My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

PROVISIONAL INSTITUTIONS 153
articulate an aesthetic commitment with its choices, as well as being able
to include presses and magazines too small to be handled by other distributors.
In addition, Segue included selections of small press books and
magazines from the UK, as well as New Zealand and Australia. Segue Distributing
was discontinued this year after losing its government grant support.
I suspect that in the future activities such as Segue's will best be handled
through electronic bulletin boards or similar formats.
One of Segue's most useful assets is its mailing list, which it makes available
to affiliated presses. The mailing list keeps track of a shifting community
of readers, with special attention to the local audience that wishes
to receive notices of readings as well as the national and international audience
that wishes to receive notices of book and magazine publications.
I say community because audience is too passive a term to describe this matrix
and because there is a tendency to speak of community when referring
to a small press readership or, especially, the local"scene" for a reading
series or a magazine. But I resist the term community as well, since it
is more accurate to think of constellations of active readers interested in
exchange but not necessarily collectivity.
While much distribution of poetry takes place in the mail, we all owe
a great debt to the few remaining independent bookstores that make an
effort to keep in stock a full range of poetry titles. There is no substitute
for flipping through new books and magazines in a bookstore, and such
bookstores themselves are crucial sites of whatever a poetry community
might be.
We also owe a debt to those publications that are committed to reviewing
and discussing small press publications, since one of the most involving
aspects of the small press is the intensity of interchange that takes
place in reviews, letters, correspondence, and conversation. This is what
makes The American Book Review so much livelier than The New York Review oj
Books. At their best, reviews and essays in the alternative poetry press are
less concerned with evaluation than with interaction, participation, and
partisanship; in this respect, the prose of the small presses offers a refreshing
alternative to the evaluative focus of newspaper and mainstream magazine
reviews as well as the often stifling framelock of academic discourse.
Indeed, the literary small press provides a forum not just for innovation in
poetry but equally for innovation in prose, in the process demonstrating
that a free press means giving writers stylistic freedom, not simply the freedom
to express their opinions in mandated forms.
The power of our alternative institutions of poetry is their commitment
to scales that allow for the flourishing of the artform, not the maximizing
of the audience; to production and presentation not publicity; to explor-