Small Press Poet 3

Using my old Olympia typewriter to typeset and hiring an offset printer, I was able to fund limited editions of small poetry chapbooks. I was selling mass market paperbacks for Bantam Books and reading plays for Joe Papp at the New York Shakepeare Festival. I named my publications BardPress, and published chapbooks for the Scribblers under that imprint.

The Eye of the Cat by Matt Laufer

Aria by Lydia Raurell

The chapbooks were distributed at poetry readings and at the New York Small Press Book Fair; the first of which was held at the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art at Columbus Circle (1974). -- Subsequent fairs were held at Lincoln Center, the Custom’s House, Bryant Park, Martin Luther King Jr. High School, NYU, the East Side Armory, Madison Square Garden, and finally in 1987 at Columbia University.

Small Press Poet 2

Back in Manhattan (1974), the Scribblers, began as an open reading on West 85th Street. Vincenetta Gunn, an actresss, and I were living together in a brownstone. Suzie Kaufman was our next door neighbor. Vinnie enjoyed entertaining. She agreed to host the poets who came in from the Street. Suzie and I designed a small poster which we hung on a nearby lamppost. An Australian entrepreneur, Norman Bright, arrived and promised to make us all famous. He gave us the name Scribblers after Jonathan Swift’s Martin Scriblerus Society. Norman was working for Wisdom’s Child, a weekly penny saver that listed cultural events among its classified ads. Through his contacts we were able to host a weekly Saturday morning poetry reading at the English Pub across the street from Carnegie Hall. Mary Grace Bookhart invited the Scribblers to read at the Sunday evening coffee house at the Church of Saint Paul and Saint Andrew on West 86th Street. We attracted young writers like Clint McCown, Patricia and Russell Kelly, Marty Asher, Janet Bloom, Billy Drago, Arlene Rosen, Matthew Laufer, Magdalena Gomez, Barbara Holland, and Lydia Raurell. Rissa Korsun, a senior poet, who had trouble climbing the stairs to our apartment, brought us to the Goddard Riverside Community Center where Patricia helped us publish the Scribblers newsletter.

Scribblers 1

Small Press Poet

I began writing poetry in journals I kept while a Peace Corps volunteer in Bassa County, Liberia (1969). I burned most of my notebook in a fireplace in Tenerife when I left West Africa (1970). The few pages I held onto were published as a small chapbook at the London New Arts Lab. I hawked my chapbook, Chrylust, in Regent Park, the Roundhouse Café, and the Troubadour.

CHRYLUST & Others