Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Denis Johnson — 4 Poets

It’s 1990 — maybe 1991. I’m on the phone with a cat named Steve Fisher. We’re in some pretty serious talks about starting a publishing company. Steve makes a suggestion: “let’s call it the synaesthesia press.”

“I’m all for that,” I said.

Steve suggests we contact some writers we both admire and solicit them for work. Our original thoughts are to launch a broadside series first, then get into chapbooks.

We talk about it some more, hang up, and I run to my dictionary to look up the word synaesthesia.

Steve secures a poem from Denis Johnson, and of course it’s a keeper.

Then, some things get into the way. Steve vanishes, and, later I discover, it’s for good.

In the winter of ’94, I made a commitment to synaesthesia press, and the following spring I published its first two books.

The Denis Johnson poem appears in the second book, 4 Poets. As do the rest of the poems from writers I solicited — and a few I never spoke to.

Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Tsaurah Litzky — Blessing Poems

Remember Joe Maynard’s Beet magazine? It was a small gem, published out of Brooklyn, New York, and I think I found a copy one day at Tower Records. Joe did a great job with Beet, and I wish it were still around.

I first stumbled on to Tsaurah Litzsky and her “blessing poems” in Beet. I went nuts over them. They made me laugh a whole lot, and anytime poetry makes me laugh, I want to publish it.

The Blessing Poems was synaesthesia press chapbook #5, and it was published in the late summer/fall of 1996. I remember the book well because it was only halfway done when I moved from Arizona to San Francisco and started graduate school.

I collated and bound the book in a little room I rented for a few months — #419 — at the Mayflower Hotel. The Mayflower’s on Bush Street between Geary and Taylor in San Francisco. There was a hot plate and a small TV, alongside my typewriter, piles of Blessing pages, and a stapler, all crammed on a kitchen table overlooking the city.

What a great view! I was almost on the top of Nob Hill, but I like to refer to that area as “the Tender Nob”. The Mayflower was right off the #29, near the #32, and just blocks from the heart of the ‘loin. I left that room to take a gig managing a residence hotel in the same neighborhood not too long after; I should have just stayed put in that hotel the entire time I lived in SF.

I don’t recall the limitation, but I do recall writing the colophon and ISBN by hand on each book. There’s still a few here, in the archives, that aren’t bound yet. And another synaesthesia press author, A.D. Michele, illustrated the book.

Tsaurah Litzky lives in Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe this is the reason she says the purpose of her work is to seek the light. She’s been widely published, most notably in the Best American Erotica series.

Tsaurah believes this is the Promised Land.

So do I…even after everything’s that happened since this book was published.

Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Joe Maynard — Grampa Odis

I’m not sure how or when I came across Joe Maynard.

I’m positive I knew Beet before I knew Joe, and I’m thinking I got a hold of him after reading some of Tsaurah’s Blessing Poems in his little mag. We started a bit of correspondence not long after, and we kept it up for a bit. We tried to meet up for a beer, when, in the summer of ’95, I was in NYC for the Kerouac Conference. We never did make that meeting, and I’ve not been in touch with him for quite some time…not until the Armory book fair in NYC, which musta been 2005.

In addition to Beet, Joe Maynard edited and published Pink Pages; it was a superb little mag that specialized in naughty stories. Erotica. That sort of thing.

I found this bio on a website that had some of his work: his poetry and fiction have appeared in Long Shot, Lungfull, and Exquisite Corpse, among other places. His entire life is contained within four square miles between Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan with only an occasional leak here and there.

Viva Atlantic City!

Grampa Odis is Joe Maynard’s book the synaesthesia press published, and now it’s out of print. I can’t recall how many copies I printed.

Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Alan Catlin, Erroll Miller, & Jack Micheline — Bad, mad and dying

In 1997 the synaesthesia press published Bad, mad and dying — a limited edition chap book featuring three writers: Alan Catlin, Errol Miller, and Jack Micheline.

There were three different editions: 26 copies were lettered and had a cover with an original painting by Micheline; 1 – 50 numbered copies were signed by all three contributors on the page in which their story appears; the rest of the edition were numbered.

Alan Catlin is from upstate New York and is a poet & bartender. His story, “Finnegan’s Wake,” takes place in — you guessed it — a bar, on Saint Patty’s day, and all I’ll say is: fatality. Catlin’s poetry has appeared in many little magazines, including X-Ray.

Errol Miller is a short story writer from Louisiana. His stories have appeared in hundreds of little magazines. His contribution is called “The Pool Hall Affair.”

What can be said of Jack Micheline? He was an original Beat, there from Day One; Jack Kerouac penned the intro to Micheline’s classic first book of poems River of Red Wine, Charles Bukowski loved him, and Allan Ginsberg couldn’t ignore him…Jack really helped on this title. Here’s how:

We were waiting for the #16 to take us out of the Mission when it all began:

ME: I got a couple good stories to publish.

JACK MICHELINE: I gotta poem, man. It’s good. You want it?

ME: Of course. Now all I need is a title.

JACK: What’re the other stories about?

Here’s when I tell him about Alan’s and Errol’s stories, and then Jack leans up against the building on 17th and Mission — the Asian fish mart — and he thinks real hard for a while and I’m thinking maybe he’s making fun of this whole deal when suddenly —

JACK: I got it, man. Bad, mad and dying. That’s a tough title.

ME: Better believe it. Now I need a cover.

JACK: Gimme two days. Come to my room Friday. You’ll have your cover.

Jack also provided an illustration for the center of the book: it’s a picture poem — Kenneth Patchen comes to mind — and it is a drawing of 4 horses and under the drawing the poem reads:

North Star Number 2
Wins the 1 Mile Race
At Cold Downs in Memphis Tenn
June 12 1948 It Paid $97.60
Dennis Morales Up

Posted on November 6, 2007July 9, 2021 by Jim — Leave a comment

Harold Norse — Sniffing Keyholes

From the Barry Miles book The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963, published by Grove:

“…for a brief period — from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963 — it was home to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation.”

Mr. Miles is referring to, of course, #9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, Madame Rachous’ hotel — The Beat Hotel.

The synaesthesia press was proud to publish Sniffing Keyholes, a small masterpiece written by Norse while he in residence at Rachous’ hotel.

From the author’s introduction to Sniffing Keyholes: “In February 1960, before moving into the Beat Hotel, I began doing ink drawings and cut-up poetry at the Hotel Univers on rue St. Grègoire de Tours next door to Edouard Roditi. He had often put me up at number 8 where, he said, Thèodore de Banville had rented a room for Rimbaud. Shortly after I moved into the Beat Hotel in April, I wrote Sniffing Keyholes, a sex/dope scene between a muscular black youth called Melo and a blond Russian princess called Z.Z. It was my first narrative cut-up. I felt I had broken through semantic and psychological barriers; hashish and opium helped with the aleatory process.

My experience of breaking new ground alarmed and exhilarated me. For awhile I believed I had lost my reason but didn’t consider it a great loss — the mind works in mysterious ways. Actually, word, image, and perception come together in a simultaneous jumble, not, as grammar and logic would have us believe, in a linear structure. I telescoped language in word clusters in a way James Joyce had pioneered, but with this difference: I allowed the element of chance to determine novel and surprising configurations of language. John Cage had done it in music, Pollock in painting. When I showed it to Brion Gysin he raved, “You’ve done something new! It’s a gas! Bill must see this right away.”

Bill Burroughs came down to my room. “Well, Harold, Brion says you’ve written a very funny cut-up. I’d love to see it.” In his fedora and topcoat he sat at the edge of my bed reading the piece, exploding in little sniffs and snorts, his equivalent of lusty guffaws. “This is marvelous,” he said, looking up. “You must show it to Girodias.” Maurice Girodias, owner of Olympia Press, had published Naked Lunch; his father had published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. But I wasn’t so sure he’d go mad about a few typewritten pages of cut-up. Burroughs disagreed. “I’m calling him right away to get you an appointment.”

A day or two later I trekked over to the office a few blocks away on the rue St. Sèverin. I was right. Girodias read it and thought it similar to Burroughs. He wanted to see more but didn’t sound enthusiastic. “He missed the point,” snorted Burroughs. “He rejected Naked Lunch the first time it was offered to him.”

I published Sniffing Keyholes in an edition of 203; the first 100 were signed by the author. Book design with die-cut cover with see-through illustration of “Z.Z.” by X-Ray Book Co.’s Johnny Brewton; hand-sewn in wraps, nine pages. OUT OF PRINT.

Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Tim O’Brien — Enemies and Friends

Enemies and Friends by Tim O’Brien — two short stories published in a single volume and constructed in the dos á dos format.

A chap book printed in a dos a dos format, 6″ by 7″, 6 pages per side.

Each story originally appeared in The Things They Carried. This is their first separate publication.

Illustrations by Fritz Scholder.

Letterpress. The entire edition consists of 125 copies: twenty-six lettered copies are bound in cloth. Each is housed in a slipcase made of 12 gauge steel; boxes hand made by a local blacksmith. They were priced at $250; however, the book was oversubscribed at publication.

Ninety-nine copies are hand-sewn into Olive Larroque, a French, hand-made paper. Priced at $125; OP as well.

Publication date 15 September, 2001.

They can be had on ABEBooks.

Posted on November 6, 2007August 23, 2024 by Jim — 1 Comment

Chris Offutt — A Dog & His Boy

I can’t believe it’s been 7 years since Chris Offutt’s A Dog & His Boy was published. Mr. Offutt’s story was published in a very small run of fifty copies; I don’t think we need to say it was over-sold upon publication. There were also six author copies that weren’t mentioned on the colophon, and a very small number of “overs” — five to be exact. They’re marked “out of series”.

I always thought I would going to write something about my experiences with Mr. Offutt; who knows…maybe I will.

The book was letterpress printed: Baskerville Roman was the font face for the text of the story; Goudy Bold and Goudy Handtooled were used for the cover and title page. The actual book work started in the fall of 1999, and we went to print in December of that year.

The story was printed on Somerset Text. I love that paper and will use it again. Two different endpapers were used, but I don’t recall what they were. I pretty sure Banana Mash was one, and I want to say Thai Grass was the other. To make matters worse, either Banana Mash or Thai Grass were used only for the author’s copies. I just don’t know which got which. Rives Arches was the cover stock we used. It looks pretty, but it’s a bitch to print with.

Kathy Sheehan provided linoleum cuts for the illustrations. She was in the MFA program at Arizona State University at the time, studying printmaking. Kathy carved four illustrations: two illustrations of a school bus, one coming towards the reader, the other leaving. The bus is the first and last illustration of the book, and the image — coming and going — provides a very nice book-end effect. There are two red feet, as well as one of the main characters in the story, The Dog.

The Offutt collectors that were on our mailing list secured a copy of A Dog & His Boy for the publication price of $75. Once upon a time, Joseph The Provider had one listed for $250, but he sold it.

And I don’t have any more.

Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Charles Plymell — Journals From Lysidia

It would be tough to accurately describe Charles Plymell’s importance to the Beat Generation, as well as to little magazines and small press publishing. He lived with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in San Francisco in the early 1960s. It’s not enough to say he admired and was influenced by the Beats — his best work stands right alongside that of his contemporaries: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso.

Plymell’s work has been published in numerous places, from well-known Beat journals to Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books imprint. As an editor and publisher, he has, in turn, published many Beat figures, including those mentioned here, as well as many who aren’t: Herbert Huncke, Gerald Malanga, and Roxie Powell; Plymell publications are too many to name here; The Cold Spring Journal and NOW are the first two that popped into mind.

Charlie also printed R. Crumb’s first Zap.

In an interview with Jon Randall, Plymell says the best scene he ever experienced was “in the 50’s high on Oxy and/or Bennies wailin’ in the clubs around K.C., Wichita’s ‘Colored Town’ or Oklahoma City. Driving the old Route 66. As whites, we could go into clubs with musician friends and talk and visit with artists like Fats Domino, Wilson Pickett, or even Charlie Parker, if we were lucky. Everyone was accessible because they weren’t that famous and if you were cool and had a little booze or reef or bennies, you could really be happy. To put it in chronological order, this was before an old hipster by the name of Herbert Huncke hitch-hiked out of Chicago and happen to say, ‘Man, I’m beat’ to the Columbia student, Allen Ginsberg, so at that time, I knew nothing of The Beats.

The second big scene for me happened when I moved to Ashbury St. in S.F. in ’62 and met some of the old poetry people around the Auerhahn Press which was interesting but very tame, somewhat like the old bohemian scene around City Lights Books. Those were the old canons, the intellectual progeny of the literary 1920’s. They were not ready for what was about to happen. Rexroth saw it coming and used to comment on what was going on, when I would visit him at his flat off the Filmore. I was dancing in the Haight-Ashbury completely out of my head on LSD and weed — no ‘hippies’ yet. We called them ‘heads’. ‘Did you see how many heads there were on the streets tonight?’ we would say. This was before Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth or any of the old beats were aware of what was happening.

Cassady was running around. I met him in North Beach late ’62 or early ’63. McClure dropped by Glenn Todd and Justin Hein’s place to see what was going on with the LSD. Bruce Conner had come back from Mexico with a suitcase full of marbles. We had Sandoz LSD. It wasn’t called acid then and wasn’t like what you got afterwards. (Except for Owsley). We worked up a rock ‘n roll ritual dancing to Ray Charles and then joined hands and really stepped into another world.”

Plymell’s synaesthesia press chapbook, Journals From Lysidia, is an excerpt from the Waterrow Press publication Hand on The Doorknob — The Charles Plymell Reader; in fact, Jeff Weinberg played a major role in getting Journals From Lysidia published and out there, too.

Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Roxie Powell — Wild Whispers

Robert Peters said of Roxie Powell’s first chapbook, Dreams of Straw, “anyone anxious for an original experience in poetry will love Dreams of Straw“. Non-workshop, non-Iowa, non-NY city-clever, non-anything. It’s rumored Allen Ginsberg carried one with him for years, and this is fact: Ginsberg paid for a second printing of the book.

Roxie has published only two additional books in the 35+ years since Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press printed Dreams of Straw. the synaesthesia press is proud to publish the poet’s fourth title, Wild Whispers.

From Anselm Hollo’s forward: “these Wild Whispers range from the meditative mystery of the title poem to painterly evocations of place….childhood moments revisited on tortuous paths; bawdy, bucolic, but never obvious love poems.”

Charles Plymell, who penned an afterward, posed the question I’ve already answered here: “What great & feared iconoclastic critic and the real Poet Laureate of his time praised him in print?”

Wild Whispers was published in a limited edition of 125 copies; 99 are numbered and signed by the poet, 26 lettered copies are signed by Roxie, Anselm Hollo, and Charles Plymell. The lettered copies have three letterpress broadsides laid-in. 24 pages, folio, with dust jacket and covers letterpress printed and all copies hand sewn into wraps.

Roxie Powell is one of the best poets you’ve never heard of. We’ll even go as far as to argue that his first book, Dreams of Straw, is one of the most whimsical, quirkiest — and superb — little books of poetry published in the 1960’s.

I’m even taking Richard Brautigan into consideration.

Just don’t expect an argument from me.

Posted on November 6, 2007December 25, 2008 by Jim — Leave a comment

Jim Pritchard — “The Neighbors” and “The Man With The Buzzer in His Throat”

There’s lots to say — and as much to keep quiet — about Jim Pritchard.

His story, The Neighbors, ended up being published as the very first synaesthesia press chapbook. As a publisher, I was heavily influenced by the beat chapbooks from the mimeo era, and that was the initial idea for everything the press would put out. Of course, things change, and that policy went out the door when I went to press with the Chris Offutt book. But looking back at The Neighbors, and Pritchard’s other contribution to synaesthesia, The Man With the Buzzer In His Throat, well, I’ll stand by those two books any day.

The Man With The Buzzer in His Throat ended up being published in Vox. The artist Brian Marsland silkscreen the cover in his backyard on a warm spring day in Tempe, Arizona, in two variants: on cover had just the red ink featuring the man with the buzzer in his throat and the title of the story; most, however, had a yellow background.

Now, if we could only find Pritchard. Last time we heard of his whereabouts, he was living in a one-room flophouse in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, driving a cab, and working on a novel. Then, he disappeared.

If you know how to contact him, please let me know — he owes me money.