Poet, Publisher, Editor
Born years and years ago in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, Brett Rutherford
started writing his own science fiction comic books at the age of six,
his own horror stage plays at the age of ten, poems at thirteen, and
fiction at fifteen. The landscape of the mountainous area, with its
abandoned coal mines, smoking coke ovens, and sinister hillbillies,
colors his writings about his childhood years, which he survived thanks
to science fiction novels, Classic comics, Shakespeare, Shelley, Poe,
H.P. Lovecraft, a small-town library, and a handful of good teachers. The ruins of his maternal grandmother's house, outside Scottdale, Pennsylvania, are shown below.
Rutherford attended school at
Edinboro State University (then Edinboro State College), interrupted by
a sojourn in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, where he
wound up reading his poetry in coffee houses and seeing his first magazine publication as a psychdelic centerfold in The Haight-Ashbury Free Press. During his sojourn in San Francisco he worked on that short-lived publication and became its editor.
He returned to school
in Pennsylvania once again and spent two years engaged in working
toward his degree in English, composing piano music, and running his
own underground college newspaper, The Edinboro Prometheus.
The Prometheus was one of only a handful of independent student newspapers during those years of tumultuous politics and antiwar fervor. There, he also produced a hand-made book of his poems based on the San Francisco experience, Songs of
the I and Thou. He also did college radio work, and was a
prize-winning student journalist for the school's above-ground
newspaper, The Spectator.
He then left school and headed for
New York City, where he was soon reading his poems in coffee houses and
working for a living. Within a few months, he found work as a
temporary typist at American Institute of Chemical Engineers on East
47th Street. In short order, he was offered the job of public relations
director for that organization, which involved him in PR work, writing publications catalogs,
editing executive speeches, and serving on committees for that
non-profit. By 1971, he had acquired enough print buying experience to
feel a desire to own a printing business. With a friend from
Pennsylvania, he founded The Poet's Press that year. The aim of the
press was to be a viable commercial printer, and to use the assets of
the printing enterprise to publish poetry books for deserving authors.
The Poet's Press also served Manhattan's gay community in the
post-Stonewall years, doing printing for a number of gay activist
groups and social organizations. Although the commercial venture went
bust in the recession of 1973, The Poet's Press was well-launched as a
small press and continued, publishing about a book a month at its
busiest.
Along with poet Barbara A. Holland, Rutherford also established Poets
Fortnightly, a newsletter and poetry calendar, New York's first
organized poetry calendar listing. He began publishing some of
Greenwich Village's most intriguing "neglected" poets, including Emilie
Glen, Barbara A. Holland, Ree Dragonette, Donald Lev, Richard Davidson,
and Shirley Powell. He read at practically all the poetry venues in New
York City, directed a staged reading of Richard Davidson's Song of
Walt Whitman at Westbeth, and read at the inaugural meeting of The
[American] Shelley Society.
Running a series of poetry readings in his Sixth Avenue loft called
"The Eighth Day," Rutherford helped found an informal circle of
neo-romantic poets who were unlike the prevailing avant garde who
centered around St. Mark's Church or the Upper East Side. These poets
were fascinated with surrealist art, the supernatural, mythology, and
often as not wrote longer, narrative poems. Two of these poets, Emilie
Glen and Barbara Holland, had between them thousands of magazine
publications of their work. In retrospect the Greenwich Village poetry
scene of the 1970s may be seen as the last flowering of Literary
Bohemia. In the following decades, it became economically impossible
for writers to live and congregate in the Village or any other central
"Bohemia." This was the end of an era, and The Poet's Press was a
visible part of it. The readings these poets attended and hosted, held all
over the city, were lively and often thrilling, and it was not unusual
for two or even three poets to write and introduce new works in
response to what another had written the previous week — or even the
previous day. During this period, Brett Rutherford published his own
books: City Limits and The Pumpkined Heart, and
edited the anthology May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poems.
To pay the bills and support his Muse, Rutherford found employment
as an editor for National Association of Printers and Lithographers
(NAPL), and within a few years he became communications director of
that organization. Shortly after it moved to Teaneck, New Jersey,
Rutherford made his own leap across the Hudson to the then-sequestered
Weehawken, a small town perched on the Palisades directly opposite
mid-town Manhattan. From there, he continued his literary and
publishing ventures. Many new books came from the press; more new poets
were found and fostered, and Rutherford accumulated a growing body of
his own poems that he edited into thematic books, including Anniversarium:
The Autumn Poems and Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems.
He also co-authored a successful horror novel, Piper, with
John Robertson, which was sold to Playboy Press as a hardcover, and
then not published when that press shut down its hardcover operation.
The book, in a thorough revision, finally appeared from Zebra Books and
sold 35,000 copies.
When his place of employment was taken over by unpleasant
management, Rutherford went freelance, and spent the 1980s editing and
writing hundreds of articles, monographs, manuals and books about
printing and graphic arts topics. He had a regular column in the weekly
newspaper Printing News and edited four newsletters for
Printing industries of America, and wrote technical, sales and
marketing manuals and training materials for a number of non-profits.
He also became a desktop publishing, computer and database consultant
to publishers, helping several convert to computers and to train their
personnel. His largest projects were three landmark market surveys and
equipment censuses for the American gravure printing industry, the
automation of a national database publishing concern, and editing and
designing a college textbook on printing.
While he was doing this workaday work, accumulating more than 600
publication credits, he was applying the new techniques of desktop
publishing and new media to The Poet's Press, producing books combining
new technology with hand bookbinding, and publishing books on diskette
and CD. In New York City, he co-founded, with Matthew Paris and Jane
Madson-McCabe, The New York Writer's Cafe, an Internet cooperative that
put hundreds of e-texts onto the Internet at a time when this idea was
still quite leading-edge. The Poet's Press had its ups and downs during
this period, at times almost vanishing, and then re-emerging when it
seemed that some new technological breakthrough would make it possible
to produce new books and help aspiring poets. He shared his novel
production methods with a number of other small presses.
In 1985, the city of Providence, with its H.P. Lovecraft and Poe
associations, beckoned Rutherford to pick up roots and try a new city.
He liked the idea of moving with his writing and press to a college
town, where he hoped to form a new circle of writers and artists
interesting in working with him on the press. The move was also a great
one for Rutherford's writing, and he soon produced The Lost
Children, his second Zebra horror novel, his book Poems from
Providence, and his biographical play about H.P. Lovecraft, Night
Gaunts. The play was given two staged readings at The Providence
Athenaeum.
Despite the charms of Providence, New York continued to be where the
work was. Rutherford twice found himself returning to New York City to
live — once to complete a major market study that required him to be on
site, and once to take a position with a New York directory publisher
as its Manager of Information Systems. During these returns he lived in
Weehawken, and, briefly, in the atmospheric Vinegar Hill neighborhood
near Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood where Walt Whitman once lived and
worked.. The Poet's Press books published new books fitfully, and,
despite all odds, the press passed the landmark of 150 books.
The late 1990s found Rutherford back in his beloved Providence,
writing much new poetry, but watching with alarm as the printing
industry, which had been the subject of his journalistic work, begin to
shrink. Magazines shut down; others became ghosts of their former
selves, and the nonprofit groups in the field no longer commissioned
the kinds of large projects that he preferred doing. After several
years of working for a market research firm doing elaborate surveys
about the procurement plans of printing companies (a dreary topic
indeed), and seeing little else on the landscape other than writing
Chicken Little articles about the coming demise of print, Rutherford
decided to commence a new life chapter.
How to combine a lifetime of experience in writing, publishing and
printing? Back to school! The interrupted journey in academia was
resumed in the Fall of 2003. Rutherford enrolled as a lowly
undergraduate at University of Rhode Island. He graduated May 2005 with
a degree in English and a minor in History. He started 2005 with a
quadruple whammy: in the first week of the year, he published his
newest poetry collection, The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets;
a new, expanded edition of Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural
Poems; and an expanded edition of Night Gaunts: An
Entertainment Based on the Life & Writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
The fourth publication is an anthology from Invisible Books called
Buried Alive: An Anthology of Underground Writing, which features
Rutherford's poetry. He was featured in an anthology of poems about
space flight from University of Iowa Press, and a symphonic suite by
composer William Alexander, inspired by three Rutherford poems, was
performed by The Erie Philharmonic in April 2005; another
Rutherford-related work was performed by that orchestra in November
2006.
In September 2005, he started graduate school at University of Rhode
Island, and completed his master's work in December 2007. He is now working for University of Rhode Island as Coordinator of Distance Learning, and teaching in the Women's Studies Department. Thus far he has created coollege courses on The Diva, Radical American Women, and Women in Science Fiction.
At present, Rutherford is also accelerating the production of e-book
versions of his own books, and of the entire backlist of The Poet's
Press. These e-books, many of which are for dead poets, are to be
circulated free to a worldwide audience via The Poet's Press website.
Rutherford hopes to spend the rest of his years teaching some
combination of literature, the art and technology of publishing, and
poetry. His mission as a teacher, should the opportunity arise: for the past, a focus on the Romantic
era, with the reconvergence of informed reading of its literature with
history, art music, drama and visual art; for the future, an
exploration of the evolving fusion of American literature with Native
American, Latino and Asian cultures. Combining scholarship with his love of the Gothic, the poet is now assembling two anthologies of supernatural poetry, the first an annotated new edition of Monk Lewis's 1801 Tales of Wonder, the other his own selection, The Supernatural Poem Since 1800. Volume 1 of the Lewis anthology appeared in 2010..
"American's literature will now be hemispheric," Rutherford notes,
"with its past rooted in European culture, and its future enriched by
the shock of the new, especially from Latin America and Asia. Poetry
may be the most powerful way to bridge between cultures, and with the
advent of instant electronic publishing, the next generation of writers
are going to appear and triumph, possibly in cool disregard for
traditional publishing channels. And the reader will find them."
ANNIVERSARIUS: THE BOOK OF AUTUMN
Now in its fourth edition and vastly expanded, Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn is Brett Rutherford’s 40-poem epic cycle of autumn poems. Although there is plenty of Shelley, Poe, and Bradbury here in the celebration of “autumn’s being,” this cycle encompasses works that are mythic, metaphysical, political, satirical and, of course, supernatural.
Autumn becomes the landscape for Jan Palach’s suicide in Soviet-invaded Czechoslovakia in 1969; for translations of Pushkin and Hugo; and for rhapsodic and moody invocations of fall in Western Pennsylvania (the poet’s birthplace) and haunted New England (his adopted home). Greek myth comes in by way of a hymn to Rhea, the Oak Tree Goddess, an encounter with three oak nymphs, and a dinner party in Hades.
Rutherford walks in the footsteps of Poe in New York City, and sets two other powerful poems in Manhattan: one a panorama of historic Madison Square Park, and a troubled visit in the aftermath of 9/11.
Influenced by Poe, Shelley, Whitman, Jeffers, Hugo, Bradbury, and Greek classics, these poems present a cosmos tinged with autumnal sadness, yet they are brave with the delight in a life fully relished down to the last falling leaf. Although solitude and loss stalk through these pages, there are also poems expressing a defiant, transcendent spirit. Each of the two “Rings” of the work ends with powerful affirmation. The locales of the latest poems include New York, Providence, rural Pennsylvania, the planets Mars and Pluto, and Ming Dynasty China.
This book is meant to be relished slowly, to be read aloud and savored for music as well as meaning. Each poem stands alone as an “anniversary,” yet the cycle as a whole is Romantic in sweep, its structure like that of two successive long symphonies. For more details about this book and its avalability, go to the CATALOG PAGE.
DOCTOR JONES AND OTHER TERRORS
This chapbook, in
full color, combines two terrifying poems about “Dr. Jones,” a
perhaps-imaginary, perhaps-real mad surgeon whose speciality is cutting
off arms and legs from young boys in rural Pennsylvania. Rutherford
here presents a disturbing sequel to an already-disturbing childhood
recovered memory. In “Torrance,” the links between Doctor Jones and
Western Pennsylvania's legendary, dreaded state mental hospital are
revealed. Color digital art reveals Dr. Jones' vintage car, his medical
kits, and images of the present-day ruins of the state hospital, where
ordinary mental patients were mixed with the criminally insane. 32 pp.,
paperback, ISBN 0-922558-29-9.
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OUR ON-LINE BOOKSTORE.
THINGS SEEN IN GRAVEYARDS.
Revised and gathered together here in one compact,
oblong book are all 15 of Brett Rutherford's multi-faceted graveyard
poems. Terrifying, sardonic, satirical, romantic, erotic, these
neo-Romantic works are set in New England graveyards at Mt. Auburn,
Providence, Salem, and rural Rhode Island, with side trips to New York
City's Potter's Field (Hart Island), a haunted monument in Kyoto,
and the legendary Aceldama in the Holy Land. Accounts of strange
exhumations, grave robberies, graveyard trysts interrupted by lonely
ghosts, and a delicious transcript of a meeting of cemetery security
guards. There is much to savor in this handsome book, illustrated with
black-and-white photos and pen-and-ink digital art. 80 pp. ISBN
0-922558-27-2
The Companion "Images" Volume is now available. 48
pages of full color digital photographs and digital art by Brett
Rutherford. Views of historic cemeteries in Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, and other locales, mixed with evocative close-ups of
foliage, flowers, exotic fungi, and the haunted architecture of
Providence and Marblehead. 48 pp., ISBN 0-922558-28-0
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order either/both titles from our on-line bookstore.
