by Chris Prewitt
CP: My introduction to you was a Tweet--so 21st Century it hurts--in which you said, "I think it's punk as hell to DIY release yr poetry & I also hate that the Poetry World at Large doesn't see it that way." To what do you attribute "the Poetry World at Large"'s resistance to self-publishing?
JLM: There are two main reasons the poetry-world frowns on self-publishing. One reason, the more valid criticism of the two, is a concern for the craft of poetry. Many people seem to think that (do-it-your)self-publishing means you are literally doing it all by yourself. That you have no outside feedback, no help with editing, etc. That it means throwing some unfinished poems into book form and calling it a day. I’m sure some people do it that way, but most of the people I know who self-publish take great care with their work, and get help and feedback from outside sources.
The other reason is pure gatekeeping and elitism. It’s the mindset of, “If anyone can put their work out into the world without The Poetry Institutions deciding it’s worthy, it can’t be as good as the work that has been chosen by bigger presses and institutions.” A lot of that stems from fear, from people worried about losing their own little shred of power or clout. It’s a scarcity mindset. They think that if other people self-publish and get attention for it, it makes their own (institutionally-approved) work seem lesser, or draws attention away from their success.
In general, I don’t understand the hatred of DIY publishing, because it is a time-honored tradition in the literary world. Hell, Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. But the gatekeepers know that, and they use it as a sort of “exception proves the rule” thing. “Well, yeah, Whitman self-published, but you’re not Whitman.” But how do they know that their attitude isn’t causing a very singular talent to never see the light of day, to just give up? I’m of a more-the-merrier mindset. I want more lit zines and micro-presses and self-publishers, not fewer. It’s worth it to wade through 1000 “shitty” self-published books to find that one singular talent that wouldn’t have been otherwise available to read.
CP: This is a two-for-one question on the subject of your press, Bone & Ink Press. First, what motivated you to create this press? And what "gaps" do you see Bone & Ink Press filling?
JLM: I’ve been publishing my own and others’ work in zines since I was twelve, and running a press seemed like a natural extension of that. Also, when I got obsessed with Henry Rollins around age 16 and saw what he was doing with 2.13.61, I vowed I’d one day do something similar with my own press. Then, in early 2017, I wrote a split chapbook with my friend Misha Bee Speck. When it was done and we were discussing how to best get it out into the world, I decided it was time to start a press and that our split would be my first title.
As far as gaps go...my aim has always been to amplify marginalized voices/publish books that might not get published otherwise. (Though all the books I’m publishing would’ve found homes elsewhere eventually, cuz they’re just that good.) My aim has also always been to run a “punk” press. By that I don’t mean that all the writing is about punk, or that all the authors are punks. I mean a sort of punk energy and ethic, which fuels me.
In many ways, Bone & Ink Press lives in a gap. It started as more of an anti-press, akin to what Stolen Paper and marlskarx, et. al., are currently doing—I printed everything zine-style, either in-house or at the local copyshop, and only published a few titles a year. Almost immediately, I grew out of that format. I took on more authors, many of them with manuscripts longer than anything I could publish zine-style. Now, I have the chap/books printed professionally, and I have my authors sign contracts! But I still do all the editing and layout work myself, still don’t have ISBNs on the books, still don’t sell through Amazon. I recently got scolded about those latter two things. Someone told me I was limiting what my authors can do with their work and how much success they’ll have. I didn’t respond but I wanted to say that first of all, it’s because of financial limitations, not entirely by design. And secondly, I think that my authors know what they’re getting into when they send stuff to me, if they’re at all familiar with the press.
I would ultimately like to return to a more zine-style, DIY, very-limited-edition press, after I complete this year’s roster. As things are right now, I’m completely overwhelmed by the mailorder aspect of running a press. And unless I get a wealthy benefactor to fund it, the only way for me to afford ISBNs and wider distribution would be to use a print-on-demand service—and I’ve heard enough horror stories about those that I don’t want to go that route.
CP: The hybridity of your art, including your work with zines, and your documented admiration of punk seem to speak to a resistance to conformity. Do you think that resisting conformity is an essential quality of art?
JLM: I don’t know if it’s essential to making art, but maybe to making great art, or art that’s better than mediocre. After all, if you’re not resisting some kind of conformity, where’s the tension in your work? Why are you even making it? Shouldn’t you just be doing paint-by-numbers, or playing in a tribute band? (Both of which are fine outlets, by the way, but I wouldn’t call them art.) Resisting conformity is definitely essential to my own art-making process. I don’t want to conform to anything, not even an anti-conformist mode or ideology. I’m inspired by a lot of stuff, but I try my damndest to take that inspiration and make it my own.
CP: Here's potentially a tricky question about resisting conformity vis-a-vis regionalism. You've largely lived in the Midwest and once served as the poet laureate of Racine, Wisconsin. Do you feel that the Midwest is misrepresented or mischaracterized, say in mass media? If so, what do people get wrong about the Midwest?
JLM: The Midwest is definitely misrepresented in mass media, and a lot of people who have never spent time here have huge misconceptions about it. They call us the “flyover states.” They assume there’s no important or interesting art or culture coming out of here; assume we all live in a cornfield and go cow-tipping for fun. Those same people also seem to think that all midwestern states are the same. While there are similarities across states, anyone who’s lived or spent time in the Midwest knows that Ohio is not the same as Michigan, is not the same as Wisconsin, is not the same as Nebraska, etc. The Midwest is huge and varied!
To be fair, people often develop misconceptions about any place they’ve never personally experienced. I lived in Oakland, California, for a couple years. Whenever I came back to Wisconsin to visit, people said things like, “I thought you’d be tan from hanging out at the beach and surfing all day.” Most of the depictions of California shown in mainstream media are of SoCal, so people think the whole state is just surfers, valley girls, and celebrities.
CP: The 1990s permeate your poems, with Courtney Love figuring prominently in your collection The Girl with the Most Cake: Poems About Courtney Love. For younger poetry readers, the 1990s are something of a mythic time, arguably the last great decade. As a writer who lived through the 1990s and who has written a great deal about the 1990s, what would you have these younger readers understand?
JLM: The first thing I want them to understand is that it wasn’t the last great decade. There’s been a ton of amazing art, literature, scientific developments, etc. in the years since. I romanticize the ‘90s because that was the decade in which I came of age, so I developed many of my passions and interests during that time.
Another thing I’d like people to understand is that things weren’t perfect in the ‘90s. I saw a post on Tumblr once where the OP said something like, “I wish I’d been a teenager in the ‘90s, when all the music was good.” Oh god. There was so much bad music in the ‘90s! It’s just that now, we only mention the good stuff. So if you weren’t old enough to remember it as it was happening, it’s easy to forget the bad music existed. On a more serious note: the ‘90s were the height of the AIDS crisis. By 1994, AIDS was the leading cause of death in the US for people ages 25 to 44. Gen Xers and us older Millennials/Xennials lived with that threat looming over us. I was only 12/13 in 1994, but I was very aware of HIV/AIDS and for years I was convinced that I would one day get it and probably die from it. (In my late teens/twenties, I was in some high-risk groups for HIV/AIDS. I don’t want to get into it further here, suffice it to say that was a very real fear for me.)
That said, there was a lot of great stuff in the ‘90s, stuff that helped shape me into the person I am. ACT UP and other HIV/AIDS activist groups, queercore and riot grrrl, and the relative prevalence of zines and slam poetry, to name just a few things.
CP: Your new book, The Loneliest Show on Earth, uses the circus both as a framing device and as an extended metaphor. Why do you feel the circus best serves the subject matter of this collection?
JLM: One of the central themes in this book is Otherness; the various ways one can be Other(ed). The circus and sideshow, with the way they put so-called freakishness and unusual talents on display, make a perfect stage on which that theme can play out. Another one of the themes is community, finding your people, other freaks. At its heart are these questions: when you are, in some way, Other, what is there to do but run away with the circus (either real or metaphorical)? And then, when the traumas you experience among the people who were supposed to keep you safe, turn out to be just as bad as anything that happens in the outside world—or when the circus closes its tent flaps for good—where do you go from there? When you run away from the circus, will there be another one to join?
CP: Narrative appears to be important in The Loneliest Show on Earth. The speaker acknowledges that these are stories, and more to the point, the speaker telling these stories is conscious of the audience. Why is it important to draw attention to narrative and to the audience?
JLM: I chose to draw attention to the narrative and speak to the reader in part because it’s a book of fractured stories, addressed to more than one person, told from more than one point of view. It’s autobiographical, but also fabulist; all the personas/speakers are both me and not-me. I wanted to address that, but in a fun way, a sort of vaudevillian wink at the reader. They know from the get-go that “the Feejee Mermaid might be a gaff,” but if I spin a good enough yarn, they might suspend their disbelief. Or rather, they might stop trying to discern what’s Real and what’s Make-Believe. I was in a fiction writing class in college where one of the other students was always asking, “Did that really happen?” (meaning: is it autobiographical?) about people’s stories. One of our other classmates shut him down by saying, “It’s a story.” A story is a story is a story. The way you tell it matters more than differentiating between fact and fantasy.
CP: In addition to narrative poetry, you also compose erasure poetry. What appeals to you about erasure poetry?
JLM: Erasure and other forms of found poetry appeal to me because they’re fantastic ways to take a source text and make it my own, or enter into a dialogue with a text. They can be a way to shape things I dislike/disagree with into something different, to debate and disrupt the meaning of the source text. Or they can be a way to pay homage to something I love, without plagiarizing or merely imitating.
CP: Which poetic approaches are you interested in trying that you have not yet had the opportunity to try?
JLM: I’d like to try my hand at forms invented by some of my current favorite poets: namely torrin a. greathouse’s Burning Haibun and Matt Hart’s Obliterations. (The latter is a form I discovered today, as I’m reading his new book The Obliterations, which is amazing so far.) I’d like to try zuihitsu, and I’ve been working on a palinode but haven’t finished it yet. (The palinode isn’t a form, per se, but...) I’d like to revisit some forms I’ve tried before but haven’t succeeded with: haibun (the non-burning kind), ghazal, sonnet crown. And I invented my own form last year, called The Fanzine. I’m working on a bunch of those; once I complete and publish some I’ll tell everyone what the form consists of.
CP: Finally, for readers who are new to your work, where do you recommend they begin?
JLM: Chapbook-wise, I’d suggest people start with either the split I did with Misha—It’s Like The ‘Watch The Throne’ Of Tender Punk Poems (it’s out of print but the digital version is still available on Etsy and Payhip, or the digital sampler chapbook Hello America put together—10 Poems By Jessie Lynn McMains.
For individual poems, I’d suggest people start with Track List for a Mix Tape I Will Never Give My Crush, Saint Anthony and the Ten Thousand Things, forget the fuck away from me (origin stories of a safety pin girl), and other words for mainline.
Jessie Lynn McMains (they/them or she/her) is a multi-genre writer. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications, including Memoir Mixtapes, Okay Donkey, Tiny Essays, Moonchild Magazine, and Barnhouse. They are the author of several chapbooks. Their book-length poem, The Loneliest Show On Earth, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press in February 2020. They were the recipient of the 2019 Hal Prize for poetry, and were the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Racine, WI. They are editor/publisher of Bone & Ink Press. You can find their website at recklesschants.net, or find them on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie
Chris Prewitt (he/him) is the author of Paradise Hammer (SurVision Books), winner of the 2018 James Tate Poetry Prize. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Twitter correspondence welcome @poetcprewitt.