Copper Canyon basks in the glow of huge prizes and illustrious writers

PORT TOWNSEND -- The small white clapboard structure could be a military remnant at scores of former Army posts, except for what is displayed near the front door. Inside the onetime cannon repair shop hang reminders of the two most celebrated prizes in American writing, both won in 2005 by the old building's sole occupant, Copper Canyon Press.

There is a photocopy of the telegram sent last April, only months before printed telegrams were discontinued by Western Union. It is addressed to Ted Kooser, a Nebraska poet, in care of Copper Canyon and it says simply: "You were awarded the Pulitzer Poetry Prize today. Congratulations!"


		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	Copper Canyon Press in its historic building at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend.

Then there is the certificate from November that proclaims the 2005 National Book Award in poetry was awarded to W.S. Merwin for his Copper Canyon collection, "Migration." This first National Book Award for the famed Maui-based poet was a testament to his illustrious career over five decades, but also a testament to the national stature of Copper Canyon, which had lured this leading American poet away from his prestigious New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

Many New York houses in their high-rent skyscraper offices in Manhattan would consider it a very fine year indeed to have won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award. That both awards were won in a single year by a tiny non-profit, poetry-only press in a humble abode in the distant Northwest is a literary coup of the first order.

This might seem a publishing tale straight out of the kidland pages of "The Little Engine That Could" or "The Tortoise and the Hare," a tale of persistence paying off in a sudden triumph. But Copper Canyon has been at it for 34 years and last year's awards reflect the press's rising prominence during the last decade, despite daunting upheavals and other challenges.


		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	Michael Wiegers, executive editor of Copper Canyon Press, goes through manuscript submissions.

"It's the common consent among the literati that Copper Canyon is the best poetry publisher in America," emphasizes Jim Harrison, the esteemed literary writer from Michigan. "Copper Canyon is so consistent -- they keep a poet's books in print and their books are always beautifully designed. They are singularly dedicated to publishing poetry. ... There's no one of that quality in the business. Period."

Harrison is not just blowing lit smoke. His assessment of Copper Canyon is seconded in almost identical terms by last year's two prize winners. Kooser praises Copper Canyon's "dedication to poetry and its poets," while Merwin salutes its "absolutely unflinching dedication to poetry."

At the table

Any presumption that a cadre of poets must be ensconced inside the clapboard building at Fort Worden State Park would be mistaken. Only one poet now works at Copper Canyon and that is Kristin Becker, the 37-year-old development director who translates Russian poetry and writes her own verse. Yet she has absolutely nothing to do with the books published by Copper Canyon other than make certain there are grants and donations to support them.

No poetry is written by the two other talented and amiable members of the triumvirate that now leads Copper Canyon, executive editor Michael Wiegers and marketing director Joseph Bednarik, two 41-year-olds who keep baseball gloves in their offices in case they are struck by the urge to play catch.

What Wiegers and Bednarik lack in verse skills is outweighed by their evangelistic devotion to the power and worth of poetry amid what seems a skeptical or even uncaring populace.

"We consistently hear, 'Poetry? Ah, poetry. ... ' " Bednarik relates. "You have a genre that some people are expert in and even get fed by. But outside of poetry's intense community, it is a hard sell. Though if you can just get people to read a Kooser text, then they get it."

Those inside Copper Canyon definitely get it. They may not be poets themselves, but their love of the literary form is unquenchable, no matter how difficult the work. They demonstrate that on a Friday afternoon when they gather around a conference table laden with wine, cheese and fruit and discuss the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet whose book by Copper Canyon later this year will be among his first translations in America.

Darwish is a phenomenon in the Arab world, a poet with the following of a rock star, but his translated poems in "The Butterfly's Burden" prove a slog for several of the dozen staffers at this informal monthly meeting to discuss upcoming books.

"There are little parts in here that I could get, but then I hit an off button," concedes Jessica Rice, the 30-year-old production manager. "I'm just barely keeping up with what's being said, then I lose it."

"I'm sure there's so much we're not getting here -- that's one of the things I want people to have permission to say," says Wiegers. "Darwish resists being tethered to all reality -- he wants the reader to feel displacement ... the Israeli-Palestinian conflict casts a shadow in his work."

Much of what distinguishes this press is on display around the conference table -- from the love of the printed word to the collegial atmosphere under this roof; from the allures of life in Port Townsend to the press's reach into the great world beyond with its publication of such important foreign writers as Pablo Neruda of Chile, Czeslaw Milosz of Poland, Chris Albani of Nigeria and Ho Xuan Huong of Vietnam.

What works to publish remains the "trickiest" task for Wiegers, who selects and edits them.This graduate of Kalamazoo College began his love affair with poetry when his mother gave him books by e.e. cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the age of 14 ("Wow," he thought, "this is poetry?").

Wiegers, a former bookseller, came to the press 13 years ago from Coffee House Press in Minneapolis. He still struggles with finding the right mix of poets to showcase in Copper Canyon's 16 to 18 new titles a year. He wants to include younger poets ("the toughest to do"), established poets, foreign poets for translation.

"This is a real publishing house, but we also want to maintain a do-it-yourself mentality here," Wiegers says. "We want to be nimble and, I hope, graceful in responding to the trade."

Getting Merwin

Copper Canyon's nimbleness has seldom been better displayed than in its lengthy courtship of Merwin. The publisher began its Merwin dance by bringing his out-of-print volumes back into print in fine new editions.

But wresting Merwin's upcoming work away from Knopf, including his second collected poems, was a giant leap into the publishing major league, where big bucks and big egos rule. Copper Canyon benefited from Merwin's growing disenchantment with Knopf, which seemed to him to be afflicted with the bottom-line preoccupations of New York publishers these days.

"When I was considering what to do with my selected poems, Knopf took for granted that they would do it," Merwin relates. "But Copper Canyon had more titles of mine in print than Knopf and that made it easier to move from Knopf. Besides, Knopf wanted to do a smaller book with the selected poems than Copper Canyon did. And then Copper Canyon said they would match any offer I would receive from Knopf.

"That was remarkable for Copper Canyon, but they said they could do it. I wondered if they could."

Those same worries spiraled around the offices of Copper Canyon and reverberated through its seven-member governing board, which includes such Seattle notables as Rick Simonson of The Elliott Bay Book Co., Mimi Gardner Gates of the Seattle Art Museum and mountaineer Jim Wickwire. But the press mounted a separate fund-raising campaign that attracted 26 donors, including several newcomers, and ultimately produced the largest advance ever paid by the press, a five-figure sum.

"It worked out at Copper Canyon," Merwin says, "and I'm very glad that it did."

Publishing Merwin's "Migration" still presented challenges, especially for Wiegers. What looks like a rabbit hutch above his desk is a collection of 35 former mail slots that contain the book manuscripts that are in various stages of the march toward publication. Merwin's selected poems would not be just another file, due to its prodigious size and the poet's pre-eminence.


		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	Marketing director Joseph Bednarik looks through review copies of Copper Canyon's books, which are stored in the Fort Worden building, but distribution of the press's books is handled in Minnesota.

"I was intimidated to a degree with Merwin -- he is who he is," Wiegers concedes. "But in telling his wife that I was intimidated by the trust of his work, she told me, 'Get over it. He puts on his pants one leg at a time, too.' ... That made it OK. As an editor, you've got to be fearless about raising your opinions."

The published version of "Migration" reflected both the risk and the work that went into it. Merwin's magnum opus registered 564 pages and carried a $40 price tag. There were cheers when it won the National Book Award, but also sighs of relief.

"That was just a thrill, unbelievable," remembers board member David Brewster (a former publishing exec, not the well-known Seattle Town Hall founder), who received the news in a cell phone call from Wiegers at the New York ceremony. "Something like this does not happen to a small press every day. It was so rewarding, so validating of our efforts and commitment. It made everything we went through have so much more meaning."

Changing of the guard

Copper Canyon has surmounted challenges that might have swamped many other small presses and other non-profit groups. It fought back from near closure in 1993 when its financial prospects were grim.

It weathered several publishers of varying effectiveness, including Thatcher Bailey who is widely credited with getting Copper Canyon to expand its boldness and vision during his four-year tenure that ended in 2002. But there was also Sid Farrar, who arrived at Copper Canyon from Minneapolis after two extensive national searches and left only months later for personal and professional reasons.

Then there was the departure of the press's co-founder after more than four decades at the helm. For many, Sam Hamill was Copper Canyon Press.

The award-winning poet and Chinese translator, a former Marine Corps vet turned Zen Buddhist pacifist, often carried the press through the decades with his ideas, drive and vision. But Hamill is a cantankerous, abrasive person, who often seems steeling for a fight and usually finds it. His outsized personality only grew in 2003 during the blaze of publicity that followed Hamill's founding and leadership of the Poets Against the War protest that questioned the Iraq conflict.

Hamill, 60 then, was presumably going to retire from Copper Canyon at some point, but his departure was hastened by the efforts of Seattle board members Wickwire and Brewster, who admits it was "a challenging period with a lot of emotion and a lot of personal stuff on the table." Copper Canyon's founding editor left at the end of 2004, his exit much in character, with considerable rancor and sturm und drang.

Now, peace has settled over Copper Canyon under a close-knit triumvirate of equals that has replaced the top-down leadership of a publisher. The sometimes-rocky transition period is over and everyone seems to have finally found, as Bednarik puts it, "our sea legs."

Copper Canyon's income in 2005 topped more than $1 million, with sales of 115,000 copies of its titles, its best year ever. Merwin's "Migration" accounted for 13,000 of those sales, while Kooser's "Delights & Shadows" sold a phenomenal 40,000 copies, confirming the press's assertion to the poet that it could certainly improve on past sales of his work that usually hovered around 1,000 copies.

Kooser's sales at Copper Canyon were boosted greatly when he was named the U.S. Poet Laureate and again when he won the Pulitzer. The former insurance executive had been brought to Copper Canyon by Harrison for their joint volume, "Braided Creek." Kooser soon fell under the homespun Copper Canyon spell, as had his friend.

What the writers found was not just a publisher that brought them more readers than ever for their poetry, but also one whose attentive approach fit well with their Midwestern sensibilities. Visits to the Fort Worden office cemented that impression.

"That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park," says Harrison.

Kooser adds: "I visited Copper Canyon about a year ago and they took me over to Michael Wiegers' home for a marvelous potluck lunch. Everybody who works at the press brought a dish and it was lovely. Far better than to have an Eastern publisher take you to lunch at an expensive restaurant in New York City and spend their time with you answering cell phone calls."

Copper Canyon's reach may be across the country and around the world, but it is very much a product of its longtime home in Port Townsend. The Victorian seaport is a Left Coast kind of place, with an enviable lifestyle that is a magnet for artists, seekers and free spirits, the sort of folks who end up inside the front door of Copper Canyon, often as volunteers, sometimes as staffers.

Press people

The current staff includes: a singer in a blues band (bookkeeper Mary Goldthorp), a former llama rancher (volunteer coordinator Jan North), a tango instructor and actor in a Robert Altman film (office manager David Miller).

Development director Becker arrived at the press as a volunteer but was instead hired as part-time office manager, while production manager Rice began as an unpaid intern. Both possess the multidimensional resumes so common at Copper Canyon and in Port Townsend.

Becker did a stint in the Peace Corps in Poland, taught language arts in middle school, and came to Port Townsend when her husband enrolled in the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding. Now she tracks down the money beyond book sales that keeps Copper Canyon publishing. Forty percent of its funding comes from such disparate sources as the National Endowment for the Arts ($50,000), the Lannan Foundation ($150,000), the Washington State Arts Commission ($10,000) as well as individuals whose donations range all the way from $25,000 to $1.

"One of the great challenges is finding funding sources for contemporary poetry," Becker explains. "We're dipping into the same pool when the number of presses is growing and the resources are not keeping pace. So you often feel as though you are competing with yourself to keep up the tradition here."

Rice had been an instructor at the National Outdoor Leadership School, leading sailing expeditions in Baja California and mountaineering treks in Wyoming, before her "knees gave out" from lugging too many 80-pound backpacks. She arrived in Port Townsend three years ago, cobbled together gigs as a housesitter and petsitter, freelance writer and bartender, the sort of makeshift making-do required to live in this magnet small town with pricey housing.

Now, Rice shepherds books through the production cycle and chases down such details as permission to use art on a book cover. As she puts it, "It's solving problems, like I used to do in the woods. But I also get to see the human stories behind a book, as well as the blood, sweat and tears. I've read Jim Harrison, but getting to see manuscripts is something else, especially when he writes comments like 'I don't care where you put a comma.' "

Commas do matter to editor Wiegers, a devoted reader who somehow works his way through more than 1,200 entries in the annual Hayden Carruth publication contest that occupy overflowing crates in his office, his living room and even his bedroom. Wiegers is an engaged line editor of the sort that is becoming more of an endangered species than the spotted owl.

"My role as an editor," explains Wiegers, "is to sometimes change words, sometimes gracefully suggest to an author that he has used the same word several times. I want to see an arc of movement in a book, some discussion, some echoes, some cohesion to the book beyond it's written by one poet."

Wiegers enjoys a close working relationship with Bednarik, a philosophy grad of Haverford College in Pennsylvania who had worked at Story Line Press in Oregon. The impromptu games of catch by these two baseball enthusiasts may be their "best meetings," as Bednarik puts it, but their two families sometimes vacation together and their young daughters are pals, too.

Wiegers and Bednarik travel together or separately to conferences, readings or even the publishing capital of Manhattan where they meet with critics, agents and authors. Copper Canyon's rising national prominence is not the result of simply sticking books into the mail in Port Townsend and hoping for the best. The engaging and eloquent duo regularly spread the gospel of Copper Canyon.

"The hallmarks of Copper Canyon," Bednarik emphasizes, "are that we spend time on design and standards with our books. We want a book to have some heft in readers' hands, from the cover on the front to the substance inside."

Last year's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award speak volumes about the heft of titles coming from a former artillery repair shop. Copper Canyon Press has replaced obsolete war cannons with lasting verse.