November/December 2015
Michael Szczerban
State:
Washington
Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.
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One might not expect to find the center of American poetry here, hanging off the northwest corner of the country, in a white building set on the grounds of a decommissioned military base. But this is where Copper Canyon Press operates: Fort Worden, in Port Townsend, Washington. From just a few rooms in what was once a cannon foundry, Copper Canyon has achieved outsize national and international acclaim.
Founded on a shoestring in 1972 by Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson, with Bill O’Daly and Jim Gautney, Copper Canyon Press started as a letterpress printer of poetry. Four decades later it has published more than four hundred titles, including winners of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes and the National Book Award, and inspired countless other independent-minded editors to start their own presses.
At the center of the publishing operation today is editor in chief Michael Wiegers, who started working there in 1993 (two years after Swenson left the press, following her separation from Hamill). After working for years in the poetry section of bookstores in Boston and the Twin Cities, followed by a stint at Coffee House Press, where he learned about editing and publishing under the late Allan Kornblum, Wiegers joined Copper Canyon as its managing editor, and over time his responsibilities accrued. After Hamill left in 2004, Wiegers was named executive editor. Now with a small team, and still an independent nonprofit, Copper Canyon publishes twenty books a year.
The authors Wiegers has published include W. S. Merwin, Ruth Stone, C. D. Wright, Ocean Vuong, Arthur Sze, Dean Young, Alberto Ríos, Matthew Zapruder, Brenda Shaughnessy, Frank Stafford, Ted Kooser, Roger Reeves, and Michael Dickman. He has also published major works in translation, including those by Taha Muhammad Ali, Ho Xuan Huong, and Pablo Neruda—whose collection of previously lost poems, Then Come Back, will be published by Copper Canyon in 2016.
How did you find your way to Copper Canyon?
After college I worked for a stint at a brewery and then in bookstores. I had a good education, but in bookstores I felt a new freedom and liberty to just have at it with books. I could take them home to read at night and return them to the shelves the next day. The poetry sections were always neglected, going back to my first bookstore job and at each job after that. People came to know me as the guy who read poetry and could recommend it. There’s a certain degree of intimidation with poetry. But given my experience, I wasn’t intimidated.
Why weren’t you intimidated?
To an extent I have always approached poetry like the village idiot; I don’t need permission to read poetry and I’ve never felt that it is elitist. It feels natural to me. Other people in the bookstores probably came to it with a different experience, where poetry was a secret code that needed to be figured out.
Like everyone in my Jesuit high school, I had to memorize poetry. But I was into punk rock, and around the same time, my mom—who was more of a free spirit—gave me my first two poetry books of my own: the collected e. e. cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. I discovered another way of expression that was not only okay but celebrated. As I read more broadly, and the bookstores encouraged me to know what was out there, I dove into it.
Was there a particular reason you mom gave you those books specifically?
Because she had them on her shelf. [Laughs.]
She was a reader of poetry?
Yes, but not much. She went blind when I was ten years old, and I’ve never asked her how much poetry she read when she was younger. She’s still a reader—she listens to books—but it’s all prose. The programs that provide books for the blind don’t carry much poetry.
During the late sixties, my mom started getting a different consciousness and exploring new things. My dad was a very conservative Catholic. A year or two before the divorce, my mom started inviting friends—I’ll call them hippie priests—into our living room to conduct Mass with guitars and Kumbaya. She had a little bit of a rebellion going on, and some of that may have been expressed in poetry.
She was probably responding to my own rebellions too. I remember trying to sell her on some kind of teenage bullshit—that punk rock was so philosophical. She’d say, “That’s not philosophy.” When I would turn to books like Stephen King, she’d say, “No, you don’t want to read that,” and give me something else. There was rebellion and snobbery, encouragement and redirection.
Was there a subversive aim with the books? To teach you something?
I don’t think that there was any subversive aim with the books she gave me, though I wouldn’t put it past her. I grew up with my dad and saw my mom once a month. When she put those stick-on daisies all over my dad’s new car, though, that was kind of the end of the road.
Where did you go to college?
I’m just your basic BA, pretty much self-taught. I went to Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts school. From my Jesuit and college educations I learned good critical skills, but the bookstores were where the doors blew open and I read and read and read.
How did you get from Kalamazoo to the Twin Cities?
I lived with my mom in St. Louis for a spell. Then, when the constant audio books drove me crazy, I moved to Boston and worked in a bookstore there, barely making rent. My plan had been to save up to travel more overseas, but I decided instead to head across the country in the opposite direction. I had an old 1968 Volkswagen bus that I had bought in Kalamazoo when I was brewing beer.
Please tell me you had a name for it.
Um, yes I did. Uncle Henry. [Laughs.] After I left Boston, it broke down in Minneapolis. I had an old friend from Kalamazoo there; I crashed at her place, slept on her couch, and got a job at the local bookstore. I got the van fixed but never left. A couple winters later, the van wouldn’t start because of the snow, and I had already spent too much on parking tickets, so I walked into the bookstore and said, “There’s a free VW van to whomever can move it within the next two hours before the plows come.” One of my coworkers raced out and kept it going for another two years.
I had actually been heading to Seattle. These were the early grunge days. I’ve always been somewhat motivated by music, and I wanted to go be a part of the scene. Minneapolis ended up being a six- or seven-year detour on my way.
That sounds like a joke—you drove in, broke down, and decided to stay.
Yeah, and I loved it.
Eventually, a colleague from a Minneapolis bookstore got a job at a local newspaper and hired me to write book reviews, and that led to writing for a couple of other papers in town. One of those early reviews was of Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems, which is still the touchstone book for me. He’s my poet, the one who drew me to Copper Canyon. That book won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and I fell in love with it. I wrote a glowing review that led the people at Copper Canyon to know me.
Then, when I worked at Coffee House Press, we shared distributors and Copper Canyon’s managing editor and I would correspond. She recommended me to the board of directors when she left. That’s how I got here back in 1993. When the job came up, they flew me out on a beautiful day. I walked down the dock that goes out over the water here, looked out at Mount Baker, and said, “Hell yeah, I want this.”
Tell me about your time at Coffee House Press.
I loved working there and learned a lot from Allan Kornblum. My title when I started may have been editorial assistant, but I was really an administrative assistant. Then, as the slush pile grew it became mine to manage, so I hired volunteer readers and interns to get the work read. I started editing and copyediting, and became associate editor before I left. I was able to grow my editorial role there because it was more than a single individual can do. In a lot of ways this job is bigger than any of us. There’s always an opportunity to do more, to do better. Isn’t publishing, after all, about making public?
I’m sure there are things now that fall through the cracks, and I hope they are recognized and picked up as opportunities by interns and other editorial staff. Even though I want to do it all, and I am a bit megalomaniacal in that way, there are things that are going to fall off my desk. We need more intelligence, certainly, than my own to keep track of it all.
When you moved to Copper Canyon, what did your job entail?
When I started as the managing editor, it was just Sam Hamill and me. We hired a former intern as the office manager and assistant. I was doing bookkeeping on little notepads and marketing and publicity and production. Over many years my position evolved into executive editor and then to editor in chief. Three years ago we hired Tonaya Craft as managing editor, and her primary job is running production—being the conduit for our designers, copyeditors, authors, proofreaders, and me. She keeps the trains moving on time. Increasingly she’s doing some hands-on editing herself.
Back in 1993, how many books did Copper Canyon publish a year?
The first year I was here, we published four books. When Sam left in 2004 we were doing about fourteen, and now we’re up to about twenty.
Are you still looking to increase the number of books you publish?
I always want to publish more books. At heart I want to say no less and yes more often. Over many years you want to continue to commit to the people you’ve published in the past, but you also have to bring in new voices. But without publishing more books, people have to start dying or they have to stop writing. I hope neither of those things happen, because many of our poets are dear friends and close confidants. My impulse has been to support their work as best, and as reliably, as I can. So that has necessitated adding more books. When I sign on a new author, I’m looking at that book first and foremost. But I’m also looking at the author and the longer tail.
Agent Michael Wiegers
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You’re imagining the arc of a person’s future career?
Right. Maybe not the arc of a whole career, though that would be ideal—and I can think of a number of poets for whom we’ve published everything, and we envisioned that from the start. But I would never rubber-stamp any writer, for that writer’s own good. If somebody has been working with me across four or five books and sends a manuscript that repeats earlier work, I need the courage to say, “It’s not there, let’s keep working on it.” Those are hard conversations. I want to make certain that I check all of my prejudices. If I really care for someone I still have to be a hard critic—particularly if I really care.
That courage must come from a conviction about the work. How do you develop that conviction?
It comes from practice and learning on the job, realizing that a decision I make now may have an impact ten years from now. We all go into this because we want longevity. We want something of the eternal, if I can be a little pretentious about it. We want to be seen and acknowledged and remembered over the course of our lifetimes. When I work with someone I want to perpetuate that person’s career, to have it seen as an important body of work, to have a longer view of the work that we’re doing. Maybe the egotistical side of me wants to say, “Hey, I was that editor.”
I’ll go back to entering as the village idiot. Even someone like W. S. Merwin, who has published dozens of books and been awarded heavily, still wants an honest reading. I have his new manuscript right now and I will tell him what I’m seeing. Most likely he’ll say, “Well, I’m doing that because of this.” But entering those conversations with an author may turn the book away from some of its weaknesses, or it may help me advocate for what the author is doing. Both the thrill and the responsibility of the work are in asking those questions.
There are some authors I probably wasn’t hard enough on. You're not going to prevent negative reviews, but if you’re on your game as an editor you can protect the author from the obvious.
What does an ideal editor look like to you?
The idea I use to explain that is from Odysseas Elytis, the Greek Nobel Prize winner, from a book we published called Open Papers. He talks about every writer wanting a third reader. The first reader is your mom, dad, brother, sister, lover, husband, whatever. The second reader is that colleague, another writer—in this day and age, somebody in your workshop who is going to read your work with sensitivity, sensibility, and understanding. Any writer worth her salt has at least two good readers. But everyone seeks the third reader, an unknown beloved. In many ways I aspire to be a professional third reader and to meet people where they are.
The challenge for me as an editor, and maybe as a person, is not to be too judgmental up front. I take in as much of the picture as I can and then bring my critical skills to it. A lot of the people I know come from vastly different backgrounds than I do, or they may have little in common with the reality of my life. But that is what interests me. Editing is the opportunity to learn more.
It’s a challenge that with all we need to do to put a book out into the world—from making the physical object to publicity and marketing—we don’t spend enough time talking about the why of poetry. Why are we engaging in this? We don’t get to talk about why poetry has been the carrier of civilization from the start, from that first human scream. I look at each book we publish as another opportunity to recharge those batteries, to say, “Oh yeah, that’s why.”
In this day and age, the book business is so difficult. But the book business has been difficult in every day and age. There’s the joke that after Gutenberg published his Bible, his second book was about the death of the publishing industry. We all like to complain, but each time I enter into that sacred space with an author, it revives my life in the world of poetry. I hope to cast some of that enthusiasm into the world in the form of the books we publish. I love being able to say that we’ve got something I’m really excited about. That’s the publishing impulse: “Hey, you’ve got to read this.”
When did you first start translating poems yourself?
I first translated poems when I lived in Spain for a year as an undergrad, just out of personal curiosity. I started doing it on a more professional level when I was editing Reversible Monuments with Mónica de la Torre, and she suggested I try it. I think my first response was, “No, I can’t. I’m the editor, not a translator,” but then I started doing it and loved it. I would like to do more; it’s just a time issue. But I think I’m a much better editor than I am a translator, so I put my efforts there. The thing with translations is there’s always the original to compare them against and to show you where you failed. There’s that phrase traduttore, traditore: “translator, traitor.” You’re going to be held accountable to the original. But certainly somebody can look at the books we’ve published and say I suck as an editor, just as easily as that person can say I suck as a translator. [Laughs.]
But no one will compare the finished book to the unedited first draft until long after you’re dead, if ever.
Right. There’s also a little self-consciousness, plus being a perfectionist and believing, “No, I have to do this right.” Forrest Gander told me to just let it go at a certain point and not revisit it, because as a translator you can just keep revising.
I like that process, but it takes a different mindset and I need to close everything else out in order to get there. It takes longer for me to get into that role than it does for me to sit down and read a manuscript. I know that I can go home this weekend and edit two or three books, whereas in a weekend I may struggle to translate one poem to my satisfaction. But I love that translation forces me to slow down.
One thing I love about poetry is that it forces me to read and to be interrupted in a different way, to slow down, to pause. “Why is the line written that way?” Translation slows that down even further. It’s like I have to switch linguistic brains too, and have a conversation between the two languages.
It seems to me that the original poem also gets edited in the act of translation. How much do you make the translated poem your own?
I think you have to make the translated poem its own: It must become a poem in the language you’re translating into. I want that to happen without too many liberties, to have a poem that at least suggests the original. I’m trying to remember a poem that John Balaban translated, a Ho Xuan Huong poem written in Vietnamese. The tonal character of the language makes it sound like rain falling. He makes some vocabulary adjustments to create the same sound while conveying the same meaning. It’s not a verbatim translation but it’s trying to bring forth some of the characteristics beyond the vocabulary to make the poem more in parallel to the original. You’ve got to make some impositions along the way to bring your language to the original, or the original to your language.
Translated works have always been a part of Copper Canyon’s history. Where did that come from?
All the founders were very much into translation. One of the first successes of the press was Bill O’Daly’s translation of Still Another Day by Pablo Neruda. That book established that translations actually do well and they enliven poetry in the original. I think it’s been in the ethos of the press since then.
Let’s talk about the roots of Copper Canyon. How did the press begin?
It depends on who you talk to—I’ve heard various stories over the years. My understanding is that it all started when Sam Hamill and Bill O’Daly were editing a magazine out of UC Santa Barbara and they won an award from what was at the time the CCLM [Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, now the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses]. With that money they bought their first printing press. I don’t know if Tree Swenson was editing then—she may have been working on that literary journal—and she and Sam were a couple. But Jim Gautney is the founder I’m intrigued by, because he was the one who taught them all how to print using letterpress. I’ve looked for him at various times but can’t find him.
I think that a lot of presses start that way, with people behind the scenes and in the shadows who we never see. That’s not to discredit those we do see. I suspect Jim never asked for attention yet was instrumental in giving the others the knowledge to start the press.
They started in Denver when Tree and Sam and Bill were living together; Jim may have been living with them also. Then they were invited to come to Port Townsend by Centrum, an arts organization here, and so they all moved. My understanding is that Bill and Sam worked in a porn bookstore for their day jobs while they were starting the press. I’m not certain what year Bill left, but I think it was after the first couple years here in Port Townsend. Then it operated pretty much as a mom and pop shop with Sam and Tree and their friends.
A few years later Sam and Tree essentially sold the press to itself and created a nonprofit. That was a year or two before I arrived. The nonprofit status allowed us to get grants directly from the NEA, the Lila Wallace Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. They were instrumental in developing independent and nonprofit publishing as we know it today.
When did Sam Hamill leave the press?
I think Sam left the press about ten years ago or so, but again, like Allan Kornblum, he’s one of my great mentors. Allan taught me to be more of a publisher and Sam taught me to be more of an editor.
Would you explain the distinction?
Publishing is about getting the books out there, about getting an audience and expanding the reach of the book. It’s about making something public. Editing is about close contact with the text, and also about advocacy. Advocacy for the author, advocacy for the art form.
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There’s a difference between being somebody who’s interested in making this great object—that would be the editor—and somebody who trusts that the object is great and wants to get it to the world: the publisher. Sam was more of an editor than he was a publisher. I shouldn’t speak for him, but I think sometimes he saw marketing as a dirty word—but if you were to recast that as helping someone get an audience, that’d be fine.
Sam has a lot of conviction on how things should be done, that there’s a right way and a wrong way to edit a book. Shortly after I first started, he and I were talking about letterpress. He made a comment about type punching into the paper to make an impression. I said I was taught that for an even impression, you should have the type merely kiss the paper. He said, “No, you want to punch it!” Some of us are punch, some of us are kiss. [Laughs.] But that’s Sam. Make that impression, sink it deep, and make it lasting. That’s what he’s done.
One of our poets recently asked me for some recommendations for prose poems, and I caught myself echoing Sam: “That’s an oxymoron—there’s no such thing as a prose poem!” I have learned some ways of being from Sam, and ways of looking at poetry and how you make books.
What other impressions did Sam leave on you?
One of the main things is the importance of tradition and seeing new voices fit into it. This wall of books in my office is my model; I’ve tried to build a conversation among them. I like to think that when I go home at night that one book is arguing with or cajoling another. Sam helped me to say, “Okay, this is working out a tradition that has always been a part of the press, or has been a part of poetry, and this is pushing against that tradition.”
He also influenced me in terms of design and texts like Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style or Adrian Wilson’s The Design of Books. I learned to carry forth the tradition of letterpress into what we do now, and be kind of particular. Sam wasn’t a great copyeditor or proofreader, but he had a good eye, and so did Tree. A lot of the designs that first drew me to the press were from Tree’s hand.
What did you do when you first joined the press?
The press was recovering when I came in. First of all, there were a number of books that had been delayed—and I further delayed them. I was the managing editor, and managing our schedule meant determining what we could get out, and when. I had a plan for how to get out the books that we had under contract, after which we could start gradually building the list.
I remember calling Carolyn Kizer when I was still drying off behind the ears. “Hi, I’m Michael, I want to introduce myself and give you the good news that Proses is back on track and we plan to release it” in whatever month. She said, “Oh, great, just in time for it to go into the toilet.” Click.
You haven’t made it in this business if a writer has never hung up on you! [Laughs.]
There was a lot of uncertainty. There were several books that had been hung up in the middle of Sam and Tree’s divorce. My job, in essence, was to help make a big transition away from being exclusively founder-driven. Mary Jane Knecht had been doing all this work behind the scenes, and it was her decision to resign that turned the applecart over and caused changes at the press. There are moments when no individual can contain it all. Eventually there were more new people here than there were original people, and the press started growing.
Did the editorial mission or composition of the list change during that period?
It started to. For example, there were a number of people who had been with the press before we started hiring new staff. I remember going to Sam with C. D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining and saying we should really publish it. This is one of the models I learned from: Sam said, “Okay, I don’t get it, but let’s publish it if you’re that committed to it.” I hope to do that as an editor also. There are books where I don’t get it or it may not be my cup of tea, but I’ll listen to others.
I’m a terrible ruminator. I can like a book but say, “What about this, or what about that?” It’ll take me forever, and then someone here on staff like our managing editor, Tonaya Craft, will say, “What are you waiting for? It’s a great book.” Sometimes I need that little push.
Has the idea of what makes a Copper Canyon book changed?
I hope so. Our list has expanded in a variety of directions. We had been really successful in a particular aesthetic and a particular demographic.
What do you mean?
The joking way to put it is that there were a lot of middle-aged, white, male Buddhists. There are a lot of middle-aged, white, male poets. I’m a middle-aged, white, male, nonpoet. As much for my own personal interest as anything else, I get excited by something that’s different. It’s good to have a knowledge of the traditions but also to work against them.
When I started we had two people of color on the list. That’s changed, though we can still make improvements. There weren’t many women on our list. We are changing that, too. Aesthetically, it’s changed quite a bit. I’ve always gravitated towards West Coast poetics and the influence of Asia, but I’ve brought in more people who were from the East Coast, knowing that it’s not a binary. We’ve brought in more young poets and started to look at different kinds of projects.
One of my strategies as an editor has been to expand. I see the value in focusing on one area but I like being more encyclopedic. I turn to books not for what I already know, but to be surprised.
How you would define a Copper Canyon book now?
Irreducible. It also has lineage, an awareness of the tradition of poetry.
Does your editing style change with the material you’re editing?
My style is to enter into the space that the author is trying to create, meeting authors on their terms. I try to be aware of my own biases and editing tics. I try to meet the text where it is, instead of bending it to who I am, but I will challenge poets to make certain that they’re being intentional in their choices. When they are, I back off. There’s probably a difference in how I approach poets relative to where they are in their careers, though.
Do you mean that you might be more hands-on with somebody who’s written a first book than with a veteran writer like W. S. Merwin?
It’s hard to generalize. I do know that Merwin wants a close read on his new book, in part because of how it was composed—the conditions under which it was written meant that he’s feeling a little more need for guidance. Some poets entering into their first book want an editor to work with it. Other first-book poets have been workshopping the material for ten years and the last thing they want is some guy in the corner of Washington telling them to change this or that.
If I’ve worked with somebody over the course of several books, I may have a different sensibility in how I approach the new material. I may just cut through all the bullshit and be really direct in my commentary, or I might recognize a sensitive spot and come at it from a different angle. It may relate to age—recognizing that people are at different places in their careers and may be expecting more or less.
I’d like to hear more about your editing tics. It’s rare for an editor to reveal that about himself.
And it may continue to be rare. [Laughs.]
Well, I’ll acknowledge too that I have my own tics and fallback positions—I’m just not fully aware of them.
The obvious one I’ve mentioned is a knee-jerk reaction towards prose poems. I enter them with my biases. I’m still waiting: Maybe one of our other editors will say, “We really have to publish this. These are prose poems like they’ve never been done before!” Of course, I’ll probably say, “Because they’ve never been done!”
I also always go in and look at how a poet is using their pronouns. If there’s overuse of a certain pronoun, like if “it” is being used as a generalization, I’ll want you to be more concrete. There’s also the obvious use of the first person pronoun.
This seems more like a strategy to me than a tic that gets in the way of good editing.
It is, but maybe it’s too easy.
A quick way to respond when you could be reaching for a deeper analysis?
Right. There are also typographic things. I never know how to pronounce this and I should probably look it up if I’m going to use it, but I’m thinking of majusculation, when the first letter of a line is capitalized. Microsoft Word does that automatically, so if I see somebody who's writing that way, I assume they just haven’t turned that off in their program instead of choosing to do it thoughtfully.
The flip side of the tic might be the blind spot, the thing that you tend to miss.
At the acquisition level I sometimes miss the larger arc. I may be reading and missing a throughline because I’m being expedient and I’ve got five hundred manuscripts in my queue. I’ve got blind spots about incorrect grammar and when I see our copy editor go through a book, I think, “Damn, he’s good.” The things I miss are usually in pursuit of expediency.
What would poets of all kinds benefit from hearing?
One of the biggest things is to be respectful to the unknown people. There’s a tendency to say things like, “I don’t want an intern reading my manuscript,” or “I want to go to the editor in chief, not the associate editor.” But nothing turns me away faster from a book than somebody who wants to bypass the “underlings” or however they see those people.
One, I was one of those people. Two, they keep me honest in making my final decision. Three, they can be a poet’s greatest advocate. I won’t tolerate disrespect for somebody just because you don’t know their name or because they’re younger.
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Let’s say I have a manuscript of poems and send it to you. How would that become a Copper Canyon acquisition?
If you were to just send it to me as an e-mail attachment, I’d say, “Thanks, I’m not reading right now. Send your book through our open reading period.” During that period, the books come in and are assigned to at least two readers. And then we just go through and figure out how much further we want to pursue each of them.
This is for every one of the two thousand manuscripts you receive a year?
Yes.
Is the ultimate decision in your hands, or do you need to involve others who help manage the press?
It’s my job to decide. If I know a book will require significant resources, it becomes a management issue. In general, we have a budget and a certain number of slots. For those slots the editorial choice is mine—I’m looking at the larger budget, how much do we have already, what might this book sell, how to get the pieces to fit.
The Pablo Neruda book we recently announced was different. We knew we needed a large advance, that it was going to be a big print run, and that it was going to require a lot of staff resources. I knew that we should do it, and I wanted to do it, so I let people know I was going after it and kept them informed. I whooped and hollered on Christmas Eve when I got the manuscript, and by New Year’s, George Knotek and Joseph Bednarik and I were sitting down with some of our board members. Everyone thought we had to do the book, but also recognized it would be a challenge.
For books where we’re less certain of the sales or our ability to raise funds for them—they are questioned in retrospect, I guess, but I also know well enough that there are few risks that I can take as an editor—and I can only take them if they’re balanced with the other books. To an extent, my colleagues have to trust that I’m picking good material.
I’ve had a couple of instances when a book hasn’t done well and somebody asks what the hell I was thinking. I can say that it didn’t go as we expected, but the reasoning was sound. I try to create a mix. It’s almost like making a book. You don’t want to have all sonnets or villanelles or blank verse. If you can show a mixture that’s serving the larger whole, it makes for a more interesting book.
Tell me about working with your board of directors. Does that committee have a homogenizing effect on your publishing choices?
Basically, I’m choosing books and trying to build a coalition around those choices. But I’m also choosing those books with input from other people as well. The board’s primary aim is to make certain that we’re being wise with the money that’s entrusted to us by donors—that’s their governance role.
Their other role is to get out and help us raise funds for the press. The way you get people excited about doing that is to get them excited about the books. The way you excite them about the books is by how you discuss the work. If an intern is really excited about a book, and conveys that excitement to me, and I convey it to the board, that’s not homogenizing at all. That’s bringing in all sorts of different perspectives.
We are all cognizant that this is a business, and we need to make money in order to convey the mission well. But the bottom line isn’t the mission. The mission is to create a vibrant body of poetry. How can we be creative within the strictures of that? How do we turn those limitations into advocacy?
In general, the way I’ve approached being our artistic director is to bring in different opinions and honor them and sometimes disagree with them. Now our challenge is how we take somebody’s first book and make an audience for it. When our board is holding me accountable, it isn’t going to be for the critical response to our work. It’s for what our business is like, and do we have the right product mix, if you will.
There have been years when we’ve not done as well. Is that because of the books, or because of the economy, or the state of philanthropy, or the book world? If you can articulate why you chose a book and what in the collection of poems made you want to choose it, for the most part we all recognize that some things can be a good choice aesthetically but the chips may not have fallen in our favor.
What do you consider when estimating the sales potential of a book?
We talk a lot about comps, or comparable titles—what’s out there in the world of poetry that is similar or that reflects what this book is going after. It might be the style of documentary poetics or addressing a certain topic. You figure out the comps, then go on to Nielsen BookScan to see how much they sold to develop a good target. You figure that you can expect a certain amount in sales.
Then we put that projection into our larger mix and shift pieces around—how it falls within our budget. You always hope for situations like when Ted Kooser came to us with Delights and Shadows. I had asked him what his best-selling book was: about 1,500 copies. I was a little cocky and thought we’d do better than that.
And then Delights and Shadows sold, what, a hundred thousand copies?
But we printed 2,000 or 2,500 copies at first. To me, that was already doing better than the last book. But we had no idea he would be named poet laureate and then win the Pulitzer Prize. That’s playing the lottery. We’re in a hits business. If the book is a hit, then you made a great decision. If it’s not, then…
Next time.
Next time. And if they’re consistently not, then I’m out of here. We’ve had some good runs, and some runs that have just been okay. I still love those books. There are a couple poets on our list whose work I just absolutely love, and who I will go to the wall for even though the rest of the world doesn’t see it yet. The readership isn’t there yet for whatever reason, but I think they’re brilliant. I will still advocate for those books. As an organization we’ve embraced the concept of what we call “mission books.” We need to allow for those, and sometimes those mission books end up exploding.
How did the new Neruda book come to Copper Canyon?
Pretty much every morning I read the New York Times, the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Huffington Post—a bunch of different things, just my regular wasting the morning over tea. Last summer there was an article in the Guardian about a newly discovered manuscript of Neruda poems. I immediately wrote to the foundation and to the agent. At that point scholars were still authenticating it. I just said that when it’s ready I’d love to have Copper Canyon see the manuscript. Then, after a couple more notes, I received an e-mail from one of the agents with the manuscript on Christmas Eve.
In the original Spanish?
The original with the ephemera. It was locked down tight. I could not even print it out. I read it on my computer, and thought, “Wow, these are good!” I didn’t expect them to be, but they were.
There is always that question with a lost manuscript. Was it lost, or was it discarded?
When I got it I told everybody here, and they already knew how I was champing at the bit. Right after New Year’s we met with a couple of our board members and told them about the opportunity: how we thought it was a big book and how it fit into the press given all of our other Neruda titles, what we’d need for an advance, how many copies we would print, a preliminary budget. We wanted the board to get behind it and to help us with fund-raising. A couple of these representative members agreed that we had to do it.
The first thing we did was set the advance with the agents. Then we turned to several key constituents and asked them to commit to providing what we needed. They came back and said yes, and we talked about the costs for the book itself. So we went ahead, knowing we had the advance covered and we had donors providing some more for the actual production.
Then we began to brainstorm our marketing plan, our publicity plan, how many galleys to print, what’s the postage to send them, what we’ll do on social media. We presented the Balcells agency, which represents the Neruda estate, with a full package. Finally we heard that the estate wanted to go with us, given the work we had already done with Neruda’s books in the past.
It was almost like a capital campaign. We joke that Copper Canyon is the house that Neruda built, so this gives us another opportunity to talk more about our whole list.
What is the process of bringing those lost poems to print in English?
I read the poems in Spanish and thought they were really good, but then we needed to decide on a translation with the agency. But to do good translations you do need to slow down. That’s why we sat on the information for a while—so that when we announced the book, we had some translations to use as examples for media.
Now that we’ve had them translated and copy edited, we’re moving toward design. Full color is a new thing for us, and we’re trying to figure out where to print, what the best design will be. Where do we want to go with this? We have a series that’s designed to go together; does this book do the same thing or does it cut its own path? Is it going to be hardcover or paperback?
It’s interesting to hear you describe a book as a capital campaign. If it takes off, it could supply years of future expansion for the press.
It’s also this: Neruda is foundational to this place, and this is shoring up that foundation. We have the whole body of his late work and some of his great love poems.
There’s a story I’ve told many times before about a couple who sent us a donation of five hundred or a thousand dollars here and there. One of our board members knew them personally and invited me to have lunch with them. Beforehand, I was told that the husband was a World War II veteran, a pilot, a hunter—a man’s man. I wondered what this guy was going to talk to me about.
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He had recently had a heart attack, and his wife was recovering from cancer. They came into the restaurant and sat down with their daughter. At a certain point Pablo Neruda came up. The daughter said, “Dad, tell Michael what you did,” and he said, “Oh, no,” and went into that shy space that people get around poetry. Finally, the story came out. A few months earlier for Christmas he had gotten out his best fountain pen and he wrote out Neruda’s sonnet that says, essentially, when I die I want you to go on living; I want you to be my eyes, to be my ears, so all the world can know “the reason for my song.” This man of considerable means chooses this, of all things, to give to his ill wife.
I realized that we have something people want. Even though we can sometimes devalue poetry and see it as not being vital, this is what people want. This man came to events for years before he died. He showed up in a wheelchair to hear the Dickman brothers read two days after he had a heart attack.
When we got this Neruda book, I saw that it has the capacity to move people, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with this man’s widow. This book is also going to make it possible for us to do other books that may be more difficult to sell. That was part of our planning. We plotted it out: If we do this, we can do that. I hope I’m not wrong!
I was going to ask what keeps you up at night, but I think I know.
This and so many other things. After we did all of this with Neruda, I just got a new manuscript from W. S. Merwin. I thought we might never see another manuscript from him, because of his age and health. He’s lost his eyesight and his writing has trickled to the point where he composes poems in his head and dictates them to his wife. When I got his new manuscript, I thought: “Yes! No! I’ve got these two big projects—and this is another that I need to go to the board and ask for help.” It’s a good thing, and once again our board agreed that we had to do it. If you bring everybody into the larger understanding, it becomes a group decision in that way. I can’t do this alone.
Now that you brought up Merwin, can I ask you about a letter you wrote in his defense in the wake of a bad review of his Migration?
Oh no.
You defended him, but I was most interested in what you said about the economics of poetry. We’ve talked about the economics of running the press, but not about the economic life of the poets whose work you publish.
Right—and there is no economic life for poets. At least that’s true relative to the books. Poets are not making money off the books. The way that Merwin has is because he’s written a number of them, so at this point he gets royalties from several books, and in the past he used to benefit from reading and speaking gigs. He was able to cobble together a living without having to teach, but that’s not going to happen for the majority of poets.
Let’s get beyond this fucking whack-a-mole game in poetry where if anybody gets any sort of attention, we bang it down. There’s a reason that people have to teach in order to continue this art. It’s one of the few ways that you can get insurance for your kids or make a livable wage, but it reinforces the notion that poetry is something of the ivory tower. In order to survive as a poet you’ve got to get a job and the most likely ones are in universities. With the rise of adjuncting, even that’s not what it used to be.
I’ve not always been the smartest of businessmen, but in the past I would front-load advances as much as possible. We’ve got a number of unpaid advances on the books that we’ve had to write off. Part of that is just recognizing that a poet may have worked on a book for ten years, and we’ve offered a two-thousand-dollar advance. Just calculate the hourly wage.
I’d love to come up with a strategy that recognizes poets but also allows us to survive as a publisher. A way that’s appreciative of the economics all around: for the publisher, for the poet. Right now I do think that having a book is going to help a poet land a job or reading gig or whatever, so it’s not just about the royalties. But the economics for the poet are terrible.
Do you see something happening to the audience for poetry?
I would guess that audiences are becoming more tribalized, and moving into smaller but more concentrated groups. But I want a vibrant, inclusive art that is expanding to larger audiences. I hope for more books like Richard Siken’s Crush, which has increased in sales every year since it was published. That was ten years ago, and it keeps going up. It’s touching people. I don’t think it got great reviews out of the gate, but it has kept growing by word of mouth. And Richard is somebody who’s largely outside of academia.
One of my concerns is that poets will only read their own work. They’ll read their friends, they’ll read their colleagues, they’ll read the next hot poet. I was just at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference with a group of fellows, and I asked them who they thought was doing really well right now. I went back and looked at Bookscan and saw that those people had sold only five hundred books—but the perception is that those poets were rock stars. Then you do a comparison and the people you may look down upon may sell much more. That’s not an aesthetic judgment but just what our perceptions are.
What kind of legacy do you hope to leave behind?
To train some great editors. To be publishing books that last twenty years, fifty years, books that are meaningful into the future. I would love to see all our books sell long into the future. I would love for this place to keep thriving and continue to be irreducible. I would love to see more translations.
I would love to see two or three poets who are to their generation what Merwin is to ours. Look at the past couple of years. We’re losing a great generation of poets. Levine, Kinnell, Strand. There are a lot of really good poets writing today, but we don’t have a coherent “wow” generation. I would love to see something like that coming from our books.
To stake out new territory?
And to change how poetry is being written. Take Merwin and writing without punctuation. That was a revolutionary, groundbreaking tactic. This may be me being an old fuddy-duddy, but you see a lot of poets writing like that today, and I don’t think they’re necessarily doing it with a full understanding of his reasoning. But I would love to see these books giving rise to a great moment in American poetry.
It seems that two priorities for you are originality and justice. Is that so?
On one hand, I don’t directly subscribe to a poetry that “does” something—but at the same time I believe in its power to do something. I don’t think that art or poetry needs to set out to change the world but I think that it can change the world and make us more compassionate, more just, more aware. Those are but a few of the things that poetry can enable in us, and I want to engage poetry because I do want to make change in how we view ourselves, how I view myself.
I think you do that by being original. You do that by changing the point of reference a little bit, by giving another view of the blackbird. Our mission says that we believe that poetry is vital to language and living. I want us to inhabit that mission for years to come. Poets have the capacity to expand and propel the conversation.
What are you chasing?
It’s probably the notion of that larger, enlightened readership. Maybe it’s not the sort of thing that I can create, but I want it. I want it to happen. That may have to come from the poets themselves rather than my thinking that through publishing we can make a great readership. I hope I can contribute by providing poets with beautiful books that will make people want to read and share their work.
You’ve worked at independent bookstores and independent presses. What is the relationship between them?
In both cases, individuals share a love of the sacred space of reading a book. Both are propelled by faith in the word. That sounds quasi-religious, but I think that words put in the right order can propel and enlighten and enliven us, and do positive things. They can make us angry as hell, too.
I think that independent bookstores are also at their root a missionary sort of endeavor. It’s hard to make money in them; that’s why so many have gone under. But they allow for independent, individual voices to emerge. I remember sitting down years ago with the poetry book buyer for our certain unnamed chain. She typed in the name of a poet and said, “We’ve sold ten copies of this person’s book,” and the conversation was over—whereas I could go to an independent bookstore and have a real conversation and get somebody excited. That independent bookseller might sell more in that single store than the chain sells in the entire country.
Do you sometimes suffer from overload? What’s your response to it?
First of all, some self-compassion. I have this desire to engage all these things and realize that I can’t but still keep trying. If I can get out into the woods, up into the Olympics, that’s when I’m my best self. When I go out to a writers conference and I’m sitting around talking about poetry—not the difficulties of publishing it—that gets me excited and brings back learning to this place. I practice yoga. That doesn’t help me with the reading, but if I’m walking alone in the Olympics and following my heartbeat and my breath, that gets me thinking about poems. The beats of our hearts, the rhythms of our breath, all of these provide a form in the world. That’s what art is doing also, trying to make sense of the world.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown.