The quintessential short fiction of its time, The Plastic Factory's minimalist surface sits atop a terse inventory of the inner costs of living outside the professional managerial bullet train, looking through the display windows at the swatch-life, emerging with the antithesis of the yuppie-preppy sensibility. Every phrase glistens with the dull sheen of the bog slime rising all around these characters acting out the anomie of the soul in the Reagan era when the American Dream got hijacked from everyone outside that cozy 1% at the top of the food chain. This is the voice of their prey: listen up! Robert Siegle, author of
Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency From the silence of the industrial countryside, Kolm has written an elegy for time wasted through work. The Plastic Factory accumulates its power through attention to detail and process. The botched life of the narrator takes on a certain sad grandeur. Thomas McGonigle, author of Going to Patchogue
Ron Kolm (born 1947) is an American poet, editor, activist and bookseller, based in New York City. Kolm came to New York in 1970 and got a job at the Strand bookstore, where he worked with Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith.
During this period he became friends and colleagues with a group of writers who would come to exemplify the Downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s (Downtown, in this context, means anything below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan). In 1985, Kolm, Bart Plantenga, Mike Golden, Max Blagg and Peter Lamborn Wilson founded the Unbearables, a loose collective of poets and artists based on the precepts of Hakim Bey, as set forth in his seminal book, TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone). They took their name from a short story by Mike Golden. Their first reading series was at the Life Cafe in the East Village. 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 (1995), Crimes of the Beats (1998), Help Yourself! (2002), The Worst Book I Ever Read (2009), and The Unbearables Big Book of Sex (2011), all published by Autonomedia.
Kolm's own publications include The Plastic Factory (1989, Red Dust and 2011, Autonomedia), Welcome to the Barbecue (Low-Tech Press, 1990) and Rank Cologne (P.O.N. Press, 1991). His work can also be found, along with the other Unbearables, in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999), and in Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (New York University Press, 2006). He has collaborated on a novel, Neo Phobe, written with Jim Feast (Autonomedia, 2006).
The Ron Kolm papers (some 35 cartons of correspondence, notebooks, objects, chapbooks, signed first editions and runs of literary magazines) were purchased by the Fales Library at New York University, where they now reside.
