This spring, I met publisher and poet David D. Horowitz, who was selling books from his Rose Alley Press, at the Redmond, Washington Poets in the Park Conference.  As I browsed the press’s well-designed, handsome books, David asked if he could read me a poem from one.  “Of course,” I said, and he read from Resin from the Rain, a book of his poetry, written in form with much attention to meter and to rhyme:

Sparrow

I’m an ounce
Of flit and bounce,
An inch
Of hop and flinch.
I chirp and chatter,
Perch and scatter,
Alert, still:
The world can kill
And think it doesn’t matter.

I enjoyed his presentation, his love of poetry, and the treat of hearing in rhythms and rhyme, a reminder about paying attention to small life and to consider the consequences of our actions.

I bought the book and looked up “Sparrow” again to read the words myself.  On the page opposite that poem is another short poem I enjoyed:

Sidewalk

Platform for stroll and stride, overcast
For life, you raise us over grate and gutter
And curb our haste. You river past
 Driveway, house, and store, urban clutter
And green park.  Perimeter of high-rise block
And barren lot, you sturdy cities, rock-hard,
Your grainy squared surface gum-starred.

The message of the sidewalk as river, as keeping things together even if we mistreat it, and the rhyme, rhythm, and the word choice all enlivened my experience of being alive.

I was hooked on David’s voice.  After reading all of the poems in Resin from the Rain, I turned to another book David had introduced me to, a copy of his helpful ring-bound collection From Notebook to Bookshelf:  Four Pamphlets on Writing, Publishing  & Marketing.  Inside, I found the titles:  Twelve Simple Ways to Improve Your Writing, Getting Published in Journals—Some Basics, Publishing Your Own Book:  A Brief Introduction and Marketing with Conviction, & Without Debt.

As in his poetry, David’s prose is tight, and his collection of pamphlets well organized, clear, and always right to the point. The reader receives valuable, distilled-from-experience information on contact.  Under Publishing Your Own Book:  A Brief Introduction, for example, David writes:

Once your book is printed, you will probably try to sell it to bookstores and libraries.  However, a bookstore or library seldom employs the support staff necessary to process paperwork from every small firm trying to sell it material; thus, its buyers generally order from book wholesalers. Book wholesalers specialize in quick, accurate, and money-saving delivery of books and book-related items to bookstores and libraries.

As a small publisher, you will need to have at least one wholesaler, and preferable two to four, selling your work….

One of David’s sensible, clear tips in Marketing with Conviction & Without Debt is this:

Before composing promotional material, call and then visit various wholesale and store buyers.  Ask them what they consider when buying.  Compose your marketing material considering what they tell you.

One of my favorite exercises in the Twelve Simple Ways to Improve Your Writing section is this one:

Select one of your favorite paragraphs, say a paragraph from your favorite chapter of your favorite novel.  Read it over one hundred times over several days. Live with the paragraph. Consider why you like it. Read it aloud; analyze it; check the definition(s) of every word in it.  Then put the paragraph aside for one week.  Write at least one page per day for the next seven days. After one full week, read the paragraph again.  Consider how your appreciation of it has deepened, and how your understanding of what constitutes good writing has changed.  Be able to explain why you think the writer chose every word and positioned every punctuation mark as he or she did. That’s right–every word and mark!

If as writers we read occasionally with the level of attention David advises, we would always be learning from a love of language and its strengths.

Online at Rose Alley Press, I learned that the press is dedicated to publishing rhymed and metered poetry, cultural commentary, and pamphlets about writing and publication in today’s corporate-driven economy and that it is named “for the London street where, on December 18th, 1679, poet and playwright John Dryden was brutally beaten by three thugs.” The homepage explains, “Evidence suggests that an aristocrat who mistakenly attributed a satire’s authorship to Dryden hired the assailants. Undaunted, Dryden continued writing, even more boldly than before the assault.”

In addition to enjoying his poetry, I was intrigued by Horowitz’s dedication and vision.  I was pleased when he agreed to an email interview, in which he discusses his background, perception and experience as a writer and publisher striving to maintain his literary vision and bring it to the attention of others.

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Sheila
I’d love to hear more about your writing.  Can you email me a description of your poems and your point of view concerning poetry?

David
I primarily write short lyric verse in rhymed metrics.  I often seek to celebrate or spotlight the mundane and overlooked–an individual tragedy in a larger news story; urban landscapes; and coping strategies for difficult relationships and jobs.  My poems have been about unconventional topics such as oatmeal, sidewalks, Scotch Tape, alleyway dumpsters, and basketball.  Humor I like, especially understatement that uses droll double entendre.  I rarely use obscenity in my verse.  I am not a prude, and I have written some love poems and a few about sexuality.  I like the witty thrust, though, rather than the obvious guffaw.  I tend towards optimism, but I do not necessarily celebrate the childlike sensibility.  Work through gritty detail, acknowledging flaw, complexity, and confusion; that’s how humans can genuinely progress.

I also dislike polemical posturing.  I am tired of performance verse denouncing corporations and Republicans.  I have my own reservations about corporations and religious conservatives, but I would like to hear some fresh approaches in political verse, approaches that acknowledge life’s full complexity and the full complexity of those who are not one’s allies.  Knee-jerk bash sessions yield propaganda, not poetry, and the politically committed of whatever stripe tend to want their artists to toe their line.  Poets rarely write better by being spokespersons for political movements or parties.

Indeed, I think the personal is distinguishable from the political.  I am delighted when a leftist, rightist, and centrist can look at the same sky–or hear the same poem–and feel roughly equivalent pleasure. Likewise, I can respect a poem’s craft and perception, although it might posit a different perspective than my own.  Of course, social relations and politics can influence love relationships, family ties, or friendships.  We didn’t need Marxists to educate us in this truism.  Nevertheless, I like to cultivate articulate refinement and reflection, as well as the voice of private friendship–the cooed compliment to a lover or the commiserating observation to someone despairing, regardless of that person’s politics.  I enjoy cultivating common ground not necessarily based on some assumed shared political perspective.

Sheila
Did you study with particular poets? Do you consider one or more poets to be your present teachers?

David
A few of my teachers have been actual classroom teachers and some have been masterful writers whose techniques have indirectly taught me—those who might customarily be called “influences.”  One was both, a great teacher and brilliant poet.  This was William Dunlop, my teacher at the University of Washington.  His was the only actual college-level verse writing course I ever took.  He was an excellent instructor, and he valued and understood rhymed metrics, too.  Other worthy teachers included Charles O. Hartman and Miceal Vaughn at the University of Washington and Donald Davie at Vanderbilt University, where I was a graduate student.  Professor Davie was also a critic and poet of great skill.  Two graduate school colleagues, Curtis Sherwood and Mark Brown, and a host of figures from diverse artistic endeavors, also provided important lessons and challenges.

Most importantly, William Dunlop introduced me to the work of Philip Larkin, and Larkin is the most prominent of my contemporary influences. Auden and Yeats are other twentieth-century influences.  Most fundamentally, I love British and Irish pre-Romantic writers.  My favorites include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Swift, Matthew Prior, and Charles Churchill.  Critically analyzing their poems helped me improve my own verse.  Jonson, Marvell, and Prior in particular influenced my craft and tone in deep, lasting ways.  Mind you, I respect larger international perspectives.  Most prominent here is the T’ang Dynasty poet Tu Fu, who is a master at using physical detail to create mood.  Again, all of these I consider to be teachers.  I try to learn from all, though, including my students when I taught and audiences at open mics, especially when they do not applaud wildly.  Such reactions can help a poet determine if a poem needs to be revised or altogether scrapped.

Sheila
Because you are also a publisher, can you discuss and compare the pleasures of writing and the pleasures of publishing?

David
Publishing entails many facets of literary production and promotion.  Each offers a distinctive pleasure.  Selection of a manuscript to publish is pleasurable, especially when one rescues work from oblivion and a poet finally feels justly acknowledged.  Editing is pleasurable as one evokes a writer’s best effort, helping a draft evolve into a final publishable manuscript.  Often the publisher, who is also the editor in my case, confronts a writer’s initial resistance to change a manuscript.  Winning a writer’s trust to help him or her recognize how the manuscript can be improved combines the pleasures of friendship, alliance, and literary craftsmanship.  Actual book production offers particular pleasures of project completion and beauty.  One feels almost like an artist who has just completed a fine painting.  The pleasures of promotion are also many:  helping the author’s friends appreciate his or her full talent, feeling the work gain respect for some kind of posterity, watching friends from different phases of a poet’s life befriend each other at readings, making back a little money to at least minimize one’s losses, and discovering the book is receiving some good reviews.  All of these are the publisher’s pleasures.

The pleasures of writing are perhaps more purely aesthetic and ethical than those of the publisher.  One feels pleasure reaching for and finding phrases that vividly express an idea or capture an experience; purging oneself of despair by writing a particularly honest or sympathetic piece; connecting with larger literary traditions as one relearns the lessons of the greats during the course of one’s struggle to compose; helping other people through difficulties by reading some effective, poignant piece at a performance venue; and earning some vindication when one’s books sell well.  All of these are writer’s pleasures–although, of course, there are many more.

Sheila
When poets or other writers decide to self-publish what should they consider?

David
A poet or prose writer considering self-publishing should ask the following questions:

Will I strive to produce an attractive, perfectly edited book?
How many copies of my book do I want to sell?
Do I want paper copies or will e-books be good enough?
Do I want hardbound copies as well as paperback copies?
Am I willing to take much time to learn about the publishing business?
Am I prepared to sell my book for ten years, not ten months?
Do I want feature readings at bookstores?
Am I willing to read with other poets and writers to sell my book?
Am I prepared to help other poets and writers sell their books?
Am I prepared to occasionally buy others poets’ and writers’ books?
How often and far am I willing to travel to sell my book?
Can I accept sales in twos and threes, not dozens, at readings?
Can I accept friends and relatives refusing to buy my book, even if it costs under $10?
Can I accept friends and relatives ignoring, and possibly even ridiculing, my invitations to attend my readings?
Will I devote at least fifteen hours to market each bookstore reading?
Will I devote at least fifteen hours per week, every week for the foreseeable future, to promote my book and work?
Will I devote at least five hours per month to seek media interviews?
Am I prepared to volunteer at local literary events and book fairs?
Am I prepared to host a reading series at a performance venue to help other writers and to sell my book?
Am I prepared to host a Web site listing my upcoming readings and information about my book?

Sheila
These are most important concerns.  Becoming a publisher must have influenced your writing. And taking writing so seriously must have altered your life.

David
Actually, being a publisher has not changed how I write my poetry.  I am a publisher partly to publish commercially marginal work, namely poetry, much of it rhymed metrics.  I do not try to make money publishing, and indeed I lose money doing so.  I do not write specifically for publication or to make sales or a living.  I write to purge frustration; bestow honor; reward virtue; challenge hypocrisy, deceit, and cruelty; and celebrate beauty and utility.  My desire for praise and fame seeps into motivation, and I say this without apology or shame.  I have an ego, and I am not a saint.  Nevertheless, such motivations cannot satisfy me.

Most fundamentally, I write because I love words, language, and rhythmic expression.  In some sense, I feel akin to what Donald Davie called the “erudite, elated rover threading a fiord of words.”  Articulating an original, precise phrase that communicates deep emotion and insight to a wide audience gives me great pleasure.

Being a publisher, however, has profoundly effected how I market my writing.  I mistrust many contemporary sales paradigms.  They are often economically disastrous for a publisher.  I have found the following do NOT generate much sales for the poetry book publisher:  book reviews, advertising, contest entries, journal publication, generic mass mailing, and reliance on traditional distributors and wholesalers.

What DOES tend to sell poetry books?  First, the book must read well, be perfectly edited, and have a beautiful, sturdy cover with thoughtful critical blurbs.  After that, positive personal contact is essential.  The poet needs to read for live audiences, and tell valued friends, co-workers, and writing peers about it.  Then a book needs to be target marketed to potentially sympathetic librarians and bookstore professionals.

Scattershot generic marketing rarely works.  My three basic marketing principles are positive personal contact; publicity, not advertising; and ten years to market a book, not ten months.  My experience as a publisher informs all of these viewpoints.

Writing is the center of my life.  It is my greatest pleasure, challenge, and love.  I have avoided labor-intensive careers to save time and energy for my writing.  What a rich, satisfying life, though!  What deep pleasure and meaning writing affords, and what fine friends I have had because of a shared love of writing.  I have no regrets about my devotion to writing.  I live a great life, full of healthy, creative complementarities.

Here’s to the writer’s life despite its occasional disappointments!

Sheila
Yes!  Thank you so much for describing your work and experience.  I look forward to reading more from Rose Alley Press.