Sunday, January 14, 2018

The Poet's Press Loft in Manhattan


This two-part poem is a recollection of sitting on the balcony of The Poet's Press Manhattan loft in 1973, while the printing press ran inside, and then visiting the locale two decades later. I photographed the building this past November. The building is 668 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue to locals).

OF THE MAKING OF BOOKS

1973
What is it about ink
poised over virgin paper
if pen, a word at a time,
why not a press,
page upon page repeating?
Plate, blanket, roller,
compressor, roller, sucker, gripper
(the guts of unromantic offset
supplanting Gutenberg)
the lift and thrust of the sheet
no hand has touched,
the slurring commingle
of ink and water in foaming fountain

till stanza follows stanza
canto and chapter —
sheaves to be folded and sewn
into a hundred books,
five hundred books!
I call it making paper babies,
my dingy loft on Sixth Avenue
a hatching hive of chapbooks.

I sit on the fire escape
outside my soot-grime windows.
The moon has long since set,
street dark in cast-iron canyons.
It is insufferable August —
I want to sleep in coolness —
the press churns on behind me,
the infeed pile diminishing,
the finished sheets descending.

I know its sound like a heartbeat,
just how long I can linger
before the ink needs tending.

I watch the late-night drifters below:
rag pickers and winos and psychopaths,
a junkie laden with burglar tools
eyeing each storefront,
some swearing brawlers
from the lesbian cycle bar
around the corner,
the blur of cabs with
rolled-down windows,
blear-eyed drivers barreling
in homeward trucks,
the dilatory patrol car
beaming the doorways
for sleeping bums
or a glimpse of frenzied sodomy.

Inside, I empty the paper bins.
It is three a.m. I can still print
another signature, wait out
the early dawn on the fire escape.
I cannot sleep anyway.
Sometimes it seems I work
for the machine.

There has been little profit in this,
yet everywhere I go in this rusted city,
poets are gathering.
A multitude of hands lift up
these books.
In chorus they chant
Just off the press
My latest
Please buy one


1996
The cast-iron street is floodlit now
the columns as white as marble
bed bath and book and clothing stores
draw thousands here. I always pause
to look up at the forgotten loft
where I began my consummate folly.

I have dragged this book madness
two decades now. My closets explode
with unsold volumes,
projects half bound
and then abandoned, the beached whale
guillotine cutter in my bedroom.

The poets I published are dying off:
the Village Sibyl, Barbara Holland, gone,
now Emilie Glen, my poetry mother.
I hear it said at her memorial
that these things mattered after all,
that little books are voyagers,
bottle messages into indifferent seas,
rockets to the future.

In this world of too many books,
so much bad verse and rotten prose,
it is hard to believe it.
Yet it was thus with Poe,
Whitman and Dickinson.
Barbara haunts Morton Street,
and Emilie, Barrow.
Only their books wing onwards,
perching on brownstone rooftops,
flapping their shiny covers,
ready to plunge when least expected,
open to that page,
that singular poem,
that line with its magic

in words that stay.

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