Underwhich Editions and the Radical Tradition

Paul Dutton

"Aaa, hell," said the printing salesman. "Think big: maybe it’ll sell fifty thousand." This boilerplate exhortation to a bolder vision was calculated to infect me with the necessary bravado to up my order from three hundred copies to a more self-respecting five or ten hundred. The figure of fifty thousand was (I believe) cited merely as a way of making a point, offering some exemplary positive thinking as an antidote to my obvious impoverishment of confidence. Besides, a higher run would give me better value for my money: with most of the cost going for set-up, a few more bucks would mean a lot more copies. But I knew that anything more would be an investment in future disposal problems. I lacked neither faith nor confidence in the work in question–Brian Henderson’s The Alphamiricon–it’s just that I was fully aware of the lamentably small audience for it. Henderson had created an exquisite sequence of twenty-six kaleidoscopic Letraset alphabetical images–works of a type called "visual poetry" by cognoscenti, though most often popularly referred to as "concrete poetry" (a term properly applied exclusively to visual poetry of the 1950s to the early ’70s). I’d decided to have The Alphamiricon printed on cards and packaged in a box, which was why I’d assigned it to this particular printer, who also made boxes and had come up with a decent price on a one-piece folding box that fit the bill. The bill, unfortunately, didn’t fit the box, some key instructions having been ignored, but that’s another story.

The Alphamiricon was not an unusual publication for Underwhich Editions, which is an unusual publisher, with a list containing so wide a range of media and formats–including books, broadsides, chapbooks, one-folds, cassettes, vinyl, and other such–that we have tended to use "items" as the general term for what we issue. I had, in fact, gotten the idea of cards in a box from an earlier Underwhich release by Steve Smith (who is now publicly Steven Ross Smith, to avoid confusion with proliferating namesakes in the literary field). He’d put out his Three Naturals, a shuffle-text on cards, in five-inch reel-to-reel tape boxes that he’d salvaged from some recording studio or other that was about to get rid of them. It was, however, a one-time opportunity, especially as one reason for the boxes’ pending trip to the garbage was that cassettes were making five-inch reel-to-reel obsolete–which fate was, of course, shared by those nifty boxes. Denied such serendipity, I had to work a little harder to achieve a similar form of "packication" for The Alphamiricon.

These two anecdotes of Smith’s and my experiences embody several elements that have been characteristic of Underwhich Editions since its inception in 1979: unorthodox content, unorthodox publication, efforts to economise (the projects being self-financed, with costs barely recovered and any surplus going into subsequent publications), low print-runs and individual initiative. The last aspect is embedded, albeit obliquely, in Underwhich’s very name, for when the late bpNichol invited a number of (then) Toronto writers to form a collective context for their disparate publishing activities, he stressed the notion of an imprint (as opposed to a press) under which everybody would continue their own programs while sharing promotion and order-filling costs and duties. Nichol’s repeated use of the phrase "under which" ("an imprint under which we would each publish . . .") led me to suggest the name that we adopted. His concept, which was agreed to by all, was that each editor would maintain responsibility for content and for financing, but that an agreed level of production quality had to be maintained, the main stipulations being no mimeograph (the age of Gestetner had not yet ended) and no photocopy editions (this latter was relaxed as the technology improved).

We were a disparate group, not all of us publishers at the time–specifically, the previously mentioned Steve Smith, Brian Dedora, and myself. The active publishers present were: Nichol, who had been tirelessly putting things out for some fourteen years, first doing Ganglia magazine and then his grOnk mailouts; Steve McCaffery, who had recently started up anonbeyond press; Michael Dean, with his Wild Press; and Richard Truhlar and John Riddell, who were issuing Kontakte magazine through Truhlar’s more diversified Phenomenon Press. These various publishing ventures (tiny, nonprofit, and done for the love of it) focused largely on innovative material; and all the writers involved in Underwhich, whether or not they were also publishers at the time, were interested, to one degree or another, in the extended aspects of literature, what I sometimes like to call the intersensual characteristics of language as pure visual and/or pure sonic event. These integral aspects of language and literature are rarely exploited in higher-profile literature–and when they do find their way into that sphere, they are often dismissed or ignored. (To cite one instance: Victor Hugo’s sorties into visual play are not included in his collected works.) Nichol, to whose writing the visual and sonic dimensions of language were central, expressed the general principle perfectly in an interview published in 1987, in the magazine Artviews (Vol. 14, no. 1): "Writing, in essence, lies at intersections of poetry, painting and music. In a sense, to write is a visual act–to put letters on a page, to create lines with a pencil or a pen. There’s a very definite visual moment. The page is a visual field and that’s one of the elements of writing. . . . Inherent in language is a system of sounds and pitches and so on. We could say a kind of musicality is one of the elements of language. Each of these is part of what makes up what we think of as writing."

Interest in these characteristics of language were a central (though not exclusive) concern of the newly formed publisher. In its maiden mail-out, Underwhich declared itself to embody "a fusion of high production standards and top-quality literary innovation," and went on to announce its dedication to "presenting, in diverse and appealing physical formats, new works by contemporary creators, focusing on formal invention and encompassing the expanded frontiers of literary endeavour."

We were as good as our word with our first offerings, which included a perfectbound paperback, a folder, three chapbooks, and two cassettes. Only one of the chapbooks, Rafael Barreto-Rivera’s Here It Has Rained, comprised completely linear text–and even it was nonlinear in development. The other items all contained one or both of the visual and sonic elements of language. Prominent among them was what quickly became our flagship publication, the book that built Underwhich–Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, co-edited by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery. Our steadiest and strongest seller, it remained in demand for over twenty years. It fully embodied the aims and ideals of Underwhich. Nichol and McCaffery financed it through funding grants to the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival held in Toronto in 1978, for which it served as the commemorative catalogue, with classy graphic and book design by Glenn Goluska. It featured an entry on each artist in the festival, with statement, sound-text, photo, biog note, and general discography, not to mention a brilliantly condensed historical survey by McCaffery. The book, far from comprehensive at the time (though fully representative) and now, of course, awfully out of date, is one of only a very few to be written on the subject and is, as far as I know, one of two available in English.

We’re pretty good at keeping things in print at Underwhich, where enthusiasm for an artist’s work often outstrips the extent of its audience–or what we can reach of its audience. Enthusiasm has always been the operative word. We’re not after profit and we’re not a business (neither of which that printer with the fifty-thousand-copy mentality would ever comprehend). We’re so much not a business that our collective account was set up only to process our shared-cost contributions and expenses and to accumulate sales income for dispersal to the respective editors. With few exceptions (a brief period of Ontario Arts Council block-grant financing in the late ’80s through the early ’90s), the editors have maintained independence in their financing arrangements. So Underwhich is not even a fiscal entity.

For the first several years my financial involvement consisted exclusively in the payment of low monthly fees. I was so reluctant a publisher that it wasn’t until 1987 that I got around to putting anything out. But I believed in the concept of Underwhich and liked most of what its editors produced. So, with payment of dues entitling me to a copy of each publication, it all seemed worth it. I was also happy to contribute volunteer time to compose the catalogue copy, a craft I’d made my living at for several years in commercial publishing. It was far more satisfying to apply pre-assured praise to the diverse, always out-of-the-ordinary, often downright quirky works put out by Underwhich’s collection of individualistic editors than it was to do the same for the parade of potboilers, cookbooks, journalistic trend-riders and mainstream mediocrity that McClelland & Stewart had to peddle to the public in order to support the proportionately small amount of serious literary art to which they were able to commit. Underwhich may or may not have had an equal proportion of the mediocre within its particular aesthetic frameworks, but at least it’s all been artistic endeavour–and even the worst stuff from Underwhich has had, for the most part, the saving grace of unconventionality.

The dedication to nonconformity makes Underwhich a bookseller’s nightmare–or would, if any bookseller cared to invest much time and energy in our list. While many Underwhich publications conform to book industry dimensional standards, just as many, or more, are clearly calculated to undermine convention, guaranteeing headaches in the areas of display and merchandising (not that such concepts are compatible with Underwhich content in the first place). Nichol loved to work out unusual cuts of print-sheets, producing two or three different-sized chapbooks on the same press-run. Others have opted variously for tubes, cubes, squares, boxes, and envelopes. Bindings might be perfectbound, cerlox, post, plastic spine, hand-stitched, anything. Richard Truhlar went beyond the book to microfiche, producing an eighty-four-page anthology in that medium, the idea being that readers would take the fiche to their local library to enjoy it on the fiche-reader there (this may have been a geographically limited undermining of convention, based as it was on the Toronto library system’s use of fiche for their cross-branch cataloguing). Then there were our audiocassette releases, the Underwhich Audiographic Series, begun by Steve McCaffery and carried on by others, notably Truhlar. All of this anti-industrial activity has made even mail-order operations difficult, since each order represents a new adventure in packing. As for bookstores, we keep them on our mailing list and offer standard discounts; we even, for a brief and futile period, went so far as to engage a publisher’s rep, writer Marshall Hyrciuk, who, unlike his customers, was sympathetic to the aesthetic concerns of Underwhich. We continue to receive only a smattering of bookstore orders, the bulk of our sales being to libraries and individuals.

The radical external character of most of the Underwhich editors’ projects reflects the general radical character of the contents. I say "general" because our list contains works situated within other traditions–lyric poetry by Lola Lemire Tostevin, Victor Coleman, and Kristjana Gunnars, haiku by George Swede, and short fiction by Fabian Boutilier, Martha Gould and others. But through numerous changes of membership in the collective (Steven Ross Smith and I are the only two remaining original editors), the overwhelming majority of items reflect a commitment to those principles announced in Underwhich’s first catalogue. We have the cryptotypographic minimalism of Leroy Gorman, the angular alphabetico-visual constructs of Ray DiPalma, John Riddell’s magnification (and minification) of text to create abstract visual textures, David UU’s typewriter pattern-poems, Clive Fencott’s half-drawn, half-written narrative technique, to name just a few instances of publications taking the visual treatment of language to a variety of extremes. Such use of text and the alphabet as a medium for drawing–sometimes figuratively, sometimes abstractly–has been, since the days of the Dadaists and Futurists, closely associated with exploitation of the sonic dimension of language. So it’s not surprising that Underwhich’s list contains a strong sound-poetry component, specifically in the aforementioned Underwhich Audiographic Series, and additionally in the Underwhich Undertones, which comprises a number of recordings produced by a variety of labels subsumed into Underwhich by different of the individual editors. And just as visual poetry overlaps with the realm of the visual arts, so sound poetry tends to overlap with music. Truhlar, equally interested and involved in both literature and music, has put out more than one Underwhich recording of purely musical material, specifically electroacoustic composition. Thus it is that Underwhich has offered everything from a cassette of early Canadian sound poetry of the ’60s to a CD of electroacoustic works by Paul Dolden, one of the ’90s most renowned composers of such work.

I referred earlier to a brief period of financial assistance through the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) block grant program. The move was instigated by Nichol, who had sponsored various more ambitious production ventures in the past and, as I understood it, wanted to see more such projects brought in as joint efforts, achieving that goal by investing Underwhich with a bit of aboveground character, as it were. Sadly, he didn’t live to see the first books to be published with the assistance he talked us into getting. This funding phase (during which our usual independent program of individually financed projects continued) was one of change in other areas. Just before Nichol’s death, there had been some departures from and additions to the collective’s personnel; and by about three years after his death, still more departures occurred. Some of those who joined for varying lengths of time and with different levels of involvement, were Frank Davey, jwcurry, Keith Southward, Beverley Daurio, Karl Jirgens, and Lucas Mulder.

It’s worth saying more about our adventures with funding. Shortly after we received our second grant, I recall mentioning the fact to someone in the literary community. "So that’s great!" came the response. "Pretty soon you’ll be able to get into the Canada Council program." Or words to that effect. I felt a bit like I did with the fifty-thousand-copy printing rep: getting a pep-talk from someone who’s missing the point. There opened up before me a vision of an approved template for publishing progress, which went something like this:

1. Unruly youths publish their own works and those of their peers, along with a smattering of helpful senior writers to add clout.
2. Some of the unruliness is tamed and a more polished appearance is presented to the local funding agencies for money (permission) to do more of this more polished, more bookstore-book publishing. Not so many more readers, really; just a classier appearance.
3. Sullied only slightly by the remaining vestiges of those disrespectful early days–and with loud public professions of pride in them (but with a note of dismissiveness in the voice, as of one well aware that they were the days of an early phase now well outgrown, like adolescence)–a business is brought into being, all ready to behave properly, to pay (and collect) taxes, and to publish a more widely accepted type of material. Time to approach the Canada Council, stripped of any anarchic trait like unruliness, ready for federal funding, adults at last.

I hyperbolized clearly, since many fine and respectable literary presses have maintained a consistent editorial direction, from their early unfunded beginnings to their ultimate condition of multilevel support; but that direction is oriented primarily to the mainstream audience. It’s not a matter of that being wrong (numerous Underwhich authors and editors have had books put out by such presses); it’s just that some publishing operations (such as Underwhich) have a different esthetic: it could be considered as analogous to the difference between the applied sciences and pure research. Nor are the required business principles unreasonable. It’s just that some publishers’ characters and goals are not best served by certain of the strictures explicit or implicit in the block-grant structure. And it gradually became clear to me that Underwhich was such a one. While we remain grateful for the funding we received from the OAC and the publishing thus facilitated (some of it radical in character), there were several points on which we were being hobbled., a few of which I offer, in no particular order of importance–and in the past tense, conditions having possibly changed since our last experience of the process.

Eligibility for OAC funding required that less than twenty-five per cent of the publisher’s program be for books authored by principals in the publishing company. If two of our board of author-editors published chapbooks of their own work, and two others published chapbooks by writers not in the collective, and we jointly published two forty-eight-page books by extra-Underwhich authors, we’d have a third of our list by principals and be ineligible for a grant the following year. A minimum of two forty-eight-page books per twelve months were required for eligibility, and volunteer time was often simply not available–or we’d find ourselves scrambling for manuscripts. Another thing was that a significant factor in determining the amount granted was jury assessment of cultural value, which put a radical press, devoted to exploring new esthetic territory, in the position of being judged by criterion opposite to their mandate–or by jurors unqualified to assess the merits of the work in question. Another factor affecting the grant’s size was what was called "services to authors," which seemed basically an assessment of how much money went to getting books into stores. We couldn’t impress in that department, for reasons made clear earlier in this essay. (At this point, it’s relevant to note that a large portion of our sales occur at the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, which the OAC assists with funding, specifically to aid sales of the non-bookstore-able publishers.) The capper, for me, was the requirement of financial records, which came into effect a few years ago. This meant a whole lot more unpaid work–or, more likely, work we’d have to pay for, none of us being too handy with figures. To put it succinctly, we were a trapezoid peg being fit into a square hole. To shift metaphors, we decided to let the tail wag some other dog and go our own radical, renegade, self-financed way.

And that is what we do at this point, myself in Toronto, Steven Ross Smith in Saskatoon, and, occasionally, Susan Andrews Grace in Nelson, B.C..

I didn’t know what Nichol was getting me into back there in 1979. And, as I’ve noted, it was a long time before I really got into it, my involvement progressively intensifying, my resolve steadily growing. My experience has led me to the firm conviction that Underwhich is, of its essence, an underground publisher: responsible only to itself and its authors; doing things when the time is right for the publisher, not when the next grant application (or the terms of the previous one) requires it; tailoring the form to the requirements of the work, rather than seeing that it will fit bookstore convenience; publishing editions of fifty, a hundred, two hundred; making no concession (other than in catalogue hype) to the commodity-driven, marketing-oriented mercantile mentality to which so much literary publishing is so anomolously wed by a complex concatenation of forces. We share these traits with a wealth of like-spirited ventures not just in Canada, but around the world (I’ve not mentioned the number of U.S. and European authors on our list, most of them published by Nichol). The radical underground publishers are not just "seed-beds of talent," as is so often contended in justification of them in conventional high-profile literary circles. They are not amateurs waiting in the wings for fame, but proponents of an alternative esthetics; not a stage to be outgrown but to grow through and with (that’s artistic growth, as opposed to audience growth). They are wild gardens, often mere patches, of vital significance to the literary ecosystem.

This is an updated version of an essay first published in Descant 91, Winter 1995.