Empty Bowl was a small, non-profit press founded in 1976 by Michael Daley. It was dedicated to publishing books and periodicals that reflect the visions and concerns of Pacific Rim communities, biological and cultural features of distinct regions, and in interdependence of all like along the Pacific Rim.
When we weren't working in the mud, when we weren't covered by it, we were holed up in big green Army tents, smelly like the back of the truck, to dry out, keep warm, cook a little stew for dinner, to make cheese sandwiches without leaving thumb prints, or to lie back and read. Greyhound buses all over town in 1976, the Bicentennial year, history everywhere, the tourist or antique hunter its medium, old rockers, beds, and tables shiny in the storefront windows, a date next to the price-for months we escaped all this to clear-cuts and there we planted trees.
Bob Blair and I shared a tent big enough for cots, boxes of supplies and books, a small round airtight woodstove, and a couple of lamps. Those who'd done this even once before slept in homemade campers mounted on decrepit pickups. We spent a lot of time in woolen long johns, learning more efficient ways to dry clothes. A chaos of lines ranged from the safest point near the stove, clothespins bearing the weight of socks and underwear. We cooked over the woodstove our odd concoctions of carbohydrates and protein; once I gagged a friend with barely cooked grain. Just before first light the mice in our food supply would wake us, we'd stoke the stove, cook some sorry coffee, get back into damp rain gear, and carry soot-stained cheese sandwiches onto the clear-cut, hip bags filled with mud ball treelings, Doug Fir. By now they've probably been harvested by the toilet paper mills.
Some time during those months, Bob and I came up with the idea of publishing a poetry magazine for the Pacific Northwest. Bob had just acquired a Chandler-Price platen press, which he'd installed in a second-floor office of the Taylor Building in Port Townsend. In 1974 many such presses were appearing around town. I helped set type with Bob, Rod Freeman, and Kevin Quigley when they published a collection of poetry and art in 1973 known as The Wale. Copies of this book, now rare, were all over Port Townsend and Seattle for about five years. Four or five letterpresses were in the back of the Weir Building, kitty-corner from Seafirst Bank and just across the street from the Town Tavern. The Weir building was unheated, so we spent a great deal of time "planning" at the tavern. The building was being remodeled by Jim Weir, who expressed himself with grunts and gestures. Jim was always framing walls or stairs, then dismantling and reframing. Changing his mind didn't seem unusual, until we came to see the process of assembling and dismantling was chronic, and the building would never be finished.
One of the last flyers printed there was a statement to protest a Kaiser plant in Port Townsend. The day after Kaiser decided not to build, Jim's brother, a millionaire in Seattle, had us kicked out of the building, and those big Chandler-Price printing presses grew feet and walked out. Jim just kept framing, dismantling, and reframing the same vestibule staircase with new beams. He wouldn't look at us. A few years later, a tunnel which originated in the basement of the Weir Building caved in one morning in the middle of Water Street halfway to Seafirst Bank, Jim blinking up into the dust.
Our magazine was going to be printed on one of those letterpress machines, and Bob and I were going survive for a month or so on unemployment checks while hand-setting each page. We had enough material from many fine writers throughout the Northwest to print the first issue of Dalmo'ma by Fourth of July, 1976. The title was a Pit River tribal place name I found in Jerry Gorsline's copy of Indians in Overalls by the anthropologist Jaime de Angulo. It mattered that the name for the publication should be a place. "Place" for us meant-almost exclusively, and too narrowly-the Olympic Peninsula, but the Pit River people lived in Northern California, beyond the southern boundary of our own region. I had admired the intent of Kuksu, a magazine edited by Dale Pendell, Gary Snyder, and Steve Sanfield. What we were doing took some of its influence from their publication, and our title paid homage to stories collected by De Angulo, the French linguist and ethnographer who trained himself to rely on primitive ways. Immediately after the United States incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he tore a hole in the middle of his living room floor and roof, and heated the home with fire vented through a smoke hole.
The title Dalmo'ma, imagined a place such as one in his Pit River songs. It wasn't clear from De Angulo if "Dalmo'ma" was an idealized and imaginary landscape. We were looking for roots we thought we never had, but someone had, and the places we loved contained. Gary Snyder showed up at a reading to benefit one of our early issues and elucidated the etymology of the word "Dalmo'ma," an enlightening linguistic experience to which I hadn't the presence of mind to bring a tape recorder. I remember very little, other than the distinction between glottal stops and glottal clicks. And being forced to admit I knew nothing about the rather odd and apparently meaningless word I'd selected for the title of our magazine, except that I liked what I thought it sounded like in my Euro-tongue's appetite for blithe colonization. I imagined finding, if it were possible, an elder of the Pit River people and asking him, as if I needed to know, what the term might have meant, and being told it was a place of spiritual rebirth, a journey into enlightenment, a vision quest for power, a meeting of the center of one's being with the entire universe. And then I imagined the old man, an old man with long white hair and a lot of wrinkles mapped across his smile, turn away and leave me in hippie reverie at the top of some hill in California, shaking his head and laughing when he got back to his truck and drove away.
But the press name, "Empty Bowl," which fit the Buddhist inclinations of poets who were interested, was Bob Blair's choice. We set type in that sunny room in the Taylor Building for a few weeks, and printed stacks of several sheets of the little book before I thought to ask the name of the press. I assumed it would be a long process. Bob was setting the chase into the machine to begin our next run. He smoked Drum in those days when we had money, rolling each smoke meticulously so that the end product could have been mistaken for the machined sticks of committed Luckies smokers. Bob was steady and careful in everything he did, and painfully aware of the lack of these qualities in others. Tolerant of my untidiness, however, he pointed out that after typesetting, I always left a pile of small lead type and copper spacers on the workbench, "like a mouse," Bob said, "always a pile of crumbs," and made an unpleasant face.
So now when I thought to introduce the question of the press's name, he stopped locking the chase, and removed the cigarette with its half inch of ash from the corner of his mouth with one hand. Stooping over the work, he turned his face from the press to look at me, and said with one of his maddeningly long pauses, exhaling a cloud of smoke, "Empty Bowl." His look fixing me for a moment more, he put the cigarette back in its place and turned his attention to the machine again.
Although by the second issue, in 1978, Bob was no longer interested in continuing with the project, he put up no resistance when I adopted the Empty Bowl name, as if in a spirit of shared ownership. He said once he'd tried writing poetry and found it easy and didn't want to do it again. Two of his poems are in Dalmo'ma 1. He had introduced me to the dark and magical writing of Jorge Luis Borges, and Marcel Duchamp's construction "Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even." But years later, when Bob had an Airstream and traveled as a career reforester, he told me I had "appropriated" the Empty Bowl name and logo when I published Dalmo'ma 2. He said so without acrimony, but his choice of words stunned me. My memory of what I had told myself was a transition from dual editorship to collective, diverged widely; yet despite my surprise that he'd seen it so, I could recall no conversation where the name ceased to be his property.
The first time I heard the words "biome" and "bioregions" was when Jerry Gorsline and Linn (now Freeman) House were discussing a scroll entitled "Amble towards Continent Congress" written by Peter Berg. Put out by Planet Drum, this rather formal document presented us for the first time with the idea of a continent divided by natural boundaries. One region begins and another ends where geology and dominant species dramatically change. Trees and flowers, insects, birds, and climate. That places could be structured as natural rather than political systems seemed a more appropriate form of anarchy than measures then being suggested in cities.
Bioregionalism is better explained in the first and second issues of Dalmo'ma. In the first issue, Jerry Gorsline's and Linn House's "Excerpts from Future Primitive," and in the second, "Prologue to Ohode R.A.R.E II Proposal" laid out the plan by which bioregionalism accounts for man's place in habitat watershed management. These two pieces of writing constitute the largest portion of prose in the first two issues. They were both scientific as well as poetic solutions to the ancient question, "What is to be done?" The "Prologue" became a centerpiece for the second issue, as did, on the visual level, a set of elegant and symbolic ink drawings by Gué Pilon. The essay was attributed to the collective editorship of Ohode, a group of people on the Olympic Peninsula working "in the realm of watershed politics." For a magazine or anthology to evolve a theme, there must be this conception on the part of the editor that a centerpiece would state the key principles about which all other entries revolved.
The centerpiece of Dalmo'ma 1 was Mike O'Connor's "Song of Ishi," a poem cycle derived from Ishi: in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber. The poems include some in Chinook jargon, which, as every Washington State history student learns, is the language created specifically for trade among whites and natives of the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the book, Puget Sound Salishan calendar terms set the poems and translations in specific seasonal turns. There were Aztec and Sioux translations within these few pages and in both the first and second issues the poetry and stories of such writers as Tim McNulty, William Stafford, Kim Stafford, Bill Ransom, Sam Hamill, Barry Lopez, Jim Dodge, John Haines, and Jim Heynen.
Both issues quickly sold out at $2 each, and Empty Bowl's loose-knit group of editors and friends fell back into meetings, reading, and discussion. The press was occasionally busy. Two issues of a pamphlet series, Firecrackers, went out, and a few small postcard-size poems. Firecrackers 2 was produced by D.J.Hamilton and consisted of his translation from the Spanish text of a poem by the Palestinian, Mahmud Darweesh. It included a rough map of the strife-torn Middle East, about which most of us entrenched regionalists knew utterly nothing. Firecrackers 1, which I edited, consisted of three poems by Tim McNulty, Tom Jay, and Doug Dobyns. The subtitle, "Poems against Trident," marked the first occasion for Empty Bowl to speak against the Navy's proposed submarine base a few miles from where we lived. The Pacific Northwest Review of Books noted the special paper was like brown bag. It may be the "prime directive" of regionalism that artists work with local materials. Like prehistoric regionalists in Jim Dodge's Lascaux ("Magic and Beauty" Dalmo'ma 2), we found that Empty Bowl could, as if magically, attract what was needed from the community. A roll of brown paper from the Port Townsend mill which employed most of the town and fouled the air with pulp fumes appeared at the door. We could work it on the letterpress if it was cut. The three-foot roll became an insurmountable problem for days until someone came by the office with a chainsaw, divided it into three neat rolls, and left. On a small green paper cutter from the local thrift store, I unrolled the brown bag material andsliced nearly precise sheets into two stacks I flattened with the OED.
Composed mainly of people fresh from what we saw as victory in the pullout from Vietnam, activists protested the production and proliferation of the Trident Nuclear Submarine System, and production and shipment of weapons-grade material. Though the three or four white-haired men and women standing in front of thousands of municipal locations across the country today continue to be a more emphatic pronouncement against military build-up, the obligation to provide witness to warmongers and governments is the lasting purpose of such struggles. Empty Bowl began the first Dalmo'ma Anthology by publishing, collecting, and disseminating significant documents of the Northwest anti-Trident movement.
The book includes a statement by spokesperson Jim Douglass, as well as the "Defendants' Trial Brief on International Law," which declared the Trident illegal on grounds it is a first-strike weapon. Jerry Gorsline published an interview with a young Buddhist monk who along with a small group from Japan built a temple on Ground Zero. On a day when our tree-planting crew helped with construction, we met Archbishop Hunthausen, who attended protests against Trident, called it the "New Auschwitz," and withheld his taxes. When they had completed the temple, built on property adjoining the Bangor Naval Base, Trident's home port, it was burnt to the ground by unknown arsonists. Jim Douglass used the term Satyagraha, in his essay on peace in this anthology; he translates the Hindu as "truth-force," which accurately depicted the modesty and respect with which private citizens confronted this inhumanly aggressive machine.
To the anti-Trident section, the anthology linked Central American poetry and essays, and the work of writers about the environment, feminism, and Northwest poetry, specifically. Sharon Doubiago's wilting depiction of male writers in the "Bearshit in the Trail School of Poetry" indicted many poets who had been models for our publications. Although her essay took its initial outrage from the second issue's call for submissions on the theme, "Balling The Great Mother," she wrote persuasively about the lack of representation by women in a movement that took language about earth from maternal images. While producing the first issue of Dalmo'ma, I had attended Kenneth Rexroth's workshop at Centrum's first summer writing program. He had a great deal to say about publishing, as well as about writing and influences beginning writers could best profit from. Rexroth said without sarcasm that editors who start poetry magazines do so to publish their own poetry. I had to admit this was true, though Bob and I were committed to the work of authors we'd invited. That was 1976. By 1982, our anthology's commitment was to issues, thoughtful arguments, compelling images, and serious alternatives. One reviewer chastised our representing too many controversies. In hindsight her criticism is justified, yet we found it ludicrous. How could we not combine themes? Each depends on the other. As a group of editors meeting in one another's living rooms, we could not criticize the government without looking at the governed. We examined aggression in its pertinent forms. Yet we wanted our anthology to express hope. For that we selected from among the elegant photographs of Steven R. Johnson, and reproduced a triptych of paintings in black-and-white by the late Northwest artist, Nelson Capouilliez. The struggles and compromises of a collective editorship of eleven people forced us to balance our interests with the central theme, a life at peace, or as bumper stickers were saying, "Live Without Trident." Our belief in the value of individuals and communities standing up at forums not only to protest higher property taxes governed our efforts to publish.
Our struggle to combine a variety of themes fostered disagreement about what a Northwest poet was. A regional writer is not necessarily provincial but can one ask such a question without also asking what is a New York Poet, or a San Francisco, Los Angeles, Latino, or Chicago poet. "What is a regional poet?" settles nothing about the Northwest or any location. except to identify an address or influence. The Northwest suggests movie settings, coffee companies, mountains and rivers, logging. Since software often originates here, a Northwest poet might write exclusively for cyber readerships, where a poet's sensory observations need have no definable influence. It seems that a writer who has not been somewhat formed by a specific place can't really be called "regional," and that his or her references to place are backdrop and props. Empty Bowl was profoundly committed to one place; were we deceived into thinking that Northwest native Gary Snyder was a Northwest poet? Was he a California poet because he lived in the Sierras, and wrote about his community's claim on that place? Was Robinson Jeffers a California poet? Lawrence Ferlinghetti a San Francisco poet? And Rexroth? Was Robert Frost a New England poet? The answer of course is always "Yes," in the same way that Shakespeare was an English playwright. Yet, he is "the Bard," and they are "poets," our models who gained national audiences. Terms like Northwest, local, or regional for a poet may be pejorative, belittling someone who refuses to publish with the multinationals. A Northwest poet, with or without corporate readerships, writes what interests people from the Northwest.
When we finished the Dalmo'ma Anthology we felt we were not a "literary" magazine. (We still thought we would produce an issue more than once a year, but soon gave that up, and referred to subsequent volumes as the Dalmo'ma series.) We meant to be more useful than strictly literary, prejudiced in favor of the broadest interpretations, yet I think the Dalmo'ma Anthologies remain as literary text in their representation of the pastoral tradition. Just as Stephen Duck, who protested the advent of the Industrial Revolution with proletariat poetry predating Marxism, and John Clare of the same era who with mad ferocity describes down to the nose hairs every badger in sight, Empty Bowl and centuries of local poets have found a sacred grove. Robert Frost and Virgil meditated on how the human condition thrives in the vegetative bucolic, and Gary Snyder depicted the ghost logger visiting the demolished grove. Our Dalmo'ma's sought wilderness treasured by those who could not live in imaginary landscapes.
When Empty Bowl became a nonprofit organization, I was officially hired as editor-publisher trainee. An out-of-work tree planter rehabilitating from an injured back, I was eligible for retraining funded by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries for six months. Although our organization had to agree to hire me at the end of that period, we knew the chances were slim that Empty Bowl could afford an employee. It seems now to have been a shady deal, but even the tree planters who disapproved of my L & I claim thought support of the press a community obligation.
Digging for Roots: Dalmo'ma 5, edited by Christina Pacosz and Susan Oliver in l984, contained "Works by Women of The North Olympic Peninsula" and was funded by anonymous donations. In 1986 we published two issues funded by a grant from the Washington State Arts Commission's dwindling arts fund.Edited by Finn Wilcox and Jerry Gorsline, Working The Woods Working The Sea, Dalmo'ma VI: An Anthology of Northwest Writings. I edited Dalmo'ma 7: In Our Hearts & Minds, The Northwest & Central America. Working the Woods, perhaps the only book to portray the lives and experiences of tree planters, examines the neglect of watershed management, the status of the Pacific Northwest as a resource colony for timber and fish, the losses of variety species in plant, fish, and animals. Its attitude toward environment is captured best in two essays at the end of the book, "Twana Fjord" by Jerry Gorsline and "Salmon of the Heart" by Tom Jay. In Our Hearts & Minds is a collection of writing by Central Americans and Northwesterners regarding tragedies in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras. Expanding our sense of community, it demonstrated accomplishments of the Sister Cities, and established a relationship with environmental issues beyond our bioregion. With these three books we focused on the major themes our first reviewer had faulted us for treating like buckshot.
The last issue in the series was published in 1992 and called Shadows of Our Ancestors,Dalmo'ma VIII: Readings in the History of Klallam-White Relations . Edited with commentaries by Jerry Gorsline, it is monumental in the scope of Empty Bowl's vision. The collection addresses eloquently and precisely the themes fundamental to our publications: regional, environmental, native, and historic values override the general, vague, inexact blunders of political and academic systems. The book's copyright page makes this final declaration of our identity: "Empty Bowl is a small, non-profit press dedicated to publishing books and periodicals that reflect the visions and concerns of Pacific Rim communities, biological and cultural features of distinct regions, and the interdependence of all life along the Pacific Rim. The Dalmo'ma Anthology is an ongoing publication program interpreting Pacific Rim culture, history, and ecology."
Our emphasis on the Pacific Rim included books by Bill Porter (Red Pine) and Mike O'Connor, sent from Taiwan. The Rainshadow (1983), our first book published in Taiwan and bound in the traditional Chinese fashion, included O'Connor's poems about China with those set near the eastern slope of the Olympics. Red Pine sent beautiful exotic copies of P'u Ming's Oxherding Pictures & Verses (1983), From Temple Walls: The Collected Poems of Big Shield and Pickup (1984), The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse (1986), and the first English translation of The Zen Teaching Of Bodhidharma (1987), the Buddhist patriarch, all translated into modern English and bearing our logo, the half circle of the bowl.
Apart from the Dalmo'ma series, we'd begun to publish individual collections of poetry. Funding was always up to the author for these books. Although all such publications can be tarred as vanity or subsidy books, we were not inviting authors to submit based on their bank accounts, or their benefactors', but because their work was significant to many of us in the editorial committee, because the work struck us as powerful interpretations of our human involvement with this region.
Non-profit presses are the staple of a strong regional literature, without which the literature from any area is left to the press attracting the most grants. Grant support depends on past performance, which means bigger more beautiful books by more celebrated authors. More and more, as funding from government and foundations channels toward the largest, most competitive small presses, and as "reader fees" increase disproportionately to the price of books, poets actively pursue funding, give up the long-awaited approval of some venerable editor, and sometimes pony up the cost themselves. A misfortune of such developments is the diminished role of editors in subsidy presses. Compared to those graduate students or hired guns who pre-read contest submissions, one's friends are less reliable; yet a negative response by impartial readers genuinely moved by poetry can be as rewarding as acceptance into the world of academic look-alikes. Unsure of our worth in the competitive market, we approached writing with astonishing authority. Who, after all, was Dante's editor? Whitman's? Rilke's? Yeats'? Certainly Pound reading Yeats' later poems had an influence, as he did on Eliot and many other poets of his day. Who edited Pound?
Finn Wilcox's Here Among the Sacrificed is a collection of haunting poems and captivating stories about his travels on freight trains, accompanied by startling and beautiful photos by Steven R. Johnson. American hobos, Finn said, were their own bioregion. While we were in the midst of publication, I returned to the East Coast to help my family. (At least three of our six editors, Northwest writers, came from New England.) I was living alone in a small cottage on Martha's Vineyard for a few weeks, where I cut and pasted with a chalky ruler on the kitchen table. Most book designers are more rigid. I rented a light table from a typesetter and tried to keep my lines straight. Steve Johnson and I were on the phone every day discussing placement of photos or quality of printing.
Finn Wilcox, Pat Fitzgerald, and Jerry Gorsline ran Empty Bowl for fourteen years, disbanding the nonprofit and dispersing unsold books in 1998. They were filling orders, though fewer and fewer, years after books were published. Despite minimal advertisement, few reviews, and increasing disillusionment, orders came steadily from book stores, distributors, collectors and readers of poetry and literature throughout the world. They published Working the Woods Working the Sea (1986), Shadows of Our Ancestors (1992) and Psyche Drives the Coast (1990) by Sharon Doubiago. They facilitated the distribution of Empty Bowl books produced by associates of the press, such as Whole Houses Shaking (1993) by Jim Bodeen, The Family Letters of Maxwell Perkins (1995) , edited by Jerry Gorsline, and Untold Stories (1990) by William Slaughter. They placed many of our books in classrooms as texts for college and high school courses.
Migrating from Bob Blair's office to Nelson Capouilliez' vacant garage, to various pickup trucks, once to a closet behind a bakery, twice to spacious unheated offices overlooking the downtown traffic of tourists and poets, and often to kitchens and tables of our fluctuating membership for board meetings or mailings, to plan auctions and fundraisers or rock concerts, to design books and edit, Empty Bowl was a moveable feast; and the party wound up in Pat and Finn's living room. They stored books for years in their house and their kids grew up with poets and readers coming and going to pick up or autograph copies. They ran meetings and kept accounts of an organization whose name meant replenishment, the gift that moves. They saw the spontaneity of poetry needed to come to rest somewhere, and they took on the steady methodical job, permitting writers and artists a home. The press kept a place for writers to publish works significant to Northwest literature. The more nebulous and loose, the more apparent became Empty Bowl's purpose: to record an era in regional literary history and represent the tradition of those who stand apart. From our home, and with local materials, we did what literature commands: we made a solid thing of words.
____________________________________________________In August, 2006, Empty Bowl was reborn under the direction of Mike O'Connor with the publication of The Blossoms are Ghosts at the Wedding: Selected Poems and Essays, by Tom Jay.