An Alternative Route to Literary Heights

The hour was late, so was the deadline when the phone rang in writer Joel Rose’s East Village apartment. Screeches from a dot-matrix printer had pierced ears every waking hour for weeks as it reproduced some 600 copies of Between C & D.

The first edition of the small literary magazine Rose started a few months earlier with a $200 loan had struck a small nerve in Big Gotham. It sold out. Practically overnight, the apartment was deep in manuscripts. Rose wanted this second edition to top the first.

Sitting nearby, artist Rick Prol sketched delicate ink originals for the cover of each copy. Catherine Texier, a French writer and Rose’s wife, slapped a cover on every 50 pages before stuffing it into a Ziploc--the fledgling lit mag’s offbeat calling card that doubles as binding.

The telephone call was for Prol. It was Mark Kostabi, in 1983 not yet then the enfant terrible of the New York art scene he is today.

“Why are you doing this?” Kostabi demanded. “How much are you getting paid?” “Nothing,” answered a tired Prol, mumbling some high-mindedness about art collaborating with literature.

Kostabi persisted. What would art buyers who pay thousands of dollars for Prol’s work think of him making hundreds of sketches to be sold for the price of a lit magazine? For $4?

Prol hung up. He remembers realizing the sketches would take forever. Rose remembers Kostabi’s call had nagged at Prol. The artist stopped sketching somewhere between cover No. 165 and 178. Production halted. Rose says it was “the most disturbing” crisis in six years of publishing C & D. Eventually, Prol duplicated the remaining cover art using rubber stamps of the earlier drawings.

Now Rose laughs at the thought. His little literary magazine, after all, has defied the odds that send many small presses packing before their second edition. And it has done so in high style: Young novelist Tama Janowitz’s work appeared in its pages before anyone ever heard of her; 14 of its contributors have landed major book contracts; Viking Penguin published an anthology; both Rose and Texier have recent novels out and new ones on the way.

“We just wanted to see what was going on out there in alternative writing,” says Rose, 41, who, like thousands of others piecing together their next editions at the kitchen table, discovered the lure of publishing. “It is amazing to have the power of the press in your home, to be able to print what you want and have a point of view, to see if people respond.”

The modern history of underground publishing--or alternative publishing as it more accurately is called today--can be traced along with the development of cheap and accessible print technology. In the late ‘50s, used mimeograph machines provided the first transfusion of ink to the blood of would-be printers. Richard Brautigan’s work first appeared in mimeo sheets. So did a lot of Beat writers.

“Basically, it was poets and artists who wanted to amuse themselves and give themselves and their friends something to digest,” recalls Alastair Johnston, who for 15 years has printed books and poetry at Poltroon Press in a rundown can warehouse in Oakland, Calif.

“Usually they were sold for a quarter at bars. So you could buy another beer, or you could buy a little literary magazine.”

By the late ‘60s, professional printers were discarding their nearly obsolete letter presses that required hand-set type, further empowering amateurs to crank out pages like basement Gutenbergs. The times were ripe. Discord and dissent over the war in Vietnam provoked the anti-Establishment and outlaw sentiments that often motivate alternative presses to press the perimeters of the First Amendment.

William Burrough’s controversial works, for instance, first appeared in this country when Los Angeles painter Wallace Berman published them on a letter press. When photocopying prices dropped in the ‘70s, the technology supplanted the labor-intensive letter presses. Within a decade, computers and desktop publishing again refueled the boom.

“It’s a real explosion,” says Bill Shields, a poet whose Mad Dog Press in Youngwood, Pa., is a wellspring of underground poetry and short fiction. “The last five years have been just amazing for the small press. Anybody who has access to a Xerox machine can have a small press . . . Anybody who wants to get into this can. It’s a lot of people with a lot of different visions doing a lot of different things.”

Most of them are invisible. One thing that hasn’t changed much since the ‘50s is that, with the exception of a few success stories such as Between C & D, alternative publishing goes unnoticed by the mainstream population. That condition defines the phenomenon. These are the sideshow freaks of literature performing their curious acts for small audiences in the shadows of publishing’s Big Tent. Even the ringmasters ignore them.

Alice Quinn is the poetry editor at The New Yorker, probably the most prestigious Establishment publication a poet’s work can appear in. She says she knows little about alternative literature.

Peter Cooley is a poet whose work has been published by respected quarterlies and The New Yorker. A Tulane University English professor and poetry editor of The North American Review, he is a pillar of the poetry Establishment. Read Cooley a list of alternative publications--Itchy Planet, Gauzy Momento, Guts, Pirate Jenny, Quick Brown Fox--and he draws a blank. Same with the names of poets whose works frequent those pages.

“I have never heard of even one of these,” he confesses. In his role at The Review, he tries to keep an eye on the outskirts. “But this is so underground that you never see the stuff . . . I guess they don’t care.”

Laboring in obscurity is how one unrenowned publisher put it. “Why would anybody want to get into this? I’ve been asking that question for years,” says Mike Gunderloy of Rensselaer, N.Y. He means it literally. And he prints the answers. Gunderloy is the publisher of Factsheet Five, a hefty quarterly with hundreds of reviews of alternative magazines. In edition No. 28, a Chicago man told of starting a music magazine to meet the punk-rocker group Naked Raygun. An Oneonta, N.Y., woman described her magazine as “just a garbage dump of sorts for different people who write to each other and me, and I print anything they send me.”

A lot of people “do it as a way to make friends or get into a network,” says Gunderloy. “Some do it because they think they can make a living at it. That’s usually not the case.”

A former sci-fi fan and Kelly Girl who is “on leave” from Rensselaer Polytech’s engineering doctorate program, Gunderloy started Factsheet seven years ago after tiring of repeating himself in lengthy letters. After a few editions, his two-page prototype fattened into 25 pages. Now it’s more than 84. “Once you start pursuing these things, one little magazine leads to two,” he says. “For me it is a way of life.”

But “way of life” and “making a living” aren’t synonymous. Already working on Factsheet 60 hours a week, Gunderloy wants to turn the quarterly into a bimonthly and a full-time business. The author of “How to Publish a FanZine” (Loompanics Unlimited, $6.95) warns there are only two ways a “zine” (as he calls them) can make money: “Identify a specific market or get advertising support . . . If you want to write about literature, or poetry or anarchy, you have to figure how much money you can afford to lose.”

Gunderloy’s niche is tracking the underground. He estimates that zines in North America now number between 5,000 and 10,000. “You can find almost anything you look for,” says Gunderloy. And nothing is beneath his notice. Each Factsheet is a collection of sub- and anticultural artifacts. Besides artsy and lit zines are “the crackpot publishers,” he says. UFO zines, anti-IRS zines, conspiracy journals, cryonics mags, apocalypse newsletters. More typical are those for punks, sleaze-filmsters, sci-fiers, horror addicts and anyone with a pencil to grind.

“I recently saw the first issue of PFIQ, Piercing Fans International Quarterly, out of San Francisco,” says Gunderloy. “As in pierced ears. Except they are into piercing any part of the body you care to name . . . Everyday I get something in the mail that I haven’t seen before.”

The main difference between the 437 publications represented by the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM) and the thousands of independent alternative ones isn’t quality, as might be expected. The council’s members “are working within a tradition,” says CCLM executive director Jim Sitter. The others are not.

“What is going on is that people are getting into publishing who have no sense of belonging to what you might call a ‘tribe,’ which has certain patterns and ways of doing things,” says Sitter. Magazines belonging to the council “follow a lot of codes,” like having title pages, a table of contents, editing and proofreading, traditional distribution venues.

Other differences are unavoidable, however. Many zines are characterized by unrestrained creativity and degrees of dementia. Much of the writing lumbers at the reader like a stalking Neanderthal. There exists a poetic license to kill. Four-letter adrenaline pumps story plots. Erotica is everywhere, emotions everything. This is postmodern writing and these are the undisciplined stepchildren of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac.

“There’s a distinct lack of self-censorship in the work, which is healthy. These are a lot of people who aren’t worried who’s going to read their work--whether it’s their mothers, daughters or the surgeon general,” says Washington writer and poet Robert Bove, whose work has appeared in alternative publications.

As for underground bravado, Bove says much of it is half-serious. “They don’t sneer at worldly success,” he says. “On the other hand, they’re not actually out there pursuing it.”

Sitter calls zines “a different kind of publication, a type of expression that I wouldn’t normally call a book or a magazine.” He says they deserve more attention. “I would not dismiss this movement . . . some of the writers being discovered through these publications, if you want to call them that, could become important.”

Other than the most cynical, those involved in alternative publishing generally see it as a proving ground. Alastair Johnston jokes that Poltroon Press is more unknown than underground. He and partner Frances Butler have revamped their haphazard distribution methods characteristic of alternative presses. They’ve cut back on poetry because of the “small and dwindling market.” Johnston isn’t joking when he says, “We’re in a time capsule and someday someone will discover us.”

Andrew Gettler firmly believes that art “should be a threat, or at least discomforting,” and not tied to the values that appear on a check or money order. On the other hand, he admits, “If Simon and Schuster calls me tomorrow and says, ‘We want to publish your collection,’ I’d jump at the chance.”

A poet whose work has appeared in about 200 publications, some of them well above ground, Gettler also is poetry editor at Alternative fiction & poetry. By underground standards, it is a “slick,” published in the Bronx and promoted as “a place where those whose work emanates from a spirit that lies outside the safe boundaries of convention can be read, seen, experienced.” Gettler says a lot of the manuscripts he receives are “dog food.”

But that comes with the turf and Gettler seems to like the turf, maybe even more than its art. A Vietnam vet who returned to New York in ’67 to trade one uniform for another, he was export director for a New York-based chemical company for 15 years. “One day,” he says, “I just walked out and never went back.” After driving cabs and painting apartments, three years ago he detoured into America’s cultural blind spot.

“Not that these people are any better necessarily, or that their lives reflect the truth and beauty that they’re writing about,” says Gettler, 45, “but it seems to me I’ve made better friends than I did in the entire preceding 30 years.” Many of whom he has never met. When Bill Shields of Mad Dog Press got married, Gettler was his best man and the two poets who had published each other and corresponded finally met in person.

Says Shields, “When I started, there were some writers I thought were being under-published and I wanted to see what I could come up with.”

A Vietnam vet whose poetry deftly merges flashes from past battles with the ordinary battles of daily life, Shields publishes chapbooks, stapled sheets of poetry called Quick Brown Fox, and Howling Dog postcards of one-paragraph stories. “How the hell can you beat it,” says Shields of the postcards. “It’s quick, it’s 15 cents, and you are getting a man’s work out there.”

Kurt Sayenga published the first issue of Greed “out of boredom” two years ago while working for cable TV’s C-Span network. Since then, what may be Washington’s most visible underground magazine has expanded circulation to almost 10,000 by distributing through book shops, music outlets and comic book stores nationwide.

“Greed fills a hole in the underground market because there’s a lot of very bad writing out there and Greed is mostly better written and better presented, and maybe has a better sense of humor,” says Sayenga, 30. Directed at “disaffected, quasi-intellectual, aging punks,” Greed is heavy on graphics and interviews. It has the look of success. But Sayenga says conflicts are inherent in publishing a successful underground zine, especially in Washington where the Establishment rules.

He admits that he’s trying to make “a pile of money.” But he’s concerned money might corrupt the concept of Greed. “In the underground, once you become too prominent, there’s kind of a backlash against you,” he says.

In a column last year, Sayenga told readers “we’re still 10 blocks away from the road to financial security. This means that those of you who buy one copy of Greed for your 12-person group house might just as well shoot me in the back and hop up and down on my corpse.”

Keith Dodson is more stoic about his prospects. “There’s no money in it and therefore there’s no mainstream backing. The only people who see it are the people involved in it,” says the Long Beach poet who likes to tell people he cleans toilets for a living. It’s no euphemism. After dropping out of Cal State Long Beach, the one-time surfer took a day job as a school-district custodian.

Dodson has been prolific ever since. His own poetry has appeared in numerous magazines. In three years, he has published three chapbooks, two issues of the now-demised Wordsworth Socks, three issues of the “insider’s insider” Guts, and plans eight more publications before the end of the year. Now at the print shop: BBQ’ed Poetry, a collection of 22 poets writing about barbecue.

“I don’t know that it actually can lead to anywhere else,” says Dodson, 32. “You get involved in this and you do it and you are very intense . . . and then you don’t do it any more. You say I’m tired of spending $4,000 a year on this and I want to see my family and friends.

“But the sacrifice is worth it now. I’m publishing some good people. We’re dealing with a lot more than true art down at this level. This is not some stuffed couch cranking out a few well-crafted lines. We publish the people.”