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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Alternative Press

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Curtis Fox: One day after another. Perfect. They all fit.

(“OVER AND OVER” BY MC5 PLAYS IN BACKGROUND)

This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, April 20th, 2011. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, the one and only alternative press. Detroit was recently in the news when the census reported that the city has been dramatically shrinking. In the last decade, the city lost a quarter of its population. Detroit's long decline began probably in the late 1960s when riots led to an occupation by federal troops. In the midst of the chaos, there was a flourishing arts scene, out of which came MC5, the proto-punk band whose mission it was to foment cultural revolution among America's youth.

(“OVER AND OVER” BY MC5 PLAYS):
People talkin 'bout solutions, over and over
'Bout how we need a revolution, over and over

Curtis Fox: Also coming out of the Detroit scene was The Alternative Press, an experiment in poetry publishing. For more than three decades, The Alternative Press mailed out manila envelopes stuffed with poetry: poetry bumper stickers, poetry bookmarks, and poetry broadsides. The poem I read at the top of the program, by Robert Creeley, was an Alternative Press postcard. Emily Warren writes about The Alternative Press and the scene it came out of in an article up on our website, poetryfoundation.org. Emily is a poet and a former editor of poetryfoundation.org. Emily, were you a subscriber to The Alternative Press? And if not, how did you hear about it?

Emily Warren: I wasn't a subscriber, but I went to high school in Detroit and my mother was a subscriber. But the way I heard about it was through a student of Ken's who was working at the Poetry Foundation, and he said, "You know, you really ought to talk to Ken Mikolowski." And I sent him an email and saw him and then ignored him for a couple of years.

Curtis Fox: And Ken Mikolowski, just to be clear, is the founder of The Alternative Press, or TAP, along with his wife, the painter Ann Mikolowski. Ann died in 1999. But Ken is still very much with us. And, in fact, he's on the phone from Ann Arbor. Hi, Ken.

Ken Mikolowski:  Hello there, Curtis. How are you doing?

Curtis Fox: Good. So, Ken, if I were a subscriber to The Alternative Press, every now and then, back in the day, I'd get a packet in the mail. What would be the most delightful thing I'd pull out of that packet?

Ken Mikolowski: Well, I really loved a lot of the postcards and bookmarks we did. They let themselves be short poems, which I am particularly drawn to. Let me give you a bookmark by Bob Holman.

Curtis Fox: Bob Holman, now the proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Yeah.

Ken Mikolowski: That's the very Bob. We did a poem of his on a little piece of black stock with silver ink printed on it. And it says, “Postmodern lovers. In order to save the relationship, we will never see each other again.” (LAUGHS)

Curtis Fox: And that's the...

Ken Mikolowski: It's the only way to go. I mean, they lend themselves to a certain whimsy, you know?

Curtis Fox: Yeah, I can see that.

Ken Mikolowski: For example, let me read you just two more. One is called “The Assassination” by Mary Molyneux. And it goes: “He had to be shot before he told the whole world about how the…”

Curtis Fox: That's it?

Ken Mikolowski: That's it.

Curtis Fox: That's great.

Ken Mikolowski: They aren't always just whimsical. I think this is probably as desperate as you can get. This little bookmark is by a Detroit writer named Gregory (UNKNOWN). “Beer's gone. Wine's gone. It's you and me again.” (LAUGHS)

Curtis Fox: Oh, well, we've all felt that way.

Ken Mikolowski: And then there's…I have a lovely little postcard poem by Eileen Myles.

Curtis Fox: I'd love to hear that.

Ken Mikolowski:
It's called “Spider Cider.” “There are people I would like to blow away and others I think should live. Let her live, I thought, thinking about you. She'll have such a lousy time.” (LAUGHS) We put it on red stock with white ink, and on the back, where the stamp goes, we put a little heart, made a valentine out of it.

Curtis Fox: Now, Emily, in your research in writing this article, you must have dug through a few of these packets or seen some of their products. Anything stand out for you?

Emily Warren: Well, I think what drew me to this project—and I didn't know what I was getting into when I started—was its scope and its origin. So, it originated in the radical politics of Detroit in the 1960s and ’70s, and that gave it a certain street cred which drew a huge range of national poets. I wrote Andrei Codrescu; at that point he was a 20-year-old living in Detroit.

Curtis Fox: Andrei Codrescu. Now the famous NPR commentator.

Emily Warren: Yes, the now-famous NPR commentator.

Curtis Fox: And poet.

Emily Warren: Who’s made a career out of his accent, as Ken says. (LAUGHS) But I wrote him and asked him about the significance of TAP, and he said that in the year TAP was going full speed, Ken and Ann published and added art to the creme de la creme of American poetry: Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders. Hell, everybody who was anybody. So, when you start looking through these envelopes, and you start looking through the archives at the University of Michigan, or in Ken's house, you realize that nobody has ever really examined this from a literary or aesthetic point of view. And, so, Robert Creeley wrote 500 postcards, 500 original poems, and they would be written, sent back to Ken and Ann, and they would put one in an envelope and ship it out.

Curtis Fox: 500 original poems?

Emily Warren: Yeah.

Ken Mikolowski: He did 500 of them. And in Bob's case, he didn't keep any copies. Whoever got that original handwritten numbered signed poem has the only copy of that Creeley poem in existence.

Curtis Fox: That's amazing.

Emily Warren: Yeah. So, that means there are Robert Creeley poems out there that have never been collected or read by a larger audience than one.

Curtis Fox: So, Ken, what led you to hit on this very particular method of publishing? Did you actually think that poetry had been too long ghettoized in books or something?

Ken Mikolowski: Well, I was defensive about people not reading poetry for a long time, and I figured that if we made it look attractive and put it on something functional, you know, perhaps a few more people might actually come around to seeing it. And the idea of the multiple original postcards came about one time while sitting around our kitchen table with an artist, Gordon Newton. We were going to print one of his drawings. He started to work the drawing out on a postcard-sized piece of paper, and he didn't like that one and rejected it and did another and then did another. At a certain point, he had about a dozen or more of them done. And I said, "Well, might as well keep going. You only have 488 more to go." (LAUGHS)
And he picked up the challenge and he decided that's what he would do. He was the very first one to do the 500 all-original cards. When Creeley took them on, he decided to not keep any copies. Other writers who took it on—Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, (UNKNOWN)—they kept copies and they ended up with books out of the project.

Emily Warren: So, that's really important in that as he was dying, Ted Berrigan knew he was dying, he was writing 500 poems for The Alternative Press project, and he immediately knew it was a project, it was a book. So, he figured out which 100 poems would make a manuscript. And that's A Certain Slant of Sunlight. And Alice Notley told me that after Ted died, she actually didn't think she'd write again. And Ken said, "Well, here are 500 postcards."
(LAUGHS) And they literally replaced her notebooks at that time. And it was part of, inseparable from, her grieving process. And in fact, it's so inseparable that she kept 40 or 50 for herself because they’re too personal. So, this is partly a testament to Ken and Ann. They both have this capacity to form friendships and attachments. It also, I think…TAP's staying power—they were, you know, publishers for 30 years—and their originality is because they were from Detroit.

Curtis Fox:
Let me ask you about that, Ken. So, you and your wife were young poets. She was an artist. You were in your 20s. A lot of people in your situation would have gone to New York and hung out in the East Village or maybe to San Francisco and hung out with people on the scene there. Why did you stick with Detroit?

Ken Mikolowski: Ego. (LAUGHS)

Curtis Fox: So, that's simpler?

Ken Mikolowski: Yeah, I think so.

Curtis Fox: So, explain that for—

Ken Mikolowski: We knew... I'm not even going to be a modest about this. The artists in Detroit, the poets, the musicians that you mentioned, the MC5 already, and many others, we all knew each other. We were all friends. We all influenced each other. The musicians would play at benefits for poets. The artists would have a community gallery, the poets would read at the gallery. We were all friends, we all knew each other, and we all knew we were as good as anything happening anywhere else in the country. But we were in Detroit, and we were going to just make our art and do our thing right where we were. And that was sort of a belligerent Detroit attitude, but we all seem to have had it.

Curtis Fox: The Alternative Press got started when the Vietnam War was still being fought. The scene you were involved in, to say the very least, was highly politicized in a way that it's kind of hard to imagine today. Was there a feeling, was there a sense that what you were doing could actually change the world?

Ken Mikolowski: Yes, we did have that sense.

Curtis Fox: You said that—

Ken Mikolowski: So, anybody who heard that now would realize how foolish we probably were. But, no, we really did believe that we were going to change the world, yes.

Emily Warren: But they weren't just gonna change the world, the means to change the world was poetry.

Ken Mikolowski: Oh, yes. It was going to be art. Absolutely.

Curtis Fox: So, Ken, can you send us out on another poem that was published by The Alternative Press?

Ken Mikolowski: If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to do two.

Curtis Fox: OK.

Ken Mikolowski: One is a poem by Robert Hershon from Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn, and the poem is called “Ichabod.” “Everyone's first name means beloved of the Lord or bearer of glad tidings or valiant in battle, except Ichabod, which means the glory has departed and must be considered the name for the future along with a liar is thriving, unbearable cruelty, and the shitheads are running the show.” (LAUGHS) And now, to soften it, I will read you a warm and fuzzy poem written by Jim Gustafson.

Emily Warren: The least warm and fuzzy person who was involved. (LAUGHS)

Ken Mikolowski: This poem by Jim Gustafson goes simply…it was sent on a postcard with a jukebox drawing by Ann. “When I die, I just want a jukebox for a tombstone and to leave all my friends rolls of quarters.' (LAUGHS)

Curtis Fox: That's wonderful. Thanks to both of you.

Emily Warren: You're welcome.

Ken Mikolowski: Absolutely.

Curtis Fox: You can read Emily Warren's piece on The Alternative Press on our website, poetryfoundation.org. Or you can also find poems by hundreds, if not thousands, of poets. Ken Mikolowski is a poet in Ann Arbor, and he teaches at the residential college at the University of Michigan. Do let us know what you think of this program. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.

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