CULTURE COUNTER: New Publishing House Takes to the High Way

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Will Leathem, 816.547.3331

It’s not “Found Art,” Deconstructionist nor Eastern-Bloc Literature of Dissent.
It’s not New Formalist, Cubist, Marxist, Da Da nor Freestyle Slam Improvisation.

Brandishing its creed like a battering ram on a monster truck, Unholy Day Press (UDP) launches from the crossroads of the country. Intent upon crashing through the nation's literary roadblocks, UDP is leaving in its dust the out-of-gas junkers of contemporary literary classification. Fueled by twelve new books of original poetry, UDP – the subject of an award-winning documentary, The Pit Poet Picture Show (www.piggybankproductions.com/PPPS.html) – is taking its show to America's highways.

"I have to tell you, I’m not much interested in poetry that doesn’t stick in the crucible of the human mind,” notes UDP founder and publisher, W.E. Leathem, "Not since the Beat movement has the cultural landscape demanded such a self-possessed and unapologetically American literature. It is our intention through publishing and live readings to interject just such a poetry into the national canon."

Already, UDP's publications are causing a stir. The printer for three UDP titles rejected a fourth, Open Letter (To Dark Gods of the Ancient World) by Jason Ryberg for "objectionable content." Two other printing houses refused the inaugural issue of UDP’s cultural arts quarterly, The Alternative American, citing suggestive cover art – a controversy ratcheted up by the pandering to post-Janet Jackson sensibilities.

"It's 2004; haven't we laid these ghosts to rest yet?" asks Leathem, a former U.S. Senate staffer and fifteen-year veteran of national politics. "I mean, you have to take it seriously. Our freedom of expression is under direct assault by the 'more robust' intolerance of a new political and cultural Puritanism."

“Look around," Leathem appeals, "even as the mega-conglomerate, multi-million-dollar advances produce only homogenized Clear-Channel irrelevance, the traditional engines of creativity are flat-lining. Can you honestly tell me that when you turn on the television, listen to the radio, visit your chain bookseller, that this is the best of our national creative voice?"

Founded in 2002, during the build up to the anniversary of September 11th, UDP shakes loose of easily identified poetic and marketing types (academic poet, street poet, ad infinitum). Nor does it focus its ire only at any one political party. "Even as our institutions are malfunctioning, the loyal opposition can’t seem to present a coherent alternative. What if – in the face of a national ethos out of sync with the fundamental needs of our humanity – Counter Culture actually meant what the words imply?" asks Leathem. "Not ideologically co-opted by the left or the right, but an articulate counter to the current, out-of-balance pastiche that is American culture run amok?"

“I and the great preponderance of the poets published by UDP are simply tired of expending all our energy working against the things we don’t like – not that one can escape the responsibility to stand up to inequality or corruption or evil. I think that as a publishing house, UDP’s defining ethic is that we want to work proactively, to restore the life of the creative mind, to aggressively and unapologetically pursue the ideas and words that infuse existence with passion.

Poet Jason Ryberg agrees (Open Letter, 2004), It’s not that I don’t see a place for anti-war poems, for instance. I have an anti-war poem – it’s a poem about beauty.”

“I believe that Culture Counter already exists,” notes Leathem (Terra, 2004), “located right where academia, the critics, the mega-conglomerate R&D departments don’t know how to find it: in the brawn of a cartage worker, the sense of community of a small businessman, the hunger of an ex-junky, the empathy of a bartender… This is the bedrock of Culture Counter, these individuals and the millions of others like them who ignore the labels and poses and prizes, who make art and life from passion, craft and intelligence.”

For UDP, its urgency and insistence accelerated in the wake of the 911 terrorist attacks. “As I talked with customers from behind the counter at Prospero’s Books (www.prosperosbookstore.com), I found that real people had little to do with the evening news satellite feed. People wanted the memory of September 11th to be the impetus for a better world. They did not want to capitulate this momentous anniversary to the voices that would answer one horror with another, who would suborn freedom to some mythological guarantee of “safety”. So, we published Leavened911 (www.unleavened911.com), a collection of essays about life in the post-911 word from one urban community. It took over 1 million hits in its first weekend up.”

In these days of slams, “found art”, twelve-step confessionalists and ego-driven exhibitionism, the poets of UDP are driving the other way. They offer a decidedly literary poetic: lyrical even as it boasts a dirt-beneath-its-nails urbanity, a poetic that couples an in-your-face vigor with a gracious introspection rooted in the deep soil of the nation. “Look,” says poet Ed Tato (True Stories from la Cosa Nostra, 2004), “we want to put on a show and entertain people when we read. But the bottom line is the poem. Can it take you – the reader as well as the audience – somewhere you’ll find at least a moment of transcendence, of freedom.”

Transcendence – a quaintly outdated notion in much of literary America. Yet it is an example of UDP’s commitment to presenting an alternative, a counter, to the one-size-fits-all homogenization of the mega-corporate, profit-at-all-costs ethos currently dominating American culture. As those who encounter UDP’s poets soon realize, the most articulate practitioners of today’s Culture Counter may very well be a cabal of mid-western poets hell-bent to be heard.

And so it is that the poets of UDP hit the road, storming America’s bookshelves and back roads fueled with their own literary canon of words guaranteed to engage the national psyche – whether with an old family curse, a hotel patron with a pistol, a toe dipping in a bath, or life in the sewers of Romania. Nothing is off-limits except the anathema of “tedious, sloppy or dull poetry.” After all, “The ultimate question,” says poet Bob Savino (Report from the Frontier, 2004), “is simple – will these poems last?”