This is the third anthology celebrating a decade’s worth of continuous activity across above/ground press, the chapbook press I founded well before I understood much of anything about publishing, or writing, or marketing. Or anything, really. Has it really been thirty years since I launched those first few above/ground press titles? Seven months after I had begun what evolved into The Factory Reading Series, I organized and hosted the first above/ground press launch on July 9, 1993 at The Stone Angel Institute, a short-lived 1960s-style coffeehouse on Ottawa’s Lisgar Street. Across that first decade or so, every publication was singular. My original tools included typewriter, scissors and tape, and the ubiquitous long-arm stapler (I’ve gone through six since). My ambitions were large and ongoing from the very beginning, even if I didn’t necessarily know how to get here from there.
I’ve always considered the designation ‘best of’ to be a bit of a misnomer, especially in terms of how I attempt to put these anthologies together. Perhaps it is better to call this a ‘best of’ selection of work that predominantly hasn’t seen reprint in subsequent full-length collections. Perhaps the argument for a collection such as this is a ‘worth repeating,’ as I would rather focus on those works that haven’t been republished since in more traditional venues. Given the press’ production increase over the past decade—including the introduction of the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] and occasional G U E S T [a journal of guest editors], not to mention the online periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, and further print issues of The Peter F. Yacht Club—I could have easily put together a dozen or so different variations on this particular volume. Each would have been equally vibrant, cohesive, and expansive, without a single author overlapping between them. With nearly thirteen hundred publications over the past thirty years, consider for a moment that more than half of those have been produced over the press’ third decade. One might ask: why not include Helen Hajnoczky, Alice Notley, or Jessica Smith? Where are Natalie Simpson, Stephen Brockwell, or Eric Schmaltz? Where is Steve McCaffery? Where is Amish Trivedi, Stephen Collis, or Amanda Earl? Wasn’t there a Rosmarie Waldrop title, and three by Rae Armantrout? There is simply too much, too much. Call this a ‘dipping in,’ I suppose. A glimpse or even an overview of a far wider field of ongoing activity.
The late Fredericton poet and publisher Joe Blades saw the first anthology through his Broken Jaw Press, publishing GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 back in 2003, and Christine McNair and I produced the second volume, Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013, through our Chaudiere Books in 2013, which is now part of the Invisible Publishing back catalogue. If you can imagine, Christine and I had just moved into a house and our Rose was newborn when that book launched, with Christine providing a confirmation of cover stock to our printer from her hospital bed, mere hours before giving birth. One might wonder if above/ground has long thrived on or within a certain amount of chaos, but it might be more precise to consider above/ground press a project willing and able to adapt as required, rolling with whatever life is happening at any particular moment.
Editorially, the press moves as my reading interest does, from the more straightforward lyric to concrete/visual works to more experimental prose, including works that might be seen as too wild, strange, or experimental for a full-length collection. I’ve always enjoyed the form of the chapbook for its durability, and deliberately focus on an inexpensive production that allows for what bpNichol termed the ‘gift economy,’ refusing to produce items I can’t afford to freely distribute. The chapbook also allows the ability to move quickly from concept to publication, to take risks with work that isn’t hampered by any consideration of potential sales. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a stable of annual subscribers over the past decade or more who have allowed me that kind of flexibility, and it was Gary Geddes who first introduced to me the idea of subscriptions, back in 1994, as we drank Sleemans in the treehouse in his Dunvegan, Ontario yard. It was subscriptions, he told me, that allowed him to keep his Quadrant Editions afloat for those first few years in the early 1980s, well before the press evolved into Cormorant Books.
It is strange to think that I’ve now been producing above/ground press longer than I haven’t, begun way back when I was but a mere lad of twenty-three. There’s a part of me, now, that is curious to see how far I can take the press, and what new directions and adventures might be possible. There is so much more ahead that I know I haven’t even imagined or discovered. At this moment, the race to the half-century mark begins.
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