Back issues of Poultry Broadside now available online

From Sept. 2005 to April 2006, my commercial alter-ego, Gunch Press, published eight issues of a poetry broadside titled Poultry Broadside. For those who don't know what a poetry broadside is, it is a brochure containing a few poems, usually from one poet as a sampling of his or her work. In this case, each issue contained about eight poems from different poets and every issue had one poem having something to do with chickens. It was a mini-zine with a feathery bent.

This all came back to me after an exchange I had at a faculty reading at this year's Antioch Writers' Workshop with Kate Gale, a fine poet, teacher of poetry, and the editor, of all things, of Red Hen Press. Ms. Gale made the bold statement that one of the things she tells her college poetry students is that in her class they are not allowed to write poems about chickens. I filed my protest in the Q&A that followed. Later we met in the lobby and, in the course of explaining our selves better, we found that we had something in common - a backyard flock. But I digress...

My idea for Poultry Broadside was that I would solicit poetry from the usual suspects, writers I had published in the past, then distribute the issues for free in the local coffee houses, hoping that it would catch on and local writers would start submitting poetry. I wanted it to be a local thing. But as often happens with poets, things got out of hand. Once the word got out on the Internet that there was a new poetry zine starting up, I started getting submissions from all over the world. I am sometimes given to hyperbole, but this time I am not kidding.

Needless to say, I did not lack for material, except in one department - chicken poems. I had to beg, borrow and steal. I searched the Internet, and if I found something good, I would plead for permission to use it. Sometimes, I was actually turned down. One time I even had my request hand delivered to a creative writing teacher at a college in North Carolina by a local who was headed that way (the poet had not responded to my emails).

All this added up to a lot of hard work and expense. And after each issue was distributed by hand delivery to Dino's, The Mermaid, and The Emporium, I would wait for some response. Nothing. Not a word. Only four local poets deigned to grace me with their work. After eight issues, I asked my self, "Why am I doing this?" And so, like every other poetry zine I have ever heard of, I folded my tent and slogged off to obscurity, until the Blog, that is.

Years later, when I would mention Poultry Broadside, people would say, "Oh, you're the one that did that! I really liked it. Why did you ever stop?" At least a dozen people have told me that I should start it up again. They have no idea how much hard work is involved in even a small publication like that. So much hard work, so little appreciation... Unlike the Blog, I was getting no feedback. And that may simply boil down to the difference between print publications and the Internet.

For the longest time, I had no way of uploading Poultry Broadside to a retrievable site on the Internet, so they could be linked to one of my blogs. Just yesterday, I finally set up a rudimentary Webpage for Gunch Press and was able to upload the original eight issues to it. It isn't much. I used to have a regular Webpage years ago, before Javascript. A web designer I am not. I only know how to work with HTML and eschew the use of Webpage software. As I figure it out, it will get better. The important thing is the links to the eight Poultry Broadside issues are all there on the Gunch Press Website.

Some of my favorite Poultry Broadside poems:

PB No. 1 - Janet Bernichon - "1968" - Ben Hiatt - "Rooting for the Rooster"
PB No. 2 - Didi Menendez - "Kennedy's Son Is Dead"
PB No. 3 - Richard Dinges - "The Next Friend" - David Chorlton - "Survivors"
PB No. 4 - Jane Mead - "Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty"
PB No. 5 - John Korn - "you were asleep" - Alan Catlin - "Sylvia Plath in the Fog"
PB No. 6 - Alan Catlin - "A Summer Evening Still Life with Hand Grenade, Utica, N.Y. 1970"
PB No. 7 - Raindog - "The Chicken Dance" - Lee Clark Zumpe - "through the window at 2 a.m."
PB No. 8 - Ed Galing - "Elvis"