“Chafing at the Margins”: An Interview with Joel Dailey

[“I’ve reveled in obscurity my whole writing life, and publishing with presses that were close to the ground, or even underground, well, they were a fit for my work, which is chafing at the margins . . . “]

Poet and publisher Joel Dailey is the author of Lower 48 (1999) and My Psychic Dogs My Life (2008), both from Lavender Ink. Since the mid-70s, he has published numerous chapbooks with small presses, including Surprised by French Fries (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), How to Wallpaper Like a Pro (Unarmed, 2007), Biopic (Igneus Press, 1999), Audience, Ambience, Ambulance (Blank Gun Press, 1999), and Mars, 1953 (Rumba Press, 1979). His magazine publications are too many to mention, but let’s just say they include Rolling Stone, Exquisite Corpse, Fuck, and New American Writing.
For many years Dailey has been an influential and generous presence in the New Orleans poetry community and far beyond. Through his long-running and iconoclastic magazine, Fell Swoop: The All Bohemian Revue*, he has published countless poets as well as many single-author issues by the likes of Ted Berrigan, Aram Saroyan Keith Abbott, Bill Berkson, and Richard Martin.
As for Dailey’s own poetry, Hank Lazer praises Lower 48 as “an energetic, humorous, edgy successor to Allen Ginsberg’s “America” in which “Dailey wanders this world of manipulative consumerism resisting its hold with his blazing stun-guns of outrage, paranoia, passion, and comedy, leaving a laminated America del Norte in his wake.”
And in My Psychic Dogs My Life, Kevin Killian “feel[s] the New Orleans gris-gris emanating from this book like candyfloss” and “the magic of a true trickster substituting words and ideas like dice in a shell game, conjuring spells on the unprepared.”
Samples of Dailey’s gris-gris can be found here, here, and here.
The following interview was conducted in one fell swoop, so to speak, on February 26, 2012.

* Subscription to the print-only Fell Swoop is $15 (USD) for three issues per year:
Fell Swoop / PO Box 740158 / New Orleans, LA / 70174 / USA

Camille Martin: Thanks, Joel, for sitting down with me in our respective cities of New Orleans and Toronto for this interview.

Some of your earliest poetry publications were in Rolling Stone, which you later collected into a chapbook, Not on the Cover. Before I knew that about you, I didn’t realize Rolling Stone was a haven for poetry. What was it like publishing there? Please tell me they paid you in concert tickets and coke bashes.

[“The Rolling Stone poems had to be brief, quick and clever….writing for this market was actually good exercise for me at that time.”]

Joel Dailey: Back in 1978 I was living in West Los Angeles working at a “literary” bookstore in Santa Monica called Intellectuals and Liars. At that time Rolling Stone was a newsprint weekly, publishing short poems between and among record reviews in the back pages of each issue. I don’t recall how or who but someone tipped me off that Charles Perry did the poetry editing out of the San Francisco office. So I sent off a batch of short poems and he took a couple. I later found out that Perry would have the accepted poems typeset and thumbtacked them all to a bulletin board. When an issue was nearly ready to go to print, he’d look for spaces in the record review section, and the poems which fit the openings were published. RS paid a modest sum upon publication, but I was convinced that hundreds of thousands of readers were having their lives changed by my little ditties hopping out of my typewriter. The RS poems had to be brief, quick and clever….writing for this market was actually good exercise for me at that time, as a writer I mean. How to say something deliberate and humorous, perhaps, was a challenge, and many of the ideas came right out of my journals from that time. To this day, my crisp journal entries, my habitual (yet another bad habit?) collecting of language sticks and stems, often leads to poems—or they become integral parts of poems. I still have the ten or so back issues of RS in which my poems can be found. The chapbook you mention is long out of print………..

CM: But thankfully not your long-overdue first book of poetry, Lower 48 (1999), nor My Psychic Dogs My Life (2008).

You’ve also published a plethora of chapbooks since 1975. The fifteen chaps of yours that grace the shelves of my left field poetry collection are gems of pop-culture mashup, cynical (and sometimes not-so-cynical) advice to the lovelorn, and other timeless matters. The earliest that I have is Positions, published by Morgan Press in 1976—a beauty of a little book.

Morgan Press and the others that have published your chapbooks read like a who’s who of renegade small presses from the 70s to the present: to name only a handful, Pentagram, Shockbox, Rumba Train, Blank Gun, Semiquasi, Lavender Ink, and of course your own self-styled “All Bohemian Revue,” the justly infamous Fell Swoop.

There’s a whiff of samizdat—or at least underground basement operation—about the small press culture and especially these chaps. Please describe your affinity for chapbooks, which you’ve made into a kind of art form in your oeuvre, and your experience publishing them with the small presses that you’ve worked with over the years.

[“I got a small printing press one Christmas and began printing The Garfield Gazette . . . I’d leave copies on the neighbors’ front porches.”]

JD: You’re probably the one person besides me who thinks Lower 48 was overdue…..When I was growing up the kinds of jobs I imagined one day having all had to do with communication: I wanted to be a radio announcer, a journalist, a teacher. I got a small printing press one Christmas and began printing The Garfield Gazette, a three or four page newspaper. My mom still has a few issues salted away. I’d leave copies on the neighbors’ front porches. So this yearning to communicate was strong within me. I got onto poetry via Rod McKuen during my adolescent years and began writing. When the quality improved years later, 1975 saw my first chapbook, Exploring Another Leg, issued from Pentagram. Some of those deep-image poems appeared in magazines, but I had the feeling that them appearing separately diminished their impact. I needed to group them, the best of them, and fashion a chapbook—which I did, and the ms. hit Mike Tarachow at the right moment; he was very excited and had to publish it. Bless him.

Jack Spicer of course had the great idea that individual poems were better in a field of work; his notion of writing books (or chapbooks) instead of single poems was a valuable insight and very different from the workshop idea of penning the immortal poem, the one that will get you into The Greatest Hits of Am Po…..I’ve reveled in obscurity my whole writing life, and publishing with presses that were close to the ground, or even underground, well, they were a fit for my work, which is chafing at the margins, and now satirically attacks mainstream media, Am “culture” (when I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for the remote), and Am Poetry itself….I’m comfortable standing at the edge of the crowd rather than being engulfed in the thick of it.

CM: I hope someday we’ll be treated to the greatest hits from The Garfield Gazette!

I know that the work of Ted Berrigan was important to you early on. What was it about Berrigan’s work that affected you? What other poets were early influences? If you were to write your bildungsroman, would you describe any poetic epiphanies?

[“We met Ted and Alice at the train station with a cold Pepsi (we had read The Sonnets, noting Ted’s favorite liquid) and he began talking and chain smoking….”]

JD: Don’t hold your breath for seeing issues of The Garfield Gazette! I spent my junior year abroad at the University of Nottingham. At the time I was writing but I thought I was going to become an English professor with a Phd in Literature and the Nottingham year was, I thought, a necessary stepping stone in my envisioned academic career—but I was wrong about that….I met Philip Jenkins, a fellow student, a Welshman, at school there and he was heavily into the New York School and got me reading those poets, as well as the Black Mountain gang. Then we learned Ted Berrigan and the pregnant Alice Notley were at Essex for the year where Ted was teaching. Jenks took over the fledgling Literary Society and used its budgeted funds to bring this barbarian Ted Berrigan to read and give a lecture. We met Ted and Alice at the train station with a cold Pepsi (we had read The Sonnets, noting Ted’s favorite liquid) and he began talking and chain smoking….What he had to say in his non-stop fashion was beyond interesting. I had stopped attending classes at the university; I was disenchanted with the academick path I once sought and didn’t know what to do next…..Ted came on like gangbusters. His American accent, his bearing, his sureness in the idea that serving Poetry and living Poetry was not only the right choice, but the only choice—that devotion—all of that impressed me and guided me. Plus, at his reading he read great stuff; his works were terrific! Meeting him there on foreign soil changed my life for the better. I’ve never doubted that. Ted’s works have a lot to teach writers, and I’m delighted to see his Collected Poems and now his Selected Poems published so that a new generation has access to his work.

CM: Surprised by French Fries (haven’t we all been?) is a terrific chapbook hot off the Ugly Duckling Presse. The poems are by turns irreverent (“no ideas but in socks”), enlightened (“The earflaps are detachable so shutup.org”), and disturbed (“The previous owner may be previously disturbed”). Do you think of your poetry as holding up a mirror to media-saturated baby boomers and Gen-X? If we recognize ourselves in that mirror, should we be afraid? Very afraid?

Or do you think of it as helping us to chuckle through the sobbing?

Both? Neither?

[“How to be boring in a new way is not my goal. The language has to be up to something….”]

JD: I think we should all be terrified every second. Hiding under the bed as a matter of course can become a way of life, an indoor sport. Humor has always been an effective instrument and the definition of satire is humor with a point or at the point of a sword. I like to think that a reader of my work is immediately thrown off-balance by the poem not reading like his or her concept of what a poem is, or what it can do. For me, poetry has got to be entertaining and I set that standard for my own little creations, my windup monsters unleashed on unsuspecting readers of any generation. Milton Berle, that great standup slam poet, once said, “Laughter is an instant vacation…” I agree with him. Another great poet of our time whose works I treasure and admire, Anselm Hollo, once told me that for him if Language Poets didn’t have a sense of humor on display in their works it was a problem because then all you have is this dry, unending language flow. How to be boring in a new way is not my goal. The language has to be up to something…. I often surprise myself with the zingers that line up in my works….they are often pulled from my journal in which I record all manner of language bits, from magazine covers, tv news broadcasts, things I hear people say, to offbeat or common phrases I discover in student papers. The language surrounding us and creating our agreed-upon “reality” is rich, and out of that language pipe, I fashion poems. Ideally, the poems create an experience themselves instead of narrating past experiences—reading the poem is itself a fresh experience……

CM: Your poetry has been unflagging in its satirical edginess—to pick up on Berle, it has been an uninterrupted vacation. Has your writing changed from the time you started publishing around the mid-70s leading up to your most recent book, My Psychic Dog My Life, published by Lavender Ink, and beyond? Have you become more inclined, like a good Strangelove subject, to stop worrying and love the detritus of mass-pop-culture (please don’t reach for the remote just yet)? Or less?

[“. . . beneath this entertainment surface, there’s a critical, satirical message that happens without my completely controlling and engineering it . . .”]

JD: Recently a girlfriend of mine from the 70s when I was starting out with writing, recently she contacted me after no contact for 30+ years to say I ruined her life and she was dispatching a team of professional assassins to “take me out…” (just kidding). Actually, she was cleaning out her attic and stumbled upon a box of my letters, poems I’d written, etc. She was going to throw it all away but then thought better, found and emailed me, and sent this box, a literal and figurative blast from the past.. In exchange I sent her some recent books. She was astonished by how the 2011 scribblings were so different from the 1975 works—but she said many of the same elements were visible in the later works that she knew from the early, young man poems. Yes, a line of development (and hopefully, improvement) is clear as it is in many poets’ work if you get to see all of it. My poems from the 70s were more serious, but then I was also writing comical prose poems, and the Rolling Stone poems were lighter in tone. The surface of my writing now is fast in pace, humorous often by way of juxtaposition, but beneath this entertainment surface, there’s a critical, satirical message that happens without my completely controlling and engineering it. The message shows up, and I hope it’s heard or understood, understand?

CM: And the message is all the more effective, I think, because, as you say, you don’t completely control and engineer it, which is as good a segue as any to my next question.

Something you told me years ago about writing and editing has stayed with me, a twist on Kerouac: “First thought, best thought—unless it’s not.” I like the way this alerts us not to take the dictums of the legendaries too categorically. With all the manifestos and -isms stirring up the history of poetry, is there a danger in taking poetic camps and icons too seriously?

[“My entire life I’ve yearned, especially at night, to one day become an ism and finally amount to something….”]

JD: Wait a sec, Camille—this question’s a lob, a telegraphed fastball right down the middle of the dinner plate…..I adore the movements and the isms….My entire life I’ve yearned, especially at night, to one day become an ism and finally amount to something….I liked Actualism, actually, a movement out of Iowa City (of all places!) in the 70s—which was a tongue-in-cheek goof, sort of, on isms and movements. The interested reader can find an informative essay on Actualism by Dave Morice on Andrei Codrescu’s website. Who’s to say the Surrealists weren’t kidding? Marcel DuChamp was—or wasn’t he? Writers of the NY School never really fancied themselves a school at all, but it’s facile to refer to them in that way. Same with The Language School or Black Mountain (which really was a school, sort of, with a campus and a towering giant named Charles Olson) These are individual writers whose work deserves individual attention (in varying degrees)….I believe there’s a real danger in taking everything too seriously—and for a poet, taking him/herself too seriously? That is a disaster, as it shows up in self-inflated, self-important, self-serving (that’s a good dose of self, no?) poetry which isn’t worth reading….I’m a cardcarrying member of the infamous Post Contemporary School—wanna see my badge?

CM: That’s tempting, Joel, let’s talk.

You have now published more than a hundred issues of the intrepid Fell Swoop, which takes its cue from the great mimeographed zines of the 60s such as Ed Sanders’ Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. That makes it one of the longest-running small press magazines on earth. Ever. And it’s the only one I know that, like a box of Cracker Jacks on crack, includes the occasional plastic utensil to surprise and delight the unsuspecting subscriber.

the “None of the Talent, Half the Brain” issue

What’s the history of the Swoop? If there’s a secret to its longevity, does it come in a convenient, easy-to-swallow capsule? And do we dare to hope that it will never, ever, bow out gracefully?

[“Our stated mission is to destroy American Literature . . .”]

JD: It’s really a newsletter for the Insane or the Inane; it’s a bad habit and I’ll probably go blind from keeping at it….I’ve vowed to quit producing the Swoop dozens of times, but always returned to do another issue. I enjoy making the issues and sending them out….I guess when I stop enjoying the process, I’ll quit it. Our stated mission is to destroy American Literature, with a spotlight on Am Po, but truly Am Po is proving adept at destroying itself; it’s fraught with self involved careerists who are churning out Real Drivel (as opposed to Unreal Drivel, which might be more interesting)—and getting rewarded for it, as they slime trail along their “career paths” to Hooterville….

[“. . . the magazine was born the summer Ted Berrigan died, in the early 80s. My reaction to his death was to create something.”]

History? The right Reverend Richard Martin has been a contributor to every general issue; he is also our Resident Historian, a non-paying and rather cramped position….the magazine was born the summer Ted Berrigan died, in the early 80s. My reaction to his death was to create something, and so the Swooper was birthed and has continued these many years, publishing hundreds of engaging and worthwhile writers—including you, Camille…..

CM: It has been a privilege to contribute to the Swoop’s worthy cause of general mayhem.

Speaking of mayhem of a different sort, you and your family were greatly affected by Hurricane Katrina. Your home was flooded and you were displaced for months. I’ll never forget when you Fed-Exed your house key to me from your Pennsylvania home-away-from-home, so that I could sneak back into New Orleans, still under mandatory evacuation, and check up on your two cats.

In post-apocalyptic New Orleans, there was a point when Fell Swoop aficionados wondered whether the magazine would survive the disruption and continue to inject us with an antidote of impertinent chutzpah on a semi-regular basis. Après le deluge, what has given you the grit to forge ahead with your magazine, your poetry, and life in general?

A related question: In My Psychic Dogs My Life, there’s a section written under the sign of Katrina, “My Evacuation.” Whereas some poetry inspired by that muse-bitch takes a more lyrical, somber approach, in your work there seems to be a continuum in your absurdist take on the horrors-that-be—no doubt reflecting the nonstop flow of sense-defying news, pre- and post-K, in the (un)real world from which you draw your poetic raw materials. Was it difficult writing after Katrina, or was it—so to speak—cathartic?

[“It was a lot of work mixed with truckloads of Uncertainty, but, hell, the terms of existence bleed Uncertainty—”]

JD: Katrina spawned a lot of things: reconstruction, displacement, suicides, divorces, widespread fraud—and I have to tell you, HK “inspired” a lot of terrible poetry. Of course HK affected me personally, as you point out, but in terms of my writing, it added a layer, another post-apocalyptic level. We literally started over here and did without numerous comforts people take for granted. There was no mail delivery in Orleans Parish for weeks, so the Swoop rented a po box in nearby Metairie in order to receive and send dispatches; we published an issue with Joe Brainard’s adapted and adopted beloved comic character Nancy on the cover screaming “Help!” We’re the better for having experienced HK I think; the city is stronger and making a comeback. It was a lot of work mixed with truckloads of Uncertainty, but, hell, the terms of existence bleed Uncertainty—we foolishly convince ourselves that we’re secure. Olson’s warning comes to mind, “Beware of Permanence!” Part of returning to the ‘normalcy’ of my life after HK was getting back to writing; the hurricane changed many things but not my continued and continuous absurdist view of the world and peddling it through new poems.

the historic Nancy issue

CM: Are there any top-secret projects in the wings that you’d like to spill to WikiLeaks?

[“We just released The Human Bond by Clark Coolidge, a single author issue. This is Clark’s recent James Bond sonnets—not to be missed.”]

JD: I wish I had a top secret or a top hat project to give you and your readers a scoop, but o and alas. We just released The Human Bond by Clark Coolidge, a single author issue. This is Clark’s recent James Bond sonnets—not to be missed. He is a very interesting writer whose work I obviously value, a writer who’s sort of flying beneath the radar, but his work pushes limits and buttons and it does and has been doing so since the 60s. Another recent single author number is The ABC Of Duck, by a creature named Duck Martian, an alphabetical work; this feathered fowl definitely knows his ABC’s. So interesting material is still being created, and Fell Swoop is proud to offer these works to an adoring public……

CM: Rightly so.

I’ve known you for a long time, Joel, yet the marrow of your being remains a mystery to me. My Psychic Dogs My Life opens with a devastating autobiographical exposé:

A little about my life
Remove shrinkwrap.

Please help your fans understand: who’s the real Joel Dailey? Who or what will we encounter under the layers of shrinkwrap?

[“We’re all walking (or crawling) contradictions…..”]

JD: You make me chuckle, Camille….What’s inside your shrinkwrap? I looked up the meaning of my first name once; Joel was defined as “lover of literature,” and that’s true, I am. I often teach British Lit. Survey; the Romantic Age is my favorite period. I love Shakespeare’s tragedies. My two daughters grew up hearing, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” I can leer like Lear. My tastes in fiction tend to be conventional (Jane Austen is the berries, as Al Capone might have said) rather than experimental or just plain old mental. We’re all walking (or crawling) contradictions…..It’s like my Uncle Walt was fond of observing, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes….” In point of measurable fact, I’m an extra-large——

CM: Thank you for sharing, Joel.

For our readers: Below is a bonus package of Dailey chapbooks. Click on any one to get the gallery view.