Every once in a while someone mentions in a letter to me that he's seen one of my columns, and a couple of times a reader has written a letter-to-the-editor complaining of the obscurity of the poets I champion or, in one case, getting on me for my grammar, so I know the columns are not going entirely unread. Nonetheless, I feel pretty solipsistic when I write them. That has its good side: it means I don't have to worry about satisfying anyone but myself. Hence, this column, which may well be the most self-indulgent one I've yet written, which is saying a lot.

I'm just too beat, who knows why, to even pretend to review anything this time around. I do hope no one will be cruel enough to write me that it's therefore my first good column. Anyway, I'm just going to shoot the breeze about me and Small Press Review. I first came across it in some kind of rack in what I remember as a college library somewhere in LA, where I spent the seventies and a few years at either end of them. I was taken by (1) its coverage of literature not mentioned in the mainstream and (2) Robert Peters's pungent column. This was some thirty years ago. I was around thirty--not that young, but unpublished and with no literary friends, so I fantasized about someday being a Robert Peters, read by a slew of high-level readers, the way some small boy watching a light- years-out-of-reach baseball star on television daydreams about one day playing on his team.

I didn't keep up with SPR too well, as I was moving around a lot, and not fully committed to Poetry. Of more pivotal importance to me were the Dustbook directories, one of which was what finally got me into the Literary Scene. From it I got the address of Karl Kempton This was in the early eighties. Karl was then and still is the editor of Kaldron, the number one American visual poetry periodical of the last century. He rejected the apprentice visual poems I sent him, but via a real letter! And he gave me names of other editors and writers of visual poetry, such as Crag Hill, with whom I just recently co-edited the first volume of Writing to be Seen, the only serious (300+ large pages) anthology of visual and related poetry published in this country in the past thirty years. I'm not bothering to indicate where it can be bought because, amazingly, there are just about no copies left for sale. Perhaps not a surprise since we only had (only could afford) to have 500 copies printed, but a surprise considering it costs $24 and nothing else I've ever been involved with has sold more than 200 copies--except, I guess, Richard Kostelanetz's A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, now out in paperback, to which I contributed a dozen or so short entries (some of them re-using material first published here, I might add). Oh, there was also the volume of the Gale Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series that I had an essay in, but that was sold in bookstores, I don't think.

I apparently started my still-continuing subscription to SPR with the June/July 1985 issue, for that's the first one in my file. Odd to find names of people I barely noticed at the time but later corresponded with such as Arnold Skemer and Bob Black in my earliest issues. By 1990 Jack Saunders's name popped up! I only noticed one reviewer early on, even before she became a regular columnist (in the September 1986 issue): Laurel Speer. She had a verve most of the other reviewers lacked--and seemed almost as distant from my part of the galaxy as Peters had. As far as I can tell from my records, my first contribution to SPR was a guest editorial about infraverbal poetry called, "Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry" in the April 1992 issue. It is still one of the best things I've written on poetry. A month later, my first review appeared--on the front page! It was on da levy, "Cleveland's Warrior Poet." These two publications were a highlight in my literary life.

A mere year and a month later I had a column in Small Magazine Review! It was a continuation of one I had had in Factsheet Five, whose editor had departed, leaving it with another editor, who soon sold it to someone else. Along the way, everyone or just about everyone, who had been writing for it was dumped, including me. So, for me, SMR came along at just the right time.

My column appeared every other issue for a while, but then SPR and SMR combined and became a bi-monthly. Since then, I've had a column in every issue. My hope, aside from getting discovered, was to establish the kinds of poetry I write about here in the Big World. That has not yet happened, but there's still hope. Writing To Be Seen has recently had book launchings in the Miami area at Books & Books, and in New York at Printed Matter. In September there will be a similar event for it at The New York Center for Book Art. It was also featured at a visual poetry show in a gallery in Cincinnati and at the end of July it will be part of the festivities at the Ohio State Avant Garde Symposium. So we're making progress. Meanwhile, I'll keep plugging along with this column--and hope at least a few young writers think of me the way I used to think of Robert Peters.