{"id":512,"date":"2024-06-14T11:23:43","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T16:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=512"},"modified":"2024-12-08T20:03:27","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T02:03:27","slug":"history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/history","title":{"rendered":"History"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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And our history is about place.<\/em><\/span>
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HISTORY<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>

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Rob Cook, a native of Warren County, New Jersey, and Stephanie Dickinson, an Iowan raised on a farm, brought their rural roots with them to Greenwich Village where they met in a writer\u2019s workshop. Cook had published the successful Asylums and Labyrinths, <\/em>an anthology of small press psychologial horror\/sci-fi poets, and had established contacts in the world of design layout and printing. In 1998 Skidrow<\/em> Penthouse<\/em> launched as an annual print journal with Rob Cook and Stephanie Dickinson as co-publishers\/co-editors. The premier issue numbered less than 100 pages and featured on its cover a 1940s photograph of a swing band, the editor\u2019s grandfather on the saxophone, framed in red and black, and now a collector\u2019s item.<\/span><\/p>

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\"Skidrow<\/p>

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From the start the journal combined artwork and photography with poetry and prose. We wanted the textual presentation to be a visual experience as well. The photography of Lawrence Applebaum and the artwork of Spiel (Tom Taylor), Guy R. Beining, and Ric Best helped make that possible. The name was chosen in part from our location in the East Village bordering the mile long Bowery, the first thoroughfare on Manhattan Island. The neighborhood\u2019s aura dimmed in the 1930s and 1940s when the unemployed and unhoused congregated in its flophouses. The Bowery became known as Skid Row. Gentrification has since populated the area with high rises, and we embraced both visions in our name choice. From the lowbrow to highbrow, we wanted a cacophony of voices and styles. While the first issue was modest in number, Skidrow Penthouse<\/em> grew to an annual 360-page anthology sized volumes. The journal welcomed everything from long form prose to haiku. We published Donna Baer Stein, Catherine Sasanov, William Packard, Samuel R. Delany, Jill Hoffman, Johannes G\u00f6ransson, Colette Inez, and David Chorlton, among many others.<\/span><\/p>

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I believe that only the beautiful
<\/em>Shall survive on the earth.
<\/em>I believe that the perfect shape of everything
<\/em>Has been prepared;
<\/em>And, that we do not fit our own
<\/em>Is of little consequence.
<\/em>–Kenneth Patchen \u201cWhat is the Beautiful\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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From their inception Skidrow Penthouse<\/em> and Rain Mountain<\/em> Press <\/em>have kept their offices in the editors\u2019 walk-up apartment in Manhattan\u2019s East Village. The neighborhood layered in a dense past and present has a magic. The Ukrainian Shoe Repair and the Korean Hardware have disappeared, the old immigrants making way for the new diaspora. There\u2019s a moodiness here that has helped Skidrow Penthouse<\/em> and Rain Mountain<\/em> Press <\/em>thrive\u2014<\/em>the ambience of NYU students in their bloom and enthusiasm, and the shadow people, their clothing and bags the color of the sidewalk.<\/span><\/p>

We look out the office apartment\u2019s rear window from four flights up and absorb the beauty of Marble Hill Cemetery. Under the markers lie subterranean yellow fever graves. Second oldest non-sectarian cemetery in Manhattan, one of its buried notables is James Lenox, co-founder of the New York Public Library. In 2010, crumbling military explosives were found by a caretaker next to a 19th<\/sup> century grave. Another thematic meeting of the sacred and profane.<\/span><\/p>

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\"Skidrow<\/p>

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Skidrow Penthouse<\/em> began publishing full length poetry collections beginning with Issue #2, which featured Walter Griffin\u2019s Nights of Noise and Light<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>

In Issue #8 our full-length poetry collection featured poet Allen Brafman and can be viewed at www.skidrowpenthouse.com.<\/span><\/p>

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That was when he realized
<\/em><\/span>there weren\u2019t any birds.
<\/em><\/span>It was the tree itself that had been singing.
<\/em><\/span>Allen Brafman, \u201cIn the Beginning, Smoke\u201d from Stone Feathers<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>

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And in Issue #9 we featured Anthony Seidman\u2019s collection Black Neon.<\/em><\/span><\/p>

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I coast through green light after green light: Sunday, and the Valley is a plain of empty parking lots, with the Tongva gone, bones beneath the macadam. Their women of ochre-smeared faces, now dance and feast in the underworld. Their men hunt ghost deer.
<\/em><\/span>Anthony Seidman, \u201cStrata\u201d from Black Neon<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>

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Beginning with Issue 10 we moved away from incorporating full-length collections within Skidrow Penthouse<\/em>. The collections deserved their own length and breadth, the authors their own book, and Rain Mountain Press<\/em> was born to take up the cause. In poetry we have published an eclectic array of work from the formalism of Philip Dacey’s New York Postcard Sonnets <\/em>(2007) and Church of the Adagio<\/em> (2014), the sonnets of Andrew Kaufman\u2019s The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets <\/em>(2010) and Elinor Nauen’s So Late into the Night<\/em> (2011), called a “rollicking road trip on the model of Byron’s Don Juan<\/em> with over 600 stanzas of ottava rima,” to Harlem streets celebrated in Gil Fagiani\u2019s A Blanquito in El Barrio<\/em>, (2009) the urban Midwestern surrealism of John Goode’s Graduating from Eternity<\/em> (2013) a gorgeously executed duende of image and manifesto. We released Alexandra Van de Kamp’s alluring Kiss\/Hierarchy<\/em> (2016) called an “elegant canvassing of romance, lost love, and the methodical way time weaves between these moments.” In fiction, we’ve proudly brought out Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s exquisite Insect Dreams<\/em> (2007) and The Absent<\/em> (2016), a tour de force that Mary Gordon called “an astonishing combination of dreaminess and precision.” First to celebrate in print the satire of Chris Belden’s Shriver<\/em> (2013), the book is now a major motion picture entitled A Little White Lie<\/em>. Vincent Czyz\u2019s hauntingly lyrical prize-winning Adrift in a Vanishing City<\/em> (2015) is a timeless marvel of mood and texture.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/em><\/span>We’ve often joked about looking for the ones rather than the millions, or even the thousands, but those, the receptive readers who are passionate about literature and enjoy the experimental, the lyrical, the exotic in the familiar, and the sensuality of language itself. We’re also looking for those readers who for years may not have exercised their book-reading muscle except for online articles or business-related content. David Lawrence’s The King of White-Collar<\/em> Boxing<\/em> (2012) has been our Trojan horse into that audience. This darkly comic memoir chronicles the life of a Wall Street tycoon who lived for the exhilaration of his boxing bouts, to the point of losing his business, getting convicted of tax evasion, and landing in prison where he feels at home among the street fighters. Jen Knox’s short story collection After the Gazebo<\/em> (2015) appeals to a generational range as well as a class range. A Knox tale begins in a recognizable place, often a blue-collar setting, but she confounds the reader’s expectations and ends them in eerily beautiful, untrod territory.<\/span><\/p>

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\"Jefferson<\/p>

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Designed in the Victorian Gothic style as a courthouse and women\u2019s prison, the Jefferson Market Library was scheduled to be demolished in 1959 and saved only by a consortium that included e.e. cummings. It opened in 1967 as a library that Marianne Moore frequented. In March 2014 the Jefferson Market Library hosted the launch of Kafka at Rudolf Steiner\u2019s<\/em> by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson. Freighted with Greenwich Village\u2019s past, the old court rooms where women were tried now house the library\u2019s children\u2019s section. Rain Mountain Press\u2019 Gala Book Launch, held on September 21, 2017, in the library\u2019s main meeting room, celebrated the launch of Palermo Stevenson\u2019s The Absent<\/em>. The reading included Nava Renek reading from Where the Survivors Are Buried<\/em> (2017), and Deborah Clearman from Concepcion and the Baby Brokers <\/em>(2017). And there was no more welcoming space to hold poet Philip Dacey\u2019s memorial, which celebrated his life and poetic legacy. Readers included Gil Fagiani, Jill Hoffman, Austin Dacey, and Collette Inez.<\/span><\/p>

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I believe that we are going into the darkness now;
<\/em>Hundreds of years will pass before the light
<\/em>Shines over the world of all…
<\/em>And I am blinded by its splendor.
<\/em>–Kenneth Patchen \u201cWhat is the Beautiful\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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\u201cWe will lose everything we love,\u201d says Zen teacher Joan Sutherland, \u201cand everything that loves us will lose us.\u201d On the cusp of the Pandemic, we published Allen Brafman\u2019s luminous poetical meditation Wherever I Look I Am Never There <\/em>(2019) that delves into the paradox of an earth that both sustains life and entombs it. And Michelle Somerville\u2019s The Glamourous Life<\/em> (2020) has been described as a \u201cgrand cosmic ride that walks a fine line between Iggy Pop and Jesus and between the profane and the sacred.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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\"Photo
Photo by Lawrence Applebaum<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>

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Then arrived 2020, the year that wasn\u2019t, and we along with the planet journeyed into lockdown. Zoom became our means of face-to-face communication and one in which we could invite the world. During the Pandemic Rain Mountain Press published two posthumous collections: Karl Gluck\u2019s Blue Dwarf<\/em> (2020) which illuminates the poet\u2019s battle to escape mundane reality and enter a higher, more rapturous sphere of existence; and Lawrence Mallory\u2019s Ned Considers Beckett in Key West (2020) <\/em>wherein the narrator, a devotee of Kant, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, views humanity through a bemused philosophical prism, though his vision, like Beckett\u2019s, is alive to what is rib-tickling in our foibles, misadventures, and tragedies. Bringing out the posthumous work of remarkable writers who were not well known during their lifetimes has been a labor of love since 2010 when RMP published Ronald Wardall\u2019s extraordinary Lightning\u2019s Dance Floor.<\/em><\/span><\/p>

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When lockdown ended there was a publishing uptick\u2014under sheltering-in-place conditions writers wrote and those who had never written found they could write. Veteran writer Jiri Klobouk brought to completion How High the Moon<\/em> (2021), in which a 19-year-old jazz lover confronts post-war Czechoslovakia\u2019s totalitarian oppression, and in Nearing the End<\/em> (2021) he creates his own dialect\u2014a Czech, Japanese, and English phraseology that he uses to tell a wildly imaginative tale.<\/span><\/p>

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In 2022 Rain Mountain released Vincent Czyz\u2019s The Secret Adventures of Order<\/em> (2022). Essays that beg the question, according to Pulitzer Prize finalist James Goodman, \u201cis there a hidden order that surfaces in strange ways\u2014the route we take through a city, Jungian synchronicity, seashell patterns? If Lucifer isn\u2019t Satan, then who was he?\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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Scott Pariseau\u2019s poetry collection Along the Way<\/em> appeared in 2022. \u201cFederico Garcia Lorca said a poet should be a professor of the five senses,\u201d David Jauss writes, \u201cand Scott Pariseau’s poems are marvelously sensory. Indeed, many of the poems read like verbal paintings.\u201d Both formal and free verse, the collection includes a painstakingly researched essay \u201cWhat\u2019s in a Name.\u201d Paul B. Roth\u2019s prose poem collection Moments in Place (<\/em>2022) immerses us in the poet\u2019s \u201cacute perception, and threads the reader right through the eye of his natural surroundings.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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John Goode\u2019s magnus opus The Sun Held the Dice<\/em> (2023) translates his experience of Pandemica <\/em>into luminous, dramatically breathtaking verse. The 21st<\/sup> century Chicago that erupts onto the page takes its place beside Carl Sandburg\u2019s 1914 \u201cChicago.\u201d As a reviewer puts it, \u201cthrough plane-shattering imagery and Cubist juxtapositions, he\u2019s out to rearrange your universe.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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We arrive on the shores of 2024, when independent publishing has not only flourished, but growing words and paragraphs and chapters are everywhere.<\/span><\/p>

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We are the books and the authors we\u2019ve published and the journey through time.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And our history is about place. \u00a0 HISTORY \u00a0 Rob Cook, a native of Warren County, New Jersey, and Stephanie Dickinson, an Iowan raised on a farm, brought their rural roots with them to Greenwich Village where they met in a writer\u2019s workshop. Cook had published the successful Asylums and Labyrinths, an anthology of small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"elementor_header_footer","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-512","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1126,"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/512\/revisions\/1126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rainmountainpress.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}