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Fall 2001

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UMASS GATHERINGS: UMASSISTS AT THE BARRICADES!
With the alternative literati at the Big Small Press Fest

by Steven L. Beeber '85, '95G




	SMALL-PRESS PROVOCATEURS: alumni Matthew Zapruder, left, and Brian Henry of Verse at Memorial Hall in May. Photo by Ben Barnhart.

DADAISM. SURREALISM. POST-STRUCTURALISM.

UMassism?

It might not seem like the most natural progression. But at "The Big Small Press Fest" at Memorial Hall last May, the words zeitgeist and avant-garde — even fin de siècle — would not have seemed out of place.

On campus for this most unusual conference, the first of its kind anywhere as far as anyone knows, were some of the leading names in alternative publishing today. The editors of magazines as well known as Open City, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Nerve were in attendance. So were the creators of such up-and-comers as Conduit, Rain Taxi, Fence, Verse Press, Volt, Paragraph, and jubilat — William Waltz ’92G, Eric Lorberer ’91G, Rebecca Wolff ’91, Brian Henry ’97G, Gillian Conoley ’83G, Karen Donovan ’89G, and Michael Teig ’01G, respectively — all UMass grads who’ve founded journals during the past five years.

The brainchild of UMass poetry professor Dara Wier and Verse Press publisher Matthew Zapruder ’99G, the Big Small Press Fest celebrated the resurgence of the alternative press movement in an era of increasing literary corporatization. From New York to San Francisco to Minneapolis to Easthampton, Massachusetts, the figures on the barricades are risking career advancement, not to mention foregoing sleep, to publish some of the most challenging and interesting writing to emerge in years. Editing their own magazines, serving on the boards of others, licking stamps and stuffing envelopes in their living rooms, these writers are making sacrifices – not just to their economic and social lives, but to their art.

"Oh god, that’s the worst part," said Fence founder and editor Rebecca Wolff, who lives in Manhattan. "My apartment is filled with copies of Fence and correspondence and paperwork. It’s all too easy to find my own writing slipping away in the maelstrom."

SO WHY DO THEY DO it? In large part that’s what the conference proved to be about – why they do what they do, as well as how, for whom, and to what end. (Wolff, among others, stoutly denied any intention "to start a school of writing." The purpose of founding Fence, she said, "was to undermine that whole idea.")

As the day began and panelists began commenting on such practical topics as
"Getting Started" and "Keeping It Going," it became plain that their endeavors are almost entirely impractical.

"In fact I’m losing money," said Wolff good-naturedly. Her fellow panelists laughed and nodded.

"I wish there were three of me," said Lorberer. "Then I’d only be tired half the time."

It was a convivial, laid back, easy-going group, yet they’re doing what writers and editors have done since the first firebrand signed a manifesto: creating a moment. Paris in the 20s; New York in the 50s; San Francisco in the 60s; UMass in the ’00s? If that seems too much to say, consider that Dada began over a dinner conversation, and that Surrealism followed soon after when some disgruntled Dadaists were drinking at the bar.
Movements come and go while most people are barely aware of them. And at UMass it does seem that something has been brewing these past few years, something only now coming to fruition and amply on display on this sultry May afternoon.

"Yes?" says one of the editors, pointing into the audience during a Q&A session.

"Umm . . . yes," a young man says, rising awkwardly. Then, bucking up his courage: "There are those who would say this panel represents some of the worst aspects of the new little magazines. That they’re part of a deplorable new aesthetic, a new order that is impenetrable.

"They might even say that what we’re seeing here is a meeting of the new lieutenants of the East Coast Literary Mafia. How do you respond to that?"
It’s a classic movement moment, one splinter aimed at another. The interlocutor is a member of the family – his ponytail would qualify him if his presence did not – and his irony is obvious. Still, the smiles of the panelists are fixed for just a bit longer than is comfortable.

"Well," says Zapruder finally, leaning into his microphone and speaking in a husky voice, "we’ll have to make them dead then."

EVERYONE LAUGHS AND THE TENSION lifts - but not the mood of seriousness. Something is at stake here: if not the future of American literature, at least the future of the participants’ literary preferences.

What has brought so many to this festival? As the weekend progresses and panel follows panel ("New Media," "New Authors, New Movements"), they dwell mostly on their desire to see alternative poetry published, their hopes of building a community, if not a movement. Yet a striking number of speakers, alumni and non-alumni alike, pay homage to Wier and James Tate, the two leading poets of UMass’s MFA program. It is these poets, they say, who’ve shown how to be both experimental and structured: "How to be free to write good poetry, whatever form that might take," as Lorberer slyly puts it.

What the alumni may be too modest to crow about is that UMass’s MFA program is one of the oldest in the country, and consistently ranks among the top ten nationwide. Or that the campus has produced writers as diverse as Paul Theroux ’63 and Dave Berman ’95G (the latter also leader of alt rock faves "The Silver Jews"). They don’t mention having worked with such current and former faculty as John Edgar Wideman, Agha Shahid Ali, Valerie Martin ’74G, Tomaz Salamun, or Paul Muldoon- – perhaps because they take the chance to have done so almost for granted.

"Oh, yeah," says Conduit associate editor Steve Healey ’92G, who now lives in Minneapolis, when asked about this between panels. "I guess it is essential that we went here. But you don’t think of it on some level. It just becomes part of who you are.

"The environment at UMass breeds experiment. We’ve all been encouraged to try and define ourselves by our own standards. Now we’re trying to create a format where others of like mind can have their work published and read."

If the poets – and they are mostly poets – at the Small Press Fest are expressing their freedom, it’s not simply for purposes of self-promotion, though they don’t deny there’s a bit of that in their makeup. Primarily, they say, they just want to create an environment for the kind of poetry they like — poetry that is "not boring."

"Good poetry in other words," declares Lorberer with a laugh.

IT'S NOT ONLY THE EMERGING talents who see in this gathering the expression of a trend. It’s people like David Lehman, editor of Scribner’s Best American Poetry series and the conference’s keynote speaker.

In his tie and pleated trousers Lehman looks a bit like a grandmother at a keg party here. But his remarks make it clear that he cares as deeply about new work as any young writer in a thrift-store shirt and scraggly goatee.

Lehman quotes critic Lionel Trilling to the effect that the function of "little magazines" is to make the official representatives of literature a little uneasy — "to keep a countercurrent moving that perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move."

"This puts the matter gravely," adds Lehman. "And while the gravity of the situation is not in issue, it is a pleasure in the year 2001 to note that our magazines manifest resistance with an air sometimes of buoyancy or a levity that is the opposite of grave."
Perhaps that is the best way to describe the movement coming out of UMass – buoyant, full of levity, anything but grave.

"This is the perfect venue for a small press festival," says Lehman, "because the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts has proved to be such an extremely fertile breeding ground for poets and writers and editors.

"How lucky for the university, and for all of us who love poetry and prose."

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