Here’s an excerpt:
Why did Joyelle and I start Action Books?… Ever since I went to graduate school I’ve known that nobody would publish the kind of writing I liked. Even Artaud… if Artaud wrote today City Lights wouldn’t publish it. If Celine wrote today New Directions wouldn’t publish it… Etc… Not much chance for me or my Shangri-las. No much chance for someone whose idea of heroism involved putting out cigarettes on his arms… And more importantly, few presses would publish work that is flawed, but those are the best works (See for example Sean Kilpatrick’s awesome story in your No Colony journal)…When I was starting to write as a teenager I read Surrealism and Beats and that’s what I thought poetry was… poetry was the spectacular destruction of wealth… Later I read Beat/CA influenced journals like Caliban and Disturbed Guiliotine… Things edited by Iran Cohen and other unreconstructed 1960s renegades… but these were sort of coterie journals; not open to a rancid 20-year-old… I wanted to interact… When I tried to find journals to publish in, I found plenty of journals and they were mostly full of crap.