After reaching out to him, Dr. Sappol was kind enough to respond to an interview about his work on Personal Injury. This took place over email in April 2019.

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As a starting point, how did you begin working on Personal Injury? There were many other magazines from the same period, in New York, to publish works to, so why create your own?
 
I was very young, in my mid-20s, wanted to be a writer of some kind, an avant-gardist. And I wanted to be part of a scene. There was a poetry scene in New York, several poetry scenes, some overlapping. No one was policing the boundaries of poetry vs. prose, writing vs. performance art. And after Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Richard Hell, the boundary between poetry and songwriting/music-making. It was all quite eclectic. There was the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Franklin Furnace, the Ear Inn, all these poetry-reading, writers-reading venues.
 
Self-publishing, friends-publishing pretty much went with the scene. The poets in New York did it, the poets in Washington and Boston and other cities did it. That’s what you did. You published your friends and yourself and anyone else who cared to come aboard. There was a kind of self-selecting aesthetic. In my groups, we rejected poetry that was too flowery or pretentiously high-flown philosophical or too confessional. We were anti-Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. We tended to favor smart-ass-ism. But past that, you could do almost anything.

Was Personal Injury mimeographed or printed in a more traditional press? Relating to the production of the magazine, how did you distribute the copies - for example, through a mailing list or on shelves at a store?

There was a mystique of mimeograph in the downtown writing scene, and especially at the St. Mark’s poetry project. These mimeographs were made by using a typewriter typing on a mimeograph master sheet, and then run off on a mimeo printing machine. Mimeograph was super cheap, a technology made for schools and offices, for small batch printing. (It was made obsolete by photocopy machines, which started taking over the market in the 1970s.) But I was coming in late in the game, when the mimeograph mystique was waning, and offset lithography was becoming cheaper. And there was the Print Center, a non-profit print shop in Brooklyn, run by artists and writers as a kind of co-op, which survived on funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, maybe also other sources. The aim was to foster poetry, avant gardism. The Print Center had special IBM selectric variable space typewriters, with special type-head balls and could make camera-ready pages that looked as though they were typeset. They also had offset presses, paper folding machines, staple binding machines, paper cutting machines, all the stuff that you would find at small batch job printer of the time. Lots of poetry, "experimental fiction", and other arty things were produced and printed there, including Personal Injury (PI). As for distribution of PI, I had a few subscribers, gave most of the magazines away, also sold it in a few New York book stores that had poetry sections with lots of little magazines (e.g., Eastside Bookstore, 8th Street Bookstore, Gotham Bookmart).

When I was initially looking through the magazines on the Independent Voices archive, I was immediately drawn to Personal Injury over other magazines due to the visual imagery. From what I could see on the database though, adding pictures was something uncommon in poetry magazines, so how did you come to this decision? What was the intention behind including these visual elements? From personal experience, I find that visuals tend to break text into more manageable chunks, but I was wondering if there was any additional aesthetic connection between the medical imagery and the content published.
 
We loved Dada and surrealism, collage, bricolage, montage. Anything which mixed things up, anything that juxtaposed disparate elements. That was true in both the texts, and the text/image mash-ups. The Dadaists and surrealists loved to pick among the rubble and debris of medical, commercial advertising, sentimental novels, technical illustration and diagrams, and so did we. PI was more visual than most little magazines, partly because it was easier to incorporate visuals in offset lithography than in mimeo, and partly because I loved to play with visual elements, loved to arbitrarily collect comic books and thrift-store books with charming visual elements, on any topic: mathematics, psychology, zoology, anatomy. And because they were all used, they were all in some fashion historical. I had a large pile of such books. The medical images effected a charming estrangement, but so did everything. And eventually that was what I studied when I became a historian.
 
One other point: intellectual property. I didn’t think about, and if I had thought about it, wouldn’t have respected it. I liked to take things out of context, so no captions identifying the source. Some of the images had some of the original captioning, others none at all. Now I wish I knew where some of these things were from- for example that wonderful psychiatric diagram of all the emotions.
 
What was the writing scene like at the time? Clearly, New York was a hot spot for artists, poets, and students alike, especially in East Village where you were located. Were all of the authors you published also from that same area? Did many/most of them send submissions to your listed address, or did you meet the authors in person before publishing their work? As a follow up to that, were there a lot of social events where you could meet and/or collaborate with other poets, or did you meet through shared contacts or something else entirely?
 
There were many writing scenes, many writing events: poetry readings all over town, in bars and bookstores and universities and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Creative writing classes. Mostly downtown, East Village and Bowery, but also West Village, Upper West Side, Brooklyn. Remember this was the post-war baby boom generation. Demographically odd: huge numbers of people in their teens, 20s and 30s. We had a kind of generational hubris, arrogance. We tended to dismiss the elders, we thought we were going to change everything, although we did have a sense that we were part of longer lineages of avant-gardes… A lot of congregating in bars, parties in apartments and lofts… A lot of drug-taking… A lot of fucking and sexual perversity, both hetero and homo…
 
We thought that New York was the center of the universe, but New York wasn’t the only place. Writers came from out of town to give readings in New York. New Yorkers went out of town to give readings in Boston, DC, Chicago, etc. Not sure of PI’s authors percentages. Most from New York. A lot of them from the Washington, DC scene (many of them going on to form and join the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group): P. Inman, Tina Darragh, Doug Lang (originally from Wales). Opal Nations (England). Tom Ahern (Providence). Some transient writers, who floated around just briefly. Others fairly established in the New York scene: Alice Notley, Jim Brodey. The only one who really busted out of all that: Eileen Myles (not yet a lesbian, lived in the West Village). All of those were personally known to me (I think except Opal Nations, whose work I had read). A few were totally unknown to me, submitted their writings with an SASE, by mail. I really can’t remember how many people submitted, and how many I rejected, but I think I did reject some. The whole process was wayward and eclectic. I wanted poetry that wasn’t especially poetic, but somehow was anyway.
 
About Peter Inman's interview with you from the first issue: was this an actual interview, i.e. he prepared a list of questions and you answered them, or an example of a written collaboration between the two of you? It struck me as a rather odd format to include in a poetry magazine, but also reminded me in a bizarre way of Ted Berrigan's "interview" with John Cage.
 
Not an actual interview, just a bit of clowning… Just one of many collaborations. Everyone was doing them; they could take many different forms. But there’s a lot in there. You could follow every single one of those references: orange claw hammer (Captain Beefheart); Blue Cheer (an excessive and incompetent one-hit psychedelic band, known for being the loudest band of the day); Lewis Macadams (obscure third-generation New York School poet). The bricolage of media and literary references was a new kind of poetry. Sort of like search engine searches are a new kind of reading nowadays…
 
For my final question, is there any particular way or mindset with which you would recommend approaching the poems included, especially the ones you wrote? You may not be able to speak for the other poets, but I was wondering if you were looking for anything in particular to fit to a certain aesthetic when going through the submissions.

Well, it’s a historical artifact, a relic of a different time and place and politics and sensibility, a relic of a group of people who were arrayed in scenes. So place it: New York in the 1960s and 1970s seemed like it was falling to pieces. We were raised in the church of modernity, to faithfully believe in progress, and then there was the reality of New York falling apart, burning down, a halt to progress… And then there was the proliferating media of our time: even before the internet and the digital era, a proliferation of images and published writings and artworks and information. And we gloried in that, and gloried in desecrating that. We collectively subscribed to a certain vision of democracy, a democratizing culture of literature and art. Don’t take art too seriously, but take it very seriously for all that. Don’t be pretentious; be pretentious! Art can’t redeem you, but live with art and without redemption. An amateurist ethos: write without having a university degree, without knowing a lot about literature and art, but knowing about literature and art is also good. An autodidactic sensibility: be interested in everything, make it yours.
 
And then there’s what’s in the poems: which you can close-read for pleasure (and we were a pretty jokey group of writers) and for the particulars of the human condition, the writers’ and your own… We were writing for ourselves and for posterity (as we conceived it to be). And writing for you to come along a few decades later. Judge for yourself. I read PI and see my youth—juvenilia—but some of the writing (my own and the others), speaks to me still.