Supermachine Poetry Journal is a indie literary publication endeavoring to give young writers and readers a place where they can voice their thoughts, collaborate, and share their work with the world. Now, after releasing two issues to much critical acclaim, they’ve turned to Kickstarter to support their 2011 “literary season.”

Ben Fama is the editor and publisher of Supermachine, and he’s also a poet whose chapbooks happen to be sitting on my coffee table right now. I love what Ben and his coterie of bearded poets are doing with live events, print design, and indie publishing, so I was excited to get in touch with him to hear more about his thoughts on fundraising and writing in community (and also tell him I have his chapbooks on my coffee table). Check out his thoughts below, support his project here.

First things first: what is a Supermachine? What makes it so super?

Supermachine started as a ‘zine I was doing when I lived in Blacksburg, Virginia. It was kind of a bicycle advocacy and culture-jamming type of xerox’d thing. I wanted to be real punk, I was growing a serious beard and I was riding around on this tall bike (which is two bike frames welded together so you are up twice as high) and doing all kinds of critical mass organization. I was also writing then, so the publication then was a mix of prose things and various other rants. I was young!

When I moved to Brooklyn, that kind of fell away but my desire to draw an immediate community together to share in intimate things didn’t go away. I started doing the SUPERMACHINE Reading Series for this reason, and it moved into a journal, which has now grown into this official thing that even has a barcode, but our distributor says that will help it get into more bookstores. I couldn’t be happier with it all. I think if the old me with the big beard saw the product I am involved with after all these years, he would be happy (and he would tell me to ride my bike more in NYC).

In your video you talked about having a bunch of your writers jump in a van and hit the road to go do poetry readings. I also noticed on your website that you guys are hosting what is said (by you) to be THE PARTY OF A LIFETIME. Why do you think doing events is important to you guys? Do you see it as part of what you are doing itself, or a sort of promotional leg?

Putting on readings and events is something that everyone involved with SUPERMACHINE really takes a lot of pleasure in, and it is very close to the heart of what we are trying to do, for sure. When there is a calling by other cities to bring our writers, we always do it. We’ve been to Philly a few times, Amherst, Beacon, Washington D.C. We try and bring people from NYC that have been published in our recent issue. Writers have to spend a lot of time in solitude with their own ideas, so to be able to get people together to celebrate this whole ritual, and to be able to see what everyone has worked so hard on, is always very compelling and inspiring. I really wanted to show side of what we try to do in our video—the sense of magical occasions that SUPERMACHINE tries to provide for the writing community.

Fundraising on Kickstarter is all about inciting a community to action—sometimes your own, sometimes beyond your own reach to complete strangers who find your story compelling. Does this come pretty naturally to you or does asking people for money feel weird?

Asking for money is something I’ve had to learn to do, because when I started all of this, I was pretty much giving copies away just to get the name out. The other editors had to sit me down and talk to me about actually coming up with a sustainable way to distribute the journal to as many people as possible. There is no way I would have started a Kickstarter campaign if I didn’t think that the rewards we could offer were worth the amounts being asked for. We are offering a years subscription to the journal (2 issues), plus two signed chapbooks for $30 dollars. The actual value is around $45-50, and this has been our most popular reward tier. We’ve been gaining a lot of subscribers this way.

You seem to really emphasize aesthetics and production in what you make. I love all of it. Do you feel like “nowadays” if you are going to make a book or a journal or a pamphlet, you should have fun with it, delight the reader whenever you can, enjoy the process?

Design and aesthetics are so hard for me, because there is this schizoid mix of me wanting the designs to be right there at the edge of things talking back to whats happening in other genres (music, visual art, and various other sub-cultures), but still feeling a responsibility to the other editors and especially the authors we publish to make our journal into something that is respected by the greater reading audience. That means doing things in a way that still exudes the wildness of Supermachine, but also in a way that will still, for instance, appear to my extended family like a literary magazine. Book designers get into trouble a little if they over design a book because people desire it as an art object, not as a book that is purchased to read, and so the book will only exist as an art object to be owned and displayed, not as a book to be read, abused, smudged, dog-eared, stuffed under your pillow before sleep and dreamt about and so on. People buy it as a gift to give someone else, not to read themselves. That is one of the best lessons I have learned about designing books.