Preface In Search of an Author from a Pamphlet In Search of a Printer

Visiting the downtown Cleveland Public Library, I noticed a book under that marble bench on the first floor—a green notebook, cheap, spiral-bound, covered in dust; yet, as I read through, I realized that it must have been recently written. Dust falls fast on fresh ink. Many of the references were from earlier that year, but the manuscript begins with passages from a variety of authors, including Cervantes, Kafka, d.a. levy, and others.

The pages are stained with what I’d hope is coffee, and even now the heavy odour of kratom clings to its pages and seems to shiver the mind. The writing is in a script between cursive and print, neither legible as the former nor the latter, alternating freely between pencil and red ink. The author of the notebook? Oleander Sārameyas the Younger—a name and situation so absurd as to suggest to me a double-hearted farce of Johannes de Silentio or Antosha Chekhonte.

I’ve heard that “criticism is the highest form of autobiography,” but this effaced text erodes my own. I’ve heard it can be fun to dig graves, but all I’ve ever known is filling them; and it is difficult to fill them. I’ve heard we will dig the graves of our owners, but I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of writing. I’m tired of dying. If the revolutions of the nineteenth century let the dead bury the dead, and the revolutionaries of the twentieth century buried their rulers only to become rulers and, then, bury themselves still living, we can only hope the revolutions of the twenty-first century and beyond will let the dying earth bury the living dead in a tomb half within and half without.

For you, my dear reader, I’ve arranged Sārameyas’ fragmented material in a straightforward form. Most of the debates are, or were, foreign to me, but I’ve made edits and additions where I thought necessary for legibility and scholarship. Well, so long from this nameless editor; witness for the witnesses; faithful attendant to the knight of faith in the print shop; or some other title as silly as it is serious. Although I write this preface still uncertain about this experiment, I have sought to share it in my certain admiration of its guarded growth. I’ve always admired how in the same motion that the cryptkeeper opens the mausoleum every morning their apprentice buries them because, even if we do not have the strength to lay ourselves to rest, perhaps another can gather our earlier strength—that knowledge and conviction we can no longer carry—gather this into themselves and accomplish what we could not.

To be an artist you don’t have to suffer...

You’ve got to have lots of money and lots of love.

And a Siamese cat.

— d.a.levy^[1]

And neither should poets or publishers rely on the suffering of workers for the production and distribution of their art...

You may have heard that a little firm called Small Press Distribution (SPD) shut its doors last spring as definitively as it sealed its lips. A non-profit for “small” presses, SPD distributed largely poetry, non-fiction, and artist books, but they also served academic presses and publishers such as Semiotext(e). You may be unfamiliar with the situation of book distribution, but that acronym, you may faintly recall that acronym, unassuming and yet, and yet . . . somehow infamous or shameful?^[2]

This isn’t the first time SPD has been a source of existential panic for publishers, poets, and literary institutions. Whereas that previous crisis was characterized by the near silence of publishers, poets, and literary institutions, today’s “crisis” with SPD’s closure has raised a cacophony throughout the canopies of ‘indie’, ‘small press’, and ‘independent’ publishers as well as the non-profits, hobby lobbies, and self-proclaimed literary communities.

A sister organization to SPD^[3]—that Council, that Community, I mean that Cartel of “literary products and services for independent publishers”—the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) had this to say on the managed collapse, the silent implosion of SPD:

On March 28, 2024, Small Press Distribution (SPD), a distributor that served hundreds of independent literary publishers, announced on its website and in a letter to publishers that its operations had ceased, effective immediately.^[4]

What follows in their response is a list of presses previously distributed by SPD and a FAQ on warehoused inventory, unpaid sales, and informational resources to aid publishers in reclaiming their books and finding new distribution. CLMP further notes how publishers can seek financial remediation from SPD:

In mid-April, the attorney for SPD sent a Notice of Commencement of Proceedings to Voluntary Wind Up and Dissolve Small Press Distribution to all presses previously distributed by SPD. This notice includes instructions for asserting a claim against SPD. The deadline for submitting claims is August 8, 2024. If you are owed money from SPD, we encourage you to read the notice and begin the process.

Thankfully, there exist grants from the Poetry Foundation, and other distributors are ready to embrace publishers abandoned by SPD. For unpaid sales, “dissolution will be overseen by the Superior Court of California, which will determine the equitable disposition of Small Press Distribution’s remaining assets to the extent all claims from creditors cannot be satisfied.” For warehoused inventory, SPD states its stock of ~300,000 books is divided between Ingram and PSSC [Publisher’s Storage and Shipping].

You might now ask: “Can presses get their books back and, if so, how?”

Thankfully: “Yes, presses can get their books back, but they will have to pay for shipping and handling.” This cost alone, however, may already be enough to strain or wreck some, if not most, of the presses caught in this logistical web. To this, we will say...

Let a hundred fundraisers bloom!

Let a hundred presses compete!

While this is not the collapse of the publishing industry, the dissolution of SPD and the frenzy of its former publishers indicates the beginning of the end for publishing reliant on nonprofit organizations such as SPD and CLMP, if not also the decay of our radish sack of press terminology. To be sure, many of the affected publishers will further entrench themselves with trade distributors, but, for those who fail and for those outside these systems, this situation is a pivotal moment to contend with publishing today and tomorrow. The collapse of SPD, to me, signals the rupture and departure of the ossification, or rather the congealment of alternative publishing that reaches back to the late 1960s when both CLMP and SPD were founded.

Let us now take it straight from the horse’s mouth, without confusing blocks of salt for sugar... sugar for salt?

In their official statement of “great sadness and profound gratitude,” SPD leadership shares their sudden and devastating news of dissolution with emphasis on their accolades. From starting in the back of Serendipity Books with eight presses to managing warehouses with more than 500 presses, they explain that SPD could go on no longer because of declining sales, loss of funding, and “the challenges of a rapidly changing book industry.” In winding down operations, they also note how staff had been reduced to a minimal team.

My concern here is neither arguing over how SPD should or could have done any better for its publishers nor to satirize the organization's aims—though I cannot help but do so on occasion. My concern is in dissuading any and all attempts at another Small Press Distribution and, in general, dependence on corporate entities for publishing, specifically non-unionized print shops. If not by argument, then by humiliation. After all, it is a gentle art making enemies, and wouldn’t it be vulgar to keep them as friends for too long?

Of course, what SPD avoids in their statement is how their staff had already been reduced to a minimal team. By 2021, nearly all workers not in management had been pushed out. A year before its closure, Damaged Book Worker noted: “It is likely once SPD’s warehouse closes that it will only be employed by managers,” and this was likely the case. The board refused to discuss abuse of workers and its larger role in weakening publisher and, therefore, writer solidarity. Small Press Distribution’s final laurel-gathering at the moment of its self-crucifixion belies a repressed shame at its true relationship with presses and writers—that of a priest that assured its congregation of editors a means to survive the conflagration of the late twentieth century as the publishing industry began consolidating. As publishing conglomerates absorbed print and distribution operations, establishing standards such as perfect binding and the ISBN in 1967, SPD buried itself and its members in a crumbling sanctuary.^[5]

We could easily reach for a reshelved critique of the arts becoming “institutionalized.” But the development and persistence of organizations like SPD, CLMP, and, yes, MFAs should rather be understood as a reaction to sweeping transformations in the publishing industry and straining economic conditions. If we cannot grasp the economic conditions of the publishing industry, we will allow ourselves and our literature to be blindly determined by them. Institutionalization is not a process in of itself, but a matter of cultural activities taking shelter within institutions—institutions that have access to capital or can court capital.

Yes, the end of SPD is agonizing for its former publishers because its collapse—the formerly inconceivable—occurred and will from now on always stalk their horizons. However, for many writers and publishers, the collapse of SPD has no substance or sense because they are continually collapsing, and the publishing industry and all industries are maintaining a state of atrophy. For some of us, there is no agony in collapse anymore because agony itself is collapsing under its own maintenance. We cannot even collapse in exhaustion because, in our exhaustion, we do not have the ability to collapse. Who can speak of living? Endurance is all. Now we are thrown back into the streets. Fine, some of us have always been wolves of the library. Instead of sulking in conference corridors, join us between those great, circulating shelves!

True Water

How can literature be otherwise produced? How can literature be otherwise distributed? What forms of copyright can publishers offer authors? How do publishers discuss copyright with authors? How do we as artists want others to use their work? What incentives develop for publishers in the use of various forms of copyright? What relationships do various forms of copyright engender between writers, writer and publisher, and publishers? How should authors be compensated by publishers? What is a publishing or poetry “community” without its own network of organizations and individuals, places for collaboration, and open access to resources? What values should guide alternative networks or collectives of writers, bookmakers, and publishers?

Many of us accept alienation as a natural condition of work. Not only the isolation and repetition of our tasks as wage workers, but being primarily treated ourselves as a product. The office seems to exist in a space temporally and physically separate from that of the warehouse and yard. From the standpoint of the former, the work of the latter has already been carried out because their labor has been spoken for and reproduces itself. This is the nothingness of being a productive worker, and this nothingness is doubled in how the owner of machinery perceives their employees as simply keeping it running. Either forced into labor or living off its surplus, this is the nothingness of being a poet in the US. Removed from the realities of production, professionals, editors, and artists often make excuses for this explicitly alienating work. Furthermore, many may blind themselves to labor issues because they perceive them as the unfortunate necessities of creating a redemptive aesthetic object.

This blindness applies also for some production and logistical workers in publishing. We may be drawn to work for art, but are soon disillusioned with demands to continually sacrifice ourselves at the altar of this art—an art without any relation to its conceived meaning, any difference from an emptied document. In my first year as a printer, I was reminded by my experienced colleague that “this isn’t an art.” Yes, a chapbook may just as well be a rental contract, but my very same colleague would go on to say that their favorite aspect of printing was the subtle shifts of color throughout a lengthy print run. So, let industrial printing be called an art, but let us with an even hand perhaps call all industrial production the labor before and behind every art. Yet, today, production remains a fiscally solvent art, a solution that we soon dissolve within, and, drowning, we scarcely succeed in looking out from our breathless lives. This is natural. This relation is natural. This relationship is naturalized, but this ground is neither true nor false.

When Don Quixote visits Dulcinea, Sancho says that she did not bestow upon his master “any jewel, but some bread and cheese.” To this Miguel de Unamuno comments:

Not intelligence, but the will makes our world. The old scholastic aphorism, Nihil volitum quin præcognitum, Nothing is wished for but the previously known, must be corrected to Nihil cognitum quin prævolitum, Nothing is known but the thing already desired. Life is the criterion of truth; logic is but the criterion of reason. If my faith leads me to create life or increase it, what further proof of my faith would you have? Truth is that which, by causing us to act this way or that way, makes us accomplish our purpose.^[6]

Press on Press

Don Quixote was no knight, but he is our knight. Our image of publishing is often the same as that of language. Both can be imagined as a great, clear river, but ours is slick with oil; suffused with sediment; diverted by abandoned canals; and its thousand streams are stagnant. Nonetheless, it is this water that we must cleanse and drink from. But we cannot do this alone. No, although our water treatment is an afterthought of profit, the trust I have in my brothers is no afterthought when I wash and drink. To restate Rachel Deahl’s question more properly from her article “Is the Publishing Industry Broken?,” we must instead ask “Who does the publishing industry break and how?”^[7]

The small press world is about to fall apart.^[8]

Metaphorically speaking of course... The heartbreak is more acute for other editors. Editor of Bull City Press, Ross White says the closure of SPD was a “dagger in the heart.”^[9] Paul Yamazaki, book buyer for City Lights in San Francisco, notes that they will not continue to work with all of SPD’s former publishers, lamenting the loss of many cherished business relationships.^[10]

Recent coverage is largely restatement of CLMP and SPD,^[11] but one of the first to report, KQED, also reported on the harassment of former employee J. Worthen. This article notes that in February SPD completed a move of its inventory from their Berkeley warehouse to an Ingram facility in Tennessee, as well as a location in Michigan with Publishers Storage and Shipping. To support the move, SPD fundraised over $100,000 and, up until its closure, continued to receive donations for a supposed expansion of their print-on-demand, e-book, and global distribution services. Instead of interrogating clear malpractice in fundraising directly before their closure, even here SPD is lauded, while harassment of workers is treated as an unfounded accusation. Former director Jean Day explains SPD’s closure as an inevitability because “publishing poetry especially, but any kind of non-mainstream literature, is never going to attract the numbers that make publishing possible.”^[12] Naturally, this is the attitude of poetry’s administrators because they have confined their audience to professionals, and they cannot conceive of a literary public beyond themselves. Discussing tentative readers and writers, Octavio Paz argues “publishers have ignored these potential readers, these enthusiasts who write poems. Which is not surprising: almost all publishers belong to the ruling technocracies and therefore worship the dubious social sciences, scorn the classics, and mistrust poetry, considering it a fruitless activity or an archaic pastime.”^[13] However, poetry‘s administrators cannot even confuse readership with a consumer base, but look only to themselves and the rubble of what once was a consumer base to confirm the inevitable failure to sell art, often their own art.

As far as what has been publicly stated, publishers are owed a considerable sum by SPD for fulfilled book orders:

• Black Lawrence: $17,000
• Noemi Press: $8,000.
• Game Over Books: over $15,000
• Little Puss Press: $12,000
• 3rd Thing Press: $5,000
• Fonograf Editions: $12,000
• Rose Metal Press: $40,000^[14]

Yet, rather than seeking to grasp the root of their problems or question the basis of their distributor, these publishers stood with SPD and will continue to compete with one another for distribution. To paraphrase how Antonio Gramsci satirizes Bukharin’s Popular Manual, they are like those who cannot sleep under moonlight and, so, try to kill fireflies in the belief that by doing so they will dim the brightness of the moon.^[15] Poetry will never make a profit, but, if it somehow does, we can be certain that editors and poets won’t be compensated.

Receiving local coverage in Seattle, Asterism seems to offer the only alternative to trade distribution for poetry publishers. Editor of Sublunary Editions, Joshua Rothes notes that Damaged Book Worker’s whistleblowing on SPD was a motivating event for leaving SPD and starting Asterism.^[16] The developing distributor will not force publishers to exclusively distribute or allow Amazon to undercut their pricing, but rather focus on physical storefronts and take a flat twenty four percent sales cut.^[17] Can Asterism provide a coherent alternative for these publishers? “It Remains to Be Seen.” Are we to continue cutting each other up like the soldiers sown from Jason’s dragon’s teeth, or will we rally together Against Competition under the same light, if not the same letter?^[18] “It Remains to Be Seen.”^[19]

I Cannot Go Back To Your Frownland

In the intervening years of the Poet’s Union boycott against SPD, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with former employees, specifically the whistleblower Damaged Book Worker (DBW). Our chats spanned their experiences at SPD, the boycott, the state of publishing, and now the closure of SPD. Without these discussions, I would not be speaking to you now. As CLMP and literary organizations flounder in their attempts to respond to the collapse of SPD, DBW wrote the postmortem:

If you did nothing but cling to an abusive literary distributor and cover your eyes while workers lost everything to tell the truth about said distributor for years:

You do not have the imagination, skillset, adaptability, or humanity to now forge a “better” system.

You will, in your all-consuming desire for institutional relevancy, continuously justify the means (labor abuse) to your ends (recognition in the literary world), while telling yourself and everyone else that your principles are the opposite. You will slowly drown yourself and your books in your delusion. You will continue to lose, over and over, by valuing your bottom line over the people who make that bottom line possible.

You are wired exactly the same as the corporate behemoths you believe yourself to be better than. The difference is that you will, continually, have absolutely nothing to show for your greed. You are not inventive—you were invented. You are a whimsical breed of capitalist cooked up in the laboratories of MFAs—one that is driven not by profits and blood, but by the hope of a promise of a chance at a wink from the bottom of the literary establishment’s boot.^[20]

When workers are underpaid, you will be there to shout that presses and authors are never paid. You will say this as if it makes sense, as if you are the sun. You will say this until you are blue in the face, alone, clutching your boxes of books. Because one day, you will run out of people who are willing to suffer for your art—an inevitability that, in your self-infatuation, you never once believed would come true.

The more you ignore and deny your contradictions, the faster you will wind up exactly where all of these presses have found themselves today.

...and, until writers and editors recognize and align themselves against the suffering and alienation of print workers, here—alone in their caves of emptied words—this is where they will undoubtedly find themselves and lose any possibility of tomorrow. We must not rely on the suffering and alienation of workers for the production or distribution of our art... and yet we do. This is constitutive of nearly all production today, but we excuse artistic production to preserve a human place from the dissolving solvent of capitalist social relations.

While SPD would have us believe their decline was due to the throes of COVID-19 and a loss of funding, they left no comment on how the events of 2020 and 2021 led to a loss of workers, loss of face, and loss of any pretension to decent workplace conditions. [For the record, board members at the time included: Alan Bernheimer, Cecil S. Giscombe, David Rothenberg, Estee Schwarz, Ethan Nosowsky, Jerrold Shiroma, Jonathan Fernandez, Juliana Spahr,^[21] Laura Moriarty, Moraine Lupo, Michael Morgan, Rena Rosenwasser, Roberta Bedoya, Tonya Foster, and Wendy Lukas.] Commenting on how SPD board members made careers of ostensibly being “pro-worker, Marxist poet scholars,” Julianne Neely of the Buffalo Poetics Program reminds us that they looked past Executive Director Brent Cunningham’s harassment and the theft of wages. Additionally, Neely argues that although “academia isn’t salvageable,” these scholars and writers have dictated a false or, at the very least, incomplete history of poetry publishing. Articulating a pretty history is one matter, but, this, we can recover. Another matter entirely is trampling over people in your commitment to literature...

I will not rehash an entire history of the events at SPD from 2020 to 2021 because it has already been comprehensively collected by the workers themselves. In “Current & Former SPD Staff Responds to Management-Led Efforts To Falsely Exonerate Leadership,” they elaborate on their previous statement in “A Call to End the Anti-Worker Campaign Led By SPD’s Board, Directors, Managers & Apologists.”^[22] Both refer back to DBW’s Medium article from late 2020: “I was terrorized out of my job by SPD.” Contrary to calling DBW’s article merely a series of allegations, coworkers at the time E. Conner and J. Worthen corroborated DBW’s account of working conditions at SPD in their “Open Letter to SPD.”^[23] If you still doubt the workers, know that in January of 2021, SPD asked DBW to sign a non-disclosure agreement with $500 penalties for each breach of silence in return for $2,500 of their withheld wages—wages they never received, speech that could never have been purchased. [A timeline of events and the boycott statement are available in the archive of the Poet’s Union.]^[24]

Beginning in early 2021 “as a collective organization of anti-capitalist poets and publishers,” the Poet’s Union (PU) drafted a manifesto addressing crises with literary institutions, particularly Poetry Foundation, Poetry House, and SPD.^[25] PU went public later that March and its focus sharpened with a vote to boycott SPD, which was announced in June.^[26] A series of articles followed reasserting the original statement, clarifying points, and discussing developments.^[27] PU joined with the whistleblowers to form a boycott against SPD. Although PU has now faded from existence and collective memory, this small group of writers and publishers became the pariah of terminally online editors and SPD staff.

Although the alliance between PU and the workers may for a time have been mutually beneficial, the boycott better served the public image of PU. It provided little support for the workers and intervened only ineffectively against SPD’s reactionary maneuvers. In fact, the boycott did more to spur attacks against the whistleblowers. Ultimately, relations between PU members and the workers broke down, and the boycott fizzled out as SPD publishers rallied together.

What has been left out of this story is that this failure was in part due to a PU member collaborating with SPD management. Acting as a relay between PU and one of SPD’s warehouse managers, this member gave credence to SPD’s publicity strategy in portraying members of management as simply workers. Although whistleblowers asked for the release of this member’s name in an open letter, editors in PU became distrustful of the whistleblowers and, well, aren’t all editors friends in every sense? In the end, PU’s leadership refused to release the name of this collaborative member or speak on the extent of their communication and relationship with SPD management. In the crucial months that followed, PU broke all contact with whistleblowers and the whistleblowers, in turn, disengaged from PU. This was effectively the end of the boycott or any attempt at an effective one.

The “mole”—Brendan Joyce, noted Communist poet and co-founder of GRIEVELAND, a press that prides itself in once again centering poetry in Cleveland, Ohio. However, we can not say that Grieveland is properly named after the city of Cleveland; more aptly, its editor’s grief... or lack thereof. Comrades, this is the praxis of “communist poetry for our capitalist crisis” at the north shore of the rust belt. Although PU’s April 2023 statement on reducing its operations failed to address these details in order to conserve the image of the organization, the PU website remains a primary source on SPD’s failures and the boycott.

The boycott was largely ineffectual from the outset, but, strangely enough, SPD hardly outlasted the rag-tag efforts of PU, which in late 2023 transitioned away from organizing to “operate now as a blog, archive, and communication network.”^[28] The story of the boycott has never been fully articulated because it still lingers in the whispers of whispers between fellow editors. The breakdown of any capable opposition to SPD was easily accomplished by seeding distrust between PU members and whistleblowers. Just as DBW’s first essay states “I was terrorized out of my job by Small Press Distribution,” they could now say “I was abandoned by the boycott.” While some members aspired to outline a publishing program and create a decentralized distribution network, PU could never have produced any capable opposition to SPD or other distributors because its organizational framework is incoherent to begin with—a union that isn’t a union. ^[29]

The whistleblowers handled the fallout of the PU boycott and the closure of SPD more bluntly. J. Worthen comments: “People and presses are calling for a lawsuit against SPD to recoup money and inventory, but as you may recall, when workers who were farmed and pushed out came forward and demanded accountability and compensation for our losses, people called us enemies of small press lit.”^[30] Responding to a question of mine on the difficulties of confronting exploitative practices in publishing, DBW argues:

People become invested in the false images presented by publishers, whether through no fault of their own or by turning a blind eye—especially towards radical seeming presses—and this makes people all the more reluctant to question publishers. My years in this situation have shown me that what is important is directly asking for answers from presses, even if they have connections. Respectability politics and pressure to avoid conflict is so ingrained in this industry that presses are protected from having to explain themselves.

When presses were called out for being with SPD, you could tell from their responses that they felt immune to criticism for being indie. It is a deeply rooted issue that contaminates any attempt to hold the industry accountable. Even people with the best intentions can be driven by a fear of being ostracized by the industry or ruining their future publishing opportunities. Without bravery, there will not be change, but this industry has conditioned those within it to stifle that courage.

We might imagine censorship as enacted only by the State, but we often suppress our own thoughts before they could ever reach publication; publishers themselves select for a limited ideological range; and there is a lack of publishers with both resources and commitment. Publishing projects grow stunted and decay rapidly. As DBW explains, “radical” literary spaces can reproduce the worst of literary culture, often mirroring the worst of high school social life. Specifically, DBW advocates for examinations of individual publishers, such as Nightboat, Milkweed, and others, which they raise as examples of faux radicalism with particularly poor practices:

The truth is that a lot of people in this industry have formed a false sense of identity with the small press “community,” so exposing indie publishing feels like a threat. In other industries where there is common awareness of exploitation, people respond differently to the exposure of companies and organizations, but, here, that criticism goes against people’s belief systems, and that’s another animal! The way writers speak about being a part of the “small press community” is exceptional... because we are talking about a capitalist industry. Not many other creative industries have succeeded in so effectively pulling the wool over the eyes of their consumers and participants to make them believe they are a part of something altruistic.

In this analysis, the reader of independent literature is a consumer of outsider publishers and authors, whose consumption or mere purchases act as an extension of their identities or values. We feel like a part of a community that shares our ideals, but this feeling often goes no further than a transaction. The interests of workers in the publishing industry ought to align with those of writers and editors, but they are instead played and pitted against each other. If publishers are to be transparent, they need to be open not only about their finances—particularly their method of compensation—but also about the labor involved in their modes of production and distribution. Less so than a mediator between presses and bookstores, SPD in its later years acted essentially as an intermediary or client of Ingram and Amazon.

It was only a matter of time before SPD dissolved. It was only a matter of time until it rained. Now, just as before, we must demonstrate other means of publishing books, making books, sharing books, distributing books, and reading books. There is an infrastructure to invade and improve—that of existing industrial publishing and printing—and there are also bridges of our own to build before we can cross them. Today, we must reassess models of publishing and distribution. After all this—the maintenance of literature through the nonprofit and academy, their withering, and incessant rigor beyond rigor mortis—after all this, will we lead ourselves down the same hall of mirrors as we pass silently from the adolescence of our century? We must not... and yet many publishers have returned to an exclusive distributor with an array of all-encompassing printing and logistical platforms.

The fundamental issues of compensation and self-management remain to be confronted. These issues will be confronted and decided by the workers of these industries, but are we as publishers to be merely observers, not even those who crowd along the sidelines of the game cheering on but only those who watch mute from afar? Already, we confuse our reality and position. To incessantly argue over the ethical realities of production and distribution is to accept our own impotence and then bury our commitments under a mountain of strained decisions—feigned compromises made only to cadaver any commitments we may have once held.

We cannot forget what DBW brought to light about their working conditions, wage theft, and harassment at that most respected and acclaimed of literary institutions. What may we find in others? All the same, we cannot ignore either the decision of those publishers who continued their partnership with SPD. Publishers either left their distributor in solidarity with whistleblowers and continued publishing by other means, or publishers stayed with their distributor in begrudging acceptance of their dependence on a system they will never challenge. Working with distributors like SPD and integrated firms such as Ingram provided publishers a veil of “professionalism” or the status of being a real indie press, but do we not see today in this aspect of the authentic outsider a betrayal of commitment? They made their decision to stay then, but, now, they had no choice but to leave...

When Brains Eat Brains

In “What Brains Eat: On Small Press Distribution,” Zach Peckham and Hilary Plum discuss the importance and yet absence of distribution in conversations on poetry publishing.^[31] Both editors at Cleveland State University Poetry Center, they argue that SPD was necessary for the continuance of many small publishers. For these publishers, Hilary and Zach explain that SPD served as a “shortcut” to a wide readership; an “economic hack” for retail availability; and as means of entering an extensive digital and material archive of poetry. Although few editors and poets have done more than Peckham and Plum to publish and write critical commentary on contemporary publishing and events, even they have blinders for the granular details involved in the production and distribution of literature.

I am not entirely disputing these benefits for publishers like CSU, but we must challenge the necessity of an organization like SPD. This is not to say that other distributors cannot or could not fulfill their role any better, but only to point out that poetry publishing and distribution existed before SPD and will continue after them. Although attention is often drawn to the number of publishers they distributed, a majority of publishers will press on in their swamps, bogs, and fenns indifferent to the draining of the SPD retention pond.

Now, the question is whether publishers will maintain or change the character of their production and distribution. Already, most have made agreements with similar distributors, as opposed to migrating to another terrain where they would have to adopt a different set of publishing practices. What they cannot face is that migration will be just as necessary as the necessity they perceived in their defense of SPD—all the more so because that migration will not only tear through their checks and cheeks, but potentially leave them crippled. This is the double-edged dagger of inevitability. This necessity SPD presented and asserted never was a true necessity, but only a means of ever-displacing the maintenance of literary culture onto workers and “volunteers”—a system of reproduction that continually separates publishers from writing; separates publishers from printing; separates publishers from distribution; separates editors from all publishing activities; and, in its final dispassion, separates literature itself from all the activities of publishing.

In recent months, former SPD publishers have not only taken up analogous distributors, but have coupled with larger conglomerates.^[32] Perhaps with the exception of Asterism, existing alternatives represent twin hydras: Ingram Publisher Services and the Chicago Distribution Center, both frozen under Satan’s shadow while writhing their necks for better position to eat Cain. Ingram has multiplied itself between Consortium, Publishers Group West, Baker and Taylor, and BCH. Chicago Distribution spawning Independent Publishers Group and its brood of Bookmobile, Itasca, and the curiously named Small Press United. Although we are faced with the same chimeras, we can console ourselves that they are lazy ones who hardly take the effort to exchange their faces...^[33]

State of Commercial Publishing Distribution (North America)

1) Amazon

2) Ingram

i) Consortium

ii) Publishers Group West

3) Baker & Taylor

4) BCH

5) Chicago Distribution Center

i) Independent Publishers Group

(1) Bookmobile

(2) Itasca Books - Bookmobile

(3) Small Press United

[Does a conglomeration of “independents” remain independent?]

Any effort to convince editors wholesale of their error in assenting to the maintenance of existing literary production and distribution will likely fail. Sure, the diversity of literature may suffer through the collapse of this distribution system, but, more critically, the workers at print shops and warehouses will continue to suffer silently under the burden of their empty but all the more heavy books. Well, business is business, and we have always managed to carry on. Certainly any break from commercial channels will be difficult to realize, precipitating a dropoff in sales if not also the closure of some small publishers, yet we are already there. In our fear to take the leap, we forgot that we were already in freefall. In our fear of crossing the river, we forgot the water was three feet high and rising.

Rather than justify our lesser literary devils, let us confront our positions as writers and practices as publishers. Let us not only reject commercial channels, but let us contest the commercial aspect of these channels. Can we confront the concerns of workers not as merely upsetting but as central to our trade? Can we do this without fantasizing labor or idealizing workers? Can we give up aspirations to be professional and gain institutional recognition without condemning academics or refusing to participate with institutions? Can we cut through the publishing industry’s illusions for the need of their variable services and incidental standards? Can we take on the task of establishing a social publishing network without embracing either artisanal or industrial production? What are the principles and implications of creating a “social” publishing network? Can we attempt to do so without relying on social media or returning to the State altar? More than likely, administrators and many editors will reassert their alienated, alienating roles in a system of literary production and distribution dependent on capital, but I have faith that the immense minority will not continue to let capital and its personifications command their lives and abandon their literature in the warehouse— the true Prison-house of Language today and tomorrow.

I first brushed aside Hilary and Zach’s claims about the benefits of their distributor for readership, dissemination, and archiving, but now I can reply: “Take them.” They are self-undermining because, above all else, SPD was an institution determined to reproduce itself and its publishers—its clients—as dependents. With its base of publishers and authors, the exclusive distributor reinforced itself as the most visible path for all small publishing, while discretely covering alternative paths for organization and obscuring the history of literary production and distribution. After CLMP and SPD, what can we recall from the little magazines, labor journals, modernist periodicals of the early twentieth century, or the editors and presses of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors/Publishers (COSMEP)?

Zack and Hilary breach a central event in the saga of literature today, but perhaps a moment that will fade quickly from memory, fade even before it gains any form as an enduring sensation. On the dissolution of its client, Ingram sent a form to all former SPD publishers, requiring them to respond within two weeks about the removal of their stock from their warehouse. If they failed to respond, their books would be recycled without recourse. [Giggle.] Although Ingram and PSSC have since softened their position due to public pressure, we cannot grasp the predicament of contemporary publishing without interrogating this request by Ingram as well as the reaction of publishers in disbelief and revolting laughter.

Tens of thousands of books pulped.

A horror, a perfect horror, a terrifying image for the authors and editors of those books—one that recalls the fervor of book burnings—and, yet, now an indifferent activity for those operating the machinery, that activity undifferentiated from the breakdown of any other printed material. Afterall, we now refer to an entire era of books as pulp and, receiving mail, we casually recycle a constant flood of credit card and political mailers.

See: the shredders taking in and spitting out piles of books; books of poetry made waste; books not once touched or seen by their authors or editors; books kept pristine in temperature and humidity-controlled, fluorescent warehouses; books transferred between indistinct warehouses; books packaged, transported, and unpackaged by workers who are underpaid, unpaid, or, as we’ve learned, volunteers; books passing unseen through that divisible divinity, from word documents to printers, warehouse workers with pallet-jacks, on to waste workers, postal workers, and perhaps to return reclaimed by publishers or unclaimed as blank stock, but more often piling into landfills...

From money back into money: money of empty space; books emptied of any sociality and yet also without any value; unopened books; dark spines that appear and vanish without any hands passing through them. This is all publishing in the movement of capital. Books and presses whose nonexistence is treated as more valuable than their existence. Bookstores that collect the many names of money, that celestial demon; stores who bury themselves behind a human facade. From money back into money, as if those books never existed, except as potential books. From money back into money, as if those publishers never existed, except as potential publishers. From money back into money, the pretension of human freedom in repeated, mechanical movements or only the dust collecting on warehouse shelves, recalling the feigned life of fixtured lighting in evicted apartments.^[34]

Now, even if publishers relocate their books, if there is anything for these authors and publishers to reclaim it is this emptiness. If there is any value in this situation, it is with the dispersing seeds of their consciousness in this dismissal. Workers are discarded every day in the name of value, but the destruction of books seems to more greatly solicit and provoke our collective outrage. There is the value that owners protect and then there is the value in our knowledge of how we as authors, publishers, and workers are often respected less than the books we make or handle. Some publishers will not escape the macerating, liquifying jaws of capital, but for those who do and for those of us witnessing this breakdown—whether that be in terror, pleasure, or terrifying pleasure—let us be glad that this time it is only books being pulped.

Fuck “Class Diversity”—we have to build coherent alternatives to our present kludge, this pile of shattered knees we manage to stand on—alternatives that do not simply react to existing conditions in publishing and embrace opposing values like smallness and independence or the romantic vagueness of anti-capitalism. If not alternatives, then a means to bring our labor into a unity with our lives. We must maintain a disciplined practice that can intercept and subsume all attempts to financially or otherwise capture our activities as writers, editors, publishers, printers, and artists—as people struggling to make a living, any living. A programmatic vision of publishing could be outlined, but its content can only follow the general possibilities for all industries that suffer the dual existence of also being an art.

Addendum 1

Perhaps we once lived

and sometimes, living,

made art.

Perhaps now we want to make a living

from our art, sell and buy art, keep a career

with our art, if possible be art,

to become valuable, to become value itself

and live on as the blood of a bloodless god.

Perhaps soon and even now

we will live through art,

not as we once did, or have done,

but all the more enduringly

as we have passed through

the machine and know

the capabilities of our joined lives.

Addendum 2

One stares at the tiles in the washroom and, in staring, sees in their pale brilliance the film of one’s own eyes. Defecating into the clear water of that ever-accepting bowl, dizzy, relieved, and emptied, numb with buzzing fluorescence to return to the noise of paper feeding into those steel and rubber cylinders. Ah, and the smell of solvent, pervasive as, pervasive as, pervasive as... to be unnoticeable, the ink’s color and position shifting slightly through every sheet in response to your movements, your skin, your fingerprints peeling back over themselves at the threshold of your fingertips, translucent, the water coating the absence of the image on its plate, the blood from your cuts crossed with lines of yellow, magenta, cyan, and black, front and back, the air lifting and pulling you through that colorful embrace, the water, the water, all you ever wanted to be was the water in the absence of the image and here you are, the water in the absence of the image, the eyes that consume their own face... but, no, with the evaporating solvent you wipe the ink from each and every surface. You take a moment to rest on the catwalk and your heart loosens itself under the shuddering movement of the press. And you stare at where the cylinders meet, idling, the shadows receding, feeding the soft blue blankets and stainless steel. You imagine, you see, you reach into the cylinders and now you recall that morning, the green bottle fly unmoving in the cyan ink of the fountain, then flattened into a loss of wings. You imagine, you see, you reach... first your nails burn brightly, then your fingers are torn violently from you. There can be nothing but acceptance. At once, your hands are pressed upward into the embrace of new palms. Here begins the ecstasy of the arms breaking into this foreign form, their proper form; and, at this loss of time, we are left prostrate before the machine, in the machine, before the machine, before the machine recognizes and succumbs to your desire, a volition preceding yourself and the machine. Yes, now, we are pulled fully through the cylinders wet with ink, water, and solvent. We pass through comfortably accompanied by flocks of sparrows. We pass through comfortably, that is, without any sensation, exchanging this death with many faint lives, impressions gaining clarity sheet after sheet, day after day, mind after mind, leaf after leaf. Even the spirits at the edge of the forest city tire of playing with our living corpses. Even dead air continues to travel through strange throats. So, you pass through the printing press. You’ve passed through its architecture of breath. You collect yourself. What do you collect? What is there to collect? What can be collected now? You ask yourself: “Has anything changed?” No. What were your expectations? None. Perhaps then you have changed? Yet the light pierces you all the same in its harsh ambivalence. You ask yourself: “What then is left but to pass through the machine again?” With the teeth of dawn, with invisible hands, you now approach its thin, hissing lips unafraid.

1. Andrew Curry, “Raging Against the Dying of the Light,” Dust, 1967.

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2. Amusingly, Small Press Distribution shares its acronym with the German Socialist Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland), but its history is not only shameful in this association.

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3. Jim Milliot and Nathalie op de Beeck, "Small Press Distribution Clients Scramble to Find New Distributors,” Publishers Weekly, April 2, 2024; CLMP is acting as a mediator between publishers and Ingram because SPD left neither Ingram nor PSSC with the contact information for publishers.

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4. “About the Closure of Small Press Distribution: FAQ,” CLMP.

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5. Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (MIT Press, 2018), 241-42; The ISBN was developed in Britain in 1966 to standardize tracking information. Soon after, the ISBN was adopted in the U.S., but this process wasn’t ‘complete’ until 1979. In the U.S., the firm R.R. Bowker has been given exclusive rights to sell ISBNs. Barcodes began to be printed directly onto books by 1986.

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6. Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, Miguel de Unamuno, according to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Expounded with Comment, translated by Homer P. Earle (Sublunary, 2023).

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7. Rachel Deahl, "Is the Publishing Industry Broken?," Publisher’s Weekly, September 2, 2022.

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8. Drew Broussard, ”What the closure of Small Press Distribution means for readers,” LitHub, April 29, 2024; Editor of Black Lawrence, Diane Gottel.

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9. Adam Morgan, "On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution,” LitHub, April 3, 2024.

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10. Elizabeth A. Harris, “Hundreds of Small Presses Just Lost Their Distributor. Now What?,” The New York Times, April 17, 2024.

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11. See the litany of articles from Publisher’s Weekly.

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12. Sarah Hotchkiss and Holly McDede, “Berkeley’s Small Press Distribution, Champion of Indie Books, Shuts Down,” KQED, March 28, 2024.

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13. Octavio Paz, “A Balance Sheet,” in The Other Voice, translated by Helen Lane (Harvest, 1991) [Seix-Barral, 1990], 123.

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14. Black Lawrence, LitHub, April 29, 2024; Noemi Press LitHub, April 29, 2024; Game Over Books [“Authors scramble after the main distributor for small publishers suddenly closed," Deena Prichep, NPR, April 8, 2024]; Little Puss Press, The New York Times, April 17, 2024; 3rd Thing Press, the Stranger, May 20, 2024; Fonograf Editions, the Stranger, May 20, 2024; Rose Metal Press [“Small Press Distribution closes, leaving indie publishers reeling,” Sophia Nguyen, Washington Post, April 3, 2024]; We can only imagine what financial and interpersonal details may emerge from the ensuing SPD trials...

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15. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (International Publishers, 1971), 433.

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16. Josh Fomon, “Pressing On Local Seattle Book Distributor Asterism Books Extends Lifeline for Indie Publishers,” the Stranger, May 20, 2024.

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17. Drew Broussard, ”What the closure of Small Press Distribution means for readers."

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18. Marc Fischer, “Towards A Self-Sustaining Publishing Model,” (Half Letter, 2022); Fischer emphasizes the need for publishers “to avoid competing with other artists for resources” and instead “help others expand the audience for their publications.”

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19. [No source given.]

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20. Are we to hope its heel is rubber and not iron...? Are we then to praise the grace of its step and the softness of its sole...? [No source given.]

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21. Claire Grossman, Stephanie Young, and Juliana Spahr, “Who Gets To Be A Writer?,” Public Books, April 15, 2021; By now, many of us are aware of the biases in literary institutions, but is this the central, or even a peripheral problem for most writers? And, as they suggest, is simply shouting the poetry of our friends from rooftops the only solution? Our calls fall like black snow over the cultural asphalt. No, even a fully democratized academy or merit-based prize structure would, as Dr. Kuba Wrzesniewski says, diversify the death star. There can only be so many positions and prizes, unless we want to inhabit the world of the beginning of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Le poète assassiné (“The Poet Assassinated”).

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22. “Current & Former SPD Staff Responds To Management-Led Efforts To Falsely Exonerate SPD Leadership.”

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23. E. Conner and J. Worthen, “Open Letter to SPD,” December 18, 2020.

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24. “Timeline,” Poet’s Union.

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25. “Manifesto,” Poet’s Union, February 2021; Developing out of meetings with member poets and editors, the Manifesto was, however, principally reviewed and edited by Dominick Knowles and Mathilda Cullen.

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26. “Statement on Small Press Distribution,” Poet’s Union, June 2021.

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27. “Category Archives: SPD Boycott,” Poet’s Union.

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28. “About,” Poet’s Union.

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29. [“publisher directory.” One member of PU, betweenthehighway, created a more expansive list of publishers.]

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30. J. Worthen, “How Former Employees at a Berkley Bastion for Literary Presses Ignited a Reckoning,” KQED, August 10, 2021.

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31. Index for Continuance, Cleveland State Poetry Center, April 5, 2025.

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32. That we can call these publishers “SPD publishers” exorcises immediately any claims of their diversity or experimentation.

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33. In the months following SPD’s dissolution Small Press United’s website was a near mimicry of SPD.

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34. Matthew Kirschenaum, “Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or a Memorable Fancy,” in Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing (Post 45, 2020); Through bibliologistics—“a book history of the present”—Kirschenbaum examines print-on-demand services in the united circulatory networks of publishing production and distribution. As opposed to the outmoded publishing circuit described by Robert Danton that moves from author to publisher, from printer to distributor, and from retailer to reader, the governing dynamic of industrial publishing now relies on the integrated supply chain. Drawing from Deborah Cowen’s The Deadly Life of Logistics, Kirschenbaum approaches the book as primarily a commodity, an object of logistical space.... Something, something hyperreality.

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