Press Porcepic

urine itself is fairly interesting from both a publishing and a poetry writing point of view despite its name such irish connotations it's a very scott presbyterian town which is important in that the scott presbyterianism represents one of the predominant colonial cultures even today you tell someone from the town asks you what you do and you say you're a poet and they say well yes that's very nice but what do you really do and the do is in the sense of work what what is your work what um what do you do with your time how do you make your money some people would wonder why you would come up to a place like aaron after living in the city toronto all my life which is what i did and work for nothing it seems like a contradiction in and what you're always brought up with you brought up with tvs and all kinds of weird things which force money down your throat money is the answer to everything and probably that's that's one reason why i came up here money doesn't seem to be the answer to everything money can really mess up your head if you you're not careful with it so i come up here and make no money for a long time it just seems satisfying like i was confronted at the beginning with a coal pile in the back room and tim said you want to fix that into a room you can live here and work here for room and board and it just seemed it appeals to me because it's hard physical labor there's something about hard physical labor dave godfrey wanted to set up a small press that would be relevant to his own political nationalism and involvement with french canada he wanted a porcupine press because it would be a backwards sort of uh vaguely back to the land kind of thing but it couldn't be porcupine press because it had to be politically relevant so it's called press porky peak instead well another nice thing which is sort of satisfying in a way is i've learned a skill of of sorts it's sort of antiquated what we do but we can't afford linotype which is a machine-operated way of of setting a poem or a story so we use monotype and buy it a font of it or two fonts depending on how big the poems are and set them by hand and the font is about forty forty dollars i guess depending on where you go you feel almost i suppose like an 18th century guy with his setting stick and tight and things like that and then we draw the proofs from it it's laborious and uh boring to to an extent except you have the satisfaction of seeing higher quality work than you could get for paying for it that's something tim and i both agree on one of the things we agree on anyway is that if you could possibly do it do the work yourself spend a lot of time work hard and get the results and save the money it seems to me that's to us that's about the only way you can get a small press to operate [Applause] the whole printing process is an art form and you just don't learn it in a year you know this old dudes have been around 60 years there's other things you can do with typeset you can mess around with the type of bit and you don't have to go outside that's another thing which we want to do is keep the whole shop self-contained and that way we can do it using hand setting and doing things by ourselves as a poet i think it's very important to be able to produce your own books from my point of view to put out a book of poetry which i wrote but which i had absolutely no design or printing control over would be 10 amount to if i was saying a painter um and and did a painting where i left out all the color and let and let some bureaucrat fill in all the colors for me it just strikes me as totally ridiculous [Applause] so [Applause] uh somebody comes up here a poet who's never before like he's always taken his manuscripts to places and not being involved in the production he comes up here with his work which is a work of love upon his poems they're really uh good and and then you can show him another dimension to his poetry which he hasn't thought of before and that of producing his own poems of of the production itself the book as an extension of his poems and i don't know maybe i'm wrong but i get the feeling that people like eli mandel really you know enjoy that enjoy seeing the different side seeing their book in production it's almost like he's conceived a baby but normally he wouldn't wouldn't watch it wouldn't see it you know being born or anything and he here he can see it being born i think that's why he's attracted to party peak in a sense you know if i'm doing a book by mandel it's likely that i'll be consulting with him personally five or six times a month there is a kind of translation process that goes on there in which i think the author should be intimately involved the poets and writers that we publish are all friends i mean they they come here i know something about their personalities um in most cases the way it's developed most of the poets that we've published so far have been quite a bit older and better established and more proficient poets than i am actually um so it's it's a learning thing to be here where i can meet rosenblatt and mandel godfrey himself is probably the best young fiction writer in canada with that that kind of exposure to contemporary major canadian talents uh you can't really help but pick up a lot more just by osmosis than you ever could from even an intensive reading of their work in the classroom situations to be a writer then what better place to be than a place which is part of the birth of not birth but the growth of our [Music] and that's about what this place is it's a minor thing amongst many minor things going on in canadian literature but together they make up a cultural revolution of sorts that's good it's interesting before we get yeah the reason that i came here was one thing i've i've always been fascinated by books by by the book as a book uh as a kind of object of in its own right fascinated by the largely obsolete technology which makes books i have a a bit of romantic flair which suggests to me that it's always a neat thing to do to do something which is um a lost art in in the sense that mcluhan claims that books are on the way out i happen to think that gutenberg was was a very neat guy [Laughter] foreign so so foreign