Picture Pages

In which Mónica de la Torre finds the new avant garde in the pages of Pierogi Press

It strikes me as a relevant coincidence that I was reading David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets at the same time I was asked to write about Pierogi Press, the journal published by Pierogi 2000. The Last-Avant Garde is a true page-turner which demonstrates how vital collaborations and the sense of an artistic community proved for the writers of the New York School of Poets, mainly John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Their name derived from the group’s association with the New York School of Painters: Pollock, De Kooning, Motherwell, Johns, as well as Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Fairfield Porter. Not only did poets and painters mingle at the legendary Cedar Tavern and attend the same parties; they shared a sensibility, compositional methods, and their rejection of academicism and the status quo. Most of the poets were deeply involved with the visual arts: Frank O’Hara was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, John Ashbery had been an art critic for The Herald Tribune and later became the editor of Art News, where numerous reviews by James Schuyler were published. They also collaborated with artists and among themselves, and were engaged in publishing literary journals such as Locus Solus and the one-shot The Hasty Papers. Lehman’s tone in The Last Avant-garde is a valedictorian one; he mourns the long gone days when art and poetry were still impermeable to the market and to academic programs. Luckily, the author’s unconvincing arguments invite one to think about examples of the current manifestations of the independent spirit. Pierogi 2000 and Pierogi Press are exactly that.

Susan Swenson, editor of Pierogi Press, recalls thinking about founding a press after reading a biography of Virginia Woolf. Inspired by Hogart Press, the press founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Susan Swenson and her husband Joe Amrhein, founder and director of Pierogi 2000, decided to start a biannual journal in which only original works of literature and art would be published. This would not be a journal about literature and arts, it would not include any reviews, feature articles, or advertising, of course. Swenson would edit the writing and Amrhein would choose the art from Pierogi’s illustrious flat files.

Five issues have been published to this date, each one featuring a different hand silk-screen by one of the gallery’s artists, in an edition of 500 numbered and signed copies. The covers themselves clearly announce that what one will find inside Pierogi Press has little to do with what is going on in the publishing world: there’s no names of prominent authors on them, no labels providing the reader with short cuts to its editorial content, not even the name of the journal (which is in the back), only a work of art. Cover artists to date are Joe Amrhein, Andrew Moszynski, Ruth Root, Bruce Pearson, and Kim Jones, respectively.

To my knowledge Pierogi Press is the only journal in New York that provides a forum for both some of the most daring artists and writers of the moment. To the benefit of writers in New York, there are numerous remarkable small literary magazines that come not from universities but from individuals, usually writers themselves, who view writing as a collaborative endeavor: Open City, Fence, and McSweeney’s to name a few. However, none of them seem to bridge the ever expanding gaps between members of different artistic communities.

Along with black and white reproductions of drawings and photographs, Pierogi Press features an eclectic and unusual mix of collaborations by poets, fiction writers, playwrights, and even artists who write (something very much in keeping with the New York School). Texts by artists like Matt Freedman and Kurt Strahm proved the sad truth that artists can write much better than writers can paint. The journal also has included works by poets who have recently published their first books and will certainly become major voices, such as Suzanne Wise, Nick Flynn, and Mary Jo Bang, along with poetry in translation, as is the case of Christian Viveros-Fauné’s version of a poem by the renowned Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma. And occasionally it contains cross-bred pieces that couldn’t be found anywhere else, such as the conversation between Andrew Moszynski and Thomas Nozkowski entitled "If You Can Paint, I Can Walk," about art in film.

The journal’s appeal to a broad range of artists and writers is evident at the launchings of each issue. On most occasions the art included in its pages is temporarily displayed in the venue where the reading takes place. Anyone who has attended readings knows that an audience of fifty is considered quite good for someone who is not a literary celebrity, and will be surprised to see mobs of one hundred and fifty people or so gathered together to listen to poetry and fiction. The crowd is not the only unusual aspect of the readings; depending on the reader they oscillate from straightforward readings of works that can only be fully understood when seen on the page, to performances aligned with the oral tradition. Such was the case in a comical reading of an outrageously bad poem by Jim Torok, who then proceeded to show the audience a series of his hilarious "low tech animations." Defying the conventions of the countless readings that take place every day in New York at unflattering places such as Barnes & Noble, one of the launches at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts featured a staged reading of an excerpt of "Room 201," an experimental play by Donald Breckenridge in which four characters engage in fifteen-minute-long monologues at once.

Pierogi Press and the readings organized by Susan Swenson confirm the fact that non-writers do read and are still responsive to good writing, and that non-artists still look and care about art. What a relief to know that there is still something thriving outside of academic writing programs, the world of megagalleries only interested in generating larger than life art stars, and publishers and editors interested in literature only as the first step of a process that will eventually bring heart-wrenching stories to the big screen. Susan Swenson’s open editorial approach deserves to be fully applauded. If only her attitude were contagious.