The Poet’s Press was founded in New York City in 1971, as part of the last great Bohemia of Greenwich Village, with the mission of publishing neglected or lesser-known poets. In those days a number of deserving poets, despite having many magazine publications, had no book publications. Brett Rutherford sought to publish affordable chapbooks and books for poets, and The Poet’s Press quickly emerged as an important part of the New York poetry scene. Working out of a loft in the "cast-iron" district of Chelsea, The Poet’s Press printed and bound its own books with a small offset press and a variety of binding equipment. The press hosted readings at the loft, and Rutherford and the circle of poets he published were a vital part of the West Village poetry scene. Distinct from the more avant-garde East Side poets, the poets chosen by the press, although almost all wrote in free verse, were more traditional in centering on coherent narrative and connections to historical content or classic literature. With the publication of the 1975 anthology May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poetry, the press started a second imprint, Grim Reaper Books, later used for a number of Gothic and supernatural titles. The writings of Brett Rutherford, Barbara A. Holland, Shirley Powell, and some other contemporaries indeed constituted an informal "New York Gothic" movement.
In the 1980s and 1990s, The Poet’s Press continued to produce poetry books in what might be called "medieval high tech," combining the emerging desktop publishing technology with hand-bound books printed by various methods on acid-free paper. The books sometimes had custom-designed typefaces and employed a combination of gluing and stitching as the press sought new ways to produce handsome books that were still affordable. It would have been easy to go the route of the letterpress fine presses, but the productions of those high-end hobbyist printers were costly, and not the kinds of books that a poet could carry around to readings or bookstores.
Short-run book printing came to the rescue in the 1990s, and then the new technology of print-on-demand, which made it possible to publish and distribute books-wide without the expense of warehousing many cartons of unsold books. The press continued in this vein in paperback, hardcover, and PDF ebooks, focusing on design and typography to make books that embodied many of the classic aspects of book design.
As it became more and more apparent that poets could easily produce their own chapbooks, Rutherford turned the press to different projects, such as the landmark five volume historical series on Gothic and supernatural poetry, (two annotated volumes of Tales of Wonder, followed by three volumes of Tales of Terror.) The collected writings of departed poets from the Greenwich Village scene also came to pass: three volumes of the writings of Emilie Glen, and nine volumes of the poetry of Barbara A. Holland, known as "the Sibyl of Greenwich Village." Anthologies of writers from Rhode Island, and others from the Palisades Poetry movement of New Jersey, brought many new authors under the press’s umbrella. A collaboration with David Messineo and Sensations Magazine yielded the two-volume collected poems of Irish-American poet Moira Bailis. New poets adopted by the press often stayed for multiple titles, such as Annette Hayn, Joel Allegretti and Jacqueline DeWeever.
In the last several years, press founder Rutherford has turned his attention to a wider swath of world literature, producing, by his own and others’ hands, studies, translations and adaptations involving Ovid, the Chinese Emperor Li Yu, Greek poets Callimachus and Meleager, Rilke, Boston slave-poet Phillis Wheatley, World War I literature, and Heine’s satirical poems. Forays into essays, fiction and memoir have included volumes of Continental horror stories, a banned anti-war novel from World War I, the literary essays of Sarah Helen Whitman, a collection of Silver Age Russian fiction, and Boria Sax’s memoir of atomic espionage. The press has passed its 50th anniversary, having published poems and writings by more than 450 authors.
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