Flood Editions began in 2001 when Devin Johnston and Michael O’Leary published its first two books, The Shrubberies by Ronald Johnson and Gone to Earth by Pam Rehm. Since then, Flood has typically offered four books a year, mostly poetry, mostly by contemporary poets but also including archival works from past (and sometimes neglected) masters. The books are marked by editorial care, a range of topics and styles, and their sharp design, primarily at the hands of Crisis, the design studio of Jeff Clark. Flood’s most recent offerings have been The Year the City Emptied by Daisy Fried, a resetting of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil in contemporary Philly; Hívado by Andrew E. Colarusso, a collection of lyric sequences; and Believers and Seven Sermons from the Bacchae by John Tipton, an experimental translation converging Euripides and the Gospel of Mark.
Devin and I met in 1993 when we both began graduate school at the University of Chicago, he in the English department, I in the Divinity School. A mutual friend suggested we meet because of our shared interest in poetry, specifically Robert Duncan’s. Michael is my younger brother. He moved to Chicago in 1993 after he graduated from Kenyon College, where he began a literary magazine, LVNG, with his classmate Jay Sullivan. Upon moving to Chicago, I replaced Sullivan as coeditor of LVNG (Joel Felix would join us a few years later), and Devin’s work became a mainstay in the issues we were publishing. When Devin had his tenure as poetry editor of Chicago Review a few years later, I began to write reviews of contemporary poetry. Furthermore, owing to my friendship with Ronald Johnson, I was able to publish a consequential interview with Johnson in the pages of CR (CR 42:01). Before Johnson died in 1998, he asked me to be his literary executor.
I mention this last fact to complete the picture of my personal connection to Flood Editions. I am the editor of The Shrubberies. Likewise, I have edited two other books by Ronald Johnson published by Flood: Radi os and ARK. Needless to say, through qualities of friendship and family, my involvement with Flood has been close, though it should be stated that I have no official position with the press.
Besides the work they do for Flood, Devin Johnston teaches at Saint Louis University. His most recent book of poetry is Dragons, published this year by FSG. After working nearly a decade in the nuclear power industry, Michael O’Leary is now an analyst in the financial services industry. His most recent book of poetry is Out West, to be published by the Cultural Society.
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POL: When and how did Flood Editions form? What were you both doing at the time you started the press?
DJ: The conversations toward Flood Editions began in 1999. I had been working (since 1995) as poetry editor and managing editor of Chicago Review. I had learned a good deal about contemporary poetry and editing through those roles, under the guidance of Andrew Rathmann, the editor. But my time at CR was coming to an end, as was my graduate work at the University of Chicago. I was applying for jobs without success, mostly publishing jobs, some of them in California. At a barbecue, Michael proposed, why don’t we try publishing ourselves, in Chicago? The suggestion was spontaneous, as I recall, but it took root. We were both aware of manuscripts by poets we admired that needed a publisher. Michael had been publishing LVNG magazine with Joel Felix and you, Pete, since 1990. Michael had just started school for civil engineering and was working part time as a speechwriter. For both of us, the future felt uncertain, and the casual collaborations and freedom of our twenties may have seemed to be dwindling. Flood offered a way to anchor and organize our shared interests, I think.
MOL: I was recently married, and I had just started to go back to school for a degree in civil engineering. In fact, I was working as a ghostwriter and taking calculus at Harold Washington—I hadn’t had a math class since high school—when Devin and I cooked up the idea for Flood.
To add a little more context, Chicago was a pretty good place to land in 1993 if you had vague aspirations to make art of some form. Rent was cheap, the music was good, and there were a lot of artists around. Is that still true? Probably. It was exciting then, but not too exciting. Sort of like the good enough mother. By the end of the ’90s, I had already watched a lot of good friends leave. I didn’t want to see Devin go, so I proposed a publishing venture to keep him around. Needless to say, it didn’t work, but it has been a great way to maintain a friendship over the twenty years he’s been gone.
Michael, you say, “Needless to say, it didn’t work,” because shortly after you and Devin formed Flood, Devin got his job at Saint Louis University and moved to Missouri. Nevertheless, Flood’s books are all from Chicago. What does it mean for both of you that Flood is a Chicago press? And related: What are the realities of editing your books from two cities? I’m thinking about the practicalities, from communication to things like where to store the books themselves.
MOL: It once meant a lot to me that Flood was a Chicago press. I was drawn to regionalism and I really liked the low-key, overlooked aspect of Chicago as a place for poetry. I’ve always had second thoughts about leaving Detroit; perhaps this was an overdetermined attempt to put roots down. But thirty years later, I don’t have much perspective on it. I can imagine someone on the outside saying, “Oh yeah, it’s a total Chicago press.” Or Midwestern. But I’m not sure.
Practically speaking, the work gets done through phone calls, emails, and texts. Devin stores the books at his house.
DJ: I do think that there are Midwestern aspects to us, and geography probably shapes our choices to some degree. But we only publish two poets who currently live in Chicago, William Fuller and John Tipton, so we never made regionalism a priority. At least, we never put much emphasis on our own region; “regionalisms” more generally might be something that appeals to us, writing that’s embedded in places, that feels local in ways that might be inconvenient but not sedentary. I’m thinking of Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard in the North of England, Roy Fisher in Birmingham, UK, Merrill Gilfillan in the Western US, Ali Cobby Eckermann on Kauma land in South Australia, and Robert Adamson on the Hawkesbury. Liz Arnold’s poetry on Florida. Bill Wylie’s photographs of Kansas and Colorado. Maybe even the California sunlight and Maine winters in Jennifer Moxley’s writing, and the sense of New York in Lisa Jarnot’s poetry. Even Daisy Fried’s The Year the City Emptied in part appealed to us for the ambiance of Philadelphia, “that old worker,” though she is also translating Baudelaire. Not everything we publish evokes a geography, but it’s one thread.
As you started the process of imagining what Flood would be, what kinds of books you wanted to publish, what were the presses you had in mind as models? Likewise, were there any poets or editors you thought about as models? And similarly, any poets you really wanted to try to publish?
DJ: Of course, decades later, I’m struck by how little we knew at the outset. Neither of us had worked for a publisher. We had no advisors. The only publishers of poetry at that time in Chicago that come to mind were larger: Third World Press and the University of Chicago Press. Of course, the internet existed in 1999, but it did not seem like a portal to publishing information or community, not to me at least. As I recall, we borrowed a business proposal from someone who had opened a restaurant as our template. We got advice from friends who ran record stores and music labels. I expect people think of “independent publishing” as idiosyncratic by choice, but in our case it was partly sheer ignorance. We relied heavily on Jeff Clark, a brilliant designer and friend, to guide us on design and production. For the rest, we drew on historical models that were mostly quite distant. For example, we were aware that publishers from the 1950s and ’60s, such as the Jargon Society, raised money for books through subscription. So we put together a mailing list and sent two hundred or so letters to poets and critics, asking that they preorder our first two books for twenty dollars. We paid for our first publications that way, as we had no other funds to draw on.
Without firsthand exposure to publishing, our models mostly lay in books: those of Jargon, Fulcrum, and Black Sparrow, among others. Books that were (mostly) produced commercially, through offset printing, but that bore evidence of a care that felt artisanal. I still find pleasure in such books.
As for the poetry: we began with two manuscripts that had no other home, Ronald Johnson’s The Shrubberies and Pam Rehm’s Gone to Earth. Of course, we had become aware of Johnson through your friendship with him, years before. Pam was part of a remarkable generation of poets, mostly women, that we admired (including Lisa Jarnot and Jennifer Moxley, poets whose work we would come to publish a few years later). We thought it unlikely that Flood would be sustainable, so we did not think very far into the future. Our list developed organically, or through circumstance. Little by little, we added contemporaries such as Graham Foust, Jarnot, and Moxley; and elders such as Robert Adamson, Fanny Howe, and Jay Wright. The criteria for publication have always been simple: Did we love the work, and could we serve it reasonably well?
MOL: Just to add to Devin’s response, the models for me were Jargon, City Lights, and New Directions. In addition to Third World, the University of Chicago Press, and others that I’m not remembering, there was Agate Publishing. I knew the Agate founder, Doug Seibold, from back in the day when I was a fiction editor at Chicago Review (1994).[1] Doug was a professional editor and started Agate in 2002, two years after we started Flood. He was intimately familiar with the practical challenges of publishing before and after he started Agate. He has always been really helpful to talk to about the brass tacks of publishing.
Next, I have two related questions. First, looking at the Flood catalog, some themes emerge. There’s a general orientation toward experimental poetry in the modernist and New American lineages—this orientation arguably organizes the bulk of the books you’ve published. But there are compelling sub-themes and motifs as well, such as reprints of overlooked masterpieces/classics of the modernist and New American period (Ronald Johnson, Robert Duncan, Henry Dumas); with an interest in British poetry of these moments (Basil Bunting, Joseph Gordon MacLeod, Roy Fisher, Rosamund Stanhope); Australian poetry (recently departed Robert Adamson, Ali Cobby Eckermann); prose by poets, essays and fiction (Tom Pickard, Merrill Gilfillan, Jennifer Moxley; Fanny Howe); experimental translation (Thomas Meyer, John Tipton, Daisy Fried); and art books, photography, and painting (William Wylie, Brian Calvin). Devin, you mentioned that loving the work is the main criterion for publishing a book, which seems like the first and best criterion. But do either of you imagine any thematic properties, along the lines I’m observing, to guide what you’re doing?
And second, two of my favorite small presses claim Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Society as a model, Flood and the Song Cave. You’ve both mentioned Jargon already. Want to share any additional thoughts about this press? Thinking about this question, it occurs to me that a Jargonian thread runs through Flood, tying some of its elements together. (Probably should come up with a water metaphor rather than a weaving one…) Obviously, there’s the connection to Ronald Johnson, and also to Tom Meyer. There’s also Duncan’s Letters, which Flood reprinted from the Jargon book first published in 1956. There’s the connection to Tom Pickard, four of whose books you’ve published (four magnificent books, by my lights), who himself was connected to Bunting by way of Williams. (The story goes that Pickard, who was seventeen at the time, ordered some books from Jargon; Williams recognized the address to be very close to where Bunting was living at the time, in Newcastle, and urged the young poet to get in touch with the elder, who was revived, like in the Grail legend, and subsequently wrote Briggflatts, his greatest work.) Might there even be an oblique Jargon connection to Kenneth Cox, perhaps by way of Lorine Niedecker…? Jargon was never a highly visible operation; even so, I’m surprised to encounter people in the poetry world who have never heard of it. How do you think about the role that Jargon played? Is it similar to the role you imagine Flood playing?
MOL: Part of the challenge for me is that this interview is forcing me to reflect on twenty-three years of publishing, something I almost never do. Mostly we are just doing the work: editing, writing jacket copy, figuring out what the next books look like and where we are going to get the money to do more expensive projects (the art books). I’m not an academic, and my exposure to the poetry world primarily comes through this work, so it’s hard to see anything other than what’s in front of me.
A major source of information about how Flood is perceived is through sales numbers: some books do better than others, but it’s still not always clear why. If we had more time and resources, we could develop a more coherent sense of how Flood is perceived and what it means to people. But with limited resources—Devin and I both have families and full-time jobs outside of Flood—we have chosen to focus on publishing books we think are interesting. And though this is much harder to measure, we try to be the best press to support our writers. Or at the very least, good enough.
Aside from the immediate practicalities of supporting a writer when a book is published, the best way to support Flood authors is by publishing new and interesting work. Sometimes that’s part of the forgotten classics series and sometimes that’s coming from a younger poet like Andrew Colarusso. There is no formula for interesting work. And our taste is certainly idiosyncratic. But in general, it’s some ratio of originality, craft, and clarity. Of the three, originality is the most important. The work could be murky and imprecise and still be worth publishing if it’s unlike anything I’ve read and it’s teaching me something or pointing to some inchoate part of consciousness I recognize. Sometimes that’s what it takes to be original. I place a premium on clarity in poetry, but something clear without craft or originality isn’t going to cut it in most cases.
DJ: Connections to the Jargon Society go way back. I grew up in Winston-Salem, and I was aware of Jargon and Jonathan Williams as a teenager—through an interest in folk art, and by running across some of their books—before I knew anything about poetry. Jargon is hard to explain: Southern, rural, gay, avant-garde, sometimes serious high modernist, sometimes whimsical and absurd. It seems to have a unique character, in publishing at least. You sketch out some of the overlaps and connections, in terms of the writers we have published, and Jargon was probably a model for our eclecticism too, in publishing photography, art, and different sorts of prose alongside poetry. We made an homage to Jargon in our edition of Robert Duncan’s Letters: Poems 1953–56. Their edition was a beautiful letterpress book, with marbled papers, that harkened back to older bookmaking traditions in some ways. Ours was a contemporary rethinking of it, designed by Jeff Clark, who had designed at least one book for Jargon.
What you’re both saying about the kinds of manuscripts that interest you—those with clarity, a sense of place—and the nature of some of the models you’ve followed as editors and publishers—presses that are a little unusual, not necessarily easy to characterize—provides a compelling sense of your motivations as well as of the work you do. What are some of the changes you’ve noticed to poetry, perhaps to poetry books specifically, since you started with Flood? For instance—and we’ve talked about this, Devin—books seem to be getting longer. Are there any features of content, approach, even design (Jeff has certainly been influential in this regard) that you’ve noticed?
And, more philosophically perhaps, do you have a sense of the role that small presses play when it comes to poetry publishing? I’m not necessarily asking whether a sense like this motivates your work with Flood, but rather whether you feel yourselves aligned to a role such presses play.
DJ: One tendency in books of poetry I’d note: over the past seventy years, they have become more and more focused on thematic coherence. That can be useful, but it’s a shame poets don’t publish books titled Poems or Observations anymore. Way back in the 1920s, Marianne Moore was questioning our preference for continuity and completeness as opposed to miscellany. The sense that books need to make arguments frustrates me a bit, as miscellanies let individual poems ring out more clearly. What else? Lately I see more sonnets and pseudo-sonnets than there have been since the 1950s.
But really, since the turn of the century, the diversity and sheer quantity of poetry published in the United States has gone beyond what any person can read or even recognize. I can’t imagine why anyone would have the confidence to generalize about “the world of poetry” or poetry of the United States. It was probably a mistake— elite or provincial thinking—to ever believe you could. I’m a teacher, and when I see courses titled things like “Contemporary American Poetry,” I feel embarrassed by such a broad claim. No one person has ever heard of most of the poets active now, and for myself, I only see a fraction of the books published each year. So I don’t think I could say much useful about the ways in which poetry books have changed.
Michael and I maintain a healthy skepticism about the importance of publishing. I don’t think poetry is limited to books, readerships, markets, or even communities. It’s an experience, a way of activating language. It can survive in all sorts of conditions of scarcity. Obviously, most poetry does not happen in books: exponentially more poetry blooms in heads, gets muttered, remembered, recited, sung, scratched in notebooks, posted in various ways. But books remain a convenient, portable, sometimes delightful way of encountering it.
I think small presses such as Flood can make space for different, unusual senses of poetry and what it can do. For instance, in Daisy Fried’s The Year the City Emptied, and in John Tipton’s Believers and Seven Sermons from the Bacchae, the line between translation and composition gets blurred in ways that are exciting but hard to describe in jacket copy. In Jay Wright’s work, there’s a ceremonial dimension to the poetry and the ways in which it is enacted. These examples might relate to Michael’s emphasis on originality: poetry is being put to uses that the reader might not have anticipated.
MOL: To Devin’s response, I’ll add, poetry is weird to think about in that there are way more poetry books out there from bigger presses than people want to read. So why should small presses add to the glut? They often have an independence that bigger commercial or university presses can’t have. That independence doesn’t guarantee quality, but it produces more unusual and diverse books.
I’d like to finish with a question about the books themselves. Specifically, I’d like you to pick a book that characterizes something to you about Flood, maybe in spirit, in content, in design. I’m not asking you to pick your favorite book, but instead a book that signifies the Flood feel for you. I’m biased here to pick Ronald Johnson’s ARK, on which we spent so much time in editing (you’ll recall I even made a trip to Lawrence, Kansas, to consult the manuscripts to answer some of the editorial queries we came up with as we combed through the previously published edition) and whose visionary design by Jeff Clark makes for one of the handsomest books in my library. For me, that’s an obvious choice, but I’ll admit the book I go back to again and again is Music’s Mask and Measure by Jay Wright, a book of such exquisite poise, I never tire of looking at it or reading it, something about the magic of an obscure masterpiece in its pages. It doesn’t hurt that it takes all of twenty minutes to read the book!
MOL: ARK and Music’s Mask and Measure are great choices. I’d like to mention many other Flood books, but since you’ve asked for one, I’ll say The Shrubs by Ron. Devin, Joel Felix, and I retrieved the manuscript of The Shrubberies in the spring of 1998, just two days before he died.[2] When we entered his dad’s house in Topeka, Ron was on his deathbed with a single sheet of paper on his chest. This was his “Last Poem” that concludes The Shrubberies:
shambles this way antipodean being
come full circle
sparks in darkness lightning’s eternal return flipped the ecliptic[3]
I love that book. I love Jeff’s design, its confidence, elegance, and simplicity. Even now, when I look at it, I do a double take because I think the title is The Strawberries. Was that Jeff’s intention? Or is it the fresh lime-green cover? Little green shrubs. It was an auspicious beginning. If there’s a spirit to Flood, that book captures it.
DJ: I’ll add Rosamund Stanhope’s So I Looked Down to Camelot to the books you’ve both mentioned. The uncoated cover stock feels good in your hand, and Jeff’s design is minimalist but warm. It’s not something that any other publisher was likely to take on: first published in 1962, the book—and Stanhope’s poetry generally—had been nearly forgotten. The poetry is hard to locate: lyrical, sort of pastoral, delicate, amusing, and quirky:
Seeing December’s filicale, Her nervous woods,
In the red sound of the soil I plot my trowel,
Looking for round green words.[4]
Certain details of phrasing and image keep drawing you back, as well as something more pervasive and mysterious in the tone. Graham Foust first brought Stanhope to my attention, and I kept wanting to loan the book to other people. So why not republish it? That’s been more or less the case with all the books we have reissued, including ARK and Henry Dumas’s Knees of a Natural Man: it begins with the impulse to pass a book along to friends.
Notes:
[1]Doug Seibold was fiction editor of Chicago Review in the early 1990s.
[2]Johnson died on March 4, 1998, in Topeka. At the end of February, I received a letter from Johnson’s sister, Jodi Panula, insisting that I come to Topeka as soon as possible in order to secure his papers because she feared he was in a mood to throw everything out. At the time, I was living in Vienna and did not have the means to return to the US. I sent Michael, Devin, and Joel in my stead, who brought all of Johnson’s papers back with them to Chicago, where Michael kept them until my return in July. For the curious, I included the long letter that Michael wrote me shortly after returning from this retrieval mission in the memoir that I wrote about my apprenticeship with Johnson, “Gilding the Buddha,” in Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, eds. Joel Bettridge and Eric Selinger (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2008).
[3]Ronald Johnson, The Shrubberies, ed. Peter O’Leary (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2001), 126.
[4]Rosamund Stanhope, So I Looked Down to Camelot (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2020), 1.