Ron Kolm


Ron Kolm is an American poet, editor, activist and bookseller, based in New York City.

Biography

Kolm came to New York in 1970 and got a job at the Strand bookstore, where he worked with Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. Kolm's career in NYC independent bookstores spanned some forty years. After he left the Strand in 1975 he got a job at the Eastside Bookstore on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place where he worked with the future owners of St. Mark’s Bookshop: Bob Contant, Terry McCoy, Peter Dargis, Tom Evans and Ross Lumpkin. It was during this period that Kolm experienced the highs and lows of the pre-gentrified East Village; incidents he later incorporated into his fiction. In 1979 he began working at New Morning Bookstore in Soho, at 169 Spring Street. When it became clear that New Morning was going to close, Ron landed a job at the original Coliseum Books on 57th Street; a position he stayed at for twenty years, with a four-year sabbatical in the mid-1980s, when he worked at St. Mark's Bookshop. During this hiatus, there was a 'fiction revival' in the Lower East Side, and Kolm published stories in many of the small magazines that thrived during those years: Joel Rose and Catherine Texier's Between C & D magazine, Kurt Hollander's Portable Lower East Side, Michael Carter's Redtape, the Gary Indiana issue of New Observations and Bob Witz's Appearances. When Coliseum Books closed, Kolm worked for a year at Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway at Astor Place, before being rehired by the new Coliseum Books on 42nd Street. When that store closed due to the changing nature of bookselling, Ron continued his career at Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal. That location closed in late 2014 because of impending construction and moved to Brookfield Place in the World Financial Center. The Brookfield Place store closed in 2015. Kolm now works at the Posman Bookstore in Chelsea Market on the west side of Manhattan.
By 1980 Kolm established his own small press; Low-Tech Press. Before calling it quits a decade later, he had assembled a backlist of ten books. As he said to Levi Asher of Literary Kicks: "I published Art Spiegelman, Tuli Kupferberg and Hal Sirowitz, among others."
Kolm's publications include The Plastic Factory, Welcome to the Barbecue, Rank Cologne, Divine Comedy and Suburban Ambush. He has collaborated on a novel, Neo Phobe, written with Jim Feast. In May 2015 Unknown Press brought out a collection of his Duke and Jill stories that had been widely published in various journals and anthologies: Too Much: Tales of Excess, Have a NYC 2: New York Short Stories and Have a NYC 3: New York Short Stories, The Hobo Camp Review and Public Illumination Magazine among others. A collection of Kolm's short fictions, Night Shift, came out from Autonomedia in 2016. His work can also be found, along with the other Unbearables, in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry edited by Alan Kaufman, and in Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Literary Scene, 1974-1992.
In 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, Ron Kolm participated in Michael Rothenberg's and Terri Carrion's international event, One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change. In 2013 he became a member of Brevitas: a community of invited poets who email 1 to 2 original poems to the group on the 1st and 15th of each month. Kolm has also been the featured weekly poet in the Poetry Super Highway three times; the second was in January 2014 and the third was January 2015. He's had new work published in MungBeing, Urban Graffiti, Gathering of the Tribes and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright's Live Mag!.
Kolm read at the 2014 Sprachsalz in Hall, Austria, in September, 2014. He previously read and performed his work in Prague, in 2012, and in Florence, in 2013.
In June 2014, Ron Kolm became a member of PEN.
Historian Robert Siegle describes Kolm as "an editor and facilitator for magazines and presses as well as a writer of fiction and poetry" who "carried boxes of little magazines around to bookstores, passed around copies of new work, and connected people" in general, noting that "wherever we look along with the networks that hold together the diverse creative talents who constitute this cultural revolution, we find Kolm."
In 2012 Ron Kolm became a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin Magazine, and the editor of the Evergreen Review.
On June 6, 2013, Kolm was presented with an ‘Acker Award’ at a ceremony in the Angel Orensanz Foundation by Clayton Patterson, for his editorial work. Ron Kolm and Jim Feast, who was also given an award, got them largely for their work at the Evergreen Review.

The Ron Kolm Collection

The Ron Kolm papers were purchased by the Fales Library at New York University, where they now reside. The Finding Aid to the Ron Kolm Papers is available online: Since placing this collection in the NYU Library, Kolm has continued to build archives of Downtown materials, with an emphasis on Unbearables publications. There are now archives at The University of Rochester library, the Avant Writing Collections at Ohio State University, The Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the main branch of the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art Library and the library at Poets House in New York City.

The Unbearables

Kolm became friends and colleagues with a group of writers who would come to exemplify the "Downtown" scene of the 1970s and 80s. In 1985, Kolm, Bart Plantenga, Mike Golden, and Peter Lamborn Wilson founded the Unbearable's, a loose collective of poets and artists based on Wilson's precepts, as set forth in his seminal book, TAZ. Hakim Bey posits that one can liberate a public space, do an event on it, and then relinquish it, not wishing to become 'the oppressor.' The Unbearables used this aesthetic in the staging of their actions: they picketed the New Yorker magazine, complaining about the bad poetry being published therein; they lined the Brooklyn Bridge every September 13 and read erotic poetry to people walking home from work, they took over the New School and mounted a series of anti-seminars. Their first reading series was at the Life Cafe in the East Village. David Life, the owner of the Life Cafe, gave them berets and renamed them 'The Unbearable Beatniks of Life.' Shortly after this, they did an event they called 'The Crimes of the Beats,' during which they dropped the word 'Beatnik' from their name, becoming simply 'The Unbearables.' They later read or performed their work at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, Gathering of Tribes and the Bowery Poetry Club. Their usual targets are literary cliches, which they attempt to deconstruct with humor.
Kolm has been one of the editors of their anthologies: Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Help Yourself!, The Worst Book I Ever Read and The Unbearables Big Book of Sex all published by Autonomedia. They are currently working on their sixth one, From Somewhere To Nowhere: The End of the American Dream.
The Unbearables, who include Kolm, Sharon Mesmer, Max Blagg, Chavisa Woods, Michael Carter, Jim Feast, Bonny Finberg, John Farris, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Merry Fortune, Joe Maynard, Alfred Vitale, Shalom Neuman, Jill Rapaport, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Hal Sirowitz, Sparrow, Susan Scutti, Mike Topp, Lee Klein, Carl Watson, Carol Wierzbicki, Bart Plantenga, Tom Savage, Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo, Tsaurah Litzky, Fly and many others, continue to publish and perform in a variety of configurations and at a plethora of venues.