In case you haven’t noticed it (and you probably have), there is a revolution going on in the world of publishing. When my first two poetry chapbooks came out in 1975, they were published by Tangent Publications of St. Paul, Minnesota, a partnership between artist David Genszler and myself. David had done some wonderful drawings for one of the books, We Play Each Other Like Jazz Musicians, we found a printer in St. Paul, and printed up about a hundred copies of each book. Ten years later wh...

Sex, sexuality and sexual explicitness have long been controversial in the United States, where the attitude has traditionally been repressive and deeply laden with sexual guilt. Prior to the mid-1960s, sexually explicit books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were banned, copies confiscated, and booksellers intimidated for selling them even after the ban was lifted in 1961. It wasn’t until 1964 that the US Supreme Court declared Miller’s book not to be obscene and its sale protected...

What struck me most reading George Polley’s books, Grandfather and the Raven and The Old Man and the Monkey are their ability to relocate the reader geographically without dislocating him culturally or intellectually. The place is maybe Japan but the moral of the stories are to be applied everywhere, and on everyone.

My children read both books and enjoyed them immensely. They appreciated the sense of adventure, readability and the uniqueness of the style. I appreciated their subtle moral...