In 2016 or so, my friend & neighbor Patrick Tillery here in Longmont, Co, had a line on a sweet deal for a 10x15 Chandler & Price letterpress. He was already in possession of a C&P at his own home, but this one came with all manner of wonderful free things he didn’t want to pass up, so I told him we could keep it in my garage so long as we made some stuff. Patrick originally got the press in his shed from Ann Arbor’s OtherWind Press, who themselves had acquired it from Ken & Ann Mikolowski’s heroic Alternative Press. This new one bore a plaque saying it had previously belonged to poet Greg Kuzma’s Best Cellar Press. I appreciate these lineages, and believe they are important and auspicious.
So, Wry Press was born, and the first thing we did was a broadside of an unpublished Kenneth Irby poem, kindly supplied by Kyle Waugh, which was then closely followed by a folio of small poems by the extremely neglected poet Seymour Faust, who in the 1950s and early 60s had been a friend and compatriot of David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg, among others. A concern with archival work and ephemeral figures was right there from the start, and many other projects along those lines have followed since, including previously unpublished poems and drawings by the avant-garde jazz bassist Earl Freeman (in collaboration with 50 Miles of Elbow Room), a lost book by the queer, U.K. modernist poet/novelist/artist Oswell Blakeston, or the almost completely unknown and shadowy beat/60s counterculture era figure, Paolo Lionni.
At the same time, we think it’s important to look at the work of our own age, whether it’s overlooked elders like the genius, Philly based poet Ken Bluford, or Annabel Lee (whose Vehicle Editions was a great inspiration to our own press), or the great & wonderful Sandy Berrigan (who normally self-publishes in tiny editions), or the concrete poetry of artist Jim Johnson, or Josephine Clare, who was 90 when we published a small collection of her poems. We loved her 1970s books, but it had been many years since she’d had a collection of any kind, and we thought it important to make that happen. But, we also love the work of many, many young poets, and have done chapbooks by such artists & writers as Mac Katter, Noah Ross, Coleman Edward Dues, and Hataałiinez Wheeler, among others.
Wry also publishes a print-only little mag, called Luigi Ten Co., co-edited by myself and poet Whit Griffin. LTC comes out two to four times a year, and largely features contemporary poetry (by both younger & older writers), but with a smattering of lost or archival work as well. We hope it keeps a small bit of that mimeo-era spirit alive. We also have a bootleg arm of the press, called AWRY, which we deploy when it seems like permissions would either be impossible or onerous. We try hard to think of the ethics of it, and only use it when we feel like we have to; that is, for the love of poetry.
Not that any of this makes a single red cent, and in fact we are strong believers in the gift economy and pass mounds of our stuff along to friends & peers to whom we think it may be useful (not that we don’t appreciate an order now & then). But, like probably every other labor-of-love-small-press out there, we just want to shepherd work into the world that might not possibly exist otherwise. It’s always easier to make it than it is to sell it. So be it.
Probably the biggest project we are working on presently is an effort to bring to light some unpublished works by one of the great, neglected 20th century poetic geniuses, Frank Kuenstler (of LENS & In Which fame). Other forthcoming projects include a cassette tape of a 1969 language based musique concrète / cut-up type work by Clark Coolidge, as well as a scarce, illustrated book by Philip Whalen. There are a number of other things in the works that are in varying degrees of completion, and a list of what we’d like to make happen is fairly endless. Even though the press is nine years old at this point, it still feels like we’re kind of just getting started.
