Headquartered on the grounds of Fort Worden State Park, a former military base in historic Port Townsend, Wash., Copper Canyon Press now resides far from its Denver, Colo., origins. Fifty years out from its letterpress, small-print-run beginnings in 1973, the nonprofit indie offers a catalog of more than 400 titles that constitute an education in poetry. The press boasts award winners Hayden Carruth, Carolyn Kizer, and Dean Young; translations of works by Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wei Ying-wu; and contemporary voices such as Victoria Chang, Lucia Perillo, Paisley Rekdal, and Matthew Zapruder.
Executive editor Michael Wiegers has seen the press through 30 years since arriving at Copper Canyon as managing editor in 1993. While attuned to “the push and the pressure for what’s new,” the “discoveries” to be found in MFA programs and elsewhere, he said he also aims to “make a place for the people that the industry has left behind over the years”—notably authors of color and others without the conventional credentials that draw attention.
“To borrow Lewis Hyde’s term, we need to be good ancestors,” Wiegers added. “And as good ancestors we need to simultaneously be looking backwards and forwards.”
In honor of the milestone anniversary, Wiegers and his team assembled a celebratory anthology, A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry, that reintroduces poems decade by decade. Each poem in the edition was suggested by an associate of the press. Wiegers said he set out to “reflect the many people who have built the press over the years, including staff members, interns, volunteer board members, and our poets—turning to everybody as contributors, rather than the top-down approach.”
More than 200 people made recommendations, urging Wiegers to include contemporary poets and older favorites alike. So many readers named Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown that Wiegers included five of Brown’s poems in A House Called Tomorrow. “One former intern selected an Ursula Le Guin poem and told the story of my walking in one day with the manuscript, asking, ‘Anybody an Ursula fan?’ ” Wiegers said. “I love those moments of joy others have encountering books. For me it was kind of a casual gesture, but for a young publishing professional it was, ‘I get to read one of my heroes.’ ”
Even the anthology’s title, borrowed from a poem by Alberto Álvaro Ríos, arrived in a serendipitous moment. “All of our staff meetings begin and end with a poem,” Wiegers said, and one week, Copper Canyon finance and operations manager Julie Johnson selected Ríos’s “A House Called Tomorrow” as her closing poem. “I was in the early stages of figuring out what the anthology’s title was going to be,” Wiegers recalled, “and it was so affecting in the way she read it.” He knew right away what to call the book.
Ríos’s poem—which Wiegers noted is quoted by Michelle Obama in her new memoir, The Light We Carry—reminds its readers to think about “Everyone who has come before you,/ All the yous you have been,” and advises, “Look back only for as long as you must/ Then go forward into the history you will make.”
The trade paperback edition of A House will be released February 28, and the hardcover will follow a month later. So many people suggested entries that Wiegers assembled a companion volume, Come Shining, to be published in September. He calls Come Shining a “B-sides” compilation of poems, photos, and commentaries from Copper Canyon enthusiasts. The title references the late poet C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining (1998); Copper Canyon published 10 books by Wright, including her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning One With Others (2011).
To celebrate Copper Canyon’s 50th year, Wiegers is lining up poetry parties across the U.S. “If somebody wants to host us, we’ll come,” he said. At the AWP conference in Seattle, March 8–11, “we’ve actually rented the Space Needle.” At the Poetry Foundation in Chicago this March, poets Chris Abani, Tishani Doshi, Alison C. Rollins, Arthur Sze, and Javier Zamora will read their work and join Wiegers for a panel discussion. Additional events are scheduled in New York City and in Santa Fe, N.Mex., site of Copper Canyon supporters the Lannan Foundation (about half of Copper Canyon’s annual revenue comes from donations).
The tour reinforces the value of Copper Canyon’s program. “While the books we publish may be relevant in the present moment,” Wiegers said, “the hope is that they maintain that relevancy, that urgency, 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the line.”
