Peter Ganick started out in the Boston Massachusetts area in 1946. His father, William, was an advertising executive with Harold Cabot & Co., one of Boston's large agencies. He is retired and now, at age 90, lives in Needham Massachusetts in a retirement home. Peter's mother, Virginia, who died in 1994, was a pianist who worked in the Boston area as a legal secretary until she married William. They moved to Needham, then a radical move to the country which, being 12 miles west of Boston, their siblings thought to be a rural area. Peter is sure his interest in the arts, especially a first, music, was due to a lot of early exposure to Western classical music and the wonderful art museums in the Boston area---this due to his parent's influence. He was interested at first in music, attending the New England Conservatory of Music as part of his 18-years of piano lessons. His first teacher, Adele Bramson Ganick, before marriage was a concert pianist on cruise liners, then a satisfying appointment for a competent pianist. Peter started lessons at age 7 with her, but was dropped as a student for misbehaviour---probably because of the familiarity of Adele's being his aunt. He feels this outcome of his first lessons may have a lot to do with his teaching piano lessons since 1972 as a 'day-job'.

After studying with his aunt, he started lessons at the New England Conservatory Preparatory Department where he studied with Roland Hachet and David Barnett. He progressed somewhat during that time and went on to pursue Mathematics at Bard College in upstate New York. This decision was due to a pronouncement by Mr Barnett that although Peter was a talented pianist, 'gifted' as a sight-reader, Peter didn't have the discipline to become a concert pianist, once a goal of his. In recent times he is glad he is not a concert pianist, liking the freedom of existence rather than a career in music.

In high-school, at Needham High School, he participated in the marching band on flute and tenor sax, in the dance band (modeled after the Swing Bands of the 1940s and 1950s as pianist, and in a jazz quintet including, Bill Reddish, saxophone; Richard Batten or RIchard Yule, trumpet; Peter as pianist; David O'Keefe, bass; and, Bob Felkel, a college student at Boston College, on drums. The group was featured in assemblies at high school and we all were somewhat known for it. Bill Reddish was a charismatic saxophone player who was influenced, as was our quintet, by the John Coltrane Quartet, which was our model. Ganick considered a career in jazz piano, ultimately rejecting it.

Ganick attended two summer periods at the New England Music Camp in Waterville Maine to pursue his interests there. However, the greatest influence to his later life was the opportunity to study one summer in Pau France with the Classrooms Abroad program and another with the Marquette University Summer Program in Hildesheim Germany. Ganick experienced those countries before 9/11 and as an impressionable youth who was given this opportunity at an age when it would sink in. To this day he pursues interests in European culture and languages, being somewhat conversant in the French and German languages. He remembers renting a bicycle in Pau and during the afternoons which were unprogrammed, biking around the Southeast part of France.

Ganick attended Bard College starting in 1964, the year the (in)famous Sixties got into full gear. It was a puzzling time for all of us then and no one really understood all of what was happening at the time. Even now, in 2008, there's a debate as to what happened to America and the world and i submit the changes we went through at that time were as or at least as monumental as during the post-9/11 time in America. i realize that could be seen as an inflammatory statement, however, it's offered in good faith as merely an observation.

After having miserable experiences with second-year Calculus, Ganick quickly shifted his Major concentration to Music and passed the first part of the Bard program with a Moderation in Music. He studied piano with Kate Wolff (not the folk-singer), and studied composition with Jacob Druckman, a world-class composer and a large influence on Peter. The only English course Ganick took at Bard was the requisite Freshman Composition for which he received the grade of 'C'.

He moved back to the Boston area to finish up a Bachelor degree at Boston University where he experienced the full-swing of the Sixties, that is, from 1966 through 1969. He studied music composition with Gardner Read and Hugo Norden, piano with William Corbett, along with the usual (to music composition majors) coursework in theory, counterpoint, music history, conducting, chorus, and performance. During this period he met the composer, Luciano Berio, who to this day, has had a permanent influence in music and as how an artist (of any concentration) could be. Private composition study with John Huggler in Lexington Massachusetts and performing with Third-Stream musician, Ran Blake, were also experienced at the time.

During the period at Boston University, Ganick pursued his performing with rock n roll bands. At Bard College he performed first with a group named The Disciples, later at the college cafe with The Cellar Stairs. His instrument of choice was bass guitar. At Boston University, to snap back in times, he played tenor sax with a band named Crow, a 'rehearsal band' that never performed.

After Boston University, in 1969, 'fresh' out of college with a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition degree, there was a time where he wasn't sure where he wanted his life to go. It was summed up in a later (much later) song lyric of George Harrison's "when you don't know where you're going, any way will take you there". Attendance at a 1966 Beatles concert, a part-time job as an usher at Boston's Symphony Hall, attendance at Paul's Mall, a jazz club, where he heard/saw Coltrane's Classic Quartet and Sonny Rollins during the seminal Saxophone Colossus period. It should be mentioned at thie time that Ganick's maternal uncle, Richard Lapp, took him to Connoly's Star-Dust Room on Columbus Avenue in Roxbury Massachusetts during his high school period. Here, drinking expensive ginger ale, Ganick heard many excellent Bop and Progressive jazz musicians--- Miles Davis, Roland Kirk, Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Art Farmer, Oliver Nelson, Lee Morgan with their groups. It was a peek into the jazz culture as it was in those days.

Finally, he took on graduate studies in music composition at Brandeis University and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not completing the Master's degree in Composition, something to this day he has not regretted.

A period as a taxi driver in Roxbury, then working for a year at the Boston Public Library, and the decision was made to move back to Needham where he started teaching beginning and intermediate classical piano at the homes of students in the area. That was 1972 and he keeps his hand in that profession in West Hartford Connecticut, though the times they have been changing since then. Computer piano-teaching programs, the on-coming interest for young folks in popular music, the current state of the economy, and the shift in cultural focus in America since the time when Ganick started teaching piano he feels have 'cut into his business'.

For a period in the early 1970s, Ganick lived in the Fort Hill part of Roxbury where he started his first poetry press named Roxbury Poetry Enterprises with the publication of his own book, SOME POEMS, a photocopied pamphlet Ganick is fond of even now. Other poets published under that imprint were Will Bennett, Larry EIgner, Clayton Eshleman, and other books by Ganick. A few years later while living in Waban Massachusetts with a number of poets and musicians at the home of Jack Kimball, he continued the Roxbury Poetry Enterprises imprint and published pamplets by Brad Pearson and one issue of 'fish?' which included most of the folks living at the Kimball house and some others.

In 1980, when Ganick was iiving in Dedham Massaachusetts, an important event occurred when he went to a beach party in Rhode Island and met the woman who later became his wife, Carol. We were married in 1981 at the Unitarian Church in Needham Massachusetts by John Baker, minister. We have no children but have had a succession of wonderful dogs as room-mates, first Golden Retrievers and now a Welsh Corgi. We settled in the Elmwood section of West Hartford Connecticut in 1981. Peter transferred his piano teaching interest to West Hartford, still self-employed while Carol continued her occupation with the State of Connecticut, a position she retired from in 2002. In 2006, the Ganicks moved to a larger house in West Hartford which has a basement Carol can hold Art Classes. It should be mentioned that Carol is an accomplished artist, usually watercolors and abstract, having won many prizes in Greater Hartford art shows. She has taught at the West Hartford Art League, the Farmington Valley Art Center, and the Wethersfield Art League. Starting in 2007, she has been conducting painting workshops in the area and at the Ganick house. She is responsible for awakening Peter's interest in Art, when she started him with a watercolor set and some 8.5" X 11" paper when he was not sure what the next move was to be. Now, Peter's art interest is mostly in drawing, and he has participated in solo and group shows in the Hartford area.

In 1980, while living in Needham, Ganick started Potes & Poets Press, a move which would turn out to be significant in the history of LANGUAGE poetry. Along with The FIgures, Roof Books, Sun & Moon Press, This magazine, Tottel's magazine, P&P was instrumental in foregrounding that episode in literature. It's first two years P&P published a number of chapbooks, by Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner, Alan Davies, Dan Raphael, Bruce Andrews, Keith Rahmings, Clark Coolidgeo, and others. In his opinion, LANGUAGE poetry was instrumental in starting an attitude of experimentation in poetry. One of its primary attributes is the ability to use words and phrases in non-referential sequences of words, which allowed for disjunction in writing. A rough surface to the text was encouraged. This type of writing is still controversial being opposed to the Mainstream and Formalist poetries encouraged by a number of university writing programs.

In 1982, after moving into Elmwood Connecticut, and with a generous injection of seed money from his parents, he started to publish perfectbound books. The first books were of differing types of writing: Cid Corman, Carla Harryman, Bruce Andrews Theodore Enslin and a total of 63 perfectbound books. A list of these books can be found somewhere no doubt, in the haste to write this essay, I encourage readers to go to other sources, probably on the Internet, for this information. Encouraged by his father's expertise in advertising, he books were promoted by direct mail campaigns to lists purchased from the American Writing Programs and other organizations.

Somewhere along the line, P&P secured 501(c)3 non-profit status, bringing the price of mailings within reach. It also enabled it to apply for grants from government agencies---in the 1980s, P&P received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Connecticut Endowment for the Arts. Books were distributed by the new organization, now very important in the small press movement, Small Press Distribution---but also, by Sun & Moon Press, then a distributor as well as a publisher.


Ganick never had a 'mission statement' for P&P, but decided he would always publish challenging texts in affordable, attractive editions and that he would not promote the same artists over and over, but try to publish a range of authors, touching on a number of writers' worlds.


Around this time, he started A.BACUS, a newsletter format, single-author publication, pubished 8 times a year. While never having too large a readership, A.BACUS published approximately 140 issues before Ganick handed the editorship over to Dan Featherston, who was living in Arizona at the time. Too many authors than can be listed in this short essay were published by A.BACUS. At first, concentrating on LANGUAGE poets; and then, encouraging newer or lesser-known poets.


With the advent of desk-top computing and the Internet, Ganick started
POTEPOETZINE and later, POTEPOETTEXT. These were online publications sent in text-format to subscriber's email inboxes. The ZINE was in magazine format, the TEXT featured one author in a lengthier publication. The ZINE had approximately 30 issues, the TEXT approximately 20 issues. Ganick has kept few records of these publications A.BACUS, POTEPOETZINE, and later, poethia, another text-format online zine sent to subscriber's inboxes. It should be pointed out that while A.BACUS was purchased in an annual subscription, the online ventures were distributed without charge. Another series of "EXTRAS', or large chapbooks were issued in the early 1990s.

In 2002, Ganick attended the Be-Blank conference at Ohio State University organized by John M. Bennett. He had known of the poets who would attend this conference, and shared with them a curious characteristic concerning their own writing: we had all worked diligently at writing for a number of years, but had gained a level of exposure we desired at the time. This conference proved seminal in Ganick's development. Here he met
in-person writers he'd been in contact with for years. A life-long friend, Sheila E. Murphy; mIEKAL aND whose press Xexoxial Editions (then called Xerox Sutra Editions until pressure from the Xerox company occurred) published his first perfectbound book, HYPERSPACE CANTATAS. This book is being reprinted in 2008 in a facsimile edition. aND started the Internet mailing list, spidertangle, at that conference.

Later books were published by Avenue B, Drogue Press, Chax Press as well as self-published under the Potes & Poets imprint. Numerous chapbooks have been published and continue in that vein.

In the early 1980s, in Connecticut, Ganick met Dennis Barone, with whom he edited an important anothology of poetry, The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets. The book is important in that it featured approximately the same number of female as male writers, which, now in the first decade of the 21st century, is not a surprising for an anthology. Barone teaches at Saint Joseph College and for a number of years would meet with him every Friday morning for breakfast, which was always a pleasant event.

Around 2000, P&P had become over-committed to writers and Ganick felt he needed to concentrate on his own writing and his new interest, visual art. He sold P&P to Beth Garrison who carried the name forward for a few years afterwards, and fulfilled the commitments Ganick made. For this, he is very grateful.
However, with a friend who he met from poethia days, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, he couldn't stay out of publishing too long---so, with Kervinen, Blue Lion Books was founded in 2003. It is operative today as a print-on-demand press. For publishers wanting to operate on shoe-string budgets, print-on-demand is ideal. The imprint has continued to this day, publishing 'experimental' poetry/literature.

Two new literary friends came onto-the-scene as well. From Charlottesville Virginia then, Roanoke Virginia now, Jim Leftwich's first large book, DOUBT, was published by P&P.This book started the ideal of a long text in Ganick's mind, which to this day is a feature of Blue Lion Books who published texts of over 250 pages. Leftwich is a prolific author and visual poet who published Xtant Books, and recently the blog, textimagepoetry.

J Hayes Hurley, who lives in Avon Connecticut, a town adjacent to West Hartford, brought and refined philosophy into Ganick's mind. A talented, but, at the time, lesser-known novelist, Blue Lion Books has published a number of his novels, as did P&P before. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University and works as an Adjunct in Philosophy in local colleges.


This essay is no doubt incomplete and it was written hastily. I promise to revise it and perhaps, with the reader's patience, expand on it at a later date. I hope oversights with be forgiven and brought to the my attention for future revisions. Write me at <[email protected]>