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Michael Basinski talked with Ge(of)* Huth about his minimalist poetic practices (pictured above) and about his press, dbqp (317 Princetown Rd, Schenectady NY 12306?). Send SASE for a catalog.

Basinski: Ge(of), tell me about your press (dbqp) and your magazine (The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage) and how you see these integrated, if you do, into the map of contemporary poetry.

Huth: I come from a literary tradition, which is important for me to say because the writing world I interact with now is that of visual and language poetry. Many of the makers of visual poetry are actually artists working with letterforms as visual matter, but I am first a writer.

I started my micropress, dbqp, in 1987 because I needed to print a minimalist piece of mine (the woords) on certain pieces of bark. One poem needed to be printed on pine bark, for instance, another on dogwood bark. If I didn?t use the correct bark, the entire scheme would fall apart. It would fail to function. I didn?t know of any press that would be interested in publishing ?the woords?, so I had to publish it myself, but to keep from turning into a self-publisher I branched out into a few other publishing endeavors.

I started The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage (SJRC) the same day I started dbqp. What this magazine does is present invented words in heightened visual contexts. The format of the magazine, as a matter of fact, changes with each issue. Since the reader is never given words in context or words with definitions, the journal remains subtle and the coinage raw.

The endeavor seems useless to most people. But the reason I ended up producing SJRC is that I was already working in the most minimal realm of literature I could imagine, that of the one-word poem (what I call the pwoermd). The origin of pwoermds, for me, is the work of Aram Saroyan. These poems are single words that are usually neologistic or transmogrified by expressive spelling. By incorporating new significance to single words, pwoermds present what I call the abstract image, an intellectual idea.

The reason for my minimalism (in writing and publishing is twofold. The primary reason is that small things are easier to print. I can publish more issues of a one-page magazine than of a 100-page magazine per year. So speed and economy are directing factors. The second reason for my minimalism is that it has a hyper-intellectual quality that I find attractive. With minimalism, you aren?t reading a piece necessarily for entertainment the same way that you might read other texts. You can?t sit down with it for a long time and become involved in a situation. You have to look at the piece, consider it intellectually, and begin to break it apart. This is also probably the most obvious problem with my work: It has a hard intellectual edge to it.

Minimalist writing is certainly on the outskirts of literature, barely within literature at all. But it does fit within contemporary poetry in the vicinity of the language poets and the visual poets. The language poets reside nearby because they are poets who break apart syntax with their poems. They break all syntactical rules apart, but present their poems as if there were actually some sense beneath the words, although each poem is basically a plan on the field of language. The connection between minimalism and visual poetry is that once you break works and language into small bits, those pieces take on a visual character. At this point, they evolve out of what I call the invisibility of the text. That invisibility is what you experience when you are reading, and reading quickly, understanding the message of the words, but impervious to the visual form the text takes upon the page. But when you do break words down into clumps of letters, or work with single words or only a few words or their fragments, then a visual element is inescapable.

Basinski: Do you see your press and your own minimalist writing in contention with any other program of writing? Let?s say, for example, writing as imagined by the editors of the Pitt Poetry Series. Do you have a political agenda?

Huth: No, I have no political agenda. My writing (the more mainstream examples of it) have been published in well-known poetry magazines, including the American Poetry Review and Poetry Northwest. I?m still, in a fashion, connected to the mainstream of North American poetry. I even graduated from Syracuse University?s graduate creative writing program. So, of course, I know what the mainstream thinks of minimalism, and I am well aware of how little value they attach to it. My minimalist writing doesn?t seem difficult or literary, and those are the criteria we generally use to judge writing.

I hope not to work in contention with other modes of writing, but with them. I?m eclectic in my writing, and I see value in all types of writing. I feel (or hope) that I am a node between camps of writers, that I am connected with many areas and networks of writing. My energies are merely directed towards minimalism now, because that is the fastest way for me to write, and I have little time available.

Basinski: Any last words?

Huth: Yes, I?d like to thank my mother. Seriously: my mother did tell me a story a few times about how, as a child, before I could read, I would spend hours crawling over newspapers and examining the words there. I obviously had no idea what the words meant, but apparently I had some idea that they captured and preserved meanings. I must have been entranced by the visual nature of the text. This story makes me understand why writing is always as visual art for me.

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