When I was a baby poet of 19 in my first year at Rockford College, I went to hear an emerging younger poet read on campus. I would occasionally spot her name over the years since and remembered how she was one of the first real live poets I ever spotted in the wild. She taught at a nearby university and seemed to be friends with the faculty member who I would eventually take my first poetry workshop with. It probably solidified in my head that one could "be a poet, " which at the time felt like one's ability to "be a mermaid" or "be a unicorn." For the first time it remotely seemed like a possibility.
So imagine my surprise when last year, I get a manuscript from that very same poet, and an amazing one at that. Of course, I took it. And I'm in the stages of assembling the first batch of copies even now, and thinking about how weirdly appropriate that it's a re-doing of HOWL, about which, if you asked my 19 year old self, who was very much all about the Beats, would be ecstatic. Since I lived far enough off campus to make travel a nuisance, I would spend entire days between classes tucked in a library carrel reading about the Beats that very same semester I went to hear the poet read. I think I stumbled on that particular section of books by accident. (there was a giant card catalog on the first floor, and the beginnings of a DOS-based online catalog, but I'm pretty sure I wandered til I found the american literature section and then stumbled on that section. A reasonable a number of books about the Beat early years, about Kerouac and Ginsber.. It was many years before I would read any Burroughs, but I loved Ferlinghetti. One of the first poetry collections I bought was Coney Island of the Mind.
It was still the 90's though, and the Beats weren't really being taught in my classes, so my reading was done almost furtively during these spare hours. There were a couple of books I actually hid behind the other books so that someone wouldn't check them out before I was finished. I was of the naive opinion that if I started reading in that section and moved out in cocentric circles into work that came before and after the Beat era--I could have a fair grasp on the American literary canon. I've since of course learned that any grasp is fleeting. More work moves in, other is forgotten. the Canon gets longer and (thankfully) wider. And if you asked me whether or not I had a gasp on American literatire of even the past 50 years, I would say nowhere near it.
But it's entirely serendiptous that this book and this poet and that time in my life are inextricably linked. It also makes me feel that all the work I have done with the press over the past 14 years has brought me somehow full-circle back to the very beginning.
