Indy Correspondent podcast #2: Interview with pLopLop founder John Clark
John Clark in his studio posing with pLopLop #9
DAN GROSSMAN: Hi, my name is Dan Grossman, editor of Indy Correspondent, and I'm here with John Clark, for our podcast today. And on Indy Correspondent we talk about everything and nothing and everything in between.
JOHN CLARK: So, I can work in something there at some point. [Laughter]
GROSSMAN: Please do.
CLARK: Thanks for having me, Dan.
GROSSMAN: You're welcome, John, it's been a while since we met it's been, what, almost 30 years?
CLARK: Thirty?
GROSSMAN: No, no. Maybe not. We met in the fall of 1994 I think when we were both working at Borders Books, just Borders Books back then at Castleton Corner in Indianapolis and I was working a summer job ...
CLARK: It was a dream job to me, I mean, first of all, that place was amazing. I'm still in touch with some of those people. Phil Hundley and Kit [Andis] and several other people, but I really learned a lot from those guys and women ... I was very lucky to get a job there. And, the first time I called them up, I said I want to order this book you know. I thought this was going to be a special order. It was really obscure and they're like, “Oh we have that in stock.” So I was like, okay. So, eventually I got a job there but there was so much going on that we could get involved with ... poetry readings. It was really sort of an early form of what is now known as placemaking —- having a community place where people get together and can read poetry or just read together and talk and happenstance. So that goes back to early influences with pLopLop, learning about city lights books, and how those became, community centers.
GROSSMAN: For those of you who don't know, John Clark, founded Geekspeak Unique Press and probably its most famous product was pLopLop literary magazine. That started … when did it start John?
CLARK: 1989.
GROSSMAN: And so it was basically a small literary zine at that point and what what was in the first pLopLop?
CLARK: Just people I knew that were at readings. There was a reading at the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis, twice a month. It was Tuesday night, and there would be open mics. It was run by the Writers Center [of Indiana]. Jim Powell was the host, and it was a chance to experiment and do performances so I sort of fell into that. And with that experience, and then working at Borders and hosting readings ... other places coffee shops and stuff like that. So I went on to host other readings around town, but Slippery Noodle was sort of the birthplace. This guy said “you should start a little magazine or something; my dad has a photocopier in his office.” So that was the first issue … I mean, we just used Swingline staplers and little pamphlets, but it kind of got it rolling. So, and that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, of my childhood ... My dad was a preacher, and he made zines basically little handouts or he'd print stuff up, called it a church bulletin. But, you know, it was in my blood that printers' ink, because there were a group of men that came and help print those bulletins and things
GROSSMAN: I see.
CLARK: I would go with my dad to get ink at A.B. Dick or whatnot, the print shop's work. But I saw that you could really do it. It wasn't that complicated with the stapler and a printer, a press, which later became photocopying and very easy so ... That was another sort of origin story for pLopLop.
GROSSMAN: Well, since you're in addition to your many other artistic endeavors, you're also a poet and it seems to me fitting that he took after your dad because someone, somewhere said that basically the history of American poetry is poets reinventing the religion of their fathers.
CLARK: Right. Yeah, I feel that too because I saw him repeatedly speak, and he would do multimedia things with big pieces of paper he called charts, and they'd be literal drawings, illustrations with scripture or [with] whatever point he was going to make, and it was very multimedia in a way kind of advanced, and he even have had an overhead projector and draw and stuff, but that definitely made me feel like yeah this is doable. I just took it in a different direction.
GROSSMAN: I see.
CLARK: But it's still kind of trying to, you know, to speak to things and enlightenment which is too heavy of a term.
GROSSMAN: Which city did you grow up in, John? Where did you grow up?
CLARK: Well my formative childhood was in Louisville [KY.], so we moved there when I was in the fourth grade and so we lived there for about six years. But that was a great place, just a cool neighborhood, and just a fun, unique place to live in Louisville, but we moved to Tampa, and then that's where I started going to college, and I started getting involved in theater and blah blah blah and next thing I know I'm just doing plays, multimedia stuff and I'm kind of a ham because my dad was a ham, I mean he was a serious sort of preacher but he would always have jokes, and then when we moved to Tampa [Fla.] and he was teaching at this college, he would do these sketches and stuff with these guys and just be really silly and stuff, it was prepared me for Monty Python in that kind of crazy ....
John Clark’s father John Clark (the second).
GROSSMAN: Oh sure.
CLARK: [It] kind of punctured the pretensions ...
GROSSMAN: And there's a lot of that in pLopLop, that's for sure.
CLARK: Right, right.
GROSSMAN: John, when did you come to Indianapolis?
CLARK: The first time I came to Indianapolis was in the late 80s. Then I moved back to Tampa. And then I moved back to Indy, and that's where I just found the poetry scene. There was a contest called Poetry on the Buses. That was about 1990. And I just submitted a poem and it got accepted. I published a chapbook. There was a reading. It was my first reading was at the [Indianapolis Museum of Art] and was like this is pretty cool, I could get into this, but, you know, it was like a kind of quick plunge like suddenly there was a chapbook and there were placards on the bus. So the contest had these big basically advertising posters, but they were people's poems, and then introduced me to the community of poets in Indianapolis. I mean people I remember like Alice Friman, Bruce Gentry, and people like that … and … I’ve written this silly poem but I think maybe it, it just worked. It was silly enough kind of pop culture references.
GROSSMAN: Sure.
CLARK: Yeah, it was kind of like a stepping thing but I remember that at the IMA, that reading. It was like, yeah, this is really kind of fun. I wasn't nervous at all. And I later went on to do things at other IMA events. There was the Nam June Paik exhibit, and they would have poets and writers come in ream, so that was really cool. It was a chance to kind of collaborate with Nam June Paik and other artists and stuff, I mean he wasn't there, but it's very fascinating because one of the sculptures he had. He had a fax machine, which was kind of new then.
GROSSMAN: I see.
CLARK: But people could send in messages to the fax machine, and would print out in real time, so I had an accomplice at Borders, sending these faxes to that thing that had, like, pLopLop propaganda.
GROSSMAN: An early proto-internet.
CLARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GROSSMAN: So, what it was. pLopLop issue number three, which really kind of took off, wasn't it, it was called, what, “da turd issue”?
CLARK: A very bad pun, in honor of [Charles] Bukowski that's what it became. But I just learned about Bukowski from this book dealer out in California, who was a Bukowski and Brautigan fan. So we started talking about Brautigan. And then he's like, “Hey, do you know any Bukowski? I'm starting this newsletter. Can you do a drawing of him? And I said yeah I'll try it, you know, but. So that's how I learned about Bukowski, and then at borders again they have this source book, where they had addresses and writers from all over the country,
GROSSMAN: And Charles Bukowski was one of them?
CLARK: Well, I don't know, because he was in there. But that led me into finding through that bookdealer. He said you should try to write to him, you know? And I think Bukowski would say no visitors or something. But that's how I found other writers like Edward Field and Gerald Locklin, who recently passed, great writers like that, I'd heard their names and seen them in anthologies and at Borders and stuff. I'd submit, I'd send some self addressed envelopes. But that's how I did with Bukowski too and just sent him a self-addressed envelope and he filled it with poems. And he was like really appreciative to have a self-addressed stamped envelope, but I think he responded to a lot of people that weren't necessarily professional editors, people like from academia that much or anything. But I got lucky and then ... the reason why it was called the "duh turd issue" is because I'd asked him, I said "You're like the poet laureate of defecation, can you write something?" And it was a glorious celebration of just defecation … So I think it was called "I can or maybe I can't.” So, I don't know how brave ... I was like, Dang, this is cool. And when I got it in the mail, I just remember calling my friends, and saying you won't believe what happened, they rushed over and like this is unbelievable.
GROSSMAN: And he talked about something that we all do but seldom talk about.
CLARK: And that's where I was going somehow with poetry … It was a little more like performance art with a comedic bent, not like trying to be pretentious, and the host didn't really like that, one time he actually banned me, and it all worked out. I didn't take it seriously anyway ...
GROSSMAN: It was cancel culture way before cancel culture ...
CLARK: But for Henry Miller [whose book Tropic of Cancer was banned in the US for 30 years] all these people make the reputation by being banned … They want to suppress. It has an opposite effect.
GROSSMAN: I feel that for the audience, we should back up and talk a little bit about the origin of the name pLopLop and where that comes from.
CLARK: Sure. Well, I started being fascinated with surrealism and reading everything I could about it. and I started seeing this word appear Loplop because I was loving Max Ernst, and that's a character name he gave to this birdlike creature. So, yeah. When I decided to do the zine, it seemed to round it off to put a "p" at the beginning. That was immediately scatological, I guess, which Ernst and so many others especially Dali, were't afraid of, I mean there's so much scatological things in Dali, but, you know, in all of them just, you know, breaking barriers and stuff, so I just played around with it and wrote it down and "L"s were capital letters, and the rest were lowercase, but it seemed to have some sort of balance, like, it could be back and forth you know like backwards and forwards, but Max Ernst was a huge influence in the whole surrealist movement with collaborations, and doing exquisite corpses and things that were communal efforts and tapping into sort of just community vibe or just a whole thing where you just, by not thinking too much and [you] really are going to the place where it can be very different, I guess. [laughs] … It's a thing that anybody can do. So, some of them have slight little rules or guidelines but once you see how that works. there is a satori. There's an enlightenment … you're like, wow, you can do this. You don't have to try to think up a poem or wrack your brain to come up with the thing. You can just open yourself up and find accidents and just more playfulness …
GROSSMAN: Do you think that’s a fault of the education system? Because I think a lot of students grow up with the whole New Criticism idea that you take apart a poem and you try to figure out what it is from what is inside the poem and you get used to poets like T.S. Eliot whose poetry is dense and difficult and then, say, the English Romantics whose poems might have spoken to people at one time but might not necessarily speak to you. Was that your sense of it?
CLARK: Kind of … just the playfulness, though. When I did find out about the Beats, and they were learning from the Surrealists, and especially Kerouac with his spontaneous prose and [William] Burroughs with the cut-ups. I mean, a lot of times cut-ups are much more beautiful than trying to write something beautiful. But if you just cut it up and throw it in the air and let it land — and it doesn't always work — but that's part of the fun because it's not about perfection, I think. It's about exploration and playfulness and kind of just saying, yeah, you can do this. You don't have a degree or anything. I mean, you can do it. If you want to share it, that's fine. I think when one thing just leads to another and a lot of my education was through thrift stores and just going to Goodwill, Salvation Army, and taking a chance on a paperback that is a quarter. Looking at: I've heard somebody referenced that: I'll try this … And then suddenly it's what Kerouac called an adventurous education … I seem to have found the right books that seemed to work. So yeah, a big shout out to thrift stores and it goes with the records and just weird objects you might find …
GROSSMAN: So pLopLop went on, was probably strongest in the 1990s, probably mid 1990s it hit its apex, and you got a lot of different writers involved. One criticism I have heard is that it's kind of an all guys club but it's not exactly true, is it?
CLARK: No, I mean ... Eileen Miles was great, somebody that Kit [Andis] knew. [He] turned me on to her and Wanda Coleman, another great writer … I think I found her address in one of those books I mentioned and I think, three years after I sent that she sent something …
GROSSMAN: [Indianapolis-based poet] Deborah Sellers.
CLARK: Yes. We did chapbooks by you and Deb and Kit Andis. That's just kind of what you do. We get a zine and then people want to get involved and you meet them at readings …
GROSSMAN: Absolutely.
CLARK: And let's do the chapbook. … there was a cool printer in Indy called the Graphic Zoo, and they really got it. They were just their own little small company, but they would do things like have foil on the covers. So on our chapbooks, you know, there was a whole process and make it shiny and glinting and that was on the chapbooks.
GROSSMAN: And that was some on some of the lettering on [one of the p … I see it across the room and we'll have a picture of that on our site so people can see it. I have my own pLopLop story… I remember I walked into the Borders [in November, 1994] to begin my shift one morning. Well, to back up a little bit and explained this I had given a prose piece to some kind of contest jointly sponsored by Borders and the Writers Center of Indiana. And since I was newly hired by Borders, I figured, Okay, I'll just withdraw it. There's no point in keeping it there. But somehow you had seen that piece. So that's just the back up to this story I'm telling about me walking into work one morning, and Kit Andis is at the information desk and he says, "Yeah, we liked your piece and want to publish it in pLopLop." [And I say] “What’s pLopLop?
CLARK: "You're going to make it kid, you're on your way. [adapting the voice of a cigar-chewing talent agent]
GROSSMAN: And it was just the happiest feeling. I had just gotten out of Peace Corps and I was feeling fairly lost and here was this cool [group of people putting together a magazine} ... you guys fit right into the whole kind of thing that I was feeling or expressing in my poetry at the time so I thought my poem fit right in …
CLARK: A Surrealist twist or magical things but also straightforward ...
GROSSMAN: Yeah.
CLARK: I can't remember exactly how but I think maybe it was, somehow, a local publication or something. But yeah, it was just weird how that all kind of came together I should also mention like you had to recuse yourself ..
GROSSMAN: I should also mention that that day when I walked in, was the day after the November 1994 midterm elections when Newt Gingrich and his folks came to power. So I was feeling kind of low like Newt Gingrich kind of celebrated things that didn't really turn me on, like he celebrated like chain restaurants .. But anyway, moving on.
CLARK: Well, it goes back to placemaking, what it’s called now, a community where people can gather and you meet people unexpectedly, and [it] just sort of radiates and friendships can be forged that last decades and it's fun. But it was really the kind of thing where you just felt like, Oh this is cool: good information …
GROSSMAN: I mean at that time Borders felt like it had something of almost a university library vibe because there was so much knowledge available, and you could really discover things ...
CLARK: … somebody's going to know about this, like where the Torah is …
GROSSMAN: And then when {Borders] just kind of fell apart. I worked at Borders ... on and off until 2011 ... There were times when I wouldn't work there for several years, but I often came back working part time and … it turned for the worse, let's just say at Borders, and it felt like the stock was shrinking and like the perks for employees were disappearing and right but, I mean that's what happens. {Borders went bankrupt in 2011.}
CLARK: Seek out Kit's book Bookstore … a plug in there for Kit.
GROSSMAN: Absolutely. It's a great novel Bookstore. a novel which deals with a bookstore employee who can't get away from working with books, which we were just talking about. And we've both been there.
CLARK: That was great because later, once a month [in the mid-90s] I would drive down to Bloomington and host a reading at the Borders there. We were just in Bloomington yesterday. And once you say that at my apartment. We passed by there to get a smoothie, which we have to get when you go to Bloomington, it's a law, you have to get a smoothie.
GROSSMAN: And … a vegan taco.
CLARK: But anyway, those are great memories of just going down, hosting this reading. {It] was a challenge to break the ice and maybe call up some readers, which people did. I think people traveled from Indy to go there. … Chris Harter, another small press editor that had a zine called Bathtub Gin, he's a guy that I'm still in touch with. That's the other great thing about small press publishers and the whole network; it still goes on ... There's still people that are doing it and they're repairing mimeograph machines, and they just love that fact of that independent press, And that's another thing that I think is really important that could be a topic of a further broadcast.
GROSSMAN: Well that brings to mind the role of artwork, particularly your artwork in, pLopLop and a lot of the covers of pLopLops are or handpainted you took the time to actually hand paint each individual pLopLop cover for a time.
CLARK: And that's true and really think about it that much, but it was something that I was influenced by the great American poet Kenneth Patchen, who was amazing, amazing, poet and novelist and just, but he had these limited editions where he would paint on the covers, and I went to the lovely library, and saw some of the things they had in their collection it super inspired me. But it also was like, why not make this a unique thing? But it was also almost like shooting baskets, like I'm getting my wrist, like, to paint. I'm learning to paint and learn that was a way I had to do something. I mean the covers were printed with line drawings, and then it would pretty much encourage me or force me to fill in pain, that it really was just, it was fun, and it was also a way to just be again in that surrealist thing about automatic creation, and not overthinking it, and then just playing around and being a kid again. But yes, I think that was really directly a Kenneth Patchen thing and the fact that I learned about that and went to the Lilly Library and they were kind enough to show me these books that are just unbelievable. Anybody that's interested in the book arts, I mean, the typography within the books, the way they're bound. I mean the way that they would decorate them. Yeah, again another podcast. But yeah, it was just, I guess it wasn't too much thought around it.
GROSSMAN: As the 90s turned into the 2000s, pLopLop had a website, the beginnings of a website, but you guys never got really got into the internet ...
CLARK: I had run out of steam at that point. Because of the internet, I guess you could say in a way. The submissions weren't really coming in, and it's kind of just running out of steam anyway. It's almost like, go through the motions, not really, but you know it's just like, like, what, what .... it wasn't despair but, you know, but that makes me think of now and wanting, wanting to do a new issue. So that's something that I'm really looking into and I just want to do it right, but for the first time I'm thinking of doing a theme: the prose poem. It's a form that I'm really interested in. I was able to meet one of the masters, Russell Edson, at Butler. He came two times that I saw him. I talked to him a little bit, but he is a master of the prose poem, and also a great visual artists too I think. Maybe he was inspired by Kenneth Patchen. So that would be pLopLop # 14. I put out little hints and everything, but it's still kind of tentative. The idea is to have local bands or poets have recordings and include a CD; that may be ancient technology.
GROSSMAN: Yeah.
CLARK: Maybe cassettes are more in vogue now than CDs but, well that sounds that's really where, where it's at. I want to pick up steam, but there was definitely time where it just seemed like, try something else. No, that's fine.
GROSSMAN: Well that's something else, that became painting for you.
CLARK: That's true. And also I was getting more involved with Big Car [Collaborative] and doing placemaking and learning about that and being at the Murphy, but yeah, I definitely was just experimenting with a lot of canvases and transforming found canvases.
GROSSMAN: You’d find, say, a landscape at Goodwill and then you would paint some you're like trademark images.
CLARK: Part of the fun is, what is the smallest thing you can do to completely subvert, this thing, or, you know, Make it absurd or funny but yeah but that, that was definitely a fun experiment, and once big car moved into the Murphy, there was a big space that we were able to use and I was able to go bigger on canvases and kind of begin there ...
GROSSMAN: Do you find the same thrill going to a poetry reading now that you did before the internet ? Has the internet affected literary culture in any way?
CLARK: I don't really know because I don't keep up with it that much. I think what I'm really passionate about now is really finding out about the history of the underground press and all that stuff, the mimeo revolution, the diggers. I mean, there was a thing called a communication company that they would put out; it was basically like 1960s internet, because they would do these mimeographs, say, free food at Golden Gate Park or wherever … I'm really interested in this going back and learning more about small press editors and what they were into, and I really love literary anthologies, especially ones done by small presses. Those are amazing because they have interviews and it's very sort of experimental, but over the years I've collected a lot of them. And, they'll be packed with interviews, photographs, illustrations, and it's really just an amazing way to learn about stuff, and then certain people will pop up and you make connections and things like that.
GROSSMAN: So for you, I get the sense that there has to be something tactile, like making stuff that just appears in the cloud, doesn't interest you a whole lot.
CLARK: That's pretty much true. I love paper and drawing on it. Crumpling it up, or just being there. I mean I'll, I'll read maybe a library book on Kindle or something like that. But yeah, I really love the paper and especially with the frottage technique which is based on texture. And so I like to use a lot of leaves and anything textured and to do these rubbings to get an initial image, it's very efficient in a way, because you can take literally one second, and do a rubbing of a week and you've got, you know, a blueprint of what the drawing, accidents and all this kind of go off on that. And then, you know, spend a few minutes transforming it, and then looking at it maybe a half hour later and adding one or two little things to it. And, oh yeah, it's good. And maybe nobody will see it because it's on typing paper, but it's still keeping that wrist action …
GROSSMAN: Well it's been going on for a long time, I mean I think there's something very human, in the whole thing [in art].. I mean, if you go back and look at the [cave paintings in Lascaux, France] ...
CLARK: They were just seeing what they saw but twisting it a little bit, you know, adding their imagination.
GROSSMAN: And if we think that abstraction was discovered sometime in the 20th century, would be very incorrect ... people discovered a long time before.
CLARK: That's beautiful stuff. It hits me here in my inner ear: the great narration of what's his name, [puts on a German accent] Werner Herzog.
GROSSMAN: I've not seen it but I've heard about it [The Werner Herzog documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.]
CLARK: Early people, they had it, you know, it was like there was something in there, whatever it was, there was a need to do something and just goof off, or just use the hand wrist action or something.
GROSSMAN: I think that's the difference between say art and science I mean science you look at, like, a treatise, written 2000 years ago and like it seems incredibly dated because of course there was a lack of understanding about how physics work, such and such, but you don't get that with art ... you get direct communication.
CLARK: Yeah, there's something instant about it. And that's why the [San Francisco-based radical community-action group] the Diggers were using those mimeo-machines there was an instant chemistry. And it was using technology, crude technology but using it … to help people be more human, I guess. Let's just, let's have free food. Why not everybody meet … everybody who’s hungry ... And that's, in a way I think where we're at, again, food banks and people really realizing how you can just be kind to each other. It doesn't take that much effort.
GROSSMAN: That was almost the premise of the House Life Project that started up. Laura Holzman was involved in this. It was here in Indianapolis, basically what they did was just taking abandoned homes and turning them into temporary installation slash art gallery/ community gathering places.
CLARK: And it was, it was so cool to be involved in that because he would just hang out with people in the neighborhood and people would come and there'd be folding chairs and there'd be snacks, and it was very natural. But I had some experience with just doing placemaking things with Big Car … but the House Life Project was a whole other thing, I mean, it was really focused and there was some terrific publications that came out of that ... I still cherish that and just little meetings with people in little tiny .. enlightenments.
GROSSMAN: I went to one of those events, a real cross section of community people … curious people from people from farther away. And that was, what, around 10th street and almost downtown.
CLARK: Yeah, just south of 10th street two locations that I worked at ... But that was something I really love to do because I love to collaborate, especially with kids, just on simple drawing, where you just fold a piece of paper in half and, do an invisible collaboration. You open it up, it's kind of magical …
GROSSMAN: So John, when can we expect the next pLopLop?
CLARK: I think we're looking at a fall /winter issue, that's a great thing about zines, you can do that fall/winter … issue three and four together ...
GROSSMAN: That's great, John. I think we're rolling up towards the end and unless there's something, some question I didn't ask or something you want to add.
CLARK: I have no more wisdom.
GROSSMAN: No more wisdom. All I know is that I know nothing.
CLARK: I would say just try something. If you've never tried to draw just get a pencil on a piece of paper and scribble on it and then look at it and say “What is the potential?” and add a beak to it, or nine! It goes back into the fourth grade, when I was at Ellen, C. Simple elementary school in Louisville, Kentucky, near Churchill Downs. I was sitting on the floor of the school — I remember it as a marble floor — right outside the principal's office. We had a student teacher, and she was probably a high school teacher, and I said “I'm stuck. I don't know what to draw.” She said “Just scribble anything. Look at it like you're looking at a cloud, and turn in what you see.” And that was like the first surrealist lesson. And I've sort of carried that on. So yeah, thanks Dan. Good talking to you.
GROSSMAN: Good talking to John, it's been a lot of fun. All right, all right, all right, that ends our podcast I hope you all enjoy it. Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai, Reviewed and edited for length and clarity by Dan Grossman.
