Janet Holmes, director of Ahsahta Press, based at Boise State University in Idaho, took the time this week to share her thoughts on  poetry publishing as part of my ongoing series of publisher profiles. Ahsahta publishes seven full-length collections of poetry a year, including recent works by Kate Greenstreet, Lisa Fishman, Rusty Morrison, and Julie Carr (as well as myself). Like some other small presses, Ahsahta offers a yearly subscription option, which is one of my favorite ways to buy poetry and encounter the work of many poets who are new to me, as well as poets whose newest books I always look forward to reading. We talk often in these profiles about the amount of poetry that is being published each year and the difficulty in finding something to read in such an overwhelming landscape of new work, but the subscription process can help, by bringing poetry, often in similar styles or approaches, directly to you. Janet says more about this and what it’s like to craft a press’s identity and consistent aesthetic below.

Tell us a little about the history of your press, where the idea came from, and what makes your press unique.

Ahsahta Press was formed to rescue work by 19^th- and 20^th-century Western American poets and published its first book in 1975. The three Boise State professors who started it took its name from a Mandan word recorded during the Lewis and Clark expedition in Idaho, meaning a Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep. Shortly thereafter, they began publishing the work of contemporary poets living west of the Mississippi River, and continued doing so into the mid-1990s. Ahsahta was the first publisher of Linda Bierds, David Baker, Gretel Ehrlich, Wyn Cooper, and many other now-familiar poets. But the press was dormant in 1999, when I was hired at Boise State as the first poet in the new MFA program, and my idea was to re-establish it with a broader national scope and a particular aesthetic. I wanted to bring out work that was riskier than most other presses were publishing—edgier, less in the mainstream, but more than worthy of notice.

What are your thoughts on the growing accusation (as in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education) that the rise of MFA programs and the relative affordability of starting a small press or a journal are creating a glut of poetry—that there are more people writing poetry and seeking a publisher than actually reading poems?

Well, I think it’s true! At the same time, I think many of those poets are not aiming for the sorts of “success markers” that writers in previous generations aimed for: publishing in The New Yorker or becoming the Yale Younger Poet. I think the MFA programs (and spoken word movements, for that matter) are returning poetry to a more popular and private practice, not unlike its role in earlier centuries, when it was not uncommon to find everyday people writing poems in their letters to each other. Now they’re writing them on Facebook or their blogs or publishing them themselves with Lulu or other print-on-demand services like Lightning Source. Somehow I don’t think that’s dangerous for the genre. There probably always were more talented poets than publishers could accommodate.

What happens, then, is that “traditional” publishers like Ahsahta become gatekeepers of a sort. Readers can’t rely on the corner bookstore for recommendations; big-box book retailers don’t even stock contemporary poetry.  But a press that has a consistent vision readers identify with filters the work out there and presents books of a predictable quality. More and more, when you ask people what they read, they name presses rather than particular books—it’s why the subscription model works so well.

What is the role or place of the small press in the larger publishing world? Is it hurt or helped by the current publishing and bookselling climate?

Small presses are the last havens of writing as an art. That doesn’t mean that the work we publish isn’t entertaining as well, but that a good small press isn’t publishing books while considering only the bottom line and the lowest common denominator. Unfortunately, there are a number of small presses whose lists are inconsistent because they seem to be uncertain about what kinds of work they want to champion.

What are your feelings on e-books/chapbooks versus the printed {chap}book as an object?

Personally, I like books as objects. Chapbooks are where the book arts flourish! But they’re usually small runs—e-books or e-chaps can potentially present the work to a much, much wider audience.

It’s a given that small presses don’t necessarily have the marketing budget or the name recognition of larger presses, so what is your approach to getting the word out there?

Traditional advertisements in one or two venues. Word of mouth, which in this day and age means Facebook, Twitter, blogs, online reviews. We have an e-mail newsletter that goes out to more than 4,000 recipients. We also are working to place our texts in classrooms and have had moderate success with that.

What do you look for in a poem or a {chap}book as a whole?

I hesitate to answer that, because I really like finding books that are sui generis, absolutely brilliant unclassifiable things! Our mission statement says we’re looking for “surprising, relevant, and accessible experimental poetry,” but “experimental” can encompass all sorts of  approaches, from a “project” book like Julie Carr’s 100 Notes on Violence to  Brian Teare’s lush elegies in Pleasure, which we’re bringing out this year. One of my favorite books was the über-obsessive sonnet-acrostic sequence 67 Mixed Messages by Ed Allen.

What do you think is the greatest challenge facing the small press community today and what is its best advantage?

I’d be surprised if anyone said something other than distribution was the greatest challenge. But all that is changing as indie bookstores become more and more pressed to sell best-sellers just to stay afloat. What does it mean to be in a bookstore if bookstore shoppers aren’t buying poetry?

Our best advantage is that we can take more risks on publishing different kinds of voices, because our publishing models don’t rely upon making back advances. We can keep our costs low and introduce a wider range of writers to the public.

What have I failed to ask that you’d most like to say about your press, the world of poetry and/or publishing?

Well, one of the things that I used to establish Ahsahta as a national (rather than a Western) press was the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, which is coming into its tenth year. Paul Hoover will be judging for us, following Terrance Hayes, Rae Armantrout, C.D. Wright, Peter Gizzi, and a host of other notable poets. For the past few years, we’ve taken new writers into the press only through the contest winners and runners-up, but beginning in May 2013 we’ll re-establish our open reading period. I’m really looking forward to that! Because the Press has been committed to our authors, frequently doing two or three books by each, we’d had quite a backlog, but things are getting under control, and will be able to take books from an open reading period fairly soon now.

This is also a good time & place to remind everyone that subscriptions for the new season of our books are on sale during the month of August at our website. We’ll be publishing new work by Karla Kelsey, Brian Teare, Kirsten Kaschock, our Sawtooth Prize winner James Meetze, Susan Briante, Brian Henry, and Lisa Fishman. The books are gorgeous, the writing is world-class, and [putting on my marketing hat] the price is right.