"I was Hitler, but I was a good Hitler," Fagin says with a characteristic smile at the Brookline headquarters of the reincarnated press, an hour from Harvard. "I came back to New York in 1967 to live permanently, and right away was involved in a community of writers. My way of being involved was to cleave them to me and control them all by starting a little magazine. It became a kind of benign power, and at the same time a friendly way to involve myself. That was my original motivation."

As co-director of the New York Poetry Project, a landmark venture located in the basement of St. Mark's Church that sponsored hundreds of public readings, Fagin had "instant accessibility" to the best work then being produced. "If somebody read something that I heard and I liked I could run up and say "I want that!" People might as well have moved into the church and written poetry, and I would have printed it."

Imagine stacks of paper on a basement table; Ashbery's sorting to your left, and Ginsberg's stapling to your right. "Everyone was loose and free and easy," Fagin says of the pseudo-utopia he and his writer friends created. "I know it seems idyllic, but maybe it was." Like the School of Paris in painting, the New York School of Poets-closely linked to emerging abstract expressionist artists-was simply a group of writers defined by their common vocation and narrow geographical living space.

"The key," Fagin explains, "was speed. We were able to run an issue off over the course of a night, collate it, put the covers on, staple and distribute-instant publication." One of Fagin's greatest credits is publishing Ashbery's "The New Spirit," included in his Three Poems of 1972. Many see the landmark prose poem as responsible for introducing the form into modern poetry. Charles North, who also read at the Harvard reading, had his first book published by Fagin and insists that it was "the best poetry venture in my lifetime."

The press stopped publishing in 1976, due in part to a lack of "interesting manuscripts." North, gentle and erudite, partly blames the "fake professionalization of poetry and by the MFA phenomenon" for the shoddy state of contemporary verse. Indeed, Masters programs at prestigious schools (of which Iowa is the most famous) seem increasingly out of touch with the imaginative energy so consistent of underground communities. But today's problems are also economic. When publishing was cheaper, poets could devote their time to the serious business of writing verse-and keep their sense of humor about it. "Now," Fagin laments, "poets are not serious and no fun. One cannot have fun when one has to work one's ass off."

Cyberzines may represent a relatively recent alternative to hard copy publishing, with the advantage of more writers having access to more work from more places. But the possibility exists that the good writing-which, Fagin and North agree, can take years to be recognized as such-might be deleted before it achieves any critical acclaim.