"I'm going to do it all wrong. Totally wrong. Which would be the right way to publish poetry." - Jay MillAr

Like bill bissett (yes, the b's are lower case) 30 years before him, Jay MillAr (yes, he spells it with a capital A) does things his own way. Bissett is a West Coast literary legend Jack Kerouac once called "the greatest living poet today." MillAr is the founder and proprietor of BookThug, a small Canadian publisher that he describes as "a weird library that borrows from both old and new ideas to produce a collection of interesting books." MillAr also runs Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, an "imaginary" online bookstore that eschews bestsellers in favour of more esoteric work -- mostly experimental literature and hard-to-find collections of poetry, including one written by the World Wide Web.

MillAr, 35, describes Apollinaire's Bookshoppe as "imaginary" not just because it's an online-only operation, but also because "it's the kind of bookstore that has been in my imagination for a long time because I could never actually find it. I think it exists in other people's imaginations as well." Together, MillAr's enterprises are helping to secure a place for poetry in the 21st century.

'Enthralled and frightened'

Edmonton-born and now living with his wife and two sons in Toronto, MillAr was inspired to start BookThug after attending a reading by bill bissett in 1992, where he was "both enthralled and frightened" by the poet's performance. Soon after he discovered bissett's unconventional blewointment press and decided to start up a contemporary equivalent, also featuring young, cutting-edge poets.

Gregory Betts, one of MillAr's authors, describes his publisher in terms that could as easily apply to bissett's groundbreaking endeavours. "There are old cranks in the poetry community today that resist the rebelliousness of BookThug and cringe at the violation of established norms and habits. These writers have a hard time understanding both the essential value of experimentation, let alone the need to explore new modes of thinking about writing. BookThug, on the other hand, seems to begin from the premise that these questions, these violations and these challenges are worth attempting."

But first things first. Why the capital "A" in MillAr's last name?

"It's really a mnemonic device so that people will ask why it is there," he says. "The name is pronounced 'Miller,' so growing up I was always correcting people on the spelling." The capitalization further evolved when he received a nickname that emphasized the second syllable -- Millar. "I have to admit that names for me are weird. My real name is John -- a tradition in my family is to name the first-born John, and then never call him that."

Visions of boondoggle

As for other unusual names: "BookThug started out in 1992 as Boondoggle Books. I found the name in the dictionary. It's a military term that means to carry out useless and trivial actions with the appearance of doing something important.

"I ran Boondoggle mostly to publish my own terrible early work, but I published a few other writers as well, until around 1995 when I changed the name. BookThug comes from a poem by Daniel f. Bradley called PROLE, which we included in his Boy's First Book of Chlamydia."

For a niche publisher, BookThug's variety is vast, ranging from Gregory Betts' "anagrammatical wonderbook" If Language; to Rob Read's O SPAM, POAMS; to Morten Sondergaard's Vinci, Later, a translation of Danish poetry; to Jon Paul Fiorentino's Selected Losses, "an irreverent and energetic exercise in the poetic language of loserdom."

'Invaluable' cyber-resource

Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, in turn, was created to support BookThug through web-based sales of its books, as well as those of other publishers. Its tongue-in-cheek slogan, "Selling the books no one wants to buy," is at once whimsical and hard-nosed. "I worked for many years in a large used bookstore with a surprisingly large poetry section," says MillAr. "Which never sold anything. I do love people who prove my slogan wrong, but I also understand that the kind of books that I sell and publish are not the kind of thing that average readers are looking for."

The bookshop is named for Guillaume Apollinaire, the famous early 20th-century French poet and publisher who, says MillAr, "wrote some of the most innovative poetry of his day and supported himself for a while writing rather outrageous pornography. My friend Stephen Cain gave me the name. He joked that it could be a poetry and pornography store. I also like that Apollinaire invented the term 'surrealism' and was present at Theatre des Champs Elysees on the 29th of May, 1913, for the opening of Nijinsky's Rite of Spring."

Says poet Fiorentino: "I think Jay provides an invaluable resource for those of us who care about poetry. His bookstore makes rare and out-of-print works by important artists available. His enthusiasm for innovative poetry is second to none." Vancouver poet and academic Steve Scollis, author of the BookThug-published collection Blackberries, agrees. "Jay's efforts are taking up a very important place: publishing excellent work, and promoting/selling the real connoisseur's books -- the rare but-oh-so-good stuff, the stuff poets read and say, 'yeah, that's poetry.'

"So many of us across the country are paying attention to BookThug's publications and watching the Apollinaire site for news. Everyone who's seen my book either knows of Jay already, or immediately asks, 'who is this guy?'"

Shunning government gravy

MillAr has opted out of the usual funding strategy that virtually every small press in Canada relies on. "Most presses agree that literature can't happen without funding, but I'd like to think that, if it was done differently than 'normal,' it might succeed without support. I really admire the B.C. press called Blackfish that had the slogan 'Published in B.C. without government support' in the colophon of their books -- but I also know that Blackfish doesn't exist anymore."

Not that he's about to start filling out grant applications. "Government funding just means too many hoops to jump through." He is also concerned that federal and provincial support for the arts, with its inherent rules and regulations, will eventually lead to homogenization of published works. And he bemoans the lack of popular support for artists. "In Canada, the arts are funded through taxes, and people don't understand what they're supporting. In the States, every small press has someone on the phone all the time calling people, asking for money. Americans know what they're supporting and they're willing to pay for these kinds of books."

Does he think the world of poetry prizes, like the Griffin Prize (the richest in the world at $50,000 for a single book of poetry), are useful tools to bring poetry into the mainstream? He describes prizes and "award-winning authors" as contrived marketing tools, "poetry imitating fiction," but says he sees a silver lining. Christian Bok's Eunoia -- a controversial prose poem in five chapters, each of which uses only a single vowel -- won the Griffin Prize in 2002 and sold over 11,000 copies (a runaway bestseller given that novels that sell 5,000 in Canada are considered major successes). "People liked Eunoia or hated it, but at least they reacted to it. Eunoia got people talking. And that's what I want to do. Encourage dialogue.

"That's why I joined the League [of Canadian Poets]. To shake things up from the inside."

Poetry's pulse

Somewhere in the swirl of running a publishing house and online bookstore, agitating for poets, raising a family and collecting research data on mice (for a biologist at Lakehead University), MillAr finds time to write. His most recent book, False Map for Other Creatures, published not by BookThug but by Nightwood Editions in its new blewointment press series, is an attempt to part ways with the literary crowd. "Right now, I seem to be interested in the idea of poetry as thinking in language -- trying to write poems without having them be part of a greater constraint than writing a poem."

The consensus in the small press Canadian literary world is that Jay MillAr works tirelessly, through BookThug and Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, to support poetry and the arts. Two adjectives often connected to bill bissett and his endeavours -- hopeful and idealistic -- are also routinely applied to MillAr. But given all that's stacked against it, does he really think poetry is alive and well in Canada today?

"Oh yes. Certainly. Totally."

If anyone would know, he would.

Deb McVittie, new owner of independent 32 Books Company in North Vancouver, also facilitates writing workshops and teaches online for Malaspina University-College. She passionately believes in the power of words, the importance of community and the value of doing something "just for fun."

• Related Links:

• heartrants by Jay MillAr
• Poems by bill bissett
• The Apostrophe Engine (use the World Wide Web to write a poem)