic reminiscence, but yeah, the release found in the freedom to be cruel was a psychological saving grace for me perhaps -- it was something I had to get through, though. In junior high I was probably one of
the two or three most sadistic boys in the whole school, which is saying something -- my first time to be in school without the constant supervision of my parents, that kind of freedom-to-be-cruel from before had carried over, but into a more socialized space,
and couldn't flourish there. But somehow, I invented for myself the ability to be empathetic at around 14, and was able to be somewhat more assimilable.
So that's some extended biographical background to basically say that I was trying to tap into the weird powers and mysteries that can be experienced in childhood, and that the ability to be cruel (the healthy self-permission that informs this unhealthy activity) for me was a decent entry point to these powers, etc.
nh: now that you've covered these two sides of childhood, what do you think is next? new themes to explore or a further penetration of the endless possibilities of re-imagining/re-examining childhood?
Tony Tost: Well, right now I'm trying to finish Amplifier for Hercules, which'll be about 150 pages or so, and will include World Jelly -- University of Iowa Press is going to publish it next fall. It's more or less done except for a sequence of poems for my wife, and the last long piece of the manuscript, called 1001 Sentences, which I've been working on for a year or two, and keeps undergoing different shifts -- it's a pretty different animal from what I've done before, in some ways: its tuning, tone-wise, is maybe closer to something like Sartre or Barthes or maybe Guy Davenport than a recognizably poetic tone or vibe; some folks will probably find it overly abstract, didactic and boring. I don't know. It's pretty strange (because it's pretty square), but it also shares similarities with Invisible Bride, in that I think it's really accessible, as opposed to World Jelly, which is at first blush a bit more resistant. It's kind of the tone and push of a more theoretical prose, but with a poetry logic I guess, and a honky-tonk heart. Lots of cool images, too, I hope. I've been kind of obsessed with a lyric from Richard Buckner: "not an inch between 'I'm yours' and 'I've got to leave.'" So I've been telling myself that I'm poking around in that little plot Buckner has mapped out -- I was thinking of calling it 'Richard's Inch,' but somehow that doesn't seem quite right.
After this, I'm kind of looking to try on different projects -- I have a few sketched out, including an Ozark-based novel, to just drench myself in the pleasures and difficulties of plot and character and setting, as well as a series of essays on 'figures for
consciousness,' which would definitely be in the Guy Davenport/Edward Dahlberg sort of lineage, with a nod towards Aby Warburg: just out and out literary, temporarily erudite and full of big reaches and strange threads followed. I'd basically center a series of essays around different figures that I think can stand for the way a consciousness endeavors itself in the world: figures like the quasi-biblical St. Longinus, Wordsworth's leech-gatherer from "Resolution and Independence," Sartre's figure of the "Black
Orpheus" from his essay of the same name on Negritude, perhaps the woman atop the house in Creeley's "The Whip," etc. I really want to write a book about/around
country music as well, and pretty soon it'll be dissertation time and I'm trying to conjure up a framework where I can focus on the sorts of things I'm really crazy about: the Black Mountain poets, the philosophical works of AN Whitehead and Henri Bergson, the 'mythistory' impulse that Joseph Mali discusses in his book of the same title, focusing on people like Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin. I also like the idea of writing a bunch of little lyrical poems, something small and mysterious like Charles Wright's China Trace.
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