Should we go and open things up?
And we've got a microphone somewhere else
that can float around.
No, we only have the two.
Sure.
You can walk, right?
You know?
Yes?
OK.
All right.
Why don't you go on, sir?
You know, it's very interesting to hear this conversation.
And when you started off, you talked
about what popped into my mind is
publication studio out of Portland
and sort of there on demand.
And so there's this whole thing that publishing
and publication.
But somehow, this conversation hasn't rubbed up
against the very word public.
So can you talk about the public in relation
to poetry off the page?
And what public are you addressing
in your little worlds?
So big worlds.
Picture the world's publics.
Our executive director just loves
to say that publication comes from to make public.
And to him, publication has a connection
to making things public.
And in a way, that's certainly true.
I mean, I would say, for myself, the thing
that seems to concern me, and it's
tough to be work for speed, and also be a writer
and figure out where one thing shades into the other.
But I feel like what I'm always thinking about
is how do you build an ecosystem of this art form of ours
that's opening and welcome and encourages.
I have in my mind the sort of young poet
who wants to do something a little weird, a little out
of bounds.
And they say to themselves know that wouldn't
have a home anywhere.
So I want to make 1,000 flowers bloom or whatever.
So to think about how do you build these
on ramps into this community, rather than worrying about what
the sort of hierarchy of the status
how you go up that ladder and how you--
and I think that's why small press
publishing is important to me.
I think that it's about diversity, right?
Anything even mildly commercial is
going to do at least some kind of analysis
about who they're trying to reach.
And the numbers that you can work
with small presses that are just so much smaller that it
can be liberating.
So you know we've got like an anthology of gay Filipino
writers.
And I know exactly what any marketer or anyone
with even a sort of mid-sized independent press would say.
It's just too small of a market under the presumption
that only gay Filipino, left-handed people
or whether they're going to read this book.
And so there's a long tradition of small press of serving
underserved communities.
It's just about breadth, sexual orientation, and race,
and gender absolutely, but also aesthetic breadth for me.
Like that's something that often gets left out of that.
I want to make the art form as wide open as possible.
And I think that a lot of that activity
happens off the page if you consider the distribution
channel, and the printing process, and all
these other symbols thing as part
of poetry integral to poetry.
Maybe other people have other responses, too.