Resurrection of a Mimeo Press
An Interview with Poet/Publisher Maureen Owen of Telephone Books

Granary Books/NY Public Library's publication of an in-depth study of mimeo* publications, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, the catalog for last year's marvelous show at the Main Library (hats tipped and twirled for Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips) -- mimeo in the vitrines! -- seems to've set up a chain reaction.

This fall will see the public unveiling of great 60s mimeo poetic spirit, Cleveland's d.a. levy, in the extraordinary collection The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: the Art and Poetry of d.a. levy (Seven Stories Press -- Mike Golden, editor of the volume, is already on the road). Also: publication of the astonishing idobelieveidobelieveidobelieve by Frank O’Hara’s protégé, Frank Lima, stalwart in early mimeo days, who vanished from the scene 25 years before Inventory came out last year. idobelieveidobelieveidobelieve is Lima’s totally spiritual sacrilegious take on the Bible.

And Now, another sign! Telephone Books, one of the top mimeo presses, has been resurrected by terrific poet/editor, Maureen Owen. Telephone’s first book, Lost Ceilings by Janet Hamill, who last published with Telephone in 1980, is desktop offset, of course. . . a divine 4½ x 6¼, moody b&w Empire State cover, hypnotic richly romantic hypersurreal prose poems: “And only someone bearing fruit. . . someone born to complete her. . . a burning object to whom she might cling. . . lies on the bed in her red-walled room.” Aiee! Yes, Valery, kill me! But a taste is all ye get.

--Bob Holman

We managed to track down Ms. Owen in her Connecticut digs. We, brimming over with amazed energy at Telephone’s return, peppered her with queries. Her surprising responses follow:

About.com Po: Welcome back!

Maureen Owen: Hi Bob! & Howdy! It’s the 4th of July, but the barge that totes the fireworks broke down in the harbor and so it’s half sunk or something and no firecrackers!! But Janet’s Lost Ceilings is setting here on my desk looking like a candidate for the next Firecracker Book Awards at Book Expo 2000!

Was it the smell of mimeo and rising visibility of poetry that drew you back into Publishing?

Well yep and sorta. I’ve missed publishing horribly and been wanting to get back in the game. But I had to concentrate all my finances on college tuition for my children for a few years. You can’t be a single mother putting your kids through college and have enough money to publish books at the same time. I did and do miss the smell of the mimeo ink and the clunkiness of the big machine, but stencils may have seen their day. Sort of like the 1 bottom plow. Computers have rolled in. I’m printing these first 2 books at The Print Center under the watchful eye of Bob Hershon. Setting up pages in Quark. Perfect binding. Who knows, I have my doubts. Unless of course, the Y2K problem sets us all back -- mimeo might make a return but Xerox is so much easier, so I don’t see it in the future. What a wonderful medium it was tho. The ink sat up on the page like pure art. So black on the rough, cheap white paper. Ah, we’ll never see that kind of beauty again.

What made you start with Janet’s book?

I love Janet’s work. I’m amazed that after I did The Temple in 1980, publishers weren’t wearing out her flower beds, but I know that after Lost Ceilings they will be. It’s heady and Surreal and boldly rocked with passion. I love working with Janet too. I love her obsession with the language and her commitment to writing. She and her band have become a dynamite performance. And she has been touring a bit with Patti Smith, too. The idea to do LC as Telephone’s inaugural came about rather organically, which is how I like to work. To read these poems is want to publish them! I had a Howard Finster experience!

Plans for future books?

My plan/dream/hope/goal/etc. is to do 2 books a year. Money is always the issue, of course. Next is Elio Schneeman’s A Found Life. I’m extremely excited about it. What a great 2 books to start with! That, as you might guess, came about organically too. It was handed to me quite unexpectedly by John Godfrey at a memorial for Elio. John had only a couple of copies of the mss. and suddenly he turned to me with purpose and handed me one. I felt so honored, as though I'd been handed the Ten Tablets by some almighty being who foresaw the future. I hope I continue to get all Telephone mss. with such angelic ecstasy!

Any chance we’ll see Telephone mag (whoops! I mean “zine”!) return?

HA! Doubtful. Though it has a nice ring: Telephone Zine. I loved doing the magazine, but it is so much work that one person is soon destroyed. If I could keep it small. . . maybe. . . . . . fat chance! Just too many submissions. I don’t plan to go there.

You have a great new book out! (American Rush) What’s the intertwining of poet and publisher for you?

Completely intertwined. Both of them complete my soul. Next to loving my children, writing poetry is as quintessential as breathing to me and next to writing is publishing. I have really missed doing Telephone Books.

What’s the difference between publishing the original Telephone and now Telephone?

Well, of course, production. No stencils to type, no long midnight hours mimeoing at St. Mark’s, no gang of collators. In a way some of that romance has gone out of it. If you can call tons of work romance. Did I just call typing stencils romantic!!!? But I do miss the community effort towards production. The involvement of the whole community of poets in everything that gets done. I love doing things with lots of people in the community of poetry. This is a bit more solitary at the start. But I hope to engage others as I get going. In working with Elio’s book a number of people are involved and being consulted. In fact I couldn’t do it without them. With Janet’s Lost Ceilings, as always, it is a personal pleasure and a treat to work with Janet. Then working with Bob Hershon and the Print Center is the best. Bob H. is a genius at solving the million little problems that come up and his expertise at book design is so great he makes you feel like you thought of it! Plus, he has the patience of St. Francis!

But what hasn’t changed, and is even more so for me, is the total excitement of getting to know the poems in that intimate way one does when one is publishing a book. To eat, sleep, dream, and sweat the work as one puts the book together -- that is pure heaven and never changes. It only gets better.

Of course costs have gone up, from production to mailing -- that’s a difference not to be overlooked. You do need a little cash to get a book out now. That was true before for the later Telephone Books, but the earlier ones moved right along with elbow grease and a few stencils -- even paper was cheap then -- and book rate! Well, let’s just say the post office was a kinder, gentler place. Distribution is better, but mostly because it didn’t exist at all in the very first days of Telephone. One just took a stack of copies and hit the streets. Now I can mail copies to certain bookstores and distributors. Tho, as we all know, it ain't fantastic. In the tradition of Telephone I will continue to send free copies to an extensive mailing list.

What books are by your bedside now?

• Life, A User’s Manual, Georges Perec
  
• Albanian Diary, Ron Padgett
  
• Laughing in the Hills, Bill Barich
  
• Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order, Lindsay Blair
  
• Selected Poems, Barbara Guest
  
• The Sandman, Neil Gaiman (a present from my son Kyran for Mother’s Day)
  
• Vertical’s Currency, Joel Lewis
  
• Disarming Matter, Edmund Berrigan
  
• Unshrouding the Worm Queen: A Biography of Helen Adam, Kristin Prevallet
  
• The Phantom Empire, Geoffrey O’Brien

That’s the close stack. I have a further stack but I won’t get into it. As you can tell I tend to read too many books at one time.

Advice from Maureen Owen to young poet/publishers, please!

Definitely do it. No matter how hard it is -- it’s easy when you look at that finished book. You can always get the money somewhere; just keep your vision. There are lots of ways to do a book and some of them still cheaply. Do fewer copies, sell some and use the money to do more. Do ten at a time if you have to. Use Xerox, tape binding, take them to bookstores yourself. But your goal has to be to get the work out -- not to make money. I’m not saying you can’t ever make any money, just that you wouldn’t want that as a goal. You would give up in despair!

Good luck in your new venture, Mo!

Thanks Bob. Being Irish I never turn good luck down. Good Luck to all of us!

• Her works The No-Travels Journal & A Brass Choir Approaches the Burial Ground are online at Light & Dust Poets, together with excerpts from Zombie Notes, Imaginary Income (complete with review by Pat Nolan) & AE:Amelia Earhart.
• “Maybe the stars were crossed” is in the Winter Solstice 1998 issue of $lavery - Cyberzine of the Arts.
• Randomly selected samplers from three issues of Telephone Book are also in the Light & Dust Mobile Anthology.

• Imaginary Income (paperback edition, Hanging Loose Press, 1999)
• American Rush (Talisman House, 1998)
• Untapped Maps (Potes & Poets Press, 1993)

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