It wasn’t until I started working as the first poetry editor of BACHY magazine, in late 1971 at Papa Bach Bookstore in Los Angeles that I became aware of John Martin and Black Sparrow Press. Until then, I knew only a handful of little magazines, such as KAYAK, APPLE, THE LAMP IN THE SPINE, and INVISIBLE CITY. Although Bukowski was the best known of the poets that Black Sparrow published, I remember that as the decade went being more interested in other poets that Martin was publishing at the time: Diane Wakoski and Robert Kelly, in particular. Wakoski’s “Smudging” remains one of my all-time favorites.
As the years went on, I discovered that Black Sparrow’s success was largely due to the capacity of its editor to do an extraordinary amount of work, seven days a week. John Martin’s publishing enterprise was a one-person operation, during its first half-dozen years Martin routinely worked a full-time job as the manager of an office supply shop as well as working as the editor and shipping clerk for his own literary project. It’s my understanding that he published close to a thousand titles, by the time he closed up shop.
Bukowski wasn’t the only Los Angeles based poet published by Black Sparrow, of course. He also championed the work of Wanda Coleman, and Martin deserves much praise for having done so. One might be tempted to think that Martin published her at the first opportunity he had, but in fact Coleman approached him with a sheaf of poems years before her first publication with Black Sparrow, ART IN THE COURT OF THE BLUE FAG. If one reads the correspondence between Coleman and Martin in Coleman’s archive at UCLA, one learns that Martin certainly encouraged Coleman from the start, but also informed her that early poems were overdetermined and far too convinced of where they were wanted to go from the very outset. Martin counseled Coleman to learn to wait to hear from the poem itself about where it wanted to go. If that sounds like familiar advice, it’s because John Keats’s “negative capability” had saturated postmodern poetry by that point.
One of my favorite books by Martin was HAWK MOON by Sam Shepard, which never took off as far as I can tell. I don’t think Black Sparrow ever did a second printing, though the collection was issued again by Performing Arts Journal. I just remember that I saw a copy of it on the shelves of Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach for years and years and always expected it to be gone whenever I dropped into the store. Finally, though, with some of the Christmas bonus money I received from Beach City Newspapers in 1980, I swung by the store (which was a few blocks away from David Asper Johnson’s publishing headquarters and bought it.
Another of my favorites was Michael McClure’s Rare Angel. On the other hand, I never ever felt at home with Clayton Eshleman’s books of poems. It’s one of the ironies of a literary life that the L.A. Times asked me to review Eshleman’s “Selected Poems.” I tried very hard to be gracious and enthusiastic about his book, and many friends said that I was more generous than I needed to be. It wasn’t enough to placate Eshleman, though, let alone please him.
Martin didn’t believe there were any serious poets in Los Angeles worthy of being published by Black Sparrow outside of Bukowski and Coleman. From the point of view of a publisher who takes the business side of publishing as that which must take precedence, I would have to say that he was probably right. I suppose it could be said that his dismissal of all the poets I knew and believed only made it possible for me to build up my roster of poets for Momentum Press. One man’s rejects are another man’s betrothal.
Martin deserves to be as famous as Bukowski, even if Martin wasn’t in fact the one who “discovered” Bukowski. Too many accounts of Martin and Bukowski’s relationship overlook the fact that Bukowski had already had full-length volumes of poetry in circulation well before Martin ever purchased a six-pack and dropped in on a poet who had just a few years earlier been on the cover of the “OUTSIDER” magazine as “Outsider of the Year.” If Martin pushed Bukowski a little closer to the center of the canonical conversation, he certainly also pulled into its periphery some of us who were not even in its faintest gravitational orbit. For that, he deserves the appreciation of all the poets working in Los Angeles County.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/books/john-martin-dead.html
About Bill Mohr