The Sparrow and the Phoenix

On July 1, 2002, John Martin, the founder and for thirty-six years the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, closed down his shop in Santa Rosa, California. After finding new homes for four of his authors—Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles, John Fante, and Wyndham Lewis—he entrusted the rest of his backlist to a fellow maverick publisher, David R. Godine of Boston. The agreement was simple: Godine would keep Black Sparrow’s offerings available to the trade and to the public, keep the best-selling titles in print, and keep the house’s spirit alive through judicious acquisitions.

In short, Black Sparrow Press would not die, it would be reborn—as Black Sparrow Books, an imprint David R. Godine, Publisher.

We published our first Black Sparrow title––Mirage, a novel by Bandula Chandraratna––in September 2003. We followed it with a reissue of The Exquisite Corpse, by Alfred Chester, and with new collections by Wanda Coleman, Clayton Eshleman, Robert Kelly, and Ed Sanders––all five of these writers long associated with the Black Sparrow name. These books, and other titles from the “new” Black Sparrow, can be viewed on this Web site by entering our catalog and clicking on the Recent and Upcoming buttons.

Although we are proud of these new publications, we humbly acknowledge that we are standing on the shoulders of a giant. Our Black Sparrow books have been acquired as a living tribute to John Martin’s literary aesthetic and as a complement the remarkable backlist that he has entrusted us to distribute.

As Andrei Codrescu said on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the Black Sparrow catalog “contains works by some of the most brilliant names of our culture: Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Paul Goodman, Eileen Myles, Tom Clark, Ed Dorn, John Wieners, and many more. It’s a who's who of poets, essayists, and novelists, including a few out-of-print classics such as Theodore Dreiser and Charles Reznikoff, known for their uncompromising allegiance to art instead of commercialism.” These writers are part of that great American avant-garde whose patriarch is Walt Whitman and whose members include the Objectivist poets of the 1920s, the proletariat writers of the 30s and 40s, the Beats and the Neo-Beats, the Black Mountain writers, the New York School, and the “deep image” poets of the 60s and 70s.

On this Web site, you will find covers and descriptions of all available Black Sparrow titles. (Several of our descriptions are still under construction. Please pardon any holes in the fabric; they will be filled shortly.) You’ll find novels by Edward Dorn, Paul Goodman, Sherril Jaffe, and Wright Morris, and short fiction by Lucia Berlin, Laura Chester, Thaisa Frank, and Daniel Fuchs. You’ll find the letters of Jane Bowles, the memoirs of Theodore Dreiser, the art criticism of James Schuyler, and the essays of Milton Hindus, John Sanford, and John Wieners. But mostly you will find poetry: the first three volumes of America, a History in Verse, an epic-in-progress by Ed Sanders, guiding spirit of the satirical folk-rock group The Fugs, and a three-volume Complete Poems of William Everson, a.k.a Brother Antoninus, “The Beat Friar.” A biography-in-verse of Keats by Tom Clark, and a meditation on the last days of tenor man Lester Young by David Meltzer. And of course many classic collections of postmodern poetry by the likes of Clayton Eshleman, Edward Field, Robert Kelly, Michael Lally, Lyn Lifshin, Gerard Malanga, Eileen Myles, Janine Pommy Vega, Diane Wakoski, and John Yau.

In short, you’ll find an alternative history of twentieth-century American literature––one that somehow flew under the radar of the Norton Anthologies, Poetry magazine, Helen Vendler, and all the other Arbiters of Received Taste. Here is a band of poets and troublemakers who make a lovely sound as they cut against the American grain––if you’re not afraid of new music, and if you have ears to hear.

—Christopher Carduff, editor and publisher