Dante Di Stefano: How did Dos Madres come into being?
Robert Murphy: Like Athena the Press sprang from the head of Zeus – along with a headache - or was it from his thigh as with Dionysus. (well, actually, the head and heart of The Muse probably is more accurate – and a bit of the unexpected, if not miraculous thrown in). And it is longer in the tell of it than anyone would wish to hear, because it has to do with my own journey as a writer and a poet, and for the last fourteen years, along with my wife, Elizabeth, a publisher.
Until the age of forty I was completely unknown to the vibrant literary community of the Greater Cincinnati Area. I, for the most part, wrote in isolation (literally) often in my car. I was not in academia, but made my living in the building trades. One day my brother suggested I enter a local competition sponsored by the Greater Cincinnati Writer’s League. My poem won, and a year’s free membership to the League came along with it. The GCWL had, and still has, monthly meetings where the members’ work is critiqued by poet/teachers from the likes of Xavier University, the University of Cincinnati, Miami U. and, Thomas More College, and others. The miraculous thing that happened was that at one of those critiques Dr. Norman Finkelstein, poet and scholar/critic, after the meeting took me aside to say that he was astonished that I was not known to him, and where exactly had I been. At work in a different world, I said. But it was he who opened his world to my life with an introduction to not only significant local writers such as Tyrone Williams, and Richard Hague, and Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, Pauletta Hansel, but also to more distant luminaries such as Nathaniel Tarn, Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, and to one who became in a short year my friend, mentor, and alma pater: the extraordinary William Bronk. This all began thirty years ago. And finally in 2004 I decided to give back to that community kind enough to take me in. To give back, in some small measure, all that I had been gifted. The project was made all the easier by my wife Elizabeth who is a gifted graphic designer, portraitist, and iconographer, and now a celebrated book designer. Which means, of course, that she is the true midwife of the Press. I am but the ghost in the machine. As for a name, we decided on Dos Madres, two mothers in Spanish, in honor of our own mothers, respectively: Vera Laverne Murphy, and Libbie Hart Hughes, both lovers of literature and promoters of literacy, and who contributed financially to us in the nascent years of the press.
DD: How has publishing poetry changed for you since beginning in 2004?
RM: Well the obvious change involves sheer numbers. The significant increase in those seeking publication, and then just the problem of finding a way of doing it. It can be a bit harried for three people, I being the only reader, my wife Elizabeth the only designer, my son manning the website. It is truly a Mom and Pop corner grocery store kind of concern. Still in all we have managed somehow since 2004 to see 176 titles by 107 authors into print.
And that means, too, thousands of books mailed out.
My wife and I began this enterprise thinking we would just do chapbooks for poet friends. We printed our own chapbooks on our laser color printer, even folded and stapled them. And when we began doing the perfect-bound books we started with traditional offset printing, which cost-wise, demanded that we print at least 500 copies to gain any price advantage. As you can imagine, given the nature of poetry readership, 500 copies of any book produced by an unknown press was likely to remain significantly on their shelves for a very long time. In fact, I still have hundreds of copies of books from that early period. Luckily, with advancements in laser technology came the possibility of printing fewer books at a time, and also the ability to reorder as the need arises, yet with a quality indistinguishable from offset. We found a printer who could print books of high quality, not only in black and white, but fine color reproduction as well.
DD: Tell us about your catalog. What do Dos Madres poets share in common?
RM: First of all, when I look upon our catalog (here) I am every time reminded of the virtuosity of the design for the covers of these books. There has just been unstinting praise of Elizabeth’s design work: the look of the books: outside and inside, cover and text, the clarity, the appropriateness of the appearance of the poem on the page – the font, the margins, the decorative and organizational aspects she brings to enhance the quality of each book. Elizabeth’s presentations are unique. And as far as what our authors share in common, despite their eclectic nature in terms of tone, style, formal and informal verse: as one our author’s Dick Hague wrote (he having edited our ten year anniversary issue: The Realms of the Mothers – The First Decade of Dos Madres Press: “It is not possible to generalize about all these Dos Madres Poets, beyond claiming their universal mastery of craft. Beyond that, the diversity of theme, subject, form, diction, speaker echoes what I, a former collector of beetles, loved about the insect order Coleoptera: a tremendous range of size, structure, color, habitat, life cycle. . . . Likewise, Realms of the Mothers shows in the domain of poetry a rapturous fondness for, and extensive expression of, a similarly multifarious creation.”
And also I do find it interesting that the Press has published not just the expected numerous poet/teachers/critics from the academic community but a group consisting of two editors of professional magazines, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, an eminent doctor of pediatric psychiatry, a Jungian therapist, a pediatrician, the head of the emergency room of a Greek island hospital, a physicist, a somatic therapist, an eminent professor of cognitive science, a lawyer, a psychologist, a librarian, a writer of children’s literature, a legendary artist from the psychedelic era, a world renowned expert in biological regeneration, award winning high school teachers, one of the foremost scholars of Sufism, and councilors in mental health and drug rehabilitation. And perhaps most importantly not a few who took on the role of mother and housewife, the raising of children and so in turn the bearer of the future - maintainers of the light and life of civilization. The voices of those many who often go unheard while employed in the most important job in the world.
DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?
RM: More readers. And poets who don’t write narrowly for other poets, though that surely will go on, that necessary con-verse-ation between the voices of the living and the dead, the past and the present, and all that futures there (and all of it in our heads). And, of course, it is good to remember as Whitman said, “To have great poets you must have great audiences.” We are at the risk of always losing both. And what did Pascal say. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Alone, with our terrible loneliness, always a difficulty, for sure. And without a smartphone or an I Pad. But I do believe that Pascal might have agreed that the read of a good book of poetry would go a long way to solve our problems as well. One of David Giannini’s books of poetry being a possible cure.
DD: What can we look forward to from Dos Madres in the near future?
RM: One hopes, of course, for more of the same, if by the same one means those qualities of language which may make a difference in the reader. And, if he or she is alert enough, change them forever. Such a book, and a recent addition to our catalog is Christopher Smart’s Cat by Igor Webb. The late novelist Philip Roth wrote of it, . . .”it’s marvelous, excellently written, inventively told, full of intelligence, funny, often with a novelistic flair . . . “ Born Igor Weiss in Slovakia, he and his parents survived the Holocaust in hiding and then after the war made their way by way of Ecuador to upper Manhattan. The book takes Igor back to Slovakia as an adult, retracing his childhood—and also veers off into numerous engaging side trips into literature, so that the whole thing reads quirkily as much like a literary miscellany as a memoir, with both genres having equally impressive heft.”
Another great read, which will come to press soon, probably in August is, by noted poet Roger S. Mitchell. his Reason’s Dream. Elaine Sexton says of the book, “In Roger Mitchell’s sinuous new collection, he speaks of “a livable oblivion,” something “better than rapture,” where “ the dog catches what it knows it can’t catch,” and something “keeps us rafting/this waterfall of urgencies/in a storm of interrupted calms.” This master poet . . . raises the bar, here, again, illustrating the intense delights in the lyric moment, where the articulated self comes alive in the natural world.” And, with any luck we will have another book from David Giannini.
DD: You’ve published two excellent books by David Giannini, Faces Somewhere Wild (2017) and The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up (2018). Could you tell us a little bit about what you admire in these books and introduce David Giannini?
RM: You mean beyond his wonderfully eccentric intelligence, his ability to surprise, his quixotic perception, his fine ear, his wonderful eye in observation of nature, his ability to hear all the possibilities in a word in association with others: a sentence, a stanza and so create a poetry that gets up on its hind legs and howls . . , that is to say . . . come almost physically alive? Beyond this, I would say it is his deep and abiding compassion, his full human heartedness, not just for his fellow man/woman/child but for all that creatures there – if we but for a moment look, hear, see and feel, take the census of a breeze. For, indeed, it is a world that for many of us is in want of reintroduction – as if forgotten, but always wanted, always yearned for, always waiting to be remembered, that lives trembling with invisible, anticipatory recognition for us there.
DD: You’ve had eight books published in the last three years. This is amazing by anyone’s standards? How do you write so prolifically?
David Giannini: I’ve said and written that poetry is daily and not merely some subject to be studied in a classroom or a lesson with given ‘prompts.’ I have always enjoyed what Mallarme said: “Poetry is not made with ideas; it is made with words.” I very rarely start a poem with a concept or any sort of preconceived notion. A word or phrase or image comes to me, and I try to ride the crest of an inspiration and craft a poem usually through many drafts. I am always working at writing. I discard a great many false starts, whole drafts, or just wrong-headed ways of wordy work. All writers do that. I rise at 4 a.m. most days, jot and /or revise immediately, sometimes in a more or less liminal state, between dreams and waking. There are words and / or images, as I said, already knocking around in my head, waiting to be said or typed into my computerized journals and drafts. I work for several hours until my wife gets up, and most days I am working on several drafts at a time throughout the day, nearly every day. On any given day, I may go out and stack cordwood or go to a dentist appointment, poetry reading, etc., but lines of poems I am working on stay with me and I often jot things in my car while driving. Before cellphones there were drivers scribbling on pads or napkins beside them in the car. It is all a matter of persistence, discipline, and long love for what I must try to accomplish. I have the feeling, the sense, every day when I wake, of rising into poetry. Cid Corman, who wrote over 100 books of poetry, used to say, “catch the poem as it is occurring.” The immediacy of the thing at hand that seems to be thinking you as you work on it, that’s the feel. It can take years sometimes to finish a single short poem. It can also take just few minutes, but when the latter happens there is always the sense that it has come from a long way off, a long gestational period. I find a certain spiritual dimension through perception of physical things, the interrelations of all things and beings. I have two or three more completed, full-length books not yet out to publishers, and at least one chapbook. Well, they are all books, though some, usually academics or those who are overly influenced by professors, apparently feel that chapbooks are “less.” It is a silly notion. Leaves of Grass was first published with just 12 poems (later closer to 400.) Tomas Tranströmer’s first book contained 17 poems, a slim volume. On and on. The point is: they were books. I have been very fortunate to have Richard and Elizabeth Murphy at Dos Madres Press, and Joan and John Digby of Feral Press (a.k.a. New Feral Press) as publishers who are also fine, interesting, and very talented people who like my manuscripts. Writing, as you say, “prolifically,” refers only to amount. My publishers and others also see quality in the amount, of course, or they would decline publication.
DD: Beginning with the title, tell us about The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up.
DG: The title comes from a prosepoem (as I spell it) in the third section of the book. It is the last line or sentence of “Returning Gift.” Some people have told me they use that line as a sort of aphoristic mantra sometimes. The book is divided into three sections. The first section contains relatively short lyrics, some with deadpan, absurd humor, and even a line riffing on Whitman. The middle section is a suite of 10 poems for my wife, Pam, tracing our relationship, how it began, and the sense of how there is “third being formed from tones of talk we fuse”, not a child, but what the marriage deeply is. I speak, in all of those poems, in somewhat oblique terms, feeling and intuitive terms, taking Emily Dickinson’s cue in “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” as epigraph. Some things are more truly revealed when seen at an angle, rather than looked at flat on. That section continues in lyric tradition. The third section is composed of prosepoems. They, too, are anchored in lyricism, but also in metaphysical and comedic circumstances. There are thematic, lyric, and metaphysical-spiritual elements in this and the previous two sections that call to each other, back and forth, throughout the book. At the same time, so much of life is comic and absurd, tragically so. There is not enough meaning in life without poetry, without attempts to find meanings not obviously present every day. There are a number of the prospoems that I still find humorous, and apparently some readers do, too. I try to write books and not just a sort of anthological smattering of poems that may not cohere as a book. Many poets find it difficult or even oppressive to talk about their books thematically or generally, and I am one of those. All I can really say is that once I have an intuitive grasp of what poems work well together a book begins to gel. I have an almost absolute trust in my intuitions, though Pam, my wife, has sharp and intuitive critical instincts, too, and often points out defects in later drafts of poems, for which I’m grateful! A single line or even a phrase may undergo 50 drafts, and even then Paul Valery’s saying is at least in the background: “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.” Enough said.
DD: The third section of The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up consists of “Vertical Prosepoems,” a designation that characterized the poems in another one of your recent books, Porous Borders. Can you explain what you mean by a “Vertical Prosepoem?”
DG: I call them Vertical Prosepoems to call attention to their relatively narrow (3”, left-to-right) margins that force a reader to break into the next part of a sentence more quickly than in normative prose paragraphs. It is a way of focusing attention or concentration more sharply. I am calling the reader’s attention to something resembling prose, with ‘justified’ margins, yet with a sense of the narrow linearity of most poems, especially lyric poems. The prosepoem allows for more expansiveness and flexibility, but is ‘held’ in its visual shape that is both and complement and offset to its internal structure. Here I pause and say it’s not good to intellectualize what is essentially an organic process of ‘making.’ I usually pay close attention to the sonic elements, the “music” as some still call it, such things as internal rhymes or repeated sound patterns, for instance, within the rectangularly upright prosepoem on the page. Someone asked why I don’t just leave the lines ragged on the page, instead of with ‘justified’ margins. I’m not sure I know the answer, but it has something to do with an enigmatic sense of flat-top obelisks or monoliths which may be tributes to something unknown or once known, with or without instructions or runes, or inscriptions, like those on gravestones, and I’ve always liked that alien monolith in the book and film, 2001, A Space Odyssey.
DD: Who are the contemporary poets you admire the most?
DG: I don’t like to even imply hierarchies. I’ve learned to appreciate a wide range of people and their ways, of poems not at all like mine, but ones that may succeed beautifully on their own terms. I enjoy reading and exploring, for instance, Elizabeth Willis as well as Irene Willis and Williams Hunt (the latter two are terribly neglected!) Andrew Schelling, Lewis Warsh, and lately I am enjoying more of Sarah Sousa’s, Charles Rafferty’s, and Xue Di’s poems and prosepoems. I have very little use for urban poets and poetry that often seem to live too far up in their heads, away from the body and its senses. As usual, though, exceptions prove the rule. Some poets, like Warsh, are able to bridge, it seems, a sense of urbanity with a sense of the rural. Octavio Paz once referred to “the lacerated speech of the big cities.” I’ve always admired what Gertrude Stein once wrote, “Civilization is always rebeginning in the country.” Yeah, man! That’s a very contemporary idea! I also still have a lot of love and respect for Gary Snyder’s work as a whole. Same for Susan Howe and Jean Valentine—all wildly different poets!
DD: Whose work do you return to the most?
DG: In poetry, the dead: Tomas Tranströmer , Henri Michaux, Rene Char, Zbigniew Herbert, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Riding, all early ‘influences’. But as Louis Zukofsky once said, “Influence is literally in the air.” All is of influence, every thing and every phoneme—Everything!
DD: I'd like to end with a poem of yours from The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up:
INVERSE MIRROR
A man fiercely tight in himself, stone-like,
nevertheless scrabbled forward along a massif
and felt a fierce break in the clouds
where a woman fiercely light, cloud-like, floated
over the man fiercely tight in himself, stone-
like, and so on they went into the master task
of reflections, where one was not the other
and the other was not the one, and both upon
reflection found themselves curiously inverse,
one up, one down, each wanting to speak,
wanting truth, but knowing that the last word
is never in, though it is waiting.
by David Giannini
Robert Murphy’s work has appeared in the literary periodicals Smartish-Pace, The Colorado Review, Notre Dame Review, Cultural Society, Marsh Hawk Review, Beans and Rice, LVNG, the Annals of Scholarship, and Live Mag!. He is the author of a chapbook, Not For You Alone (2004), Life In the Ordovician - Selected Poems (2007), and From Behind The Blind (2013) - all published by Dos Madres Press. He is a 2000 winner of the William Bronk Foundation prize for poetry. Robert Murphy is executive editor and publisher of Dos Madres Press. He is married to the iconographer and painter Elizabeth Hughes Murphy, who is both book designer and illustrator for Dos Madres Press.
David Giannini’s most recently published collections of poetry include: THE FUTURE ONLY RATTLES WHEN YOU PICK IT UP (Dos Madres Press, 2018;) IN A MOMENT WE MAY BE STRANGELY BLENDED (New Feral Press, 2018;) FACES SOMEWHERE WILD (Dos Madres Press, 2017;) SPAN OF THREAD (Cervena Barva Press, 2015;). He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; and taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, as well as well as preschoolers and high school students, among others; and he worked as a psychiatric case manager for 31 years. His Installation, The International House Dust Collection, was exhibited most recently at the Yager Museum in Oneonta, New York. He has been a committee and board member of The Becket Arts Center where a dramatic reading of his extended narrative prosepoem, RIM, was produced in 2005. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded, the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut. He started and hosts Writers Read, an ongoing series of monthly readings by poets and fiction writers presenting at The Lee Library in Lee, MA. He lives among trees in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Pam, and their two cats, Mina and Maya.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.
It is so nice to read a publisher like Richard Murphy talk so intelligently about poetry publishing and in such a grounded manner. His commitment to poetry is to be lauded. And it is so refreshing to read David Giannini's insights about writing. His own commitment to poetry along with his biography shows us the thorough extent in which poetry writing is his life. He deserves wide praise for his accomplishments. I do have to say here that I have know David a long time now, count him as a close friend, and I have published two chapbooks of his through my Adastra Press (hand-set metal type, letterpress printed, hand-sewn limited editions). Hats off to both these gentlemen (and their supportive wives!).
Posted by: Gary Metras | July 09, 2018 at 10:04 PM