This event was held at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA last weekend and was hosted by Switchback Books.

As a virtual guest, Patricia Dienstfrey put forth answers to questions posed by a moderator. Read her responses below. To check out the list of participants and read more about the discussion visit Switchback:.

PD:

Addressing questions Becca asked in her original proposal seems a good way to introduce myself and Kelsey Street. I’ll be speaking for a press that’s been in existence for 34 years and has had many members; so what I say will blend memory and my own views and experience.

1. Why do you publish only women? This question leads directly to Kelsey Street’s beginnings in 1974 and our first editorial statement: “Kelsey St. publishes innovative poetry and short fiction by women.” Our inspiration came from a void that was the absence of women poets in books, magazines, libraries, upper level writing courses, teaching and editing positions, and critical and theoretical publications. The decision to publish innovative writing derived from this logic: Why look for writing that conforms to the same form and content by which male editors are rejecting women’s work? Why enact the absurdity of “pouring old wine into new skins,” as Fanny Howe once put it?  We wanted to give women permission to find and make their art in their own personal unmapped territories.

When we talked about “innovative work,” we saw ourselves as building on the tradition of the twentieth century modernists and small presses that published them. In our view, 20th century writing we loved and the existence of small presses were like two sides of one coin. We began as letterpress printers inspired by the famous image of Virginia Woolf setting type for Ulysses at Hogarth Press and by Nancy Cunard who funded Hours Press and published Louise Aragon, Samuel Beckett, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound, Zora Neale Hurston, and Laura Riding. Man Ray designed some of the Hours Press covers and Cunard herself set type for some of the editions. Winifred Ellerman, Bryher, published HD and funded Contact, a press she co-edited with Robert McAlmon in the twenties, bringing out Hemingway, Stein, Pound, Mina Loy, Nathaniel West, Djuna Barnes. Note: Both Bryher and Cunard inherited money that allowed their presses independence from mainstream markets. Not that family fortunes funded Kelsey Street’s beginnings. We bought a Vandercook letterpress, inexpensive because businesses were turning to offset printing, and later kept going by means of contributions, grants, fundraisers and a mixture of hand-to-mouth can-do and love for poetry I’m sure is familiar to you.

2. We’ve never used the term feminist in our promotional literature. One reason is that poets and publishers who inspired us positioned themselves to the side of the academy where the term feminism in the 70s was defined. Many of us did read feminist theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray and subscribe to women’s scholarly publications such as Signs and Feminist Studies and, later, Women’s Review of Books. But speaking now personally, no term that changes definition from decade to decade can define my feminism. The women’s movement put me in touch with my own losses, fragmentation, absence of a logic for writing. The exclusion and means of exclusion of women from the public record throughout history brought to light by scholarship at that time – the near absence of women’s voices and creative powers in public life and our lack of legal rights over our bodies and monies – inspired a horror vacui and presented me with a heritage from which to work as a writer.

3. Is publishing women activism? If carrying a sign in the streets is activism, then I think publishing women’s writing, these signs in books open to public discussion, is activism.

4. We look for writing in which form and content arise from the writing project itself. For attention to language, sound, the use of the page, and how they work together. Freshness. Sometimes work that is rough meets these criteria more than work that’s polished.

5. First books? An initial goal was to publish first books, to give unvetted writers the first step into print. This editorial policy was more risky in the early 70s because there was no professional route for women to become poets, so “woman poet” bore the same stigma as “Sunday painter.” Many talented women moved on from writing poetry to something else. Because the first members of the Press admired each other’s work (we met in a poetry workshop where we noticed that poems we thought strong, men thought needed fixing) we published our own first books. Then Nelly Wong, Myung Mi Kim, Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman (we accepted Juice before Renee’s first book came out from O books). We brought out early work by Erica Hunt, Elizabeth Robinson, and prose by Fanny Howe. Our booklist is on our website: kelseyst.com. But I’d like to cite a few more titles to give a sense of our list’s arc during three and a half decades. In the eighties we published more established writers: Barbara Guest, whose New York School affinities with early modernists fit well with our own; Kathleen Fraser, who abandoned tradition-based poetics to explore; and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who incorporated arts and critical theory into a new poetic line. Also in the eighties, our early interest in the limited edition collaborations of Vanessa Stephens and Virginia Woolf and those of French poets and artists such a Pierre Reverdy and Georges Braque led us to found a series of collaborations between poets and visual artists which Rena Rosenwasser curates. Finally, in the nineties, wanting not to lose sight of our first commitment to unpublished writers, we established an award series to publish first books.

6. I’m adding a question which came up for me at Becca’s reference to Linda Russo’s “F Word” article, which addresses complaints that innovative work is ‘unintelligible’, ‘difficult’, ‘uncommunicative’, (although such uncommunicative, unintelligible work continues to be written, published, taught, reviewed and read). Do we see ourselves as elitist? We first felt the need to address the reality of elitism from the point of view of race and ethnicity. Our project was to be as inclusive as possible. Soon after beginning, we changed our editorial statement to read Kelsey Street publishes “innovative work by women of color and lesbians.” Our goal was to bring out a diverse list which would reflect what was, in our view, one of the most dynamic and hopeful aspects of U.S. culture. About the same time, the question of accessibility arose when women finding their voices wanted to tell their stories, at which point a gap developed between a poetics of fragmentation and abstraction and one based on the narrative. Adrienne Rich ‘s Diving Into the Wreck, published in the early 70s, was a ground-breaking book for most of us in the Press. But we parted ways with Rich when she embraced story-telling as the poetics of her feminist politics and criticized non-narrative work as writing for a privileged few, (leading one KSP member to comment:“She’s lost her faith in language.”) Barbara Guest continued to write “under the shadow of Surrealism” as she puts it in one essay, and the influence of Mallarme, and was excluded from feminist syllabi for many years, falling into a relative silence. However, in the 90s, young poets, reading across boundaries of race, gender and poetics schools, read Barbara’s work, attended her readings, and followed her writing during her productive last years.

A concern of mine at this moment is that we keep archives and encourage scholarship that will preserve the linked history of women’s poetry and small presses in the 20th century and on through the 21st. I would love to find others with this concern. Recognizing that women’s voices have been  regulated out of most areas of history and culture, especially poetry (for reasons Virginia Woolf lays out in “A Room of One’s Own”), the very real possibility that we might lose the record of our creativity and role in the evolution of contemporary poetry is, well, unthinkable.
Linda Russo’s scholarship is a contributin. So are the “Numbers Trouble debates” – I’m glad Becca posted the Ashton, Spahr/Young and Kotin/Baird articles. We need more numbers going back to the seventies and further back to the history of women’s cultural/political absence and silence, and what lies there for the future.