Last week, the Nightstand received an obscure letter written with fervor and a typewriter. While we’re not so big on fervor, we do have a blood-mushy lump of flesh in our aortic cavity for letter writers and old-fashioned (that is, unforgiving) typewriters, and this letter, to the credit of its writer, was banged out flawlessly.

It began: “My name is Chris Dusterhoff and I do all things SPREAD.”

Mr. Dusterhoff, let us clarify, means to say that he performs all duties relating to the publication of SPREAD: The Monthly Journal of Poetry. He likely does not mean, as his arousing opening sentence implies, that he is a champion Twister player or a stomach-down, ass-in-the-air slut.

“I have been editing, publishing, and distributing [SPREAD] religiously for almost 2 years,” he goes on to say. “It is what I do. Like other people do heroin, fight bulls, or raise chickens, I do SPREAD.”

You also repeat yourself.

“Several months ago, I received an e-mail from Jacob Boyson of Spread Magazine LLC telling me, basically, to cease and desist.” Boyson is the publisher of Spread Magazine, one of those unreadable, coaster-sized club magazines. With valor, Mr. Dusterhoff printed Boyson’s curt valedictory missive in SPREAD: The Monthly Journal of Poetry as a letter to the editor.

Then, says Dusterhoff, “I wrote [back] that I had no intention of discontinuing or changing the name of my publication and that if his materialized, I would be forced to take action.”

When Boyson’s did materialize (the August 2002 premiere issue of Spread Magazine), the action Mr. Dusterhoff took was to send us the letter. Included with his correspondence were two issues of his SPREAD: The Monthly Journal of Poetry (on plain copier paper, folded three ways, and containing poems with lines like: “Fish out a pair of Mother’s nylon panties/Smell the crotch and finger the stains”) and the aforementioned premiere issue of Spread Magazine (containing local bar reviews with lines like: “You’ll be waiting in line at least an hour to get your groove on.”)

Boyson’s Spread Magazine, with its “slickness and all the advertisers,” as Mr. Dusterhoff observes, aims to cover Seattle nightlife, fashion, and culture by printing, as Dusterhoff puts it, “interviews with keen bands, DJ reviews, info. on which scooter to buy, and a Bartender of the Month.” (Spread Magazine‘s bartender of the month this month works at Bada Lounge and says in an interview that “kindness and inner sexuality” are “what makes a woman, what seals the deal.”) Dusterhoff concludes: “Seattle does not want free poetry. . . Seattle is devoid of literature, and a city devoid of literature is a dead city.”

Mr. Dusterhoff, we have also learned, went to a recent Homeland poetry reading and now wonders whether “we should all agree to a 2-year moratorium on the writing & reading of poems,” which, in these pages, we would loudly endorse. (In his journal, he often prints previously published work; i.e., poems by Bukowski.) We have grown quite fond of Mr. Dusterhoff and were happy to learn early this week that Boyson does not plan on shutting down Dusterhoff’s journal. Boyson then added that he thinks his magazine is “on a different scale.”

cfrizzelle@seattleweekly.com