POET-EDITORS/ 19


Geoffrey Gatza

Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and Publisher of BlazeVOX [books] and the author of seven books of poetry. Kenmore: Poem Unlimited and Not So Fast Robespierre are now available from Menendez Publishing. HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children is available from Meritage Press. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY (1993) and Daemen College, Amherst, NY (2002), and served as a U.S. Marine in the first Gulf War. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his girlfriend and two cats. More information about him is at geoffreygatza.com .

What is (or has been) your favorite editing project and why?

We have published a lot of books at BlazeVOX [books] and each of the texts are very special to me. I truly enjoy working with authors to develop a book out of a manuscript, and I find the act of working with text on the computer rather stimulating. But to pick a favorite project, I would have to say, the Day by Kent Johnson. This is the conceptual book, or rather, hijacking, of Kenny Goldsmith’s plagiarism, or rather, uncreative work of art that uses a full issue of a New York Times. I find this so enthralling as it is the absolute inverse of everything I do as a publisher. Kent came up with the creation and I was put to the task of making it happen. I took his texts and printed it on a large sticker. I purchased Goldsmith’s book from SPD, so as to make sure a fresh copy was purchased from a store. A part of the production involved the purchase so the chain of commerce was complete; SPD and the original press, The Figures, were both paid for their services. This seems obvious, yes, but no; we could have purchased used copies from Abe or Amazon. Or even ordered them directly from SPD. The cost for the book from SPD is $23 and at the The Figures website it is $20. There is shipping involved in all of this and it is a Harry Potter sized book. This book makes no money at all, I actually lose a $1.20 on each copy sold. Which sounds odd, but here again part of the process as it reverses the entire proposition of selling books. We could easily make that up by buying directly from The Figures, but it seems a tangible part of this concept. After receiving the books, I made a film of the production of first book. This also offered a tangible realism to the entire project by making a literary event happen outside of a book. To complete the cycle we also placed an ad for this conceptual book in Poetry Magazine, with the full understanding of the editorial board that this is a conceptual book, so as to not take anyone by surprise. I can feel that this would make Ezra Pound very happy, Nunc dimittis!

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Onomatomania (pdf format)

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