Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

October 2010
Anny Ballardini: Could you please describe your Publishing House? Would you like to illustrate your work as a Poet?
Jeffrey Side: Argotist Ebooks publishes free poetry ebooks. The reasons they are free is that it costs nothing to
produce them, so to charge for them would be inappropriate. It is difficult to describe what Argotist Ebooks
publishes. So far, its publications have not conformed to any homogeneous poetic aesthetic. Broadly speaking,
though, most of its publications are what could be called “avant-garde”-a term that I’ve grown uneasy with, as it
has become meaningless given that there is now an academic poetic establishment that has co-opted the term for
itself, and is disseminating an academically sanctioned “avant-garde poetry”. So perhaps Argotist Ebooks is not
publishing “avant-garde” poetry at all, or at least not the sort that has been assimilated by the academy.
It’s difficult to illustrate my work, but here is a poem written in 1991, which few people have seen:
I watched you gather goldenrod in the fields.
I watched you swimming in the forest.
And I watched you keeping your hands upon your knees.
GOLDENROD
You breathe like a scientist.
And your breath becomes the count of dreams.
You smell as sweet as the secondhand books you throw away.
And you write in longhand on paper before the woods run out.
And the caverns in the earth are not singing.
And I cannot walk around the laboratory.
And I cannot rest my fingers.
And I cannot stay in when the sun is out.
I used to think you were a gift to the experimenters.
I used to think you were a gift to the men fighting for their home.
Or the men who cry on the heath and moors.
Or the men who fall in the underground.
Or the men who wait for us when the clock stops.
I watched you gather goldenrod in the fields.
The sun was escaping from your hair and your feet
were deep in the wet grass.
And your arms were filled with goldenrod.
Anny Ballardini: Are there any parameters by which you understand the political correctness of a literary work?
Could you please describe them? Could you give some examples based on the books you published?
Jeffrey Side: I can’t really answer the question, as I don’t believe that poetry that thinks of itself as political is of any
urgent relevance to the aesthetics of poetry, which has always been my main concern. I assume that some of those
poets who write what they call political poetry hope it will have some interest philosophically, if nothing else.
The failure of the high profile and well-supported political protest song “movement” in the USA in the 1960s should
be an indication that if such a popular and internationally well-publicised mass movement as that failed, then
certainly “political” poetry (avant-garde or otherwise) has little hope of success.
Anny Ballardini: What is the difference between online publishing and printed publishing in terms of involvement,
risks, returns be they monetary and/or in terms of feedback/gratification?
132