Something in from Near Waters: Small Anchor Press and the Dory Reader

A dory is a small fishing boat, not built to rough high seas, but designed to bring catch in from waters along the coastline. When I received a preliminary copy of Small Anchor Press’ Dory Reader in the mail, the first in what will be a serialized run of “disparate authors” throughout 2011, one author every month in your mailbox, I had the impression that the nautical motif was fitting in that the editions were compact, bringing poetry to my door, in effect using handmade craft to bring catch in from the whipping waters. But as I sat down with the first issue, poems by Jen Bervin, it became apparent to me that a dory, although modest in size, still conveys something from a larger body. The point, in other words, is to fish.

The analogy of the production of poetry to local fishing, as it might be understood by somebody like Olson in Gloucester, or Ferrini for that matter, or even Merrill in Stonington, presupposes a field of imagination in which culture is sustenance, and the poet the fisher just in with a net full of wriggling vittles. It should come as no surprise then, that Bervin (the first poet published in the series), has (through Ugly Duckling) published “NETS,” in which she strips “Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere.” Showing her erasures of Shakespeare in light gray print, her fish are given in black. The famous 18th becomes:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Letting the catch show through the erasures, her work in the Dory Reader is more evidently reticulated, or woven in such a manner that net shows. Lines of poetry, which appear embossed on the page, are painted over so that you see the bumps or shape of words pushing up against the shrouding brushstroke. Thicker strokes make some text unreadable. Varying thicknesses of paint therefore produce a range of readability or unreadability. Not every fish slithering in the catch, it seems, is meant to be ate: “the best part of the weaving/was the drawing pressed/up against threads so/carefully arranged/to look simple/ … /the best part of the drawing/was how the whiskers emerged/like comets on the face of/a leopard.”

Like a catfish trawled from the lower waters, Bervin’s poem captures a fitting emblem for the Small Anchor project. Not only do they publish original work by new poets, they are also bringing to the surface older albeit rarely seen works, such as Joe McElroy’s “Preparations for Search,” a much-speculated-upon section withheld from his 1987 work, Women and Men. Although I am told that the cover of the book is meant to convey “a coastline at the same time as representing a graph of randomness,” I cannot help but be reminded of Mandelbrot’s graphs for the fractalization of the English coastline in his famous essay, “How Long is the Coast of Britain?” The idea of auto-perpetuating self-similarity upon which Mandelbrot bases his theory of fractals is a good way to think about the publication of a piece of an author’s work, an unseen or unnoticed leaf-tip leading back in similar patterns through branches to the beastly tree.

Other hand-bound, limited edition works published by Small Anchor include Kimiko Hahn’s A Field Guide to the Intractable, Bridget Talone’s In the Valley Made Personal, and, forthcoming, Professional Human Beings, by Pauline Cavillot, a book of writings and interviews from New Orleans, with poems by Brett Evans, Michael Ford, Bill Lavender and Frank Sherlock. But subscriptions to the Dory Reader 2011 close in two days (December 15th). The series, which will feature one poet each month and will include printed and audio material delivered to your mailbox, features Jen Bervin, Sarah Dimick, Autumn Giles, Christian Hawkey, John Jodzio, Hoa Nguyen, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Sarah Sala, Chris Sawyer, Betsy Wheeler, and Matvei Yankelevich. With the series beginning next month, the chance to get ‘on-board’ rapidly departs.