From the Boog Archives: Jeffrey Winke’s against natural impulse (1992)
Boog was founded as a chapbook press. Our first seven chapbooks were micromini ones that looked like they were tiny composition notebooks. The eighth publication was zaftig: an anthology of sex poetry and prose, where we used composition notebook stylings on the front and back covers. After eight publications, Rod and I were done with Boog publications having anything to do with composition notebooks.
In the summer of 1992, we decided our ninth publication, our next chapbook, was going to be haikus from a former assistant editor of Modern Haiku, Jeffrey Winke. Charlie Rossiter, who I’d known since I first started going to poetry readings in Albany, N.Y. a few years earlier, and whose How I Got Here was Boog’s sixth ever chapbook, referred his friend and collaborator Jeff to us, and there we went.
The work was different than anything we’d published so far, these sweet musical quick hits. I’d recently purchased an art book, Blue Note: The Album Cover Art, and Rod and I quickly decided we were going to package the front and back covers as though they were a Blue Note record.
We still didn’t know how to do desktop publishing, but we had found out at our local Kinko’s that you could give them a printout with black ink on a white sheet, and they could run it through a copier and it would come out with white type on a black field. I can still feel how big a moment that discovery was for us, the press.
We wanted to reverse everything, but knew we shouldn’t or it would overwhelm the work, the chap. But since we were doing everything via word processing, we would have to set all of the type with plenty of space between lines, and then we’d cut between the lines by hand. It felt like a kind of music of its own, each line playing its own angular notes.
So here’s Jeffrey Winke’s against natural impulse, available digitally for the first time ever (after its only print run, of 100 copies, almost 31 years ago). I’d tell you to put some Stan Getz on in the background, but, the truth is, Jeff’s words will provide you all the music you’ve ever needed. —David A. Kirschenbaum