There’s a difference between being somebody who’s interested in making this great object—that would be the editor—and somebody who trusts that the object is great and wants to get it to the world: the publisher. Sam was more of an editor than he was a publisher. I shouldn’t speak for him, but I think sometimes he saw marketing as a dirty word—but if you were to recast that as helping someone get an audience, that’d be fine.
Sam has a lot of conviction on how things should be done, that there’s a right way and a wrong way to edit a book. Shortly after I first started, he and I were talking about letterpress. He made a comment about type punching into the paper to make an impression. I said I was taught that for an even impression, you should have the type merely kiss the paper. He said, “No, you want to punch it!” Some of us are punch, some of us are kiss. [Laughs.] But that’s Sam. Make that impression, sink it deep, and make it lasting. That’s what he’s done.
One of our poets recently asked me for some recommendations for prose poems, and I caught myself echoing Sam: “That’s an oxymoron—there’s no such thing as a prose poem!” I have learned some ways of being from Sam, and ways of looking at poetry and how you make books.
What other impressions did Sam leave on you?
One of the main things is the importance of tradition and seeing new voices fit into it. This wall of books in my office is my model; I’ve tried to build a conversation among them. I like to think that when I go home at night that one book is arguing with or cajoling another. Sam helped me to say, “Okay, this is working out a tradition that has always been a part of the press, or has been a part of poetry, and this is pushing against that tradition.”
He also influenced me in terms of design and texts like Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style or Adrian Wilson’s The Design of Books. I learned to carry forth the tradition of letterpress into what we do now, and be kind of particular. Sam wasn’t a great copyeditor or proofreader, but he had a good eye, and so did Tree. A lot of the designs that first drew me to the press were from Tree’s hand.
What did you do when you first joined the press?
The press was recovering when I came in. First of all, there were a number of books that had been delayed—and I further delayed them. I was the managing editor, and managing our schedule meant determining what we could get out, and when. I had a plan for how to get out the books that we had under contract, after which we could start gradually building the list.
I remember calling Carolyn Kizer when I was still drying off behind the ears. “Hi, I’m Michael, I want to introduce myself and give you the good news that Proses is back on track and we plan to release it” in whatever month. She said, “Oh, great, just in time for it to go into the toilet.” Click.
You haven’t made it in this business if a writer has never hung up on you! [Laughs.]
There was a lot of uncertainty. There were several books that had been hung up in the middle of Sam and Tree’s divorce. My job, in essence, was to help make a big transition away from being exclusively founder-driven. Mary Jane Knecht had been doing all this work behind the scenes, and it was her decision to resign that turned the applecart over and caused changes at the press. There are moments when no individual can contain it all. Eventually there were more new people here than there were original people, and the press started growing.
Did the editorial mission or composition of the list change during that period?
It started to. For example, there were a number of people who had been with the press before we started hiring new staff. I remember going to Sam with C. D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining and saying we should really publish it. This is one of the models I learned from: Sam said, “Okay, I don’t get it, but let’s publish it if you’re that committed to it.” I hope to do that as an editor also. There are books where I don’t get it or it may not be my cup of tea, but I’ll listen to others.
I’m a terrible ruminator. I can like a book but say, “What about this, or what about that?” It’ll take me forever, and then someone here on staff like our managing editor, Tonaya Craft, will say, “What are you waiting for? It’s a great book.” Sometimes I need that little push.
Has the idea of what makes a Copper Canyon book changed?
I hope so. Our list has expanded in a variety of directions. We had been really successful in a particular aesthetic and a particular demographic.
What do you mean?
The joking way to put it is that there were a lot of middle-aged, white, male Buddhists. There are a lot of middle-aged, white, male poets. I’m a middle-aged, white, male, nonpoet. As much for my own personal interest as anything else, I get excited by something that’s different. It’s good to have a knowledge of the traditions but also to work against them.
When I started we had two people of color on the list. That’s changed, though we can still make improvements. There weren’t many women on our list. We are changing that, too. Aesthetically, it’s changed quite a bit. I’ve always gravitated towards West Coast poetics and the influence of Asia, but I’ve brought in more people who were from the East Coast, knowing that it’s not a binary. We’ve brought in more young poets and started to look at different kinds of projects.
One of my strategies as an editor has been to expand. I see the value in focusing on one area but I like being more encyclopedic. I turn to books not for what I already know, but to be surprised.
How you would define a Copper Canyon book now?
Irreducible. It also has lineage, an awareness of the tradition of poetry.
Does your editing style change with the material you’re editing?
My style is to enter into the space that the author is trying to create, meeting authors on their terms. I try to be aware of my own biases and editing tics. I try to meet the text where it is, instead of bending it to who I am, but I will challenge poets to make certain that they’re being intentional in their choices. When they are, I back off. There’s probably a difference in how I approach poets relative to where they are in their careers, though.
Do you mean that you might be more hands-on with somebody who’s written a first book than with a veteran writer like W. S. Merwin?
It’s hard to generalize. I do know that Merwin wants a close read on his new book, in part because of how it was composed—the conditions under which it was written meant that he’s feeling a little more need for guidance. Some poets entering into their first book want an editor to work with it. Other first-book poets have been workshopping the material for ten years and the last thing they want is some guy in the corner of Washington telling them to change this or that.
If I’ve worked with somebody over the course of several books, I may have a different sensibility in how I approach the new material. I may just cut through all the bullshit and be really direct in my commentary, or I might recognize a sensitive spot and come at it from a different angle. It may relate to age—recognizing that people are at different places in their careers and may be expecting more or less.
I’d like to hear more about your editing tics. It’s rare for an editor to reveal that about himself.
And it may continue to be rare. [Laughs.]
Well, I’ll acknowledge too that I have my own tics and fallback positions—I’m just not fully aware of them.
The obvious one I’ve mentioned is a knee-jerk reaction towards prose poems. I enter them with my biases. I’m still waiting: Maybe one of our other editors will say, “We really have to publish this. These are prose poems like they’ve never been done before!” Of course, I’ll probably say, “Because they’ve never been done!”
I also always go in and look at how a poet is using their pronouns. If there’s overuse of a certain pronoun, like if “it” is being used as a generalization, I’ll want you to be more concrete. There’s also the obvious use of the first person pronoun.
This seems more like a strategy to me than a tic that gets in the way of good editing.
It is, but maybe it’s too easy.
A quick way to respond when you could be reaching for a deeper analysis?
Right. There are also typographic things. I never know how to pronounce this and I should probably look it up if I’m going to use it, but I’m thinking of majusculation, when the first letter of a line is capitalized. Microsoft Word does that automatically, so if I see somebody who's writing that way, I assume they just haven’t turned that off in their program instead of choosing to do it thoughtfully.
The flip side of the tic might be the blind spot, the thing that you tend to miss.
At the acquisition level I sometimes miss the larger arc. I may be reading and missing a throughline because I’m being expedient and I’ve got five hundred manuscripts in my queue. I’ve got blind spots about incorrect grammar and when I see our copy editor go through a book, I think, “Damn, he’s good.” The things I miss are usually in pursuit of expediency.
What would poets of all kinds benefit from hearing?
One of the biggest things is to be respectful to the unknown people. There’s a tendency to say things like, “I don’t want an intern reading my manuscript,” or “I want to go to the editor in chief, not the associate editor.” But nothing turns me away faster from a book than somebody who wants to bypass the “underlings” or however they see those people.
One, I was one of those people. Two, they keep me honest in making my final decision. Three, they can be a poet’s greatest advocate. I won’t tolerate disrespect for somebody just because you don’t know their name or because they’re younger.
