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From Double Change no. 1, 2001, by Olivier Brossard. OB: Exact Change publishes "Classics of Experimental Literature" : how do you reconcile the terms "classics" and "experimental," is there not a tension there? How and when does an experimental piece of writing become a classics? And when it does, what does it say about its relationship to the mainstream & general public? Is there a risk run by experimental works becoming classics? DK: These are excellent questions, and ones we conveniently ignore in our daily work as commercial publishers. Yes, I agree "classics" and "experimental" are at odds, if not even contradictory terms. We use the phrase in our publicity materials for Exact Change, because it seems to help explain to bookstores what we are after with our list, that is, experimental works that have entered the vocabulary of the avant-garde. Another, more accurate, term might be "works of the historical avant-garde." But that sounds kind of dusty, and not too enticing! And that really is a concern of ours, because we founded the press out of very democratic feelings: we want to share these works with as many people as possible. We enjoy bringing these mysterious books out into the open, for unlikely readers to discover. Afficionados of the avant-garde may already know most of the titles on our list - but for those beginning to follow the trail of these works, what we have to offer is I think very exciting. And even afficionados usually get excited about one or two. OB: Why do you place such emphasis on Dada, surrealism, Pataphysics etc. …? Is it only because you feel such works have been neglected in English and in the US and because you think more work should be done to make them readily available? Or is it because you think such movements were really the last avant-garde ( to use a now famous expression… ) and that the contemporary literary scene is, in comparison, rather tame? DK: I can imagine publishing other sorts of books, but our list is I think the intersection of our interests and what circumstances dictate. These are books that need publishing in English. That said, I think Naomi and I share a predilection for publishing older work rather than contemporary. It's not that we don't think there is equally interesting work going on now. But neither of us feel that we have the skills necessary to delve into it as publishers. Chief among those would be tolerance: a less judgmental, more catholic attitude toward art (and artists). We are hard to please, sometimes even a bit impossible that way. Consider how few books we have found to publish thus far, among the entire history of literature! OB: On your website (www.exactchange.com), when you say "Many Exact Change titles were originally published by larger houses, especially in the 1960s, but had more recently been left out of print," do you think they are no longer in print because of their experimental, satirical, cynical & often anarchical contents - of their iconoclastic nature in some way - or simply because they do not sell enough for corporate publishers? DK: I don't think corporations even consider the ideology of works they sell anymore; if they did in the past, perhaps this is something that has changed with the total victory of capitalism that we have witnessed in our lifetimes. In other words, I may be too much of a Marxist to think it has anything to do with ideology! But publishing as a business has changed dramatically in the U.S. since the 1960s. Like all U.S. businesses, it has tended toward the consolidation of large capital -- there are now only a handful of large publishers, and a handful of large chainstores with branches throughout the country, and the rest of us working independently in publishing and bookselling could disappear tomorrow and they wouldn't notice. These huge businesses -- both publishers and chainstores -- have no time for such arcane titles. The last time there was something of a mass market for these types of books was the 1960s, and that was a time not only of ideological revolution but also of population explosion -- the youth market wanted these books, and what that huge youth market wanted, the publishing houses were happy to provide. Once that passed, the large houses lost interest. Though I don't doubt they would take it up again if, say, Ubu Roi became a popular video game. OB: When you say that "Exact Change is the looking glass version of the Penguin Classics or library of America," what does it imply in terms of publishing line & activity, in terms of your relationship to the publishing world and market? Would that looking glass be akin to the Sepulchral Portrait on the cover of The Poet Assassinated by Apollinaire, a "voluntarily" splintered, blurred and distorted portrait & reflection? DK: That portrait is actually a photograph by Naomi's father, it is from a series of photographs taken in a Jewish cemetery in New York, where the tombstones have small enameled photographs set into the stones. He took pictures of the pictures, of what has become of these images. Naomi just designed a book of them for her father, it is called Mount Zion and it is published by D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers) in New York. But as for the looking-glass: we used the allusion to Lewis Carroll to express our feeling of being on the other side from commercial publishing. What if there were a world where these books were the Penguin Classics? And of course the truth: Alice is looking at her own room in the mirror. These books are classics. They just aren't published by Penguin! OB: When did you start Exact Change? What was the urge behind the publishing house? Did you not start as a magazine first? I have seen the first issue featuring Michael Palmer : are you still interested in publishing contemporary writing? DK: That "Yearbook" that you saw, with Michael Palmer on the cover, came later. But we did in fact start as a magazine -- a little homemade publication that Naomi and I put together while we were in college, inspired by small magazines from the 1920s, though it wasn't about literature so much as the landscape. That's how the name came about: Exact Change is a sign you see on highways all over the country, at toll booths; it was also written on the outside of buses when we were growing up in New York. We liked how it could be taken as an imperative: exact (make) change. At the time we made the magazine, we were particularly interested in the beauty and absurdity of the American environment - the juxtaposition of the sublime natural landscape with the ludicrous built one. We discovered echoes of these interests in the Surrealists. We started publishing books a little later, by then we were in graduate school and we were also playing music. We knew a lot of people running small record labels, and we thought: why not do the same with books? At the time, I was studying with the poet Charles Simic, he wasn't teaching at Harvard where we were enrolled but at the state university in New Hampshire -- and because it is a state school it was possible to register for just one class, and very cheap too, so I used to drive up there once a week to study with him. I had taken classes with the poetry teachers at Harvard, Seamus Heaney and others, but I hadn't gotten along particularly well with any of them. Charles Simic had translated and edited books of European poetry, including some of the Surrealists, which I had read and loved, and he has a passion for strange Americans like Emily Dickinson and Joseph Cornell. So I thought I would try working with him instead. Over time we became friends, and one day I gave him the little magazine we had made, Exact Change. We had just made it on an old IBM typewriter but of course Naomi had designed it, and he liked the way it looked. He asked, would we be interested in publishing a small book? It turned out he had a manuscript that his publisher had rejected, because it was prose poems and they thought it wouldn't sell to a poetry audience. I brought the manuscript home and we read it and thought it was the best book he had written, we just loved it. So Naomi and I decided why not, we'll publish a book -- Naomi could design it, and we'd figure out the rest like our friends had with record labels. So I went back to Charlie and said yes, we want to publish it. But before we had finished work on the book, his publisher changed their mind, and said they would do it after all. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize! Charlie gave us a different group of poems to publish in their stead, and that became our first Exact Change book. It's called Nine Poems: A Childhood Story, by Charles Simic. Naomi designed it to look like a children's book, it has huge pages with large type. It's lovely. And then we discovered that no store would take it, because it wouldn't fit on their shelves! We published another two short books, pasting up each page individually -- Shallow-Water Dictionary, by John Stilgoe (who was Naomi's teacher; this reflected our original interest in landscape studies); and the book of Surrealist poems called Ralentir Travaux, translated by Keith Waldrop. By then we had figured out how to typeset and print a full-length book, and next we published Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks. Our program has been more or less the same ever since, focused on historical works rather than contemporary. The Yearbook, to return to your question, was our one foray since that first book with Charlie, into publishing contemporary poetry. We thought we would make a big anthology, like the old New Directions annual, mixing old and new work. We are very proud of it, but it was something of a commercial disaster and almost sunk the press. We would like to continue the Yearbook series, but we haven't been able to afford it. OB: You publish a lot of French writers from the late XIXth and the first half of the XXth century : how do you feel they have influenced American writing ( including your own ) & more generally American thinking and philosophy? DK: I can't speak to the question about American philosophy, but certainly these books have influenced American writing, especially poetry. I mentioned Charles Simic, he was instrumental in bringing these writers to my attention. John Ashbery has done so as well. The Waldrops, Paul Auster, Harry Mathews, Jerome Rothenberg, the list goes on and on of American writers who have made it a part of their work to also bring attention to the European avant-garde. I think what you see in work by writers such as these, is an embrace of the French avant-garde as a formal literary heritage, as significant as the linguistic one received from English and American writers. You know the old saw about poetry being what you cannot translate. Charles Simic has suggested that perhaps it is the opposite, perhaps poetry is precisely what survives translation. Another way to express this might be what Ashbery has said, that what interests him is the manner in which the same thing can be written multiple ways. Translation is itself a poetic process: restatement. The Latin poets restated the Greeks. The English poets restated the Latins. It's an ancient tradition, but one that was I think interrupted by modern nationalist politics, with its emphasis on national character, language, "genius," etc. In my formal education, I was presented over and over with this idea of poetry, the one that emphasizes the musicality of language, blah blah blah. I don't believe in it. Not that there aren't people with a preternatural gift for their own language. But I don't believe that's a necessary component to poetry. It may even be a hindrance. Like those musicians who are so facile with their instrument, they never develop a way of playing something interesting -- everything they play sounds good, so they stop there. They become sought-after studio players for commercial recordings in L.A., but you wouldn't want to hear what they play when they are left to their own devices. As I answer this, I notice that two of the contemporary American poets that have most influenced me -- Rosmarie Waldrop and Charles Simic -- are not native-born speakers of English. OB: Encounters of the third kind : how and where do Guillaume Apollinaire and John Cage, Raymond Roussel and Morton Feldman, Danton Welch and Francis Picabia meet, (to name but a few) ? DK: On our list! Or it could almost have been a dinner party thrown by Marcel Duchamp. OB: How difficult is it to publish books today; what do you think the state, place and role of independent publishing in the US is and should be? DK: I think independent publishing is the only important publishing going on in the U.S., apart from a few university presses and the handful of good books that emerge from the larger art and literary houses. As I mentioned before, independent publishing (and bookselling) is becoming more and more marginal to the business of publishing, which has grown closer to the general business of entertainment. But marginality works two ways: it gives you freedom, even as it strangles you with indifference. I think it's a good time to be an independent publisher, though we now have fewer outlets for our books than when we started, those that we do have are excellent. And computers have made this possible without a large staff, or a lot of money. We feel lucky, because without that technology I don't know we would have been able to find our way into publishing at all. We didn't have the capital to set up shop, in the old-fashioned way. OB: You are a publisher, a poet, a singer. Do you conceive all three activities as part of the same creative whole/action? How does the singer relate to the publisher to the poet? DK: I used to think of my professional life as very splintered and strangely disconnected. I remember that Rosmarie Waldrop gave me advice before I published my chapbook with Burning Deck -- I was tempted to use a pseudonym, to distinguish my poetry from my music and my work as an editor. And Rosmarie cautioned against it, saying, "If you divide up what you do, there might not be enough to go around!" And the truth is, it's all connected, at the very least by my own personality. Though I do write songs in a very different manner than I write poems. They really are different activities -- songs are based on cliché, and poetry on resistance to it. Still, I love both cliché, and its subversion. OB: Your prose pieces are definitely exact changian in tone : who, what writers, what artists would you claim as your influences? DK: I'm afraid I wear some of my influences on my sleeve . . . But my reading is wide ranging and I find a lot of inspiration pursuing topics that aren't strictly literary ones: at the moment I'm immersed in reading the Torah and commentaries on it, and the topic of "collective memory," as it has been called. My undergraduate education was in the social sciences, not literature, and I still hold that approach close. I believe in literature as a "social fact," as the sociologists might say. I don't read sociologists for pleasure, but I don't really read poets that way, either -- I guess I think of poets as literary scientists, I read them for information and for technique. But when I read for pleasure, I read novels. Right now: Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Aharon Appelfeld. As a result I think my writing is more influenced by novelists than by poets. OB: What about your music? Who would you consider as mentors both in the world of pop-folk but also in the more classical sense of music composing ( Feldman, Cage)? Do you claim a particular esthetics? How do you and Naomi go about composing songs? How do you work together? DK: Composers like Cage and Feldman have influenced my writing much more than my music. When it comes to music, our influences are decidedly less highbrow: Dylan, Fairport Convention, etc. etc. The same great pop musicians everyone listens to. And we have downmarket taste enough, that we can even derive pleasure from terrible music -- a guilty pleasure of ours is listening to commercial radio on long car drives. Not the top 40 stations, but classic rock, soft rock, soul music crooners. I love over-the-top emotional singing, and you can find cheap versions of that in some pretty awful contexts. Good versions of that -- Robert Wyatt, Sandy Denny, Tim Buckley -- is the music we value most. OB: You will be going on tour soon? Where? And what will you play? Do you collaborate with artists from other countries? DK: We're touring the UK and parts of Europe in May. We're still touring behind the album we released last fall, called "Damon & Naomi with Ghost," which we made with our friends in the Japanese band Ghost. For the tour in May, we're going to play as a trio with the lead guitar player from Ghost, Michio Kurihara. He is one of the best musicians we have ever seen, much less worked with, so performing with him is really a treat for us. We took him on the road in the U.S. last fall, and have been eager to bring him to Europe -- we want to introduce him to a new audience. |
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