Interview with Charles Alexander

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # ALEXANDER, CHARLES ALEXANDER, CHARLES (19-) Book Artist At UW: Interviewed: 2018 Interviewer: Sarah Lange Index by: Sarah Lange Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 3 hours First Interview Session (August 9 and 31, 2018): Digital File 00:00:00 SL: Today is August 9, 2018. I'm Sarah Lange with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Charles Alexander, poet, book artist, publisher and founder of Chax Press. We're at the university archives in Steenbock Library. So Charles, I thought maybe you could start out by telling us a little bit about where you grew up. CA: Early life. Lang SL: Yes. CA: I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, when my father was in the air force. So I grew up in a number of different places. I grew up a tiny bit there. A little bit in Norman, Oklahoma. A little bit in San Antonio, Texas. A little bit in Fukuoka, Japan. A little bit in, I think it was Belton, Missouri, outside of Kansas City. Pretty close to Kansas City. And all of that by the time I was eleven years old. At which point my family, which was from Oklahoma, moved back there. And my father had a heart condition. He had to leave the service. That was fine. And we moved into a house not too far from the University of Oklahoma, which actually my parents had bought earlier in the 1950s, during our first stay there. SL: Okay. 00:01:30 CA: I remember being taken, I think it was a field trip to the Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City. Which is I think now the Nelson Atkins or something Museum of Art. Fantastic art museum. It was my first visit to classical antiquities and all that. I remember a little bit in the, almost three years in Japan, seeing arts and crafts as well as seeing, you know, horrific things, like the Museum of Hiroshima. And being, I think, somehow influenced by all that. And I think also by the fact that my parents were both educators. And even in the air force, my father's job was not really as an educator there, but it was as a kind of a social service person, in helping people with various problems and issues. And so I remember having people from various countries and backgrounds in our house all the time. And I remember reading all the time. I was a kid by the fifth or sixth grade that sometimes my teachers had to tug on me. Because if I was in a book, there was no other reality around me. Also about that age, while I was a pretty normal kid, I played baseball and all that. But I also rode my bicycle many days to the public library in the summertime, and that was where I hung out. I started writing poems probably pretty 00:01:00 early on, ten or eleven. But I was mostly aware of it about 14 years old. And that started to be something that I think some of my teachers were aware of. I had good English teachers. I had, I know an English teacher in junior high school who took me aside one day and said, "Why aren't you in Honors classes?" And got me in Honors classes. And then a high school English teacher, Mrs. Langford, Sarah Langford, as I remember, it was a lot of years ago, so if I remember (laughs) slightly wrong, but let some of us do a lot of independent studies. And I did independent studies in poetry. I did independent studies in Zen Buddhism with a friend, with two friends who were very involved in that. And those, of course, have been interests over the year. Probably the Zen Buddhism coming back more strongly in the last decade or so. So that takes me through high school. There was not really any models for writers, artists, in my family. On the other hand, my parents and my father especially, and I remember him frequently saying, "It doesn't matter what you do. Just do it as well as you can." So I had that ethic to be really immersed in whatever it was I was going to do. And I don't think my parents were particularly motivated by money or anything. They were kind of middle-middle class, and 00:02:00 comfortable with that. My sister was four years older. And she played some piano and was interested in the arts, but did not become involved personally. As a matter of fact, she ended up studying mathematics in graduate school and eventually engineering. And ended up working for Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico, and then has worked for most of her life in Washington, DC for government job. And she-I think she understands what I do. (laughs) It might have been a surprise to her. Or maybe it wasn't. You know, sometimes you think you're a surprise to people and they tell you, "Oh, no. We knew all along you were going to do this." I, let's see. I didn't, I don't think I made any books in high school or junior high school or 00:03:00 anything like that. And I didn't really take art classes at all. SL: Okay. 00:06:07 CA: And in fact, probably the only kind of art training I had might have been in Chinese language classes. I took Chinese in college. And we had a teacher who was really a master calligrapher, and he would give us lessons. Which is really funny now, because I've been doing that more recently. Mostly just sumi ink, little abstract drawings and things. And wondering how to use those, you know. So far, I've used them, scanned them and put them on the background of paperback book covers I've designed. Or I've written poems within the drawing and have about 32 little pieces. I'm wondering, what am I going to do with this? But I love to play. I love to play with language, and I love to play with the form that a page might take or books might take. SL: So you mentioned that you were a voracious reader as a kid. CA: Yes. SL: What kind of books did you like to read? CA: Well, that's interesting. And probably I mentioned 00:04:00 the library because we didn't have a big library at our house. But what we did have from as early on as I can remember, was the great books of the western world. So by the time I was 14 or so, I had read probably twelve plays by Shakespeare that were in that. Aristotle. You know, philosophers, all these things. And then when I started taking literature classes, even in junior high and high school, I read literary works primarily. But I was interested in history, too. Political science, philosophy. That was probably most of the areas. I was never-I was good at math. My high school teachers wanted me to go into math. And actually, I think when I first went into college, I thought I might be doing something in the sciences and maybe even medicine or something. But knowing one initial freshman seminar on the joy of tragedy that I thought oh, 00:05:00 yeah, this is what I'm supposed to be doing and reading. And there wasn't much question about that. So I have tended to follow a path that I was making up through the reading as I went along. I don't think I set out to read a particular kind of literature. But I ended up being drawn toward particular kinds of literature. And you know, my library now is probably 80 percent poetry. I have shelves four feet long that are all Gertrude Stein or Charles Olson or Robert Duncan or something like that. And I just moved, so I know how many books I have. (laughter) I know how silly it is to move big libraries of books. But yeah, did you have any other follow-up questions? SL: Yeah, well I was wondering, you mentioned some poets now. But what about when you were growing up? What poets did you start reading? 09:44 CA: Oh, that's a really good 00:06:00 question. Alfred Tennyson. The bells, you know, ringing in memoriam. Romantic poets. Keats. Browning, later. Shakespeare, of course, was always there. And some things I would just find on library shelves. And at some point I decided I wanted to learn French. And I thought I could learn French by trying to read Francois Villon. And of course, Villon is an old French poet. You couldn't possibly learn any kind of contemporary French by trying to translate that work. But I think I, pretty early on, certainly by the time I ended high school, I was kind of interested in writing that made me work a little bit. And that maybe I didn't get it at first. I was answering a question the other day that somebody had online about being totally bewildered by the poetry of Wallace Stevens. I said, "Well maybe that's exactly what Stevens wants. Because it is in bewilderment that we can maybe come to understand things we did not already know previously." And that's, of course I don't know that I could have put that as consciously as I just did, certainly when I was 18 or 19 or something. But by the time I was in my early twenties, I could. And of course, when I got to college, I think, the courses in modern American poetry were most important to me. And some of the people teaching 00:07:00 would introduce me to British poets, too. H.D., Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams was, you know, one of the first poets I started just buying as many of his books as I could. There was a little bookstore. It wasn't Kepler's, which was there, but another bookstore right on one of the main streets in Palo Alto, California, that I found these volumes which are kind of lovely hardcover with dust jacket, New Direction Books, published probably in the 1960s or something, that collected Williams' works. And maybe that's when I started developing the habit of book buying. Because I certainly have that, you know. (laughs) And I think also I was pretty aware of where I came from in terms of Oklahoma roots. And the first press I started that I named Black Mesa because of a place there. And I started reading various Native American poets, too. Either anonymous early songs and things, or people, some people I would later come to at least know a little bit. Simon Ortiz comes to mind right away. When I, this is out of chronological order. But when I first moved from Madison, Wisconsin to Tucson, Arizona in 1984, the only person I knew in Tucson was the novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko. And you know, I rode one of her horses for maybe half a year, and tutored one of her sons I algebra, and was a regular at her place. Which was an interesting place, because there were also, she was seeing at the time, every time he would come through town, which was about once every couple of months, 00:08:00 Larry McMurtry. And she had an interesting group of friends. I remember once at Thanksgiving peeling potatoes with Gloria Steinem. (laughs) So it was a good place. But that's after things that happened here and things that happened in college. Bill Chase at Stanford taught, I think that first American literature class, which was not just poetry but it was partly that but also Sherwood Anderson and through Hemingway, through almost midcentury, from like 1900 to 1945, I think was the dates. So that was the first dive into certainly William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and a few others that have continued to be important to me. You know, there were some good people at Stanford those days in those areas. Al Jelke, who I think was close friends with Denise 00:09:00 Levertov. And he, you know, edited some of her work. He edited the collection of letters between her and Robert Duncan, which is a massive book of letters. He certainly knew Duncan. Even though the people I knew he was working on, or I came to know he was working on, he didn't teach in his class. But still knowing him fueled some of my reading habits. And I certainly began, at least by my second year in college, certainly not limiting my reading to what was brought to my attention in class. For example, the British poet and scholar Donald Davie was teaching there. And in a course on late 18th century British poetry, he mentioned early on and read a poem by the American poet Edward Dorn, which was called Ledyard: The Exhaustion of Sheer Distance. Because it was about an American explorer in that time period. And I was blown away. So I went and found Dorn. Dorn led me to Robert Creeley and Charles Olson and Duncan and this whole circle of combination of so-called Black Mountain poets, San Francisco renaissance poets, touching on, but I wouldn't quite immerse myself for a while in Beat poets, and also touching on the New York School poets. The group that were published in an anthology, was published in 1960, that was 00:10:00 called The New American Poetry. And still by the early to mid '70s, when I was in college, was kind of an other, or as one anthology would call it, an outlaw tradition. They were not certainly what you would encounter if you were at an MFA program at a major university. In fact, sometimes they were pushed away in certain ways. But that would be a huge influence on what I would come to give my life to. And it would get broader than that, you know. I also was starting to see a lot of art and dance programs in San Francisco, in San Jose, and in the Bay Area, including the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Martha Graham Dance Company. Plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. And I don't know when I first became aware of John Cage, but his practice and methods of composition and bringing, again, some Zen Buddhist influences and some 00:11:00 non-intention. Getting away from what somebody might have called ego practices. I think it might have been Charles Olson who said something about "do not go by the beak of the ego." (laughs) SL: Can you talk a little bit more about how you became interested in Zen Buddhism? Because you mentioned that that was something that early on you became interested in. 18:36 CA: Yeah. I think I came to some of the texts of Zen Buddhism, probably through D.T. Suzuki, who many Americans did. Books that were available in the late 1960s. I was probably maybe 15, 16, when I read some of that. I was interested in that. I had friends, Scott Campbell and another friend, I can't remember his name now, in high school and we did a little maybe month-long unit of study. And I think I was more intellectually interested. I think they were more practice 00:12:00 interested. But I became more practice interested. I went to a Zen retreat when I was still probably 18. I was a freshman in college in the hills outside of Palo Alto, California. I was enthralled and yet I was wanting to push away a little bit, too. Some of the bowing to the Buddha, I thought, I don't know if I'm ready for that. (laughs) But I would continue now and then. And it really wasn't until the last decade or decade and a half that I started sitting more regularly. One of my closest friends in both poetry and personally is Kenny Nathanson, who's a professor at the University of Arizona and has four or five books of poetry out. And he's also a roshi. And I've published I think three or four books now 00:13:00 by Norman Fisher, who's been head of the San Francisco Zen Center and has an international reputation in kind of interfaith work. And you know, I mean, it was certainly in the air in the '70s, too. SL: Sure. CA: Even the kind of interaction between Buddhist philosophy and physics was in the air in books like The Dancing Wu Li Masters, you know? What is this universe all about? So it's important to me, but I think it's a meditation practice, a way of being for me more than a religion, in a certain way. And I've actually never been like a full-fledged member of any-but then, a lot of Buddhists aren't. They don't do that. I think only maybe five years ago I finally got a cushion and a mat at home. (laughs) SL: Were your parents aware of your interest in Zen Buddhism? 00:21:40 CA: Probably not. Probably not. My 00:14:00 father died when I was 20, barely 20, very suddenly. I didn't get to talk to him or anything when he was-he didn't have that period where he was worsening or anything. And my mother might have known a little bit through conversations. And certainly some of the poets I was reading, Phil Boylan is certainly one. Gary Snyder was one. For me, Whalen, more important than Snyder in certain ways. Later, Leslie Scalapino was a very good friend, and she's no longer with us, either. But she left a little too soon. She wasn't that old. I think you'll find there are a lot of poets. Then there was a poet around here in Madison when I was here. He may have taught here one semester. He wasn't, I don't think teaching when I was here, but he came through a few times. Hugh Seidman. I believe he was in New York. And he was 00:15:00 definitely a Buddhist teacher as well as poet, too. Really different kind of poet than any, most of those I mentioned. And that was interesting. You know, I think I have a wider acceptance than many people do, but it has its limits, too. (laughs) SL: Sure, sure. Well I wondered if we could go back a little bit. CA: Okay. SL: And you mentioned that you were writing poetry early on. When, again, did you start writing? CA: I said about 14. I'm aware of like keeping a notebook and writing things on paper. I'm not aware of it as a regular practice. And I never really did much trying to publish it or anything when I was young. SL: Sure. 00:23:45 CA: In fact, I was surprised. I had friends when I was my first year in college who asked me if I would 00:16:00 work with them to write song lyrics or something. Because they thought of me as a poet. And I'm, really? (laughs) And I've had people get in touch with me through Facebook things years later. "Oh, yeah, we always knew you'd do that." (laughs) So it was something that was pretty constant. SL: And did you do that kind of because you were reading a lot of poetry, you wanted to write? Did you take any creative writing classes in school? CA: I took, we probably had some creative writing like parts of classes in public schools. And I did take one class early on in college in poetry from a poet named Belle Randall. And I kind of ran from that class. SL: Why was that? CA: I love Belle. (laughs) I have met her since. There was a very, I don't know, to me, airy sensibility. I remember her saying something about, 00:17:00 "We're spending the whole semester thinking about water." The funny thing was, 20 years later she was in Seattle and I ran into her. I had a dinner with her and about 12 people at dinner after I gave a reading. And I said, "I was in your class and I didn't stay in." And I told her why. She said, "I was so full of shit back then." (laughter) And I don't know that she was, but she was doing something that I wasn't ready for. I had a fiction writing class from Al Young. Great black writer who also introduced me to the work of Ismael Reed, which has been really great. And Al, you know, made it clear to me that he believed in my work writing. But that I think I had sort of a structural thing, an awareness of 00:18:00 language creating kind of spaces that maybe lent itself more to poetry than to kind of developed sort of plot/narrative sort of work. But he was fantastic. SL: And this was in Oklahoma? 00:26:15 CA: No. This was at Stanford. SL: Oh, this was, okay. CA: This was at Stanford. I never went to college in Oklahoma. SL: Yeah. No, I was trying to figure out, like you were talking about high school, right? So where did you go to high school? CA: Yeah. Norman High School. Norman, Oklahoma. SL: Norman. CA: And you know, I had at least a couple of good English teachers. And I know that I did some writing in their classes. But they weren't all creative writing classes. And I don't know that I would have, I don't know, if I got something out of them, it might have been just yes, this is worth doing. But how to go about it, or validation of self through it, I don't know that I got that at that early date. SL: Well what about place? So you were in Oklahoma for high school. What was that like? CA: What was it like? Oh, man, it was green. (laughs) Not as green as Wisconsin. But to me, then, green rivers and the ability to get lost in places. You know, walking down the creek to the river. Some of the things I remember have been in poems I've written, I know that. And it was, to me, a friendly place. I don't think I had tons of trauma there or anything. But it probably helped just give me 00:19:00 confidence, I think, because I was allowed to be kind of free. Both in where I went and what I did. I was not particularly driven to get in a lot of trouble, either. I mean, not any trouble that other people weren't getting into. I mean, certainly by 1970 or so, I think most of the 16, 17 year-olds were smoking pot. And we weren't button-down, clean-cut kids, you know. We walked out of school in protest during the Vietnam War period. And I was something of an activist, although I don't think I was a leader in that way. I think I was always encouraged to think for myself. Both teachers and parents. And certainly my parents thought for themselves. They're strong people. My mother, she comes from, well, they both come from very small town 00:20:00 western Oklahoma. I think they were married in Cordell, Oklahoma. And my grandmother lived in Burns Flat, Oklahoma. You barely find that on any map. And liked to sit in her rocking chair on the back porch. And she chewed tobacco. And put up all her own vegetables. And had nine or ten kids. And my father's family had that kind of, too, extended family. So part of my youth was about that. You know, we always had people within a hundred miles to go see and do things with. And some of them were on farms, at least for quite a while. I think most of them ended up finally not, well, that's a hard life. (laughs) And certainly my parents' generation, I was aware at some point that one of things my parents did and some of their siblings did in order to leave the farm life, because not everybody inherits a farm with that many children. You need those kids to help work it, but then it's not going to be there for them at some point. They were pretty smart and they got educated and they became teachers. SL: Okay. What did they teach? 00:30:33 CA: My father taught math. He taught particularly geometry. And even after he was out of 00:21:00 the military, he taught geometry at a high school 30 miles away. He also was, one of the things he did that got him into the military was teaching in an ROTC program. My mother taught English but not for that long, and then she worked in a bank after that. And I don't think she ever went back to teaching. SL: Okay. So getting into Stanford must have been a pretty big deal. Like how did that happen? CA: Well, I had good grades. Let's see. Jim Plunkett was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, you know, winning the Heisman Trophy. My parents were aware of that. I applied to only maybe four colleges. And I got into all of them. But that was the one that my parents would say, "If you get into that one, we'll help with that." SL: Sure. CA: They really didn't want me to go away at all, I think. But they weren't strongly going to argue the case. And I think in some ways when they said that, they didn't think I was going to get in. (laughter) But I did. SL: What did you think of California when you got there? CA: It was the golden state. It was the state with beaches. You know, there was a different, I 00:22:00 think, openness. Probably a little bit of the less Baptist influenced morality. It was gorgeous. And also I lived in the dorm, so all of a sudden I had roommates from California, Chicago, New York. I had, I was around some very smart people all the time. And that was fantastic. Yeah. The school was great. But the things around it were great, too. I think after Christmas break my first year there, I came back with a Ford Maverick, manual transmission. So I had a car. And one of my friends was writing reviews for things for the student newspaper of art events and things. So I became the driver. And that's how I got to see Martha Graham Company and plays all over the Bay Area. I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance with the Twyla Tharp Company. And that was great. SL: Mm hmm. That sounds like a great gig. 00:33:40 CA: And went to museums, you know. Discovered 00:23:00 espresso, which is still one of my favorite things. And certainly the food culture was quite different there. And it was just starting to, even there, to blossom in a way that I think it's blossomed a lot of places in the United States now. But the international quality, the ethnic foods, the great breads and bakeries, things like that. After my first couple of years I lived in shared houses off campus with people. It was a growing up. SL: And when did you start Stanford? CA: Nineteen seventy-two. Fall of 1972. And graduated spring of 1976. Came to Madison, Wisconsin, not right away, but in the winter of '77. January. SL: And did you know, well you were saying you were thinking that you would be doing something in the sciences first. CA: Yeah, but that lasted like two months, maybe. SL: Okay. So you knew early on that you wanted to get a degree in English. CA: I knew early on I was going to do something in the humanities. And I had started taking Chinese for my language. I thought I might do that. But the thing that just kept coming was the literature classes and absolutely loving those. So before I knew it, like oh, I have all these credits. This is what I'm doing. So by the end of my second year. But I was certainly not somebody who picked out my major right away and plowed through it. I did a little bit of different things in art history. I didn't ever take an art class again, except for studying a little calligraphy almost on the side. But I did, was going to art museums. I was becoming aware of print traditions, Oriental print traditions. You know, the Asian art museums in San Francisco were pretty incredible. Not so much book making, but through the studies of some of the poets I was aware of small press books, and some books that were letterpress. And not, not too much quite what I would encounter here when I started studying that But William Everson's Lime Kiln Press in Santa Cruz, I was aware of. And a little bit of other kind of unusually produced books. SL: So- CA: Love the feel of paper. SL: Yeah. CA: I always, yeah, and 00:24:00 even when we were doing calligraphy, you know, mulberry paper and things is just like, okay. SL: I agree with you. Did you know then when you were in undergraduate school that you wanted to go to grad school? When did you decide to start applying? 00:36:57 CA: No, not really. Because I just go with the wind. SL: Sure. CA: I went back to Oklahoma. I wasn't really sure at all what I wanted to do next. And I saw an ad that they needed at the University of Oklahoma teaching assistants. And I said well, I can enroll in graduate school and get paid for it and paid to be a teaching assistant. I'll do that. And I was just one semester, I did that. Had a fantastic teacher, Roy Male for Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Of course, Herman Melville is like this incredible light to Charles Olson, who wrote a book called Call Me Ishmael about Melville. But I also kind of fell in love, you know. And my partner, who I later married, not my current partner-- SL: Okay. CA: --was coming here to Madison to graduate school. And so, and I already had the taste of graduate school. And I thought yes, I want to do that, and can I get in there? And I did, and that all happened. I ended up staying longer in graduate school than she did. (laughter) 00:38:24 SL: Well so you were starting out then in English here, right, in grad 00:25:00 school? Is that what you- CA: Yes. SL: And can you talk a little bit about that? Who you were studying with, and- CA: Yes, I can. At that point, the graduate program here, possibly they admitted people who already had master's degrees, I'm not sure. But if you didn't have one, you had to do some comprehensive studies, pretty broad-based in your first year. And also to, you had to do a language study, to pass a language reading test so that you could do research in a language. SL: Okay. CA: So I took a lot of different classes that first year. SL: So were you on the path to getting a PhD, then? CA: I was. I was. I got the master's degree after that. And I remember particularly studying romantic poetry with Mr. Whitley. We only knew him as Mr. Whitley. Al, or, not Alexander, but some kind of Alger or something. Chambers, I 00:26:00 studied renaissance poetry, particularly Milton and Spencer, Spencer with Eric Rothstein. I studied 17th and 18th century literature with, [unclear] the 20th century stuff with Larry Dembo, L.S. Dembo. I studied 20th century American poetry, and he was actually, had done some work on writers that I already cared much about and would care more about. I was a teaching assistant with Merton Sealts, who was a really amazing Melville scholar who actually knew Charles Olson and had a notebook full of correspondence with him, and gave me that notebook once. Not forever, but to look at before I went to a conference in Iowa City on Olson, which happened in 1978, November, so I'd just been here a year and a little bit. Oh, those were all great teachers. They were tweaking the program then, you know, because academic departments are always tweaking programs. And they had been entirely kind of era-based. You know, you became a 17th century British scholar, or 19th century American scholar. And they introduced genre studies for the first time. So I was, I think, the first student who was doing poetry. Which meant it was like Beowulf to almost the present. Well, probably not even that close to the present. Beowulf to 50 years before the present of both English and American. So that was a tough road but... (laughs) But I also, in that second year here, and in some ways as a direct result of that trip to that conference on Olson in Iowa City, there was a press there that I came into contact with. It was Toothpaste Press. I don't know if you know them. They later became Coffeehouse Press when they moved to Minneapolis. But they were doing all letterpress books, mostly illustrated. There were, the authors at that, they called it Olson Festival. And Olson was, he died in 1970. But Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, just about all men. (laughs) We'll get into women later. (laughter) But they, some of them, I mean, Creeley had a book by Walter Hamady, you know. I don't think I knew that then. Duncan did, too. I didn't know that then, either. You know, were incredibly welcoming and encouraging to me. As a matter of fact, I ended up just 00:27:00 walking up to them and they invited me to sit at their table for breakfast the first day. And I ended up having breakfast and lunch every day for a week with these people. And scholars working on their work and things. But the Toothpaste was really important. And I think Allan Kornblum, who directed that, I became friends with right away. And he, and I said, "How do you learn this stuff?" And he said, "Well, you're in Madison, Wisconsin. That's the best place you could be to learn. Go knock on Walter Hamady's door." And that's exactly what I did. And so in the spring of '79, I took my first class from him. And he just, I don't even know if art departments would do that now. I'm a graduate student in English, and can I learn this? And he said, yeah! Just you know, "I won't spend any more time with you than anybody else." I don't know if you know Walter, but he's like-or, "If I don't like you, you'll have to get out of here." Or something like that. But I liked everything about his gruffness and everything, and ended up I think the 00:28:00 next winter chopping wood for the winter at his farm with him. He became I guess a mentor, and a friend, in this work. But he's a funny mentor. Walter's way of teaching was to demonstrate and pretty much disappear. And leave you the place to work in, and leave you-and there were students who had been there the year before. And they helped the younger students. And it was fantastic. Of course, he make things look rather easy. And I've learned in my own teaching, I think I make some things look easy, too. But I'm aware they're not so easy when people actually start doing them for themselves. So I absolutely learned from Walter. But I learned also from Kathy Kuehn and Pati Scobey and others who were there. Many of which ended up 00:29:00 working on that Breaking the Bindings exhibition. But that was like another couple of years down the road. Also at the same time, I started going to poetry readings, because I heard I should. And I was noticing oh, they're bringing people I really like to Milwaukee. To Woodland Pattern Book Center. I ended up frequently spending the night with the directors of that, having dinner with poets there. Pretty soon printing broadsides for readings there. And so it was a lot of things coming together at once. It was the PhD studies, the book art studies, the involvement in community. I started a reading series just off campus. I think, what did we call it? I don't know if I can remember right now. (laughs) But monthly kind of series. And I was starting to get enough books out that some other people knew me. And of course [unclear] I know 00:30:00 Eli Goldblatt came here a couple of years after I did for graduate school. And at the time I felt like I'm printing books, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, I don't have any time for any new friends. I said, "Okay, let's talk." And we talked for like eight hours or something. I mean, we're like this, you know, and still are. He's in Philadelphia and directed the rhetoric and composition program at Temple for years and is, I believe, retired. Just now. And his wife, Wendy Osterweil, ended up studying with Walter. So that was a connection, too. Although she was a little more focused on printmaking, per se, and studied with other people in the department, too. Even though she certainly made a couple of wonderful books. But they did all come together, but it did lead me away from the PhD program. I just wanted to do it. I started a press here. I bought a press from Steve Miller, who, I think it had been several years before that he was studying. But he was in Madison, publishing books and making books and prints for at least a couple of years before he moved to New York. When he moved to New York, I didn't even know him. I just heard, "Oh, this guy Steve Miller, who had been in the program, has a press he's going to sell." So I got a $1500 loan from the 00:31:00 First Wisconsin Bank and paid, I think, a thousand dollars for that press, and a little bit for type and stuff. I mean, I was ready. Moved it into an apartment at 1243 East Jennifer Street. (laughs) And my partner was Alison Circle. And she was very interested in all that, too. And while I don't think she ever took a course from Walter, she was often in the studio. And she also became really good friends with all those people. Yeah. 00:48:59 SL: So what was it like to, you said you didn't really take any art classes for a while- CA: Mm hmm. SL: --to then get kind of, throw yourself into this book arts. CA: Well, you had to make a book. You had to make a book. It had to have illustration and text. So you did it. I don't think my first book was very good. I was looking what people were doing. So I was folding paper in funny ways and doing this and that. And it was, there was actually an exhibition that semester at the Madison Art Center. I don't know, is there still a Madison Art Center? SL: I don't know. (laughs) CA: I don't know. Now there's a big museum up the street, but I think there might have been-and that book was in there. (laughs) It was called To Turn Over. And the name of the press is, it's the only book that press name ever published, was The Pared So Thin Press, which came from a line by the poet Theodore Roethke. Which was, "Who'd think the moon could pare itself so thin?" (laughs) I don't like Roethke very much anymore. (laughter) But 00:32:00 that was the first book. And it was kind of weird brown ink, and it wasn't very even. But there were so many, not so many, but there were several people around doing this work at a high level. And you just had to get up to speed. I don't know if I ever got up to Katherine Kuehn's speed, or Pati Scobey's speed as a printer or a colorist or something. But I think I do good work, and have done good work. SL: Yeah. Yeah. 00:50:47 CA: And have done good work. And in some ways, for me, I think beginning here, but certainly continuing, the work was always fueled by the reading of the content. So if a page was going to be a certain size, that should relate to what that is. If it's going to unfold in a way other than a normal way, that should be not just what I want to do as an artist, but relate to the material I'm 00:33:00 working with. And you know, it's, in Olson's essay on projective verse, he writes, "Form is never more than an extension of content." And I took that to be not only about writing but about what I wanted to do in books, too. So I think, if not in the very first book, after that there was a sense of this flow between content and form and materials and all of it. And that really, that was enough. And the people I was meeting, the writers I was meeting around the country. I think '81, I was still here when I, first time I went to the New York Small Press Book Fair. And you know, I already knew people there, but I met there. I was already in touch with Charles Bernstein, for example, and the whole language poetry movement, which was still pretty, not controversial, but unliked by many at that point. That was great. How come I get to do this? This is both great fun and it's challenging. You know, I was working at the library. SL: Which library? CA: Memorial Library. Here. I started with, I had a job, I mean, I was a TA for a while. But then I had a job on the interlibrary loan, and then I had a job in the rare book room. You know, basically being somebody who went and got things out of the vaults for people when they asked for them. SL: Sure. CA: Or as I said to somebody [unclear], I don't think it was you, somebody who sometimes disappeared into the vaults because there were things I 00:34:00 wanted to look at there. (laughter) And among my closest friends, this is particularly Eli, who I mentioned, Eli Goldblatt and Chris Bruch, B-r-u-c-h, who was a, I think he studied some art here. But I don't know if he was still in school at the time. He was a, I think he was a performance artist. I think he did study here. And he later became more known as a sculptor, and an installation sculptor. But also, he made things that sometimes moved and worked with, interactively with people. And he and Eli and I formed a poetry performance group we called Non Collinear. Because three noncollinear points define a plane. And we did performances. And then we did, and then Chris had some real issues with something like stage fright. So we started doing, well, we only did a couple more at that point, performances where we knew something was going on but the audience didn't. Like we would go places and do things. (laughter) SL: Okay. 00:54:37 CA: Anyway, but Chris, we were walking down State Street once and I said something about, "I just wish I could go somewhere where it's cheap enough I could live and do this work and not have another job." And he just said, "Charles, do it." And that's when I moved to Arizona. And I think why there, my sister had lived in Albuquerque for a long time. I had a little bit of sense of the Southwest. And it was my brother-in-law who said, you know, "Tucson is the place." He said, "It's going to be less expensive than like Albuquerque or Santa Fe." And he said also he loved Tucson because he said back at that time, it was back in the early '70s when there was a lot of urban renewal 00:35:00 money. Because of weird state politics, Tucson didn't get any. So it really saved its old barrio, downtown, its old adobe kind of structures. So I did. I went there. I had a, I found, where I lived to start with, well, I lived at Leslie Silko's. I lived at an apartment. I can't remember exactly where it was now. Not for too long. And wasn't too long till I bought an old adobe house and also the same time I was meeting Cynthia Miller, my wife, who's just a brilliant painter. And I think I said to her, "Do you want to move into this little house with me?" Twenty thousand dollar, one-bedroom, 900 square feet foot house. And I think her response was, "Been there. Done that. I don't think I want to do that unless you want to marry me." And I said, "Yeah, okay. I could do that." SL: And 00:36:00 when was this? 00:56:43 CA: This was 1985. I had moved there in August of '84. I think she got a little cold feet. But then we took a long trip from Tucson all the way up to the Pacific Northwest. We were camping most of the way and a couple of places staying with friends. And then back down the west coast and California coast and back. And we decided if we could stay together for a month in a car and a tent, we could probably get married. And now it's thirty-something years later, 32, I think, in November. And we're glad we did. And our two daughters might be glad we did. (SL laughs) I think they are. And that was something else, too. I know that's maybe part two of this talk. But she showed me other things in the arts, and provided a different way of collaborating, too. And that was-and also she probably more than any single person helped me establish a community in that place that has been substantial to me for a long time. Changing all the time. But every time I move away from there, I end up going back. SL: What is it about Tucson that brings you back? CA: It's several people, people that I just don't want to be without. And it's also a real sense of who I am and what I do there. But also, I mean, I love the landscape. You know, when we went away this last time, I mean, what's wrong? I can't see any mountains. (laughs) There's something wrong with it. I don't know if I knew that immediately when I went there from Wisconsin, but the place certainly seemed alive to me. And maybe part of that's the lack of humidity. The air, you feel a little lighter or something. And you're probably getting a little lightheaded if you don't drink enough water. The traditions, the Mexican American traditions, the Native American traditions. There's a mix of cultures there that I really like. And my first, other 00:37:00 than Leslie Silko, the first other friends I made there were a Mexican-American couple that had come from Mexico when they were kids and grown up in Chicago. Ended up in Tucson. The sculptor Alejos Garza and his wife, Yolanda Galvan. And they just took me in, you know, that was part of their family. I mean, I didn't have to ever cook a meal at home, because I'd just go to their house. Sometimes I'd cook for them. And they helped me. And actually, they're the ones that introduced me to Cynthia, too. SL: So it sounds like there's a real artistic community there that you're a part of. 01:00:04 CA: Very much so. Very much so. Not that it's always been easy for that community or me personally through the years. But it's always felt like worth doing. Worth doing, and worth doing with those people. Would be a little bit, well, probably after, it was still my first year there when I met Tenney Nathanson, who I mentioned, who was not a Zen roshi at that time, but he became that later. But was a professor. 00:38:00 And he was teaching some of the writers that I liked. And I wasn't going to enroll in school again. But after I met him and talked to him and, I think, went to a reading he gave. And I had his first book. Which he was like, "I didn't think anybody had that." So I asked him if I could sit in on his class. And he merely said, "Well, only if you'll teach a couple of writers in it." And I said okay. And that also was a community developing in that, too. Because at least a couple of people in that class, you know, one of who went on to do some amazing scholarship. And she's now retired back in Tucson. One is a creative writer and who is head of a program at University of Utah. And she's also now retired and back in Tucson, have been important people over the years, too. And Tucson is an easy place to get people to come to to give readings and things, too. You know, starting in Madison, but as soon as I got there, I started developing reading series, too, as well. And within a couple of years there, maybe three, directing the Tucson Poetry Festival, which is an annual event. So I guess, maybe I always felt like I had, I got good return back from what I was doing there as well. SL: Well could we go back a little bit- CA: Absolutely. SL: --to Madison. CA: Yes. 01:02:18 SL: I'm curious. When did you say you started in Madison? CA: Nineteen seventy-seven, January. SL: Seventy-seven. CA: I started in '79 taking the course from Walter. SL: Book arts. Did you take more than one course with him? CA: Oh, yeah. I took, I think it was basically a course that could be repeated. And I did, and I repeated it at least once. Maybe twice. And then, oh, and he also taught another course specifically on book illustration. But he defined that very broadly. So you know, if you weren't someone who already was drawing, illustration could be collage. Illustration could be you know, paper folding. It was whatever happened to augment the text in a way. And that was 00:39:00 great. And he also was using a book when he taught that by, a literary book, by Paul Metcalf. At that point, of course I knew Paul Metcalf's work very well, and would end up publishing two of his books once I started-well, actually one was Black Mesa Press and one was Chax Press. So that was, there was a lot of just back and forth and talk. It was a pretty informal class, as I remember. Reading and talking about illustration possibilities. And then was it '83, the Breaking the Bindings? SL: Okay. CA: Or '83 may have been the exhibit. So the first class toward that might even have been spring of '82 or something like that, or fall of '82. SL: And so when did you, when did you kind of finish up with your coursework here? Because I know like you stopped, you got away from the literature. 01:04:25 CA: That exhibition. SL: That exhibition. CA: That exhibition. Yeah, there were two semesters, I believe, moving toward that exhibition. And I probably would have not continued courses there. I would have just done my own work. But Walter asked me to be involved in that. So I said sure. SL: Could you talk about your involvement with the exhibition and the catalog? CA: Yes. (laughs) SL: Please do. CA: Okay. The 00:40:00 first semester of that class, I mean, everybody did pretty much the same thing. That is, we did as much correspondence, research, outlook, as we could to develop lists of what we thought might be going on in different regions in the country. And then we went there. You know? And there wasn't a big budget for sending people. So we tended to go places we had connections to. So I went to Oklahoma and Texas and New Mexico. SL: I'm going to stop you just for a moment. Because we have talked about this in other- CA: Okay. SL: But in case somebody's only listening to this one, or this is the first one that they're listening to- CA: Right. SL: --can you explain what Breaking the Bindings was about? What were you doing when you were 00:41:00 [unclear] 01:05:55 CA: Oh, okay. There had never been a nationwide exhibition of work in the book arts before. And so we wanted to create that exhibition. And we were looking not necessarily for well-known presses, but just interesting activity that was going on. And we definitely wanted it to cover as much of the nation as we could, even though we absolutely knew there was no way we could be absolutely exhaustive. And we also knew that once we found out about people's work, once we went and visited them, they were also going to have to send work in, and we were going to have to decide what we were actually going to include in the exhibition. But you know, we were not people who had ever put on an exhibition before. I mean, maybe Walter Hamady had. But we were 00:42:00 a bunch of graduate students with different backgrounds. And I think early on it became clear we weren't going to do just a letterpress. We were going to do letterpress, book arts, artist book. It was going to be fairly wide. And some of that stuff even, I think, Walter Hamady wasn't all that interested in. And I particularly remember one little heated session where he got a little on a high horse about something, and Penny McElroy, who I love, said, "Shut up, Walter!" Because he had set the ground rules from the very beginning that this was going to be something where we all worked as colleagues, and we all had a say. And it really was. And even, you know, much later, the second semester, when we went to write the catalog, I was actually the writer of the essay, uncredited. But we credited all of us, because everybody edited 00:43:00 it after that, you know, and went to that. And then he wrote a little preface, too, I think, as I remember. I haven't looked at that catalog for a long time. So there were letterpress books, there were painted books, there were boxes that were book forms. There were you know, kind of suggestions of books, sculptural suggestions of books. And there were some more traditional kind of book forms in there, too. I remember visiting universities in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico. I remember visiting individuals at their studios. And it really was an educational experience for all of us involved. And I don't know that he even said that. Maybe that was one of the goals in his mind. It certainly was. And it was very helpful years later when I helped the exhibits at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts or other little independent things that I've done. And that was just, that was a life highlight. I mean, Penny, Stephanie Newman, Kathy Kuehn, Pati Scobey, Suzie Schneider. If they were in this room now, they'd still be great friends. You 00:44:00 know? (laughs) I'm sure they've all had arguments with each other, but-(laughs) Actually, I'm not sure of that. I think that was a labor of love, that show. And most of us had known each other for a year and a half or so by then, and we really trusted each other and liked each other. SL: So it was that group of you that really was putting that exhibition together? 01:10:21 CA: I didn't name everybody there, but I named about half of them. SL: Yeah. Okay. So how many were there, about? CA: I think there were 12 or 13. Walter Tisdale is another one. I don't know, I'd have to get out the catalog. SL: Yeah, yeah. Actually, the catalog, I think they have that at the art library so anybody can take a look at it. CA: 00:45:00 Sorry if I missed anybody. (laughter) SL: But I guess I'm curious to, since Walter Hamady wrote poetry and you wrote poetry, did you ever- CA: I liked his poetry. SL: Did you talk about poetry? CA: We did. We talked about poetry. We talked about, you know, the writer I mentioned, Paul Metcalf. We talked about Robert Kelly, about Olson and Duncan and some of the people he had published. Paul Blackburn, who was a close friend of his. Toby Olson, who I just saw last fall. I've got to tell Walter that. They were close. There was one point he told me about not understanding Robert Kelly. And I wrote him a five-page essay letter about a work of his, which I might have forgotten, but somebody else doing some research on Walter came across that in his archives and got back to me and said, "You wrote this really great essay!" (laughs) That was Kyle Schlesinger, who is a great printer and poet, too, but who did not study with 00:46:00 Walter. But he's very enamored of that work. Yeah, so sometimes I was probably a thorn, saying, "Walter, you should be reading this person!" And not everybody he liked did I love, and not everybody I liked did he love. But he was, it's not the same kind of talk about the work I might have had with English professors. On the other hand, by that time, that was perfectly okay with me. I think sometimes the kind of interpretation and scholarly study doesn't always get at the heart of works as much as some more open conversations about things. And Walter was a smart guy. And very open to things. And he liked, I mean, he was an experimental book maker, I think, too. And extended that tradition. He was certainly interested in the poets who were extending and exploring. And you know, I love him for that, and for those 00:47:00 times. SL: Did you take- CA: We went to a reading together in Milwaukee. SL: Oh, yeah? 01:13:28 CA: Oh, I got so mad at him! (laughter) SL: What happened? CA: It was Joel Oppenheimer, who also was somebody he'd published, somebody he was friends with from New York. And Walter just like wanted to, it seemed to me he wanted to make it a conversation between him and the poet. And he kept interrupting him and asking him. And I rode back, on the way back I said, "Walter, you are a fucking asshole!" And he wrote a poem to me called "The Asshole and the Earthworm." And printed a broadside of it and how he was not an asshole, he was a more perfect orifice or something. (laughs) Anyway, that was a great thing with Walter. Even you could have these major things and he would extend that somewhere else, that conversation to go somewhere else. It was hard to have an actual real confrontation with him. But he had moments of 00:48:00 that sometimes, yeah. SL: Let's see here. You were talking about Breaking the Bindings and this collaboration- CA: Yes. Some people didn't like that title. SL: No? CA: Like, "What do you mean, breaking bindings? What are you doing?" And you know, whereas to us it had that, you know, it introduced the notion of bindings. But it was breaking the boundaries, you know, really. SL: Yes. So that was a big collaboration with your classmates. Did you start to also collaborating individual projects with some of them? CA: Sure, sure. SL: Can you talk a little bit about what some of those were? 01:15:27 CA: Yes. I think the very first like Mesa Press book was called American Sentences: The History of West Seneca, New York, by Donald Wesling. And was a manuscript that came to be through Ed Dorn, who was one of those Black Mountain poets. Because I asked Dorn for something and he wasn't quite ready to have anything. I would do a book of his another year and a half or so later. But I liked this work by Wesling. It was a lot of story and a lot of landscape in it. And I asked Kathy Kuehn to do drawings for it, and she did. And they were brilliant. It was probably, I did that book entirely, 00:49:00 well, I did part of the edition entirely on handmade paper, which I made at the paper mill. I loved the papermaking. That was great. SL: Did you take that with- CA: Probably other people helped me make some of the paper. But I mean, I was certainly doing most of it myself. I took papermaking, yeah, with Hamady, too. And I took it a couple of times. And then the summer before I moved away from here, I was like a ghost haunting the paper studio. And I think I took like a thousand sheets of paper or so with me that I had made. (laughs) Kathy also designed and constructed most of the binding of one of the early books, French Sonnets by Jackson Mac Low. And I think I worked with her more than anybody. I did a book [For Instance] Eli Goldblatt's, in which Wendy Osterweil did the illustrations. And I'm trying to think. I certainly, I don't know about designing the books, but I'm sure Pati Scobey had something to do with helping. So sometimes her husband Time, Tim Moore, what a genius he is, he was always around, too. He developed like equipment for book binding. And I have one of his pieces, which has helped me a lot. But mostly not too many collaborations. And not all of the books I was doing would be illustrated at all. And at least one of them I did woodcuts myself, which were not, I don't know if it were so much illustrated. I mean, probably somebody would say yes. But there were just created empty spaces in which to put titles and numbers of sections and things. That was one of the Paul Metcalf books. Oh, and I think Steve Clay was around at that time, too. SL: Okay. 01:18:39 CA: And he was in Minneapolis. You know who he is? SL: No. CA: He has become one of the 00:50:00 great entrepreneurs of handmade letterpress book. Granary Books, he started that. SL: Oh, yeah. CA: And he doesn't print himself, but he has people make books, and he's worked with great artists in New York and things. But he was in Minneapolis. He started Granary Books after having been at, I think, Origin Books. And he was coming down and meeting with us and talking with us. And may have even dated Kathy Kuehn for a little while, but I don't know. Don't put that. SL: Do you want me to take that out? CA: No, you don't have to take it out. You can say that's my memory of that. (laughter) And he was a great person to talk to about books, too. And there were book distributors in Minneapolis. Book Slinger, which Jim Sitter started. He would later go on to, I think, Jim, I think he was involved with National Endowment for the Arts, and any number of things. I early on met David Wilk, who actually was the head of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts for a while. He saw, I think I was still in Madison when he saw some books I did. Because I left them with a press I was visiting in Toronto. And he actually wrote me and said, "You should be applying for grant money. We will likely give you money." (laughs) And I did, and they did. So I don't know where you started that questions. About collaborations. SL: Mm hmm. CA: Yes, I was collaborating with 00:51:00 people. But pretty soon I was collaborating with people who weren't in Madison, too. SL: Yeah. And you mentioned that Breaking the Bindings was kind of like your last hurrah here, and then you were heading to Tucson. 01:20:44 CA: Yeah, but don't call it my hurrah. It was Walter's hurrah. (laughs) I was a part of it. SL: Yeah, I misspoke. I just meant like that was kind of the last, the last thing that you did here before you moved to Tucson. CA: I think that's right. I mean, I probably was still working on another book project in the studio. And I know that, actually I think that book I mentioned, French Sonnets, was begun here but finished in Tucson. But I gave it a Madison place name in the book. But that was certainly the 00:52:00 major event that occurred not too long before I left. I left here in August of 1984. And I think that had been the previous spring, maybe, that exhibition. SL: Okay. So then you were in Tucson. CA: I was. SL: And you started doing- CA: Chax Press. SL: --readings. Well, you started Chax Press. CA: Started Chax. SL: Why don't you talk about that, the name change, first of all. 01:21:53 CA: Okay. Okay. Well it seemed like it was a change and it was a break and it was a new thing. And I took those letters in Chax from in my mind, my father's name and his father's name. You know, they were, you know, I mean, I've kind of at different points in my life been very aware of losing my father too early and how much that meant to me. And so, he's part of that. So I'm a Charles Haskell Alexander, Junior. And he was Charles Haskell Alexander. And his father was Charles Alexander. Haskell was the last territorial governor of the state of Oklahoma, and the first state governor. And my father was born in the year Oklahoma became a state. Even though it was not yet a state when he was born. He was born in 00:53:00 the Oklahoma territory. It didn't become a state until 1907. I was a pretty late kid. He was 46, I think, when I was born. So that name, even though I really loved the fact that Ed Dorn called me up and said, "It's Tlaloc, it's like the Aztec rain god." And I thought okay, we can have it be that, too. (laughs) Now it's just the name of the press. I don't think that much where it came from. SL: Sure. CA: And I think somebody, yeah, I think it was Tom Mandel, a poet in Delaware now, but he had been in San Francisco for years, who told me he thought I should just go by Chax. Not Chax Press. And kind of inched toward that lately. So it's been a good name. And it was a good start. And, let's see. Knowing Leslie Silko, I did a broadside by her when she was at Woodland Pattern Book Center when I was here. SL: Okay. So that's how you met her, then? CA: That's how I met her. Ruth Lingen, who was part of that group, did a linoleum block print as part of that broadside. I mean, as I was printing it, she was changing it. You know, she was like-(laughs) She was never satisfied. SL: Leslie, Leslie Marmon Silko was changing the- 01:24:35 CA: No, no, no, no. Ruth was changing the cut. So 00:54:00 I'd print a couple of copies in the edition. She'd go right into the press and cut out a little differently. Leslie loved it, and I hit it off well with Leslie. And we started conversation and eventually when I moved there, I remember she called up Karl Gartung who was running Woodland Pattern Book Center, and she said, "That's one for Arizona, zero for Wisconsin!" (laughter) I love Wisconsin. I love coming back here. Yeah, no, that was a good move for me. And it was really a move that, as much as I was already doing what I wanted to do, it was like saying that in some strong way to myself and the world. It was about that time. By that time I was-nope, not quite thirty. No, I turned thirty here. I did turn thirty here. I remember Kathy Kuehn and Richard making something for my birthday. And Richard was the king of making whipped cream on top of things, which he never used anything electric. He was always-he'd whip that up with his hands. (laughs) And even though I didn't know anybody else, I very quickly knew a lot of people there. I think, let's see, the two books that were in process when I moved, one was by Carl Young, who was maybe still in Milwaukee at the time before he moved to Kenosha. It was called Five Kwaidan in Sleeve Pages which was one of the more 00:55:00 structural books I made. It's very unusual. It had these pages which you kind of have to, they're like record sleeves. You kind of have to open them up a little bit and almost peer inside them to read them. And they're from these Japanese ghost stories. And that's part of the point of them. And then the other one was by Jackson Mac Low which is, in a certain way, one of the more, most traditional looking books I've ever done. And even though it's like maybe the least traditional writing I've ever published. But I think I wanted to say something about this is classic. It may not ever have been recognized as that, but it is. And it has a relationship to, I don't know, philosophy and classic literature. And so, yeah, let's give it this nice cloth and do it that way. Then I started doing kind of little funky 00:56:00 work there for a while. The book Individuals. I don't know if you've ever looked at that one, but it has all these sort of individual poems and these dividing pieces that are attached to a spine piece that unfolds like an accordion. And you also kind of, sometimes I take it around and it sets up like this way. And that's also, that was about a poetic collaboration, correspondence between two different poets. They're writing back and forth to each other. And I wanted to just accentuate that because there's this back and forth going on. But that it does move in a progression, too. 01:28:24 SL: How did that come about? CA: I was in touch with Lyn Hejinian and Kit Robinson, who were the poets. I think particularly with Lynn. And I said, "Do you have something?" And she said, "Well, I have this collaboration I've been doing with Kit." And I said, "Send it." And she sent it. I thought oh, of course that's made that way. (laughs) And the authors were fine with it and they liked it. It wasn't something of theirs that they felt like had to be in like a thousand copies or something. SL: Sure. CA: So I think maybe we did 100 copies of that, maybe 150. A lot of handwork in putting that one together. (laughs) SL: Sounds like it. CA: And 00:57:00 that's probably also about the first time that I had student interns with Chax. And I started developing a relationship with, more with the English department at the University of Arizona. And they sent me some great people, which would include over time some other people who started presses, too. Lisa Bowden runs the Kore Press, which has become a real important publisher of women, and women of color, and she's still a good friend. She's still in Tucson, too. SL: So you mentioned that you were looking at a small house in Tucson. 01:29:57 CA: Small house. SL: Is that where Chax- CA: [427 San Miego?] Street. SL: Is that where Chax Press started? CA: Well, no. Where did Chax Press start? Chax Press started in a studio, like somewhere in the 930 North Stone Avenue, which was right next to a not particularly nice hotel. And in that 00:58:00 building where I had a studio, Leslie Marmon Silko, she had a writing studio in there. She liked to come away from her house. And then the third person there was Craig Kessler, who had a martial arts dojo. So we had a writer, a press and the martial arts dojo. And I was there for probably more than a year, but not a whole lot more than a year. Well, maybe a couple of years. Then Cynthia and I together kind of at the invitation of a really great sculptor and installation artist, Barbara Grygutis moved into a big warehouse, which was just becoming available. It was a very old warehouse, too. Beautiful. Called the Steinfeld warehouse. Or, as some people liked to call it, the Alamo. (laughs) Because we had a group of woodworkers in there called Alamo Woodworks. SL: Okay. CA: We have a lot of furniture in our house by those guys. (laughs) You know, by that time, by the time of that move, I was pretty well known in town and I was doing the 00:59:00 readings and the reading series, and I was exhibiting books. Although Leslie did once tell me, she said, "The reason everybody likes you is because nobody else is doing anything like you're doing, so they can't be jealous." (laughter) SL: Well now people are doing stuff like you're doing, your protegees. 01:32:05 CA: Well I mean in that location right there. Oh, yeah, I had protegees. Only a few that carried on in that work. I had more that wanted to work in publishing. SL: Yeah. CA: And I used to, there were four or five people I wrote letters for and ended up sending to summer publishing institute in Denver, Colorado. And they all got jobs, you know, working at university presses and other things. That's a place. If you go there, it used to be, if you were willing to move, you could find employment in publishing. Now some, not all employment in publishing is somebody's romantic idea of what they would 01:00:00 like it to be. But, anyway. SL: So when you moved to Tucson, did you bring the press that you bought? CA: In U-Haul trailer. SL: You did. CA: I drove myself. Or U-Haul truck I drove myself. And I parked it at Leslie's house and stayed there for about a week until I figured out where, you know, and I accepted her invitation to come into that studio. And that was also interesting because the girlfriend of the martial arts guy was Lola Kelly. And her sister, Marietta [Burnstar?] Kelly, was kind of a brilliant artist, entrepreneur in a way. She developed a shop there. She was going back and forth to their home in Mexico all the time. And she may be the person who introduced me to Alejos, Alex Garza and [Yole (Yolanda)], who introduced me to Cynthia. And Marietta ended up being a neighbor in the barrio, too. And she also, I don't know if they married. But she lived, at the end of his life, with Luis Carlos Bernal, who is like a world famous photographer of barrio scenes and all kinds of things. Brilliant man. He got hit by a car on his bicycle after a few years there, and that was one of the saddest things. You know, but these were just people that were part of my life there. And still are, some. Some of them still are. And made for a good life. It has made for a good life. (laughs) I get ambitious sometimes. You know, we have children and we need more money sometimes. So that happened, we had 01:01:00 our first, we were about to have our second child when I took the job in Minnesota. And I did that for two, two and a half years. And I don't think I was cut out for running that kind of a nonprofit organization. You know, it was very different from running a press. SL: So you're talking about the Minnesota- 01:35:19 CA: Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Yeah. And then I started teaching a lot in the oh, I guess now it's got to be more than 15 years ago, I started teaching. Well, I started teaching a little bit. I started teaching writing classes, creative writing classes. Not so much book making. I would always do that with groups in my studio and things. But a writer at a community college there said, came up to me and she said, "You'd be really good in the classroom." And I sure liked it a lot more than I ever knew I would. So I did that. And the culmination of that for me was probably taking this job 01:02:00 in Texas. But also, there are things I absolutely love about Victoria, Texas, where we were until a month and a half ago. But after Cynthia's parents died and we inherited that house, it just seemed like the right thing to do, to go back there. We made that decision together and I think we are really happy we did. SL: Mm hmm. Well, can you talk a little bit more about the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts and your role there, what you did? CA: I was the executive director, which means I, you know, other than the development part of fundraising and all that stuff, I kind of ran the show. And I did a lot of that fundraising stuff, too. I did some grant writing and working with the board of directors. They had a very powerful board of directors. They had bank presidents and had had a former governor and really was a very grand idea to start that place. And it began with the kind of a presence in some communities a symphony might have, or something like that. So I was definitely moving from this tiny nonprofit organization, this big place. And it was great. I helped plan exhibitions. I had to hire and fire people. I'd never had to fire people before. But at least once, I did. And just every day, keeping that stuff going. Probably one of the highlights there for me was the exhibition-the book that came out is called Talking about this Book. The exhibition has a slightly different title, The Boundless Book. You have Breaking the Bindings and the Boundless Book. And I asked for essays from most of the people involved. Visual essays, if they wanted to, and ended up editing and writing the introduction for that book, which was really great. Minneapolis was a good community. I met other poets there. You know, once you get kind of a presence nationally, you go someplace, and people come see you. (laughs) So meeting Maria Damon and Jonathan [Baron], reuniting a little bit with Allan Kornblum who was there running Coffeehouse Press. I used to go visit him in his office. And I remember once taking him like roses and a birthday cake. And his staff, you know, Allan was-you think Walter Hamady was gruff. His staff couldn't believe anybody was bringing Allan presents. (laughter) But I always liked him. I liked him a lot. So we lived in Southeast Minneapolis, which was easier to go grocery shopping across the river in Saint Paul. And kind of got to know that whole area. I like that job a lot. I didn't like working with that board of 01:03:00 directors a lot. And I think particularly with one person, we had a little bit of a clash. There was no way I was going to win that battle. Even though they might see it differently, but I left a, they were in a little bit of a downswing. And I left kind of a new budget plan and a new programming plan to make it all work. And one of my assistants there said to me about a year and a half later, she said, "You know, after about a year, they put that plan into existence exactly the way you said." (laughs) And so I hope I helped that place. I definitely did things they weren't as used to doing. They were very Minneapolis organization. And I brought in poets from other places, book makers from other places. I developed collaborations with 01:04:00 University of Minnesota where I would bring people in. And I think it was, I was probably maybe reaching out a little more than they were always ready for. SL: Okay. Is that what the clash was about? 01:41:06 CA: I don't know. I don't know. My wife has an idea about that. (laughs) I don't, and what little I do know, I don't want to say. SL: Sure. Sure. So then from there, where did you go? CA: Back to Tucson. SL: Back to Tucson. CA: Yeah. Yeah. It seemed like there wasn't any question about that. That was just what we'd do. But you know, my oldest daughter went from being just over four to being seven there. Those were great years. The youngest daughter from being one month old. (laughs) So I could still see them, the older one trying to ice skate. The younger one I remember going out to our raspberry bushes with a basket and coming back with two raspberries with red all over her, raspberries. As a matter of fact, if you look at my book Near or Random Acts, you will see things about the raspberry girl in there. And of course Near or Random Acts is N-o-r-a, Nora. That's her name. That's her book. I have other books dedicated to other people. But in some ways, and that was really her book until that was also, I was in the midst of the writing of that one, 9/11 happened and it became a little more political in that book towards the end of the first section. And then the second section was transformation. Like everything that I had done, I kind of wanted to throw a monkey wrench into and undo, and in certain ways formally. So anyway, that became my third book of poetry. So Minneapolis was good for me as a poet, and it was good for me understanding what I wanted to do organizationally. And you know, I like those people. Even those board members, I still like. I work with them again. SL: Sure. Sure. So you were mentioning one of your books of poetry. And I know that you've worked with different presses- CA: Yes. SL: --who have published your books. Can you talk a little bit about how those came to be? Like, you know, how did you, because you have your own press. CA: Right, right. SL: But then you were working with some other presses. Like how did the one that you just mentioned come to be? 01:44:06 CA: That one came to be, Near or Random Acts, through relationship with Gil Ott, who had a press called Singing Horse Press in Philadelphia. And edited a great magazine there called Paper Air. Not, did I get the right one, yes. And he had published my work in that magazine I had submitted to him. I 01:05:00 had, either about the time I submitted work I also met him, because he was very close, my friend Eli Goldblatt I mentioned who after he was in grad school in Madison went back to Philadelphia. And so at Eli's wedding, I stayed on Gil Ott's floor. (laughs) And then at some point, I think he asked me for a book manuscript if I had one. And I did. Unfortunately, he died. He had, he lived for a long time with one kidney. I think he lost one when he was a kid. He may even have lived with one that wasn't initially his. Anyway, but he had made a decision before he died that Singing Horse Press was going to become Paul Naylor's press. It was going to transfer to him. Paul Naylor is in San Diego. So that book was published by Singing Horse Press in San Diego, even though it was accepted by Gil Ott in Philadelphia. Paul's a great, and he's published a lot of wonderful books since then under that name, too. My very first book, not the first fine press or chapbook, but the first full book, Hopeful Buildings, that, I remember a conversation with Charles Bernstein, who, he just, he kind of took me aside and he said, "You're already in your thirties. You're a good poet. You need a book." I said, "Well, who should I send it to?" He said, "Just do it yourself!" (laughter) And so I did publish that one. And I think that got around and introduced my work a little more widely to many others. And James Sherry asked me for the second book. James had Roof Books and Segue Books and the Segue Foundation. He's run a series of poetry readings in New York forever. Oddly enough, I didn't meet him until many years later, and didn't really become friends with him till just the last couple of years. He's been to visit. I stay at his place in New York. He's fantastic, he and his wife Deborah Thomas. So he published the second one as Segue Books. Then there was the San Diego one with Singing Horse. And then, that's one, two, three, four, five. I just published the sixth one this year. Oh, Mark 01:06:00 Weiss, who had lived in Tucson for a while, but is a New Yorker and moved back to New York. But he got to know me and my work and really like it. And he asked me for a book. And he published something, it was almost like a selected poems, you know. 01:47:57 SL: What do you mean by that? CA: It had, it's the only book of mine that's very diverse in what it puts together. It had one series I've been working on, another couple of series, individual poems. It didn't really go back to the earlier books. But most of my books have been cohesive as books. But that's the only one, that's Certain Slants, and that is the book that began publishing the works in Pushing Water. In Pushing Water has kind of become over the last twenty years something that keeps growing. And now, so I also published later a Pushing Water: Volume One, and now Pushing Water: Volume Two has come out. The first one, Kyle Schlesinger, who's 01:07:00 in Austin, Texas, who I've known since he was a graduate student in the poetics program in Buffalo, he actually included, he partly wrote about me in his dissertation, which was on presses and poets. And then, so he asked me for a book. And beautiful book, that one. And then when I-I'm not very good at sending my work out. So but finally I had a second volume of this stuff. And Kyle didn't really have time. And I contacted Paul Naylor again. And I said, "Would you be-" And he said yeah. So he published that one. Although I designed that one. That's, I think, the only book of mine published by somebody else that I designed the book. He asked me, he said, "Do you want to design it?" And my first reaction was, no! 01:08:00 (laughter) But then I think I thought about it for a couple of days and I said, yeah, I guess so. And last fall I finished what will be the third book of that work, I think. I know I'm finished with it, but I'm not sure if I should still consider it as part of that series of work. SL: Okay. CA: Even though if anything has to do with water, it was mostly written during a residency I had on Cape Cod. So I was certainly in the water a lot more. (laughs) I'm a desert guy who writes-although water is a big metaphor. SL: (laughs) Uh huh. 01:50:35 CA: When I came to Texas, and first came to the estuaries on the gulf, particularly on Port Lavaca, and this mix of saltwater pushing freshwater, and what grows there and what happens there, that's 01:09:00 just, it's amazing. It's a natural phenomenon, and it's an amazing thing to think about in different ways, too. SL: Mm hmm. I actually wanted to ask you when you were talking about being the designer for one of your books. CA: Yes. SL: Like how working with other presses kind of affected your work. Because when you're doing your own, when you're publishing your own book, you, I imagine you're in control of a lot. But when you are working with another press, are they editing your work? What is that relationship like? CA: The only one that sort of tried to do very much editing on my book was Mark Weiss in that book Certain Slants. And so my experience hasn't been working with that kind of real hands-on editor. SL: Sure. CA: And I think a lot of small presses, and some bigger presses, for poetry, particularly, let the 01:10:00 poet have quite the hand in his own work. SL: Sure. CA: Now for me, they do other things that wouldn't necessarily be called editing, but the choice of font, the choice of the size of the page, the size of the font, the spacing between the lines. All that which I think when I'm writing a book is really important to me. And somebody else sees it in a different way. And I think I've, you know, and I will talk to people about those things. But I'm also, you know, realize that I can accept different views of my work and how it looks on the page, too. SL: Okay. 01:52:47 CA: Kyle surprised me with the Pushing Water book, you know, this sort of thin, tall book, which is not how I pictured the work at all. But I liked it. Mark surprised me with the cover of the book. I'm still trying to figure out if I like that. (laughter) I think he sees it as like a dry river running through a blue field. But my wife first saw it and she said, "It looks like bacon. Like a strip of bacon." (laughter) And I thought oh, well, so. And Gil and Paul were perfect on Near Or Random Acts. Everybody's been really great to work with, I think, in that way. Mark did mention something about a few of my turns of phrase that are almost archaic in sounds. And I had to say, that's on purpose. That needs to stand. And he got it. I love when I read old English works, I still sometimes take inspiration from just little turns of phrase in Shakespeare or something, and work from that. SL: Okay. Speaking of Cynthia, you have worked with her on book projects. CA: Yes! She's the best. (laughs) SL: Yeah, could you talk about your, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your working relationship. CA: Okay. Well first thing we worked together on a print project was a broadside of one of my poems. And she spray painted it. SL: Oh, yeah? CA: Yeah. She was doing some of that kind of work. She was making stencils and then spray painting. This was like not anything I would have learned in a Walter Hamady workshop. And it was not too long after that. And I thought yeah, I really like this. And it's not something a lot of book collectors necessarily would. But that was, she actually just likes to take something in hand and see what 01:11:00 she can do with it. She's a hard worker. So like we've done two book cover projects in the last couple of years. One is a book by Andy Levy, and one's by Charles Bernstein that the covers are letterpress and the interior are not. And they're chapbooks, but they're higher-end chapbooks. You know, the paper on the cover's really nice. And I asked her to work with me. And her way that she wanted to do that was she sat down and hand-painted covers. Like two hundred of them. And they weren't like, she had an idea of what the painting was. And so everyone's different, but they're not very different. But she likes to do that. She's not really a printmaker, although she has done some drawings that I've then printed. Probably one of the most fun books and most important books, I think, Chax has ever done was a book called Wo'i bwikam Coyote Songs. And it's a group of songs from the Yaqui 01:12:00 Native American tradition that come out of protecting the land in certain ways. And these songs were not heard for a long time. They were actually revived by a Yaqui youth who went to one of the elder singers, because they were, felt like their areas were threatened. So they started singing these songs again. And Larry Evers and Felipe Molina-- Felipe's a Yaqui singer and elder now. Larry's a scholar who's worked with Felipe before-came to me and asked about doing this book. Because they wanted something very special. And so Cynthia did drawings for that and I did the book. We used, I think I made-how did I do that? Maybe I still had handmade paper in certain shades, or maybe I made some more handmade paper. I know there was handmade paper on the covers that I definitely made. And there was a, you know, cloth, not cloth, but a hardbound 01:13:00 edition with a dust jacket. And then we also kind of went back to them and said, I don't know who first suggested this, that this is great, but we also would love something that is available to youth in the school programs. So we did a whole other different kind of edition. It still had Cynthia's drawings, but it was a little bit more conventional format, and easier to do in, I don't know, a thousand or two thousand copies, and get around. We gave most of those away. Well, we had funding for the project. We could give it away, and we did. So that was not the only time, but one of the few times that I've taken her, I've asked her to do drawings and taken those drawings and then made plates from them and printed them. SL: Okay. 01:58:49 CA: I think we've done, we've probably done that more times than I am remembering right now. (laughs) SL: Sure. CA: But still it feels to me like the collaboration between us is not even like that. It's not about projects. It's about being in the same studio space and talking with each other and working. And we did that at the Steinfeld Warehouse, and we did that after we came back from Minneapolis in a warehouse in this building, that the other half of the building was Small Planet Bakery. That was great, because when it's hot in Tucson, we could go into their freezer room. (laughter) For a minute or two. And we're now doing that for the first time with both of our works being in our house. It felt like the next step for us. We'll see. If it's not enough space, we might have to rethink that. Whereas in Minneapolis, she had a studio in the northeast part of town. If I was working on letterpress, I would work Minnesota Center for Book Arts studio. I think I had my press still in 01:14:00 our house there, too. So we weren't working together in the same place. And that wasn't as nice. And neither of us got as much work done. SL: Oh, interesting. What is it about kind of working in the same space that you think makes you more productive? CA: I just want to say it's love or something. (laughs) But it's certainly, I value her opinions. So I'll go to her and talk to her about what I'm working on. She'll ask me to look at paintings and things. She knows I'm not a painter, but she still thinks I have an eye. And I think we both really value what the other does, so we want to do our best work, you know, in some ways for each other as well as for the world. And we've been able to do that. It's pretty incredible. Sometimes I think, you know, the one thing we, other than a couple of broadsides, we've never done a collaboration that's my writing and her images in a book of some kind. So we've told ourselves well, we have to do that. So we better do it soon. (laughs) SL: That sounds like a good project. Are either of your daughters involved in book making or art or poetry? 02:01:44 CA: Our, I'll tell you about both our daughters. Our oldest daughter Kate, she did vocal music. And her teacher when she was in high school said, "Mark my words, you're going to hear her sing at the Met." Well, when she went to college, and she, they wanted her to learn in a certain way. And she learned that most like opera careers 01:15:00 don't really develop until people are in their thirties and all this stuff. That's not for her. And all the time I think she had been very drawn to international issues, and international friends, she had. So she ended up actually getting out of music and studying global studies, particularly issues with human rights. And started that at Portland, but then transferred to Brandeis. And after that, went to Bosnia, worked with the criminal court. Went to Uganda in an internship with like a justice and reconciliation project after all the problems there. And came back and worked in DC for a year. And then went to get a master's degree and just graduated this last May from Columbia. SL: Okay. CA: And is now, you know the organization MoveOn.org? SL: Mm hmm. CA: Well she's now working, she's in Tucson but she's working remotely for them and coordinating certain response areas. So she's the one who's saving the world. And I don't know if it can be saved, but (SL laughs) at some point I remember telling her, "The rest of my life, I'm going to learn more from you than you ever learned from me." And she's absolutely beautiful, and she's very happy. She just started this job two months ago or something like that. And the younger one did theater work more. And she's still doing theater work. And she did it in college, at a small college in Vermont, Green Mountain College, which didn't really have a theater program. But they did, I mean, they had a theater program. They didn't have a theater major as such. So 01:16:00 she studied communications and theater. Then she came back to Tucson and was working on theater projects there. And she came, joined us in Texas for about a year and a half and worked for the fine arts center at the school district there full time. Saved her money so she could move to New York. Which she has done. But also while in Texas worked for Victoria Theater projects where we were for some independent theater projects. And now she's been in New York almost a, well, not quite a year. And she's worked on about four plays. She's really interested in behind the scenes. So she's stage manager. She wants to be a director. She's writing as well. Absolutely is doing that. And she's, you know, it's tough. She's trying to make that work for her. Her day job is at the Joyce, which is a big dance center. You know, big dance companies, Pilobolus and I don't know, companies perform there. She's just in like ticket sales and stuff like that. But she's living in a place that we helped her find, which is owned, have you ever heard of the actor Rip Torn? SL: Mm hmm. CA: Okay. Well, he owns the building, but he's never there. But his son Tony Torn is married to the poet Leanne 01:17:00 Brown, who's a good friend of mine and Cynthia. Through teaching at Naropa University and some of the summers together and things, we've gotten to know her. So they have like three or four floors, and one has a room that was available. So that's where Nora's living. So far, so good. (laughs) And so she's, and so there's a theater workshop on one of the floors. So she's gone to that, and she's met some directors and people. So I think it's been a valuable place for her for this first year. And I know she'll keep doing work. I'm not sure what it will be. It wouldn't surprise me if she goes back to get a 01:18:00 graduate degree in theater studies or something like that, but I don't know. SL: Well you mentioned Naropa University just now. CA: Yes. 02:07:14 SL: When did you start getting involved there, and teaching there? CA: About 12 years ago, maybe. Maybe even a little longer. And I've generally taught there every two or three years since. And they have a print studio. And I usually worked in there. Although I haven't necessarily always taught strictly a printing class. But most of the people there studying are writers, poets, but you want to get some involvement in book making, print making, too. How did that happen? Well, I certainly started to get to know Anne Waldman, who has directed that program almost from the beginning, I think. I think I brought her to Tucson once to do some poetry festival, and I met her in other places. And she just invited me. So I seem to be on their list, even though I think in the next bunch of years, I think they're trying to turn over and bring a lot more younger people in, too. So I'm not quite expecting to be there quite so frequently, but I hope they still invite me once in a while. (laughs) SL: Sure. Yeah. CA: But that's been a great experience. A couple of years ago, being part of the US Poets in Mexico was absolutely great. And spending a week in Oaxaca teaching. Actually I was the only one not teaching. I gave three lectures during the week. So I wasn't teaching a class, per se. I think that, you know, the person who directs that program said, "Charles, I had no idea you were so scholarly!" (SL laughs) I don't think I'm all that scholarly. But I'm very thoughtful, and I like writing essays about, so in some ways, my studies are still there, too. SL: Sure. CA: And that kind of investigative look into what's going on in poetry and poetics and things as well as wanting to make work. SL: Mm hmm. Where in Oaxaca were you? CA: We were in the colonial area, you know, pretty much maybe six or eight blocks from the museum, the art museum, you know where that is? 01:19:00SL: Okay. CA: I can't remember the name of the street. That was the hotel we were in. The programs were actually mostly in the art museum. SL: Okay. Oh, that sounds really cool. 02:10:01 CA: There were a lot of languages schools there. All kinds of things. Really good food there. SL: So one of the books actually that I was hoping you could talk a little bit about is a book, Firebird, that we have here at UW Madison in both special collections, where most of your books here are. CA: Yes. SL: And also at the Kohler Art Library. CA: You have two copies! SL: Yes. One is the hard cover and one is the soft cover. So we have two different versions of it. CA: And that's the book that was co-published with Granary Books with Steve Clay. But I think I, yeah, the manuscript came to me from Paul Metcalf. I also met him at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee when we were here. And actually that's one of the first readings I set up and brought him to Madison. He gave a great performance here. And Paul, you know, until he died, he 01:20:00 and his wife were friends. And we visited them a couple of times. They lived in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Very old-school. He's a wood chopper, too. And he's the great-grandson, or great-great-grandson of Herman Melville, who wrote Moby Dick, actually. And Walter Hamady taught a book of his once called Genoa, which was about Melville and Christopher Columbus. And Paul likes to collage things together. Different stories, difficult things. So firebird is literally fire and bird. And one of the things going on on the page is the story of the great Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin. And the other thing is counting hawks in Massachusetts, a bird count. And he literally takes paragraphs and puts them between each other as you go through the page. And I think I did something, that's the book I was talking about that I made the little woodcuts that would bring fire and bird in, and maybe another section head for that book. It was through Steve Clay that we found Magnolia Binding, someone who bound that book and who actually made the handmade paper, too, which at least is kind of suggestive a little bit of flames and the fire part of that, too. Not too openly suggestive. But I think it's a really good, the materials in that book, and especially in the cover and binding of that book, are great. So I think of that as collaboration with Paul, with Steve Clay, with the book binder and paper maker. I think I did all the paper binding, sewing. But I didn't do the case binding. And that's a great book. Yeah. SL: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that story. I wanted to ask you a little bit about- 02:13:30 CA: You know about the great Peshtigo fire? SL: Well, I know a little bit about it. Do you want to talk about it? CA: Well, I mean, it's not really my story. But that it, I mean, the amazing thing is, it's like one of the greatest losses of human life of any fire in American history. It happened on the exact same day as the great Chicago fire, which had no loss of human lives. All property. And yet which one do we know in the popular consciousness? And I think that's an important story to tell for Paul. SL: Mm hmm. So I guess I wanted to hear a little bit about what you thought of making books over a period of time 01:21:00 where there were these new advances in technology, like desktop publishing. You started out with letterpress, and then later books you started incorporating desktop publishing. Can you talk a little bit about how your book making has changed with the advent of different technologies? CA: Okay. (laughs) The- SL: Well, as much as you want. CA: In some ways, I make a lot less letterpress books than I once did. Although we did just release a project this year, Diesel Hand, which is visual poetry. And I hope I'm always going to have a project going on, even if it may only come out every two years or whatever. And in that kind of book, I don't think I have made many changes whatsoever. I mean, I may have the ability to scan something before I have a plate made of it, and things that are a little different. I do more printing from polymer plates than I started out doing. So there are ways in which letterpress printing has changed, too. And I know certain people think you shouldn't even call it letterpress if you're printing from polymer and you're not actually setting letters. But on the other hand, if you're doing linotype, you're not actually setting letters, either. So I'm not very worried about that. But I did know that I wanted at some point to publish books that weren't going to be in editions of 100 or 150 or 200 or even 250. And I basically taught myself the computer programs, I think, starting with PageMaker, maybe. I used a program called FrameMaker for a while. I knew a little bit about using Quark Express, but I don't think I ever owned that program. And then Adobe, eventually in the last decade, Adobe programs in design. You know, PhotoShop, Illustrator, a whole suite of programs, not all of which I do particularly well. But InDesign, I think I do. But I also think that people don't much use that term desktop publishing anymore, I don't think. And to me, desktop publishing was more the era of printing things out on your own digital printer and stapling them and binding them and do it yourself publishing. And when it became designing them on your computer but sending those files out to book manufacturers, that's something different. That's like maybe digital 01:22:00 design. But it's, publishing, I mean. (laughs) And I like doing that work. I mean, I like sitting down and designing the pages. I like designing the covers. I don't much like it when an author tells me what they want to have on the cover of their book. Wait, that's my job. (laughter) But sometimes it works out just fine. And so as that started for me in 1989, '90. And actually partly started because when Bernstein told me I should do a book of my own. And I thought well, if I do it, I want it to be, for one thing, I want it to be, I had the work of a couple hundred pages. And I wanted it to be substantial in that way. I thought it's going to be a paperback book, probably with a slick cover or something. And Cynthia had a painting I 01:23:00 really wanted to use on that, but she didn't think it would quite work, so she did a new drawing based on that painting. I love it, all the houses and the buildings those are beautiful. (laughs) But I also had one, two, three books at that time that authors had sent me that I thought, this is not a letterpress book. And these were also like two hundred plus pages books. One of them was Art Facts: A Book of Contexts, by bpNichol, who's a Canadian poet. He's like the master experimenter, I think, was of our time. Unfortunately, he died when he was only 44 years old. Died in 1988. I had got to know him in Milwaukee and then in Toronto, and actually brought him to Tucson, too. And I'm still in touch with his wife. He's a powerful presence, I think, in Canadian literature. And a lot of the people I know in America really know and love his work, too, but I know he's not well known here. Also a book by Beverly Dahlen who, wow, she's a powerhouse. She's one of the best, as far as I'm concerned. And she probably helped me in a number of ways, too. Because I think publishing her work, which I 01:24:00 love, gave me certain cred with younger feminist poets and writers, especially, who were kind of experimental in their work. And then Ron Silliman. Beverly's book was a reading, it's actually come out in several volumes. That was the second, there was a reading eight through ten. And Ron's book was Demo to Ink. He wrote a book like this thick called The Alphabet, which he released in certain sections. So this one had sections from F, E, F, G, H, I, so Demo to Ink. Those books just had to be that kind of book. So I had to learn how to do that kind of book. It wasn't very difficult, really. Still, I think the telling part of doing the good work has to do with the eye and the feel and sensibility of materials, and a willingness to work with a piece of literature in a way that you're sort of developing a vision for it on the page, even if you're doing maybe less idiosyncratic kind of ways than you might in letterpress, where everything's handmade. But I think that letterpress training for, you know, basically ten years, was profound in allowing me to do the other kind of work, too. And is still present there in some ways. SL: Can you elaborate on that? CA: I think because I looked at so many pages and actually handled those pages, so I don't think of it as I'm just taking a text and putting it on paper. I think of it as what's the best way to put this text on paper? And that involves, certainly involves, the type selection, the margins, every bit of the spacing and 01:25:00 you know, everything visually about the book. Even though you don't have a lot of choices in that kind of publishing in paper and paper styles, you still have some. And some people don't think about that at all. And I think you need to think about that. I find I'm thinking about it now in some even different ways in terms of covers of those kind of books. And it's just a feel. It's just, there's nothing that's automatic. I would never think, oh, just kind of spit this out in a file and send it off. No, I can't do that. And I think our books have been, I know the authors have been very pleased, and have said so numerous times. And I think others have, too. We do a nice job. SL: Mm hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm going to stop it here. 2:23:29 End of First Interview Session 00:00:00 SL: Today is August 31, 01:26:00 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the Oral History Program at UW, Madison. I'm talking with Charles Alexander, poet, book artist, publisher and UW alum. This is part two of his oral history for the project UW Madison Book Arts and Oral History. Charles is speaking from Tucson, Arizona, and I'm at the UW Archives in Steenbock Library. Charles, last time we were talking a little bit about the poetry that you're drawn to. And that you said you really enjoy poetry that makes you work a little bit. CA: Yes. SL: And I wondered if you had any thoughts about how your reading habits might have influenced your own poetry. CA: Oh, well, yes. I mean, I love what the poet Robert Duncan said about he's a derivative poet. (SL laughs) But that just means he derives from writers, you know, who are his foremothers and forefathers, whether they be 01:27:00 Shakespeare and Dante and HD and Ezra Pound and others, or even some contemporaries. And I do think, not in a slavish, imitative way, but we gain and we find direction through a combination of our reading and writing. And that's certainly true for me. For example, last night I was teaching an advanced poetry writing class and we were looking a little bit at the work of the poet Robert Creeley. And you know, some students remarked on it being rather difficult. But once they gave up this notion that they had to solve the poem and have it kind of conclude in some way for them, it was much easier for them. And I think Creeley's way of keeping the poem open, you know, you're given what you're given, just like you might be taking a walk down the street, rather than having it all come to conclusion in a final sense. And that certainly is 01:28:00 something for some people makes poetry difficult. But for me makes it open and something I've tried to do in my work. I don't feel pressured to make statements in the poetry. I don't feel pressured to make the reader believe what I want him to believe in some way. As a matter of fact, I tend to distrust poetry that I find manipulative in that way. And most of what I gather from my reading is a more open sense of possibilities. And I hope that's what I give out to people, too, in what I write. SL: And what do you enjoy about writing poetry? 00:03:11 CA: I think in the midst of writing, there's this energy that comes in. I'm not a surfer, but I imagine it being something like that, of riding the wave. (laughs) And it only takes you so far, of course. And then something of that energy isn't there anymore. And that's maybe the end, or at least the end for a moment. So there's a physical sensibility that I like very much, which is part mental as well. I love reading the work to others, sharing it with them. I love the way it has brought me into communities of writers and readers who have shared values but not identical values, so that we learn from each other. I had a conversation with a friend recently about, and he was arguing that, for these poetic standards that have to remain. And I was saying, "Well, one thing I like to do is open up who I read poetry by. And that would include," we were talking about diversity. Poets of color, poets of different gender situations, identity situations. And when I open myself up to read a variety of people, actually my standards change. Because people lead you to understand that there's more than I know that's out there in the world, and so I can grow. I hope that is a sense 01:29:00 that I'm left with, even when I'm 85, 90 years old, if I make it that far. So I like that being part of a community that wants to continue learning and continue listening to poetry, writing poetry, creating works. And I have to say in my case it's led me not only to communities of writers and readers, but to communities of creators. Artists, composers, dancers, choreographers, etcetera. There's a lot of things I like about poetry. And I still love reading things that I read, it feels like 100 years ago, although it might have been 40 years ago. SL: (laughs) Well you know, you're talking about performance and community. And I know that last time you also talked about cofounding a poetry performance group that you said it was called Noncollinear. CA: Yes. SL: So what is it, I guess, well, I guess, I'm curious to know, you also founded, cofounded POG in Tucson. CA: Yes. SL: I guess could you talk a little bit about that, and how that got started? 00:06:18 CA: Sure. First of all I had in Tucson, starting almost from the time I arrived there in 1984, had invited people I knew from elsewhere, and also local people, to present poetry readings. I had developed a series that was independent. And one of the people I became very close to in the community here in Tucson was Tenney Nathanson, who is both a poet and professor of literature, and someone with whom I share a body of work that we care deeply about. Although it's a little bit different for each of us. So then I went away from here in 1993 and was in Minneapolis, Minnesota for three years. And when I knew I was coming back here after three years, I got in touch with Tenney, he got in touch with me. I'm not sure who started the conversation, but it became clear we were going to start a group together. And that is what became POG, which, it's not a really good abbreviation, but you can see the PO is standing for poetry, the G for group. SL: Okay. CA: We call it Pog. SL: Okay. CA: And it was a good handle for you know, an email address, a website, etcetera. It was simple, and 01:30:00 we've stuck with that. And that still exists. I've been away from here recently for four years, but POG has carried on. And now I've been invited to come back and be a part of that again. And I like, I mean, I liked it when I was running a reading series pretty much by myself, but I like it better when I'm collaborating with other people on that, and we're all throwing ideas out there. And we're agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, but ultimately coming up with a schedule of what we'd like to see happen in this community. Which I think has also benefited and helped others benefit even outside the community by bringing people in that they also learn about us and share what we do. And then by recording readings, 01:31:00 posting them online and things, it even gets more out there. If anything, the recent technological history in the world has made sharing information and projects something not only that's easy, but it almost automatically happens. SL: You're saying that you collaborate not just with poets but really kind of creative people of all kinds. What do you think about bringing creative people together who are working in different fields? How does that like make for rich events. Why do you like to collaborate with people who are working in other areas? 00:09:43 CA: Well I suppose it partly goes back to my experience in Madison, Wisconsin, when I developed my first press and started printing, so I was in the company of visual artists who were becoming printmakers and doing print projects and book projects. And here I was, a poet who was becoming involved with print projects and artistic projects. And there was a range of artistic practices going on and a range of collaborations going on. And certainly that stuck with me. And then when I moved to Arizona as a, beginning a press here, and I was still pretty young and met, the first people I met here were more visual artists than writers. And it just seemed 01:32:00 like natural to just do things with them. Not necessarily even thinking oh, we're doing this project and it's going to evolve into X, Y, Z. But more like oh, here's this guy Dennis Williams who does drama and performance projects. He invites me to be in one. Of course I'm going to be in one. Here's this woman Nancy Solomon who is a designer and sometimes photographer who's close to this dancer and choreographer, and she wants me to do something with them, of course. Whether that's going to end up being a finished piece, a performance or something, that comes out of the process, rather than you begin with a goal in mind. SL: What are some of these projects that you've worked on that maybe you'd be able to share with people? I'm just thinking, it seems like there are so many possibilities. What are some of the ones that you've done maybe that were particularly memorable to you? 00:11:56 CA: Well I don't know if I have titles on all these, but some of my favorites were with the dance company called ORTS Theater of Dance. Annie Bunker's choreographer, her husband Chuck Kester is a composer. Nancy Solomon sometimes got involved with set design. And I was asked to create words. And there were performances at, oh, various places in this community, including large performance halls and small galleries in which dancers were, well, a choreographer was creating dance, responding to the music and words that were coming together at the same time. And one of them I was actually onstage reading things. And another one, I was up in the rafters speaking things which were heard as part of the performance. And in still another one, my work was 01:33:00 incorporated into the score that the composer made, but I wasn't a performer in the event. Those were highlights, certainly. There was one painter who taught at the University of Arizona for a long time, Margaret Bailey Doogan. I'll call her Bailey, because I think she goes by Bailey Doogan most often. She began as a graphic designer and kind of made herself into a painter. Some people know her still as the person who created the girl with the umbrella on the containers of Morton salt. You know? When it rains, it pours, and it's pouring salt. (laughs) But she's a great painter. And she got very interested in the story of Saint Lucy, which is a story about sight and vision and blindness, and also the intersection of that with considering other artistic things having to do with blindness. Oedipus came to mind. And I wrote a long piece for her, I think it was twenty-some pages, called Saint Lucy Oedipus. And that became a performance that happened at her kind of a retrospective visual art museum show. And never happened again, but was a one-timer performance. But it was memorable to me, certainly. You know, there are probably others. And hopefully there will be more in the future. SL: Mm hmm. Well 01:34:00 you mentioned that you do readings and you have been a performer yourself. And I guess I'm thinking of a lot of times you know with writing and whether you're writing, whatever kind of writing you're doing, whether it's poetry or you're working in another genre, it's very solitary. I think publishing books, I mean, you might be collaborating with other people, but not always in the same room. It depends. CA: Right. SL: But then you have this performance aspect. What is it about performing that you really enjoy? 00:15:40 CA: The audience. Being right there and responding. You know, I might be a little bit of a ham, although I'm very happy to play second fiddle in tiny roles and things, too. I know that I had only a taste of performance when I was young. Like in high school, being in a summer play. As a student studying the German language, once presenting a poetry recitation in German at a contest. Which I thought 01:35:00 at the time I never wanted to do. And then when the teacher made me do it, I liked it. (laughs) So there's something about making those words live in the moment that I like very much. I like doing, but I also like going to readings, hearing others, and seeing different kinds of performances, witnessing different kind of performances, too. I've certainly always been interested in a poetry that wasn't necessarily limited to the page. You know, the poet bpNichol, who's Canadian, was active in performance poetry, concrete poetry. Poetry that became actual objects. And had a very social sense of how these things would have meaning. There was a great Japanese book art show I saw probably 15 years ago now that left a big impression, which included works by a Japanese artist who drew calligraphy figures on stones in water, so that these things were performances that existed for only a few minutes and then disappeared. I'm kind of interested, I'm a publisher, so I'm definitely interested in the permanent, but I'm also interested in the ephemeral and the thing that lives in specific moments. And performance, I think, brings one to-maybe even a combination of those things. You may be performing things that are written. But when performed, that's it. You know, 01:36:00 there's that one thing. And it happens. And it has a different kind of reality from what's there on the page. Why I'm fascinated with that is another question I'm not sure I'm prepared to answer. SL: Sure. 00:18:32 CA: But I certainly always have been. And I've always liked going to live performances, whether it be you know, classical ballet, music, to contemporary performance art of various kinds. SL: You know, while you were talking, it made me think about too with performance there is an interpretation of what may have been written. So I'm curious like were there ever times when you were working with collaborators and you were surprised by the way something was interpreted? CA: Oh, yes. Yes. Surprised and, I don't think ever displeased. But like oh, you know, I never thought of that. But I'm also surprised sometimes when I go to see a play, even a Shakespearian play or something, that someone has a turn of phrase that that's not the way I read it, but okay. (laughs) Let's let that live. And that's fine. I mean, I think that's part of being here a long time. Nothing's written in stone, how it's understood, how it's sounded. And I think I've learned certainly about my own work from others, if they've sounded it in 01:37:00 a different way, or even people who have read it in a different way and commented to me on something. Oh, okay. Let's take that into account. Yeah. SL: Is there anything that you'd like to add about either your own writing or about POG? Are you planning on being involved with POG again now that you're back in Tucson? 00:20:35 CA: I am involved with POG again. And we are planning a fall 2018 set of readings, which may involve some artists performing, too. We haven't quite finalized it all yet, so I'm not going to give the details. But in Tucson, Arizona at, interestingly enough, at the Steinfeld Warehouse, which has a 01:38:00 space for performance now. And the Steinfeld Warehouse was my second studio in Tucson back when it was initially kind of taken out of non-use for a long time, and kind of given over to a group of artists, I was one of which. My wife was one of which, too. So to go back to that space for a series of performances is exciting to me. In terms of my own poetry, I just want to maybe remark that the other thing I've been kind of consistently interested in as a reader and more involved in as a writer in the last 15 years is the long poem. And I've been at work on a poem called Pushing Water, which seems to have grown beyond an initial volume to a second volume of work and will be a third volume. So it's kind of an over-ranging idea of both metaphors for water and how we inhabit, are impacted by water. How as human bodies we contain water. How as 01:39:00 ecosystems, you know, when I lived on the gulf, mixed saltwater, freshwater. It's just become a very rich way of thinking about processes in the world and processes in language. And I don't know if I will, if it's a work that will ever be finished in a conventional sense, and that's not what concerns me, that it's still a motivating idea. SL: Have you been reading more longer poems lately? CA: Either I've been reading more water poems, or I've been noticing that things I didn't realize were water poems had water in them in one way or another. (laughs) I haven't like set out to read water poems. And it's not just poems that feed into that, too. I am at this moment teaching Herman Melville to graduate 01:40:00 students in an online course. So their first reading is Moby Dick, which is pretty hard to avoid water in that. And you know, the things that influence my own work are certainly not only poetry, but a lot of other things. I began that work in the desert, where water is scarce. Although that's telling, too. 00:23:46 SL: What about long poems? Because I think that a lot of published poems, in journals, for example, they aren't long poems. Have you been encountering more long poems? Or seeking them out? CA: I don't know about more. I mean, there have always been long poems. And the earliest long poems, of course, are more narrative and epic in things ranging from the very ancient, Gilgamesh, to the more classical works of Homer and 01:41:00 Virgil to Dante. But many poems, Paradise Lost by John Milton, poems by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the 18th century, you know, a lot of people read sonnets and shorter poems of the romantic period by William Wordsworth. But his greatest poem is The Prelude, which is a long poem and well worth taking on. In the Modernist period, it's hard to avoid the long poem. You know, Ezra Pound's Cantos. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. William Carlos Williams' Patterson. And those were, certainly when I was a freshman in college through graduate school, I would say, formative works for me to encounter. And then poets through the 20th century who were, many of them in one way or another influenced by those early Modernist works. And I think there are many people working in long forms now that it is almost, as hard as it is even to find poetry today, and to come to it, it's a little harder to find the long poems. But once you start looking, they're there. They are there. And my own, you know, I'm still interested in those that I read earlier. But I've also developed other, I often wonder, I almost always teach the American poet Hilda Doolittle, HD. And sometimes I pose the question how would modern literature look differently if instead of taking Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot as the masters, what if we take HD and Gertrude Stein as the masters? And you know, I think we need to ask those questions now, because it's been a very short period of time that we've really been reading poetry by women, and poetry by poets of color as seriously as we have read the male masters. And I'm not saying anything that a bunch of people haven't said. But it does change the vision. SL: Well speaking of teaching, you started out your teaching career at UW 01:42:00 Madison as a TA. Could you tell us a little bit about how you started out? Did you have any kind of philosophy when you first started? Or how did you develop that, I guess? 00:27:18 CA: I had a great start because at that time, you know, freshmen had to take two semesters of literature. And teaching assistants, graduate students, got their birth in teaching by working with a professor. And the professor would deliver like a lecture twice a week or something. And then the teaching assistants would have twice a week maybe meetings with students in groups of 20 in a class. And usually once or twice in a semester, those teaching assistants would be asked to give the lectures to the big group of a couple hundred students. And I worked with Merton Sealts at the University of Wisconsin in my year of being a teaching assistant. And he was a noted Herman 01:43:00 Melville scholar. He had a friendship with American poet Charles Olson, who was just really beginning to be seen as a major American poet. And all of that was fascinating to me. And I loved teaching. I don't know what to call him, I want to call him Merton, but I probably would have to call him Mr. Sealts back in those days. University of Wisconsin professors then preferred the title Mr. They didn't like to be called Dr. So Mr. Sealts, he told me that the best thing I did as a lecturer was to read the poems in a way where they could almost immediately be understood. And that became a thing that motivated me to even think about that. How can you simply help people to read better, and think of the act of understanding analysis interpretation may come out of that. But listening is so important, and reading as a listener. More recently, people have talked about slow reading. So that was the beginning. Then I taught also in Madison, I taught creative writing through Madison Area Technical College. And also at the time I think it was called University of Wisconsin Extended University. Just people that, things seemed open and I applied and started teaching. But then I didn't teach for any number of years when I moved to Arizona. And after 15 or more years here, even after going away and coming back. I was actually first a director of a program at a community college here, Pima Community College. A woman named Meg Files, I think after one of my readings, said to me, she said, "I think you'd be a really good teacher. I hope you'll consider maybe teaching a class for 01:44:00 us." And I was like, okay. And I've liked some teaching in the past. Let's try that. And I did. And at that point, I began teaching continuously since then. SL: And what year was that? 00:30:38 CA: I taught a little bit for them. That would have been, maybe about the year 2000. And I taught only a little while there. And then the University of Arizona. Mostly these were freshman classes, Honors classes sometimes. I was not a fulltime faculty person. And then a program at the University of Arizona South, in which was the first time I taught advanced undergraduates, and taught more advanced literature classes. I liked doing that, except to get there to where I had to teach those was a 90-minute commute. I didn't like that very much. SL: No, no. CA: And then this job appeared in Texas. Someone I knew, Kyle Schlesinger, who's a great poet, printer, book maker, let me know about that job. And I said, I said, "Wow, they want somebody who can teach creative writing, but who also can teach typography and design." I said, "That's very strange. What did they do, write that with me in 01:45:00 mind?" And he said, "It would be a dream if you applied." And I did, and I was hired. And I loved it. I was there for four years. And I would probably love it still. But I really like Tucson, Arizona. Plus, so does my wife, who's a painter, who's been here most of the time since she was eleven years old. And there were compelling reasons to come back after four years. And that's where I find myself now. But I certainly, you know, in Texas I directed a master's of fine arts program in creative writing. I ran a, well, I co-directed a center for the arts where there were art classes, where there was printmaking practices. And I was also making books through Chax Press at that site, too. And I taught writing workshops in 01:46:00 poetry and graduate literature classes, which creative writing students were taking as electives, too. So in a certain way, you know, I could go back there to that moment in Madison where I was well-trained, and had been as an undergraduate at Stanford, and then at Madison in literary reading and scholarship. But I chose to go off into an art department and learn bookmaking while also being drawn to Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee an encountering many contemporary poets and writers. And like I say, that rich mix of things I've tried to carry with me everywhere I've been. And it's certainly part of my life still. SL: Thank you. Is there anything you'd like to add? CA: This has been great talking with you. (laughs) It's always interesting revisiting the past like this. Last night, before I was teaching the poet I 01:47:00 love, Robert Creeley. And I looked up his presence online and recordings of his work. And I thought wow, there's a reading he did in 2002 in Tucson, Arizona, at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. So maybe I'll listen to that. So I started with the introduction. And all of a sudden I realize oh, that's me introducing-(laughter) And I had good things to say. So at all points of the past, you know, there are so many things that are still present in my thinking. And I feel like, I'm 64 now, but I've had a rich life in this work, and I'm continuing to have that. And it's a blessing. SL: Thank you, Charles. I really appreciate your time. CA: Thank you, Sarah. 35:15 End of Second Interview Session Total time =