Good Question.
It’s certainly rough out there for anyone trying to publish poetry books on a small press in the year 2026.
No one is reading anything anymore.
Yet there are more books out there than ever before.
It is delusional to try and squeeze one more chapbook (let alone 3) into an already oversaturated poetry landscape and expect it to achieve some kind of meaningful relevance.
It’s a poet-eat-poet world out there now, and indie publishers are evolving bigger teeth and stronger jaws to keep up. To survive, the modern editor-in-chief must have a certain go-go-go temperament once reserved for slickedbackhair&suspender hustlers from 80s stockbroker movies. The kind of relentless way-of-being most of us can only access for about 10 minutes after a good gym sesh, or 1.5 shots of Jack.
It is true, in this high-tech CanvaKDPChatGPT era, the barriers to literary production have never been lower, but even then the required investment of time, energy, and money will never pay off in any kind of concrete way.
Man.
Good thing I don’t have a small poetry press.
Celebrating&Documenting
Since its inception in 2013, Boulder Poetry Scene has always been a media project. Our central aim is Celebrating&Documenting the local Boulder Colorado literary community.
In other words: we say via some form of media, “This thing happened here (within roughly an hour drive of 80301 zipcode) and we liked that it happened.” Just in case people today or one day might not know that it happened and that it was a liked thing.
Celebrating&Documenting can take many forms: maintaining a WordPress where community members lovingly write articles about each other, keeping a local literary events calendar on said website, posting relevant content on various social media platforms, organizing off-beat and slightly impractical events, secretly getting jealous of those in the community who appear to have more capacity to accomplish the things you wish you could, becoming bitter for not getting enough in return for what you have put in, not feeling like Celebrating&Documenting anything anymore, feeling the same about another new poetry event as a new plaque psoriasis commercial, retreating from the project for months at a time for no good reason without telling anyone, making great comebacks dictated by burnout cycles at dayjob, cowardly retreating again and making heroic comebacks again only to… y’get it, at some point just having to be like shrugwhatever it is what it is, but maybe at least something has been Celebrated&Documented that wouldn’t have otherwise…
Oh yeah and also putting out books.
I don’t know hardly anything about what organizations that do consider themselves small presses do. Uh, they take like submissions or something, right? With like guidelines? And if someone’s manuscript is deemed more suitable than the others it gets to be made into a book I guess?
And what else? I think they’re big into blurbs? Other authors on the back cover saying nice things in complex ways about the book?
And then they make a post about it starting with the words, “we’re thrilled to announce…!” so people know the book exists? And then I imagine they think it should go into a bookstore at some point, in the event a stranger might want to purchase it, maybe based on the nice complex things said on the back cover? And maybe they even nominate it for a prestigious award somewhere so strangers will know it’s worth reading more than other published books?
That all’s what makes it like A Real Book, right?
I don’t know exactly, but when you’re a media project, you don’t need to do anything like that. You just havta try to be Celebrating&Documenting. C-ing&D-ing.
Lavender Lemonade
Like we’re C-ing&D-ing Raven Moon with her new book Lavender Lemonade…
Raven was my student at FRCC. I had her in multiple classes, so got to know her better than most of my students. She had a tough upbringing, going thru the foster care system and dealing with abuse and mental health issues, all in the You’re-On-Your-Own Star State of Texas.
She was trying to get it together in Colorado tho and get her degrees so she can be an English teacher. In her first semester, despite her best intentions, she was struggling to keep up until she was finally able to properly diagnose and get treatment for her conditions. I could tell she was an otherwise engaged and highly capable student, so I was flexible with her. To pass our Intro to Lit class, she wrote a memorable essay comparing Edgar Allan Poe’s work with Courtney Love’s. Yeah, despite being born in the 21st century, she’s into Hole, Nirvana, and the whole grunge thing – she’s borrowed my Michael Azerrad books, she gets it, she’s one of us.
I also learned that Raven is a poet herself, and had written a chapbook manuscript about trying to make it thru all the shit she hadta go thru. She hoped to get it published one day but doubted it probably ever would.
Recently someone DM’d BPS on Instagram asking how one gets involved with publishing a book with us, and I just answered “Destiny.” Cuz it’s not me who decides really, but The Gods. They’re always asking me to do things, and sometimes, when the moon is bright enough, and I’ve gotten at least 7 hours of sleep the night before, and I’m not looking too closely at my phone, I can actually receive those messages.
Like The Gods told me Raven Moon is someone whose work must be C&D’d, and I must help make that happen, and if I do not the whole intended timeline for both of us would be disrupted.
Well, it was hard to defy an order like that. And this summer, after convincing Financial Aid to cover Compliance with Higher Powers for college credit, Raven and I worked together on the book. Meeting in my office once a week, we went thru the whole process – organizing and editing the poems, designing the cover and interior, and finally publishing and planning out the release.
The result was a beautiful Celebration&Documentation called Lavender Lemonade, which poetically and visually expresses the grief yet optimism of Raven’s challenging-but-worth-living life. It’s also about lemonade… and lavender.
“Yes,” I pumped my fist at first look at an officially printed copy. “We have fulfilled our obligation to The Gods!”
Some Wheeird Goo
The Gods have had me and Sarah Lee working together for a while now. Ever since she was a student in my Poetry Writing class at FRCC a few years ago and then got really involved in the poetry scene, she’s been one of my absolute favorite poets to C&D. BPS put out her first book of stories Messs of Milque in 2023, and now we’re releasing her follow up collection of short poetry and prose, Some Wheeird Goo.
I wrote in BPS’s I Love Your Poem anthology about how Sarah is a True Original, and a couple weeks ago I introduced her at the Drifters Open Mic as a Poetic Genius. This is not just unnecessarily capitalized hyperbole. I’m a True Believer. I mean, just look at the way she spells her titles – all those extra s’s and e’s. Why use k when you can use a q? This alone demonstrates how she’s referencing a different dictionary than the rest of us.
Even if you had 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters working for eternity, they still wouldn’t be able to even accidentally come up with anything like the delightful waitwhathaha?! imagery and never-before-uttered-on-earth terminology found throughout Some Wheeird Goo. Refrigerator gnomes, and plates of chocolate noise, and Schwarmm statues. What’s a Schwarmm, you ask? Precisely my point. Sarah’s imagination taps into a realm of the collective unconscious so remote that even Carl Jung could not have conceived of it.
Am I blurbing here even tho it’s against the tenets of Celebrate&Documentism? Very well then I contradict myself. Tho to be fair, I am her editor and this is a blog post, and that feels different than whatever some literary mercenary might project upon another ‘voice of a generation’ in a back cover quote they wish was really said about themselves.
Let’s see. What did we put on Sarah’s back cover?… Oh yeah, I described the book as indescribable. Which it is!… even tho I wouldn’t mind if someone said that about my writing.
The front cover is describable: The image of Sarah Lee herself playing with real life goo – green and slimy and stretchy between her fingers. The title font itself is made out of the same goo. “Goo” is her favorite word. When she doesn’t know what else to say about something she just says “Goo.” And we all love her for it. And covers and titles should be for things we all love an author for.
I just think if there’s anyone worth C&Ding it’s Sarah Lee. Even if she wasn’t a True Poetic Original Genius or whatever, I’d still want to. The way she is genuinely enthusiastic about every single reader at an open mic. The way she is incapable of meanness to anyone ever. The way she collects and repairs stuffed animals, and completely gets my wish that Jellycat had a full moon smile-faced plush doll instead of just a crescent moon one.
Are you seeing this now? Are you seeing why the media project has to put these books out now? It’s hardly about books at all.
Book of Fear
You know what can be a pretty damn hard thing to do?… Celebrating&Documenting yourself. It may be strange for me to say, considering 12 of BPS’s 17 published titles (if you count Nine Books as 9 books) have been my own. You’d think that C-ing&D-ing myself probably comes quite easily to me, in fact. But I’m telling you, man, every time it took some real convincing. There’ve been some pretty epic internal debates about how much I deserve any C-ing&D-ing from anyone. So when you see a book of mine, it is evidence of a very small window of self-belief opening up that I happened to have the wherewithal to pounce on.
WHY JONATHAN NO TRY GET PUBLISH BY SOMEONE ELSE PRESS LIKE REAL WRITER? AFRAID TO CUZ KNOW NOT ACTUALLY GOOD?
Get outta here Beast! We’re not doing this in this essay this time… But maybe it’s cuz I don’t trust anyone else to C&D me properly. Maybe I just like my own C&Ding terms… Also maybe I am afraid.
This new book, Book of Fear, is about exactly that kinda shit.
According to the book’s Author’s Note, it’s sort of an addendum to the Nine Books (At Once!) series that came out in 2022. It was mostly written after that, but it’s also focused on a specific topic that kept coming up for a period – anxiety.
Look, I don’t like that I have anxiety. Or at least that’s how I usta more consistently view it. But I’ve been in therapy for the last couple years, which has helped me better accept it. The pieces in this book are me saying – this is happening, this is what it’s really like for me.
In this digital world, in which it’s never been easier to have everything that’s ever been felt put out there for everyone to witness for free, it still seems hard to find things, especially poetry, said about things in a certain kinda way. Even tho a shitload is being said about something like anxiety, there’s an incentive to present everything in a way to either inspire others or demand pity. I was just kinda dying to say something for once that does neither. Just let it be what it is, but also weird and funny – swearing at horses, holding up the Taco Bell drive-thru line, and freaking out about non-existent bed bugs once again. Even if I’m making progress, the book itself doesn’t know how to solve or manage anxiety, it just knows how to be it. And lemme tell you it’s not always fucking flattering.
It wasn’t my idea to share this book. Nor was it The Therapist’s. It was, you guessed it, The Gods’.
They said you gotta Celebrate&Document this part of yourself, and trust that it will be okay.
So, as you wish Gods, here it is – one more book at once. Adding Fear Gray to the rainbow.
The Release Event
Alright, I’ve gotta stop myself or else this article is gonna be longer than all of our new BPS books combined.
I will close with the details of the release event for those reading this in the 24-ish hours it will be up in time for it to matter (see flyer below).
We’re gonna do some mad-scientist openmikeology shit with ‘karaoketry’ – reading pieces from our new books with karaoke tracks backing us.
If what I’ve said in the previous nearly 2200 words appeals to you in any way. Please come Celebrate&Document with us!
Jonathan Bluebird Montgomery is the founder and editor of Boulder Poetry Scene. The author of Pizzas and Mermaid, The Reality Traveler, Nine Books (at Once!), and Jonathan and The Awesomenauts, he’s been on the Boulder poetry scene since he first came to get his MFA at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School in 2003. You can find more of his work at jonathanbluebirdmontgomery.com or subscribe to his personal Substack here
