Chase Twichell
BY Emma Dodge Hanson

Ausable Press was founded in 1999 and has since been acquired by Copper Canyon Press. What was learned from ten years of publishing books?

I always wanted to publish poetry, and have been fascinated by the making of books since I was a kid. I used to poke holes in the pages with a pencil and sew them together with string. I worked in letterpress (hand set type, printing one sheet at a time), and also taught for many years, before technology made it possible to start a press with a single computer. When I started Ausable Press (named after the river I grew up on, and pronounced aw-SAY-bul), I thought I’d publish a couple of books a year and committed to doing it for ten years. To my surprise, the books got some attention, and before I knew it Ausable had become a not-for-profit corporation with four employees. What did I learn? It’s more fun to work as an editor and designer than as a corporate executive and fund-raiser. Also that working with poets is among the most exciting and fulfilling things a person can do. I ended up working fifty-hour weeks, but I’ll never regret it.

Which writers do you encourage your students to read?

When I’m teaching undergraduates, I try to introduce a wide range of poets, usually including Mom and Dad (Dickinson and Whitman), Jeffers, Bishop, Merwin, McGrath, Larkin, Plath, W.C. Williams, and so forth, often in pairings where the contrast is extreme, for example Stevens and Frost. Also a few poets in translation to give then a taste of the wider world: maybe Milosz, Neruda, Ahkmatova. Also, of course, contemporary poets. With graduate students or adults who have been writing for a long time, I like to prescribe specific poets to specific students, depending on what’s happening in their work. There’s so much poetry being published these days — thousands of books a year in the US! — that it’s useful to give people a few inroads, places where they might begin to find kindred sprits as well as poets who will challenge their current assumptions about what they’re trying to do.

From a 2003 interview in which the Bush administration’s literary activities were discussed: “Persons with an agenda are rarely open to the questions that poetry asks, for those are the questions most likely to cast doubt on systems of belief.” If this is true, what role should poetry play in politics? What do you think of the Obama administration’s attitude toward the arts?

There are two basic questions here. One concerns the financial relation between art and the State, and the other what I might call the moral and ethical relation between them. We’re broke. Although I’ve received two NEA grants, and am deeply grateful for them, how can I argue that state-funded art is more important than, say, making sure kids get decent schooling and enough to eat? In a better system, we’d be able to fund both. But we’re a war machine. Our economy depends upon it, and our economy is the pile of sand on which our lives are built. How can we fix this? Zen says we do it moment by moment. Poetry, also, does its work moment by moment, line by line. If I wanted a soapbox, I’d get a soapbox. Poetry, at least in our culture, is not the kind of mass media that meaningful political change requires. A great poem (again, in our culture, which the internet is quickly simultaneously disassembling and disseminating) will not make millions rise up and overthrow a dictatorship, no matter how powerfully it speaks truth to power. But it can, and does, insist that we face the truth. And what is the truth? The world as it is, and not the world we wish it were. As for Obama, he’s stuck with the terrible fiscal and moral damage of the Bush years, and is in a nearly-impossible position. I doubt he has the pleasure of thinking much about the arts.

Can success actually be a hindrance to writing, helpful, or a bit of both in terms of the creative process?

In spite of my conviction that success makes nothing about writing poems easier, acknowledgment certainly boosts one’s energy and determination. Because poets are always trying to write beyond whatever it was they did in the past, energy and determination are crucial. Even more crucial than talent, whatever that is. While it’s true that some poets seem paralyzed by early success, I doubt very much that the success is the real source of the paralysis. Zen teaches that one must have great doubt, great faith, and great determination. In poetry, that means being willing to tolerate the painful uncertainty that what you’re doing is any good, knowing on some other level that it is, and bullheadedly getting on with it while flipping between the two. I recently heard the painter Ross Bleckner quote something smart that Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for novices. The rest of us just get to work.”