← New Books Network
New Books Network
Rebecca Kosick, "Dispatches from the Avant-Garage: The Alternative Press" (Wayne State UP, 2026)
00:45:05
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:01]
A
So good, so good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now get ready to save big with up to 60% off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free.
- [00:21]
B
Great brands, great prices.
- [00:24]
A
That's why you Rack,
- [00:27]
B
study and play
- [00:29]
A
come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students
- [00:34]
B
get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs.
- [00:42]
A
Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game.
- [00:46]
B
Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends
- [00:53]
A
June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc right now get up to 15% off select
- [00:59]
B
storage solutions put heavy duty HDX totes
- [01:03]
A
to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid impact resistant design prevents cracking and the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find select shelving and tote storage up to 15% off at the Home Depot. To organize every room in your home from your garage to your attic, visit homedepot.com how doers get more done welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:32]
B
welcome to the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Rebecca Kosick about dispatches for the Avant Garage, the Alternative Press. So welcome to the podcast.
- [01:43]
A
Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
- [01:45]
B
This is an amazing book. It's scholarly, obviously it deals with a really important subject, but it's just so much fun as well. And the kind of characters, the place. I mean, we're going to talk about Detroit quite a bit. The sort of history of US Art, poetry, publishing and culture that comes to life in the book is really wonderful. And I guess the place to start is with the title really this publishing house art project. I don't know, kind of political intervention that is. Or maybe was the alternative press. I wonder if you could kind of introduce the alternative press.
- [02:30]
A
Yeah, sure. So the Alternative press was a kind of DIY letterpress publishing operation that was founded in 1969 by the artist Ann Michalowski and her husband, the poet Ken Michalowski. Um, they got a letterpress machine and moved it into their basement. They didn't know anything about printing at the time, but were dedicated to learning and to printing. Um, and yeah, they started this publication program where they would send out these sort of sometimes monthly or quarterly, not always on a regular basis, but maybe three or four times a year. Packets of essentially loose leaf print ephemera that included both poetry and visual art. They mainly printed in open faced formats. So the postcard, the bumper sticker, the bookmark and the broadside were kind of the overwhelmingly dominant forms, although they occasionally printed a kind of a couple of sort of fold over pamphlets and books as well. But for the most part they printed in these ephemeral forms. And they were based in Detroit and sort of built out of the community that this couple, the Michalowskis, had around them in Detroit of other artists and writers. But then it grew from there. And they published for a 30 year span until 1999 when Anne Michalowski died of cancer. But it was a regular, ongoing, really robust operation that took place over this huge span of time, as well as a really wide network of collaborators across the US and beyond.
- [04:09]
B
I mean, it sounds funny kind of, given how rich that story is, to ask, well, why did you want to write a book about them? What inspired you? But I think quite early on you sort of stake out the idea that in some ways this is a kind of like neglected press community movement. And I guess obviously that, you know, scholarly ambition is one reason for writing a book, but also the fact that it's really cool probably helped as well. What kind of inspired you to write about both Anne and Ken and the press?
- [04:48]
A
I had personal as well as sort of scholarly reasons. So Ken Michalowski had been my poetry professor at the University of Michigan. I met him around the year 2000. So right after Ann Michalowski had died. And in the years after that, we stayed in touch, became friends. And Ken has been a kind mentor to me over the years, but never in a sort of pushy way. And he never, ever put any kind of seed in my mind about writing about the alternative press, other than giving me over the years many, many publications that they had done that I used, like many of their subscribers, as regular useful objects. So I sent the postcards out to my friends. I tacked the them up sometimes on a bulletin board or the refrigerator. I use the bookmarks in between other books, pages of other books. And I really treasured them as these useful objects, which is what I think the alternative press always wanted them to be. And then I went on to do a PhD in Comparative Literature. And I do work on US and Canadian poetry. So North American English language poetry, but also connections between poetry and the visual arts and Latin America had been a big kind of proportion of my scholarly interests. And I had gotten really interested in male art and in postal poetry in Latin America specifically. About 10 years ago, I wrote an article or chapter for a book about a set of postcard poems that the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra had published in the early 1970s. And I read that chapter over recently again for the first time in a many years, and I realized that a lot of the same sort of conceptual preoccupations were there for me in that piece of work about this set of postcards then. And so a few years later, I think I started working this about 2018. I mean, it really just occurred to me that, you know, the alternative press and what they'd been doing was really right in line with a lot of these trends around the late 60s and 1970s, with this move to, you know, DIY publishing and, you know, the postcard and mailable formats especially, which I had already been studying. So I went to sort of see what had been written about them from a scholarly perspective, and I found almost nothing. There were a couple of articles from the kind of late 80s 90s in archival journals or sort of library professional journals, which were mainly about some of the complications of collecting this material, but also the delights of collecting it and displaying it in libraries and archives. And. But other than that, there was hardly anything. There had been some features for the Poetry Foundation's website that Emily Warren had written and some other things that were written for a more public audience, but hardly any scholarship. And it really surprised me because not only were they doing something that was quite remarkable in line with the times, but they did it at a scale and for a period of time that was really much more impressive, I think, than some other operations that maybe published a few postcard poems here and there, for instance, but not for the span of 30 years and across this huge array of collaborators. And I just felt like, well, we've got to let more people know about this. And so I started what I thought would be one article and then visited the archive that they have at the University of Michigan, which is the largest collection of alternative press materials, although they're archived other places as well. And I just realized that there was much, much more material than one article's worth. And in fact, there's more material than one book's worth. So I hope more people will visit the archive and take up the project after this, too. But once I started digging in and Ken was really happy to collaborate with me and answer all my questions over many, many years, and tell stories about the alternative press. I'm just glad now that it's kind of getting out to a wider audience and a new generation, too, because, I mean, a lot of their peers had been clearly aware of the alternative press's impact on their own work as well as across the sort of like, post war US art and literary scenes. But since then, I think especially because a lot of these formats were so ephemeral and really were used, they sort of fell away. Right. They didn't remain on the bookshelves, easily accessible for people. And although there's a really wonderful archive that's meticulously put together and maintained for us by. By the wonderful librarians I've worked really closely with at the University of Michigan. I mean, anyone can visit it, but of course, there's somewhat restricted conditions in that, you know, not everyone has like, the funds to travel to Ann Arbor, for instance, and leaf through the things, although I recommend people do. But. So I hope that now, you know, especially including all the images and things, we have a chance kind of for people to get to see what the alternative press was up to and get a sense of just really a small sliver of their output. Because there's so, so much more that they put out there that's, you know, still out there.
- [10:05]
B
I mean, there's so much actually in the book, towards the end of the book, where you've got reproductions of, you know, exactly these kind of examples of the postcard work and there are other art slash publishing interventions, but I guess the kind of like, yeah, the materiality of the objects is really kind of crucial to delving into those. Those archives as well. I mean, we might come back to that towards the end of the chat, but for now, you've kind of already introduced the two key players and Ken Michalowski. But I wonder if you could sort of maybe say a bit more about who they are, but particularly in the context of that Detroit setting in the 60s, which, as you've already said, you know, was an incredibly kind of culturally productive time for various kinds of reasons, but also one that became, you know, really kind of politically challenging by the time we're into the kind of 80s and 90s. So, yeah.
- [11:10]
A
Who.
- [11:10]
B
Who are Ann and Ken and what was going on in Detroit when they first started the alternative press?
- [11:17]
A
Yeah, so Ann, she was a painter, and both Ann and Ken were native Detroiters. They. They met when they were teenagers and they got married in 1961. So I think in their early 20s. And Anne's painting, it explores a Lot of different kind of styles and, I guess, kind of thematics, you might say. But she's really best known for these two sort of opposing strategies. One are these enormous lake and seascape paintings that are really incredible. She painted, for instance. They lived for a time in this tiny little town called Grindstone City, Michigan, which is in the third thumb of Michigan, as Michiganders will know. The state of Michigan is kind of shaped like a hand or a mitten. So out on the tip there above Lake Huron, she would paint these just really amazing and enormous, enormous lake scapes that have these kind of dark turns and waves, and they look different than the ocean does. But also, she did paint seascapes, for instance, in Maine, where the Michalaskis would go together. And that's one strand of her work. These paintings that occupy maybe the entirety of a gallery wall, some of them not quite so large, but very, very large. And then counterposed to that, she did a series of poet portraits that are tiny, so only about one or two inches, you know, kind of square or, I guess, rectangular most of the time, but just a few inches of height and width. And the art critic and poet John Yao, who's also a collaborator of the Alternative Press, has written a little bit about some of these miniatures that Anne painted in that she would pare down the paintbrushes herself to just one or two hairs so that she could paint with, like, this incredibly meticulous detail. The faces of her friends and their sort of. Many times they have a kind of snapshot quality. There's a very relaxed feel to them and a friendly sort of sense of the artist being among friends in the painting. But just that takes an incredible amount of rigorous work. A couple of those have now been collected in the National Portrait Gallery. And Anne's sort of star had been rising before she died in both Detroit and nationally. And she was showing alongside people like Jasper Johns, for instance. But she had gotten her start in Detroit. She and Ken both attended Wayne State University, and she also attended the College for Creative Studies, and like many people in Michigan, had worked for a time for the auto industry as a designer for Chrysler. Ken Michalowski, he was also involved with poetry from an early age. He had been a student at Wayne State when the Pulitzer Prize winner W.D. snodgrass was there, sort of associated with the confessional school, though he was. He would maybe not agree with that, but Ken had been his student, and under his guidance, he also edited the Wayne Review, which was the student literary magazine at Wayne State University at the time. And some of those, the kind of origin stories of the alternative press, portray the beginning of it as being a kind of split aesthetically that Ken had with Snodgrass. And Ken wanted to kind of go in a different direction and print more of the contemporary poetry that people in his kind of peer group were writing in Detroit at the time. And Snodgrass had a sort of other agenda that was obviously aligned with an earlier school of thought and kind of style of practice. But Ken also at Wayne State, he had the opportunity to work with Keith Waldrop, who was there as a visiting professor, I think, for one term, while Snodgrass was on leave. And Waldrop also did letterpress printing and also did poetry postcards, which, according to Ken, the Waldrop started doing after. After they saw what the alternative press was up to. But Ken was really also influenced by Waldrop as a teacher and as a printer. So I think some of these influences were kind of already starting to cohere before the Michaelowskis actually got ahold of their press. Their 19, I think, 04 Chandler and Price letterpress. But they got this letterpress from a group called the Detroit Artist Workshop that they were also involved with. And this was a kind of multimedia group of artists, musicians, poets, based in the. The Cass Corridor near Wayne State university in the 1960s. And they were associated with a lot of the sort of arts and culture, but also counterculture movements going on in Detroit at the time. The Artist Workshop had been doing a lot of printing of their own. They had a book imprint. They also printed things like the artist's worksheet journals like Change and Work and Guerrilla, as in G U E R. And they were mainly printing with other tools like the mimeograph machine. So I talked before he died to the workshop member, John Sinclair, who was also known for a number of other activities. So we'll probably talk more about him. But he said that they had had the letterpress, but kind of never really got up and running with it. And so they decided to sell the press to the Michalowskis, who moved it into their basement in Detroit. And it really took off from there. They taught themselves to print by kind of going down to the print shop and asking a bunch of questions and in a way, getting a free education through this sort of probing of like, what part do we need if this breaks down or this. This thing that turns around, you know, how do we. And they didn't even know the vocabulary for it, but slowly picked it up and they became really, really excellent printers over the Years I've dabbled a little bit in letterpress printing as part of the research for this book, and it's very difficult. And I can see that what they did had a. That took years and a lot of dedication and practice.
- [17:28]
B
You mentioned a bit about the, I guess, kind of cultural scene. What was the kind of political scene in Detroit like when they were going? Because I think one of the things that's really important about the Alternative Press story is that intersection, that almost kind of inseparable union of culture, art, and politics that they really kind of drive forward and drive through.
- [17:55]
A
Yeah, that's right. So the Alternative Press was founded in 1969, and that was just two years after the rebellion in Detroit in 1967 that arose after years of racist policing and redlining and other, you know, very pervasive structural racism in the city. The Michalowskis were living at the time in Jeffrey's housing projects. And they. Ken talks about how when the fire got to their neighborhood, the. The firefighters refused to fight it. And so they were sort of witness to this, you know, act of neglect on the. On the part of the state and the city and the country to protect Detroiters and to keep the city also you know, alive and thriving and doing well culturally as well as otherwise. And so there was a lot of counterculture activity, obviously, at the time, and also really robust counterculture print operations that included things like the Detroit Printing Co Op that the Perelmans ran and Broadside Press, which was founded by Dudley Randall and went on to be the largest publisher of black contemporary poetry and literature in the United States at the time, by far. And so the Alternative press was another operation, along with the print activities that the Detroit Artist Workshop was doing as well, that was really founded in this kind of political tumult. The house that the Michalowski's moved into on Avery street had been abandoned by the previous owners who left along with a lot of others during the Great White Flight following the rebellion, these owners had moved to California, and they decided they were never coming back to Detroit. So the Michaloskis were able to move into this large home that had enough space for printing after that, and that sort of physically enabled them to carry out their activities and also to build a community that they had plenty of space for who, you know, obviously were in the city, but also for visitors who were coming in from outside. And like I mentioned before, they collaborated a lot with members of the Detroit Artists Workshop and especially John Sinclair, and a lot of the early sort of notoriety that the press Started to get the alternative press started to get. Had to do with some of the events around John sinclair's arrest in 1969 for possession of two joints of marijuana. So he had founded multiple countercultural organizations, including as co founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop, but also the group known as the White Panther Party, who were a group of white left leftist activists who wanted to support the Black Panther Party and the cause of black revolution. And Sinclair and others who were involved with the White Panther Party were heavily surveilled by local police, as well as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as part of his Cointel Oper cointelpro operation against the New Left. So they were illegally wiretapped, for instance, and also tracked by local police and federal agents. And so Sinclair's arrest, he was sentenced for nine and a half to 10 years in prison for just this small amount of marijuana. But that arrest obviously had political motivations as well as, you know, this sort of purported cause, right, of. Of just the drug possession. So he was then moved to a really remote prison in Marquette, Michigan, which is in. At the very top of Michigan's Upper Peninsula on the shores of Lake Superior. And, you know, seven, eight hours, maybe more at the time to drive between Detroit and Marquette, Michigan. And while John Sinclair was incarcerated there, he began sending the Michalowskis a lot of poetry that he was writing in prison. And some of their earliest publications were these postcards and broadsides that they printed of John Sinclair's poetry. And the poetry itself is also about the experience of being incarcerated as well as his desire to kind of continue fighting for the causes that he thought he was, you know, for always fighting for, but still doing so at a distance while he was imprisoned. So obviously it was much harder for him for John Sinclair to build a physical community around himself or to be in touch with his wider network in Detroit while he was so far away in Marquette. But one of the ways that he, you know, continued to kind of organize from within the prison was to send out writing to many places, but also to the alternative press. And so he has got a poem that's also called the Alternative Press that's dedicated to the work that Anne and Ken Michalowski are doing at the time, where he really cites their activities as enormously important as kind of living the politics that he also wants to bring about through his revolutionary activities. You know, he makes reference to kind of other international actors, including Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh in this poem, as well as the Michalowskis and what they were doing and Even though giving away free poems and printing them through alternative means is not on the scale of some of these larger revolutionary projects that he references in the poem, he also mentions Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers. He gives a sense that what the alternative press is doing is still important and that we need this sort of activity kind of to happen at all levels of. Of society in order for this, the revolution that he wants to see come about to happen. And he ends it by saying, you know, we will press that alternative in the face of whatever it is, would not have us free. We will press it and press it until our lives themselves become the poem. So he really sees alternative publishing as key to continuing to spread the message. I mean, he had other strategies for doing this, including being for a time the manager of the proto punk band the MC5. And he would write revolutionary liner notes and invite revolutionary poets, including Ken Michalowski, up on stage to read between, you know, acts like Iggy and the stooges and the MC5. And so he had a panoply of strategies, but he did see alternative publishing and poetry as. As important among those. So anyway, the Michalowskis print this poem and it goes out to their subscribers. And then in the archive, you can see loads of people writing back and saying sort of like, oh, we saw the poems from John Sinclair and we really want to see more of these. We love to hear from him. And then also they're using this opportunity to raise money for John Sinclair's defense fund. This also draws Allen Ginsberg to Detroit. And they print a poem of Allen's while he's in town in the same year in 1969. And this poem isn't necessarily about revolution, although it's got its own politics to it. But it then starts circulating beyond Detroit in kind of rare book dealers and booksellers in New York and on the coast. And people start seeing like, wow, there's this rare Allen Ginsberg original. And it draws even more people into the alternative press who start getting in touch with the Michalowskis and want to publish with them. So there's this really strong kind of interlinking around the founding of the alternative press between, yeah, as you say, the sort of politics that are going on in Detroit at the time, as well as the cultural politics of independent printing and independent publishing and the arts. And you can sort of see it all coming together as the press is just getting off the ground there in the late 60s and early 70s.
- [25:35]
B
And we're live from the living room as Doug eyes up the Machete spread. He's reaching for the buffalo wing.
- [25:42]
A
Perfect. Hang on.
- [25:43]
B
What's this? Oh, he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. Incredible. What a finish. Sensational combination. Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a pack of Pepsi. Zero sugar for today's match. It's poetry in motion.
- [26:05]
A
You have one new message translating. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney. You could say that again. Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato. It's certified fresh and verified hot. Now we party. This is incredible.
- [26:28]
B
Wow.
- [26:29]
A
I am clearing the rest of the day. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney. Rated pg. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know, those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs so you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online@statefarm.com like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [27:03]
B
This episode is brought to you by Fox 1.
- [27:06]
A
Watch all 104 matches of the FIFA
- [27:09]
B
World cup live in 4K for just
- [27:11]
A
19.99amonth, with 3 days free. Build your own multi view, choose up to three streams and follow player spotlights.
- [27:19]
B
Stay on top of every moment with live stats, highlights and instant replays. The FIFA World cup streaming live on
- [27:27]
A
Fox One, offers a subject to change. See fox.com for complete terms and conditions.
- [27:32]
B
How are things different? I mean, it's almost impossible to kind of compress the history and people should, you know, read, read the book for this. How would things change by the time we got into the kind of like the 80s and, and early 90s, I mean obviously Detroit goes through a major industrial, urban. I mean if you could say transformation is a euphemism, but you know, a sort of political and economic collapse that's driven, you know, as much by kind of political decisions and things like urban racism as they are by changes and trends in the global economy. Even kind of telling that story is a kind of story of politics in of itself and I guess kind of what was the press sort of doing in and around the social and cultural changes?
- [28:24]
A
It's really interesting to watch through the archive and the correspondence as well as their publications because I would say that the alternative press and their community never really moved. They were always associated. I mean, the alternative press wasn't necessarily like set up to be an operation with any particular political agenda in mind, or any agenda in mind, I would say. Like they didn't have a pointed kind of, you know, reason for being or necessarily like an aesthetic program that they wanted to forward or were doing so intentionally. And this is too politically as well. I think it just happened that sort of most of the people around the alternative press were affiliates of the counterculture and kind of, you know, loosely leftist, if not always in a kind of partied way, perhaps in the way some people like John Sinclair were more affiliated with more intentional kind of revolutionary projects, or someone like Dudley Randall, whose press was more set up specifically to advance black authors at a time when they were overlooked in the publishing scene. And the alternative press then is kind of representative of an interesting set of kind of like loosely affiliated, but also diverse points of view. And you see the times changing, but the alternative press's community sort of remains associated with this, you know, sort of loosely leftist counterculture set of, you know, practices and commitments. And that remains true even as they start to come up against this conservative tide. So, you know, for instance, around Ronald Reagan's election, you see a number of people writing letters in the correspondence that say things like. In the archive that say things like, you know, oh, well, I don't know what we're in for. Like, we're really going to have to prepare for these next, you know, what I think is going to be four years. At the time, there's a letter from Bernadette Mayer written to Ken McCloskey that says, well, I read an anti Reagan poem four times before the election, but I guess it didn't do anything good. And you can see them all really bemoaning this change because they had been this community that was formed and the press itself also was formed in this sort of revolutionary optimism of the late 1960s. And you see that optimism waning as things take a turn in the wider culture, even as they sort of remain committed to the same sort of values and ideals that they had that animated them at the beginning in the founding of the press. So, you know, there's another example, for instance, where Amiri Baraka sends in a poem that has A subtitle of 1981 for you. Is this the Fourth Reich? By Is this the Fourth Reich? Another name? And obviously he's drawing this comparison between Nazi Germany and Reagan's election or inauguration in 1981, which you know, is a strong comparison. It can be an uncomfortable comparison. But you can see these anxieties of this generation kind of expressed against this turn toward a more conservative set of politics at the kind of macro level in the country at the time. And the Michalowskis is interesting what they do with this poem because they are adding artwork to the poems that people are sending in that most of the time the poets are sending in text only, at least for the letterpress poems. And we can talk a little bit about the original work as well later. But so they add to this an upside down American flag in the spot where the writer on the postcard would put the stamp, and they also, on the front, put an empty flagpole with an eagle at the top. So they're playing with this kind of symbolism and really doubling down on these kinds of anxieties about the future of American politics in the era through their print approach, as well as through the poems that they select for publication at the time. And then there are a number of ways that comes through more subtly, too. So, for instance, there's a lighter hearted poem by Eileen Miles called Truth that is also published, I think, around the mid-1980s, early mid-1980s. And this poem reads, it's no fun to be 31 ducking under the subway turnstile. And obviously this one's more light hearted. It's almost got this like, sing song rhyme to it. But, you know, it's also making a point about the ways in which things were becoming more expensive at the time. Also, the defunding of the arts is something that it calls to attention because Eileen Miles in New York at the time, they were associated with the poetry project at St Mark's and at the time, Reagan was also cutting funding to the arts and to the National Endowment for the Arts. We can see many potential parallels, unfortunately, today. But so there's a set of sort of like, pressures that start showing up in the poems at this time. As this generation of poets moves into the 1980s and things start to change and there's, you know, the consolidation of the conservative moment and then the neoliberal kind of rise at the end of that century. It plays out too, like, in institutional politics, that register in some of the poems. So Ken Michalowski was working at the University of Michigan at this time in the late 20th century, and he was working for this kind of alternative college within the college called the residential college. It didn't have grades. It was founded in the 1960s. It had really creative majors. And it had kind of parody of Decision making between students and faculty. So one of these sorts of progressive educational experiments that, as the century came to a close, was beginning to be sort of, you know, kind of trying to bring more into line with the rest of the university. So grades were introduced while I was a student there. I was the last class that didn't have them. In the early 2000s, they introduced grades and, you know, tried to kind of standardize more of what was happening. And there's a postcard that was printed. It was submitted to the Press in the mid-90s by Paul Hoover that reads, oppression studies, Field trip canceled. And so you can see that he's sort of commenting on the ways in which some of this optimism of the 1960s and also the, you know, the results of these rebellions and uprisings in the 1960s that produced more possibilities for progressive education in institutional spaces, including, you know, these kinds of alternative colleges, like the residential college, but also, you know, black studies programs, women and gender studies programs that, you know, had been set up following civil rights movements. By this point in the. In time, they're being, you know, less well funded, potentially constrained, or they aren't, you know, being established in additional universities. And so we see a lot of the. This. These pressures of the kind of neoliberal austerity coming down on the writers and artists who collaborated with the alternative press in different ways. In a way, it's. It can be depressing a bit to trace that kind of revolutionary enthusiasm that the press was started with, and then the move into the end of the 20th century where we're seeing people come up against all of these different political pressures and disappointments, really. But at the same time, I think we do see these poets in this community remain animated and remain committed to the same sorts of values that they had when they were young. And sometimes, too, I've read a number of reviews of shows that they had done around Detroit at the time. And you'll see sometimes almost the reviewers are kind of sneering at the alternative press, like, don't these people know that the hippie era is over? Something like that. And I think that it's interesting that, yeah, they knew that, but they kept on sort of staying committed to the values that they had and to the community and to the collaborative way of approaching their work that they had always had as this collective of contributors and subscribers and printers and poets and artists. So in a way, we can take some inspiration from their dedication and acknowledge that the project of revolution is a long one.
- [36:50]
B
Yeah. And that's part of. Of the legacy of the press, isn't it? That sort of. Not consistency, but I suppose, kind of continued ethos. I mean, there's lots more I sort of could have asked you about, but I'm interested to wrap up really with. And this is a classic, difficult for audio question, but to wrap up with a question about the kind of form of the printing. So one of the things you do later on in the book is introduce this idea of intermediality and it helps kind of point us towards both some of the images that close the book, but also the way that I think we talk like quite a lot about their postcards, the kind of typefaces. We've also talked about, you know, particularly Anne's work as a visual artist. But they had quite a nice line in bumper stickers which as a, you know, kind of British person observe in the the U.S. you know, it sort of strikes me as one of those kind of great American cultural forms is the bumper sticker to kind of signal, you know, both road safety, politics and culture kind of all in one. And it was fascinating really, you know, to kind of see these as political, cultural, artistic objects that became, you know, a really kind of important product. And I wonder if you could say, you know, maybe a couple of examples of the bumper sticker printing as really a sort of extension of the story of the kind of poetry and visual art that we. We've already discussed.
- [38:34]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think the bumper stickers are one of the most maybe unique things that they published. There are a couple of other examples that I found in my research of people publishing bumper sticker poems, but nobody doing it quite like they were and for quite as long of a time. Yeah, and you're right that the bumper sticker is this very sort of quintessential post war American product. I mean, some of it even arose out of developments, industrial developments that were part of wartime, you know, that included things like the development of new types of vinyl and fluorescent inks and things. And then obviously this was brought over to something like the bumper sticker, which is probably considered more a piece of kind of like kitsch or not necessarily a high art. But that's part of their politics too, I mean, is that they were sending poetry out to public audiences, whether those audiences sort of sought it out or not. And you could be driving down the highway in Detroit or anywhere else and come across a poem by Robert Creeley or Diane deprima, for instance, and you're, you know, maybe not even realizing you're reading a poem. But in that way they were really committed to this sort of, you know, avant garde project of collapsing the line between art and life. Because we don't, you know, when we see the bumper stickers, even necessarily have to characterize them as poetry, if we didn't sort of know before the fact that they were written by poets. There's a couple of. I mean, they're all great. I love the bumper stickers for their connection incision. And they're all quite pithy and funny often. But one of them, for instance, is by Robert Creeley. It says I saw Delight, D E L I G H T. And it's an homage to Hank Williams and to the song I Saw the Light, which is a kind of born again anthem. And this bumper sticker really arose through a long collaboration between the Michalowskis and Robert Creeley over a number of years. In the correspondence in the archives, you see Creeley first writing to the Michalowskis, sort of saying, I had an idea to put something like this on the T shirt or on a T shirt, but maybe we could do it with you. Not sure in what format. And then it develops over a series of letters back and forth, until there's also this sort of concrete poem of a light bulb that says that's formed by the phrase homage to Hank Williams. Homage to Hank Williams. And I mean, it's just so great. It's got all of these features of intermediality in the sense of this fusion of visual and verbal elements, as well as the stickiness of the sticker, which allows it to travel out into these kind of public spaces more than it might do in a book or at a poetry reading or something. But then it also has intermediality in the sense of the intertextuality that is more than text with this references to the song. But Creeley's poem, it brings something that is about this kind of very lofty experience of religious conversion or sort of reawakening into something that's really brought down literally to earth. It's driving around on a car. The poem is now about the pleasures of the body. And I think the fact that all of these elements kind of work together to produce this. These kind of outcomes for the poem are what make it so special. I don't think it would be the same thing if you just kind of put that phrase as a short poem between some pages of the book. I think the fact that it's out there spreading its delights into the wider kind of roadside community is a key part of its function. And that usefulness is really important for so many alternative press publications. And one of the things that I think, think makes them really such a remarkable project.
- [42:27]
B
That's a great place to kind of wrap up this book. And given it's a combination of a huge amount of archival research, a kind of, you know, a passion project, as well as a really important scholarly work, it probably seems a bit kind of strange to sort of say, well, what are you going to do kind of now and next? But. But it struck me both in our conversation and reading the book, you know, there's several other research projects that kind of flow from the text. But equally, you know, there's that kind of point where you wrap something up and you think, what's the next thing? Is there, you know, a sort of new direction and thinking about what you were talking about, about comparative literature and particularly the Latin American context? So I'm intrigued, really, to know sort of what your next steps are.
- [43:15]
A
Well, I've got a couple of things, big projects that I'm working on next. The most pressing one that I'm working on now is a translation of the public writings of the Brazilian artist Elio Ochicica. So I had previously translated and put out a kind of critical edition of his Secret Poetry. And this will be a kind of companion piece to that book. So that one's called Secret Poetics. This one is going to be called Public Writings, and it will be translations and a gathering together of about 50 different statements, interviews, and other published writings that the artist produced during his lifetime. So that's one. So I'm kind of returning more to my practice as a Latin Americanist with that project. And then the other project that I've been working on is another scholarly monograph that I've been sort of working through conceptually for a number of years that has to do with reopening the question of poetic language. I think, as you can probably tell from my work on the alternative press, I've always been really interested in the material and substantial features of language. And in my first book, too, I thought a lot about what it means for poems to be not necessarily even verbal pieces of text, but sculptures or immersive experiences or other sorts of substantial objects that might involve some sort of verbal elements, but also might not. And I've been really interested in the question of, like, if poets treat these other sorts of materials, nonverbal materials, as communicative material for the poem, what does that say about how they conceptualize poetic language? And most of the kind of theories of poetic language are sort of animated by this binary of the poetic and the ordinary. But I think that comes with a sort of presumption already that we're talking about verbal language and indeed that we're talking about a kind of monolingual linguistic zone. So I've been trying to reopen this question of poetic language as something that is maybe more plural than what we've necessarily thought it as so far, so that we can think more about, you know, translingual practices as well as practices with quote unquote languages like the visual and the material that might extend beyond human verbal language. So I've been trying to do a more theoretical project, but it arises in many ways out of this kind of dedication I've always had as a scholar to sort of starting with the poets and letting them guide me to the theories, right? Because I think a lot of times theory is catching up with practice on the ground. And so that's the next kind of big question that I'm hoping to ask, if not totally answer. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington. Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci Fi.