Hand-Made, Unfunded, Anti-Normal, Brazenly Subversive and Even Vulgar: A Brief History of Altzines

Editor of Thrice Fiction takes us through the splendid rabbit hole of zine culture

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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In the 1980s there were still more than five main publishing houses, and some still fostered small(er)-run mastheads that took a chance on lesser-known potential. But journals like The Paris Review, The Antioch Review, The Sewanee Review, and those of that kind, would almost never break from the tyranny of champagne cocktail realist angst long enough to peek above the event horizon of the alternative press’s singularity.

Surrealism, Fluxus, stream-of-conscious, or anti-post-punk-poetry, would almost never be accepted by the “major” literary reviews. Those who managed to sneak in every rare once in a while only fulfilled what seemed to be an unspecified quota, allowing only so much weirdness and no more. Especially if the writer was marketable in a Sid and Nancy kind of way. And it is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of alternative writers and poets and performance artists at that time, in turn, wanted little if anything to do with what they considered - as some still do - the boring regularity created by MBAs in sweater vests.

(“MBAs in sweater vests.” And no one would apologize for those kinds of words. Being offensive wasn’t as off-limits as it is now.)

Instead, you’d have to seek out the outliers in places like Dharma Combat, The Lost and Found Times, Burning Toddlers, Asylum, NRG, Alabama Dogshoe Moustache, Communist Egg Beaters, Mallife, or Nightmares of Reason. And most of the time the only way to find these publications was to go right down into the alternative universe in person because they wouldn’t be found in respectable bookstores selling coffee table books for Christmas, and there was no internet.

That usually meant finding tiny, out-of-the-way neighborhood independent bookstores usually run by people with things like anarchism in their resumés, or hard-to-find jazz clubs in questionable parts of town, or the occasional college professor who seemed to know everyone in the alternative universe. And you could always show up at poetry slams organized in old bars or cheap, converted basements where there were handbills and rumors to entice you further down the rabbit hole.

Or, if you were lucky enough, you could stumble upon a glorious compendium of all that was altzine: Mike Gunderloy’s Factsheet Five.

Mike Gunderloy somehow managed to be the nexus for every hand-made, unfunded, anti-normal, brazenly subversive, and even vulgar publication ever created simply out of the passion of having nowhere else to go, or (more accurately) there not being anywhere else anyone wanted to go. Before long things arrived at his door from all over the world, and it turned out the alternative press was everywhere and larger than anyone could imagine from their small garret above the shoe repair guy. (Garret: these days known as a gentrified “loft” and twelve times as expensive). Gunderloy was the internet.

I don’t know that even one of these wild-eyed venues in Mike Gunderloy’s listing made any money off of all this. It was usually all out of pocket. Most of the schedules were irregular, to put it mildly. Crowdfunding was known as passing the hat or just plain panhandling. And the only thing they had in common with the standard literary journals was that everybody had more submitters than subscribers, an eternal verity. And yet, out of this haphazard cyclone, subverting the known world, came the likes of Kathy Acker, Charles Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, Hugh Fox (one of the founders of the Pushcart Prize), Richard Kostelanetz and Lorri Jackson. Their DNA came from these byways.

All that said, the truth is that there has always been an alternative press. What happened here has happened before. For example Fred Woodworth’s Anarchist journal The Match! began in 1969 during the Viet Nam era and still operates to this day, still printed in his workshop, off the grid, in the desert near Tucson, with only cash payments for subscriptions accepted. Send him a $20 bill and you’ll get every new issue he comes up with until you or he drops dead. There has always been an alternative, beyond what is spoken of here. Going back into the 19th century - that I know of - and I wouldn’t be surprised if it went back to ancient times.

Within the pages of Sub Rosa, Paper Radio, and Poked With Sticks, to name another few, there were expectations of there being no dogma, no manifesto, and with the understanding that non-conformity can always slide into its own kind of conformity in order to allay that effect as long as possible. These were places for “found” poetry, and what is now more commonly known as “Outsider” work. Places where an editor, fed up with the usual stuff, gave their pages to the unheard.

More than just an overflow of submissions the standard publications wouldn’t take, the world of the altzine formed its own culture and, in time, presented the oeuvre of writers who published nowhere else from first to last and fed the occasional cross-over, as mentioned above. And all a logical extension from the student anti-war movement of the late 60s and 70s, and “The Beats” that came before them. Think Ginsberg’s Howl and Kerouac’s On The Road.

In the June 1991 issue of Malcontent (a mailart extravaganza), editor Laura Poll spoke of the relationship this underground wave had with its contributors. “I like to think I freed them from a horrible mundane life of kissing editor’s ass. They’ve admitted that their charade of form letters and bios and lists of where they’ve been previously published (like I care) were sent to editors because that’s the kind of crap editors want.”

There is always hierarchy and tribes and markets though the imperative to write doesn’t care. But there have also always been writers who keep trying to fit neat paragraphs and clean lines into an understood formula, burying the way they’d really want to tell the story or make the impression of the poem. All the places one could be are just as valid, but an alternative is a natural outgrowth of the rejection of the hierarchy.

Tribes develop over the silliest things sometimes. And markets are built, for better or worse, around the things people need or think they want. It’s that way with writers too, I suppose. Not knowing the difference between need and want is a lot like not knowing which world your writing belongs in. Finding out is a part of the process too, beyond just learning how to limit your adverbs and clichés.

The point is that the alternative still exists. But you don’t have to go to dark parts of the city making sure you don’t step on the needles to find it anymore.

I’ve been surprised to find so many people who don’t know it’s still out there. You can still go into out-of-the-way bookshops and come across a multi-colored wall of alternative magazines, most with circulations of a few hundred at best, put out by the latest version of a subculture that came from the punk, post-punk, and dark wave days and never went away. Of course, the internet has solved the problem of finding these places - though you still may have to refine that search. Plenty of minuscule independent bookstores, where you can find multiple hundreds of “altzines” still firing away out there, have websites now.

I say this for anyone who may need to hear it. If the function of this newsletter is to help people out, it seems suitable to mention that maybe the only reason you can’t find placement is that you’ve been on the wrong planet all this time. Maybe you shouldn’t be trying to fill out a form letter.

Sadly, Mike Gunderloy no longer publishes the Factsheet.

It was a time.

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Photo credit: Philipp Messner via Flickr // CC BY-NC 2.0