Singing Bone Press

        An attempt, then, to record with a minimum of comment the idea of the collaboration by extending the nature of the poems as memento. To make a small box of poems and other objects as a kind of personal “medicine bundle” and a gift for friends on the reservation and off. The result was a printing of 101 copies, signed by the author.

Then, Seneca Journal: Mid-Winter, a book accompanied by antiquity or primitive uncouthness and some aspirations.  Seven more books followed over the years.

There’s little doubt that Singing Bone derives energy and renewal from the forms it conceives and eventually produces, but there’s an ocean of events between conception and completion. Ordinarily what often appears to be a day’s work is really nothing more than that, plain work that hasn’t been glamorized by any stretch of the imagination; the rewards at the end of the chain still appear to be great.

There’s a Sung bowl around the shop that leads the hands by its shape into an exquisite but simple act of coordination. There’s a concern here as well for the effect touching has on the mind. How the book is held, as much as what is seen, is part of the pattern of formulation.

Materials are altered or cut or creased or stacked or rolled or wrapped or tied or bundled as a way of conveying possible formats for unpublished manuscripts. Serious concern for leftovers as another way of starting has sometimes overshadowed an original format.

Perhaps the only view held necessary is the use of multiple pages or separate areas to express a total idea. While packing words inform a semi-protective matrix can be challenging in an aesthetic sense, overlooked we feel are the effects old social systems have had using indigenous simple solutions in the process of general construction.

The spirit and necessity of making do with limited materials brings about a distinct personal solution, and so quite significant is the equality of hand-making to support the quality of the written work.

While there is no true plane of self-sufficiency here, there is a tendency to feel that the rejection of almost everything available is an advantage. And so what occurs often is total rejection and a variety of exercises that may appear stagnant or futile but which must nevertheless occur.

Once in a while you have to sit around the little red press as if it were a pot-bellied stove and wait. It’s a time when simple nomenclature of raw materials can produce levels of refinement, a feeling of selective brevity and a form of refreshment unlike the corporate bookstore fare which continues to appear more like the packaged solutions for fast feeding we all experience in the supermarkets.

There is no illusion about the nature of material resources being sacrosanct, nor is there the tendency to lean on nature as if it were an armature. Yet it is always a question of context and degrees of emphasis. There is little use bemoaning the fact that paper is mashed and pulverized beyond recognition if you can use it.

And then again the continuous flow of industrial stuff, useful and otherwise, has increased our dependency on outside forces that would otherwise demand personal solutions to problems. But the need to find relationships forces us to activate muscles almost never flexed.

The press has a guaranteed obstacle course and problem solving is more the rule than the exception. Work sessions provide a lot of time to discuss folkways, poets, painters, and mostly the nitty-gritty that carries people through a day. Everyone around here writes and a fortuitous understanding has strengthened the group’s ability to appreciate the interests we each have in primitive holistic and post-dada work. It has allowed us to find a basic level of continuity.

The style and humor from all this helps everyone relax, a vital component, and to draw upon some inner fresh energy. We were not looking for a familiar pattern but rather a spirit of openness, of rawness and, as is expressed through Zen, a spirit of wabi or poverty.

After the first two years Singing Bones was feeding itself with type and paper courtesy of book payments that appeared now and then. There weren’t any aspirations to work towards a profit-making status. It just never became a serious subject for discussion.

A major nemesis in those days was sorting and cleaning type. It’salways a problem, but at the start we were inundated with mounds of stuff that seemed to have arrived in old shopping bags mixed and mucky. The special talents of Tom Lang have eliminated problems of that nature, problems Virginia Wolff often complained about.

Unlike a commercial publisher whose operations leave the author out from the construction of his work, a small press like Singing Bone can be sensitive to an author’s feelings and is directly influenced by the personality of the work and the personality of its creator. A close collaboration is a luxury we can afford.

Our hope, as the story of the singing bone goes, is to make songs from bones, to make books from trash. Beyond this, to use our own acquisitive today’s waste to shape our own way and to offer our accent on pleasure.

              Since the publication of the original article Singing Bone Press published several more books, bringing the total to seven before the three went on to other endeavors. The press is reviving itself with the same artists, having been at rest the lifetime of two generations of seventeen year locusts.

THE SINGING BONE PRESS