Before George Fragopoulos and I started the press, it was bubbling below the surface, mainly through reading, talking about small press publishing – some texts that come to mind are Matvei Yankelevich’s Harriet essays, Juliana Spahr’s Du Bois’ Telegram, the Waldrops’ Keeping/ The Windows Open, and Ugly Duckling’s anthology A Poetics of the Press. We also saw a void, as many others probably do, where work around us wasn’t getting published. One day, Voila! We “started” a press. Some things really do just happen like that. Shortly after that, we wrote a manifesto, and then nothing happened for a while… but once we got started, everything sort of happened quickly. In 2022 we printed a zine, a chapbook, a full-length, and a journal issue. In 2023 we did two journal issues, two chapbooks, and one full-length. In 2024, we’ll print two more journal issues, two books, and two chapbooks.
But to backtrack: the name for Beautiful Days Press came from a chance procedure–a book George and I pulled off the shelf during a reading at Black Spring Books in Brooklyn, the day we decided we were starting a press. We immediately liked the book’s psychedelic cover and the fact that it was a little-known translation from German by Anselm Hollo. I didn’t know it then, but that book was printed by Urizen Press, a short-lived New York press in the 70s that published works in translation from Theodor Adorno to Pierre Clastres. There isn’t much information about the press available, but the publisher wrote this fantastic blog post that really gives a taste of the wild world of 1970s New York publishing.
One thing that immediately struck us about the name Beautiful Days, maybe perversely, was the sense of the apocalyptic it conjured... the strange, almost hyperreal vivacity of things as we approach the void. Our unofficial motto is “between the end and whatever's before and/or after” – a sentence meant to splinter time in multiple directions in the same way that the palpable sense of an end does. Does the sense of beauty we still feel in spite of that sense of an end mean a promise of something better?
Of course, many people might see our name and immediately imagine something from the sentimental mainstream of poetry, which hasn’t shifted much in the past few centuries in its veneration of a certain kind of well-wrought or preciously off-kilter pleasantness, or some safe admixture of that with catharsis. We would rather people get us wrong in that way, though, than give up on beauty. What could be more important, for artists, than form? Why do it, in this day and age, if you don’t believe in form? Just write a substack. As for us, we’re hitching our wagon to the “beauty” team. Where can it still take us?
We didn’t really talk about it, but there was also clearly something “higher vibrational” we were putting out there, because we started to get a lot of submissions with the word “god” in them. That’s not the worst thing, but not exactly what we hope poetry can do either (maybe just the old problem, again, of something made into explicit content which should really be worked through on the level of form?). George recently published a book of ekphrastic poems based on Pasolini’s films called Heretical Materialism and I think that’s a good way of phrasing it. I’d say we’re heretical materialists.
What else… I guess I could mention that we have not quite gotten to the “break even” level with the press yet, though we’re usually close enough. [Subscriptions and sales help, especially direct sales]. There are a lot of people who’ve written more interestingly, and from more experience, about the politics inherent in a press’ finances, distribution, etc. We’ve tried to do most things ourselves to keep costs down and offer the books at very reasonable prices–we want them out in the world above all. At the same time, we are still providing some small things like an honorarium for writers (though some authors opt for more author copies instead). Also, we recently secured distribution with Asterism, and we’re excited about the broader geographical reach that affords us.
It’s been very exciting so far to find out how much amazing work is out there and to play a small part in maintaining the microclimate(s) in which poetry circulates. We’re looking forward to what comes next!
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photo: Joshua Wilkerson (left) and George Fragopoulos (right) in 2022
photo: Beautiful Days at the New Orleans Poetry Festival 2024
