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.