The history of poetry publishing is littered with lost books, vanished presses and poets abandoned to oblivion. Poetry publishing has always been a tenuous enterprise, destined to be a money loser, surviving largely as a labor of love. Although roughly 2,500 books of poetry are published in America each year, most—98% according to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses—are published by independent publishers. And many of these are tiny operations, consisting of one or two people. The casualty rate among these presses is high, and along the way cherished poetry books are lost forever—unless someone intervenes to save the day, and the poetry.
That's what's happening in the case of Ausable Press, a small publisher of poetry founded in 1999 by Chase Twichell, a highly regarded poet and the wife of novelist Russell Banks. As of January 1, 2009, Copper Canyon Press, one of America's foremost independent poetry publishers (its list includes National Book Award winner W.S. Merwin, C.D. Wright and Twichell herself), will assume responsibility for Ausable's backlist and current contracts, keeping the books in print under a Copper Canyon logo and continuing to publish many of Ausable's authors. Ausable has published books by both prominent and lesser known poets, such as James Richardson, Linton Kwesi Johnson and the current poet laureate, Charles Simic. And most interesting of all, at least to those used to the cutthroat big business world of trade publishing, Twichell is giving the press—“lock, stock and barrel, including the revenue, the inventory and everything,” said Twichell—to Copper Canyon. All Copper Canyon has to do is give the books a good home. “I was never in it for the money,” Twichell said. Both houses are nonprofits, so the transfer is relatively simple.
Providing a good home for Ausable's backlist and current authors is exactly what Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon's executive editor, intends to do. “When Chase approached me, I thought, here's a press that has a solid backlist, with a number of poets I would have liked to publish originally,” said Wiegers. They first began discussing the possibility of coming together at the 2006 Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual convention in Atlanta, which has become a kind of BEA for the indie press world. In recent years, other presses had approached him, he said, about somehow joining with Copper Canyon, which offers something unique in the small press poetry world, according to Wiegers: “Copper Canyon has been at it for 35 years, and we've learned not only how to publish books but how to sustain an organization.” Twichell's offer of Ausable was the first one Wiegers seriously considered: “I've always been interested in the idea of keeping books in print and supporting the whole ecology of poetry publishing,” he said, “and it just seemed like this one was a good fit. We share a distributor, Consortium, so there weren't as many of the logistical issues. The Ausable ISBNs will become associated with Copper Canyon from the first of the year.” While he can't promise to continue publishing all of Ausable's authors, he's committed to honoring all current contracts as well as first refusal clauses.
Twichell quit teaching creative writing to found Ausable because “it's something I had always wanted to do,” she said. “I had received a small inheritance, which I pledged to the press, along with 10 years of my life, which have now passed. I always had a limited run in mind. I couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life as a business person instead of a poet. Instead of just being a poetry publisher, I had become the head of a not-for-profit, and the amount of extra work that had nothing to do with publishing poetry became onerous. I decided that instead of letting it go on under someone else's direction, it was better to let it have a short brilliant run and kill it. A great deal of the best poetry is coming out of indie presses, and Copper Canyon is the best of all of them,” said Twichell. “I think Ausable is going to have the best possible future.” Far from killing it, Twichell has ensured that Ausable's legacy will survive.
