How to do things with words

Saw Joan Retallack last night as part of the Contemporary Writers Series at Mills. They get some first-rate writers in that series.

It was interesting to see Retallack read. She's friendlier than I expected, almost chatty. And she made an effort to explain what she was doing in the poems she read, which made them a bit more accessible. Even still, for me, I felt more in the layering of sound and metonymy than I actually understood. At one point, and I'm not even sure why, I had tears running down my face.

One thing she mentioned at the outset, which troubled me, was that her book How to Do Things with Words has gone out of print. I was saddened to think that it would now be difficult for more people to find and read that book, and I started thinking about how it might be possible to start up a press devoted to helping authors keep books in print. It might be pretty doable for cases where the author retained copyright. Some sort of print-on-demand system might make the project feasible, though print-on-demand has promised a lot more than it has delivered in the last decade or so.