How did you come to name the press Pedlar? Many have asked. In 1996, searching for a name, I uncovered the little-known fact of Walt Whitman selling his Leaves of Grass door-to-door across America. A pedlar of poetry & of beauty & of a great love for the human & natural worlds: I believed, in 1996, that the image of a queer poet (who had suffered already more than his share of detractors), on the road in the dark with only a pronounced trust in the worthiness of his project, was an image that would sustain me across the vicissitudes, the blind alleys and cries in the night. And it has, a thousand times over.

Pedlar Press is dedicated to the memory of Walt Whitman’s agency & dignity & faith.

Introducing Pedlar Press’s Salon series, Working to Disruption

Next Salon:  Poets Warren Heiti & Phil Hall, in conversation at Supermarket in Kensington Market, Toronto

Thursday 31 May 2012, 6 to 8PM

Independent literary presses are mission-driven not market-driven. The motive to publish is to enrich the literary culture by bringing works by important and often neglected writers to the widest possible audience. Manuscripts are selected and books are published as part of a press’s fulfillment of its mission. Mission Statement (excerpt): To publish modern and contemporary literature of enduring cultural and artistic importance, works that challenge accepted views of life and art, foster an international and multicultural sensibility of literature and preserve and extend the literary tradition that values innovation and experimentation in form.

Watch here for news of what’s up next up in the Salon series.

Thanks are due as always to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This series is supported by the OAC Arts Investment Fund.

Every Saturday till MAY 19, 2012

Thanks to the vision of author Martha Baillie and her good friend Roscoe Handford, who is the Wychwood Barns market manager, and the support of the OAC Arts Investment project, market-goers have recently been coming upon a literary table where, next to potatoes and organic crackers, fiction and poetry are for sale. The 100 Mile Literary Diet, we are calling the initiative. It seems a simple thing, to offer a weekly space for literary producers to sell their wares directly to the consumer. But it is far from simple. And showing up to market is far from simple.

I have stood behind the Pedlar Press poetry titles, listening to exclamations of delight and to questions about these unknown poets. There are reasons why market-goers have never before heard of masterful poets Souvankham Thammavongsa and Joanne Page and Sandra Ridely, for example, reasons having to do with system-and-money-and-convention-making. I repeat myself often at the market, mentioning how the airwaves are jammed almost exclusively with talk about the Top Ten Canadian Writers, and how the other 99% are rarely if ever discussed. Poetry gets pummelled, ploughed under, by the slogans which dominate the commercial airwaves.

I’ll never be able to thank Martha and Roscoe enough for this experience, one that has redeemed my faith in the Pedlar Press audience. How come we don’t know about Pedlar authors and books? : the surprise and delight of first-time market-goers is palpable. I champion difficult work and serious reading: serious reading is not for everyone, I know, and our culture does not promote independent thinking. To come to market once is luck. To come again and again is an act of the imagination. Because to show up a second, a third, a fourth time means that the question, What am I doing here? has been asked. What am I doing here rather than at Chapters/Indigo?

There is an absence of slick signage, an absence of slogans, at Wychwood Market. Let it continue to be so. Let me be cautious about an overuse of the witty ’100 Mile Literary Diet,’ cautious about making the literary table into a system that celebrates itself rather than the human beings who come to investigate its poetry and its fiction. Instead let me stand in all humility behind the literary wares displayed on a 3 foot-by-three foot table, conversing quietly with market-goers about the goodness of literature. Let me, alongside other vendors, come and go, leaving behind only that most delicate of traces : living nourishment. Let me remember the brilliance of William Carlos Williams:

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.