Dates

• Existence: 1965 - 1974

Biography

Weed/Flower Press was founded in 1965 by Nelson Ball, one of Canada's most respected non-mainstream poets. Ball ran Weed/Flower Press for nine years publishing not only his own minimalist poetry, but also early works of some of Canada’s finest poets, among them, bill bissett, David McFadden and Victor Coleman, as well as poetry from America and Great Britain by Anselm Hollo, Clayton Eshleman and Carol Bergé.

During the life of Weed/Flower Press, Nelson Ball produced forty beautifully prepared and executed chapbooks and books. His wife, the painter Barbara Caruso, was responsible for designing some of the covers and her cover design for Rosemary Eckert’s 'The Story of Cinderella' (1970) won the ‘The Look of Books Award’. Also in 1970 Weed/Flower published bpNichol’s 'The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid', one of a collection of four titles for which Nichol received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for 1970. Weed/Flower published the first Canadian edition of Nichol’s Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (1973), originally published by Bob Cobbing in London in 1967; and Ball compiled its Coach House Books edition in 2004. Ball also published two poetry journals, Weed (1966–1967) and Hyphid (1967).

Among Weed/Flower’s contemporary small presses that sprang up in Toronto in the 1960s during the mimeograph revolution were bpNichol’s Ganglia Press and grOnk (with David Aylward); bill bissett’s Blewointment Press; and Coach House Press, before it grew into a literary press. One of the fundamental reasons why Nelson founded Weed/Flower was the autonomy that a sole editor enjoyed: the freedom to publish whatever he liked and to go in whatever direction that caught his fancy.

Financial gain was low on the list of expectations for Ball—intentionally so. He enjoyed exchanging his publications for titles from other small presses. Most of the poets he published had appeared in Volume 63 (a journal he had edited, while in his first year at the University of Waterloo, with Steve Buri), and Weed (his journal published under the Weed/Flower imprint). Weed/Flower titles were also available in London, England, through Diana Gravill and Nicholas Rochford’s Compendium Books, and Tony Godwin’s Better Books. Nelson met visiting non-Canadian poets such as Anselm Hollo, Clayton Eshleman, David Rosenberg, draft-dodging poets Joe Nickell and Doug Featherling, Diane Wakoski, and Allen Ginsberg.

Room of Clocks (1965) was the first of Ball’s own collections that he published under the Weed/Flower imprint. It was printed on a Gestetner; and collated, stapled, and folded by hand with the help of Barbara Caruso, who also designed the cover. There followed collections by Bergé, Hollo, and Eshleman. Eshleman had admired Barbara Caruso’s work and invited her to design a silkscreened cover for his The House of Okumura (1969). Too late was it realised that the cover, designed in full black, became marked and damaged very easily (the copy in the Sheffield collection is quite possibly the only one in existence with an undamaged, mint cover).

One of the standout Weed/Flower publications is the collaboration Points of Attention (1971). Minimalist poems by Ball are balanced by Caruso’s serene silkscreened plates with hand-mixed colours, smaller versions of her much larger Colour Lock canvases; one of the few hardback volumes from the press.

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