I’ve been listening to the new Jay-Z album almost non-stop. It’s good. Damn good. But what strikes me about the content of Jay’s lyrics is how much attention is paid to the status of rap as an art form. Constantly name-dropping emerging artists and supporting what’s new (as in “A Star Is Born”) and chastising other rappers for subpar performances (“D.O.A. (Death of Auto-tune)” and “Reminder”), this album is all about pushing the art further.
Ever since Eileen Myles posted “I Hate Poetry” over at the Poetry Foundations Harriet blog back in May (“I hate poetry magazines by and large. You get two copies in the mail. One to archive and the other to read for a week and then to give away. Poems, fiction and a sad bit of art or two. It seems like poetry dies in such magazines.”), I’ve been thinking about who out there is pushing the game forward and how. This topic has clearly been on other people’s minds, too. Most notably, our pal Roxane Gay whose posts at HTML GIANT have consistently raised the issue of how to improve the infrastructure of independent literature.

So, who in the indie lit game is pushing things forward? I want to hear from you. To get things started, here are few from me.

Blake Butler – As if his writing alone wasn’t enough to make my brain expand and contract at the same time, Blake has been busy editing HTML Giant, Lamination Colony, and No Colony, taking part in the Featherproof Dollar Store Tour (which deserves a nod itself), signing book deals with HarperCollins, and all around stirring the pot. He’s gonna call your sh*t and tell everyone he knows about it when it’s good. That’s kind of the gold standard, isn’t it?

Dan Wickett – WTF Dzanc? How’d you go from an email newsletter to an indie publishing empire overnight? Seriously, damn. Monkeybicycle, The Collagist, creative writing seminars, Best of the Web anthologies, the list goes on.

Maureen Thornson – Maureen’s a great poet (as you’ll see in the next issue of Barrelhouse) but she runs Big Game Books, the publisher of tiny sides—essentially, tiny chapbook/broadside hybrids. She’s done like 50 or more of them with a lot of great up-and-coming poets. Too often you only see a poem here and there, Maureen’s tiny sides give you 6 pages of poetry that are representative of that poet’s project. And they’re like a dollar or something crazy cheap like that.

Adam Robinson – With Publishing Genius Press books getting optioned as films by Spike Jonze and IsReads expanding to more cities all the time, he’s a force for good and he’s changing the way we think about audience. You canhear more from Adam in our inaugural Mixtape Podcast.

Wave Books – Touting their own nationwide Bus Tour a few years ago, Wave continues to be a center of activity. They host an online space for erasure projects, had an online magazine The Bedazzler, and publish some of the best poetry around.

Shanna Compton – The queen of DIY poetry, Shanna runs Bloof Books and edits their online Tweak Job. She also hosts The DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative which is where you go if you want to know anything about chapbooks and small press poetry.

I know there’s a lot more people who deserve accolades for advancing the lit game. If you were the Jay-Z of indie lit (you may very well be) who would you want on your next album? Who would you release a diss track on?