ANN ARBOR—It continues to be delivered in a plain manila envelope with the buffalo imprint signifying the contents are from The Alternative Press. Inside is magic, humor, postcards, bumper stickers, bookmarks, broadsides and much more, for anyone interested in nationally recognized writers as well as emerging writers and artists.

Some of these pieces of art, all from Ken and the late Ann Mikolowski’s Alternative Press, will be on display at the University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library as part of The Alternative Press Symposium open to the public Oct. 17-19.

From letters, notes, postcards from poets, artists, friends, and supporters to manuscripts of poems, sketches, Christmas cards, announcements, and subscription renewal slips inscribed with notes such as “Can’t wait for the next packet!” to poetry readings, all will be part of the exhibit and symposium.

The symposium, coordinated by James Fox, features poets and artists speaking on their experiences in creating art in Detroit. It begins Oct. 17 with poetry readings by Robert Creeley and Edward Sanders. On Oct. 18, the program includes Morgan Blair, Donna Brook, Brenda Goodman, Robert Sestok, John Sinclair, Dennis Teichman and Michael Mikolowski with Glen Mannisto serving as moderator. U-M’s Kathryn Brackett Luchs will present her film “Work in Progress: Images from Detroit’s Cass Corridor,” and Marsha Miro, a Detroit-based art critic, will speak on “The Cass Corridor Art Movement.” Ken Mikolowski will speak on “The History of The Alternative Press.”

On Oct. 18, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Rackham Amphitheater, Ann Waldman and Ron Padget will present a poetry reading. Waldman, poet, writer, muse, and editor of poetry anthologies is co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo. Padgett, a poet, novelist and playwright, is known as the “grand old young man of the New York School of poets.”

On Oct. 19, beginning at 7 p.m., in the East Quad Auditorium at 701 E. University Street, poets Morgan Blair, Donna Brook, Lolita Hernandez, Robert Hershon, Glen Mannisto, Christine Monhollen, John Sinclair, Keith Taylor, Dennis Teichman and Mick Vranich will take part in the “Detroit Poetry Blowout.”

Inspired by the ideals of the 1960s, the Mikolowskis developed The Alternative Press as an inexpensive means of distributing the writings and art of known and yet-to-be-known artists from Detroit’s Cass Corridor art community. By 1971, with printing costs escalating and the cash for materials rapidly diminishing, the Mikolowskis decided on a subscriber mailing that would fund their packets sent in plain manila envelopes, but full of marvelous “stuff.” This experimental, innovative and unpretentious method keeps the simple mission of the Press to “get art to the people.”

In 1996, the U-M Library acquired the archives of the Alternative Press, more than 35 linear feet of material that includes a complete run of the annual packets, examples from each postcard series, all publication by the Press, and all correspondence and business files related to the Press. “What is remarkable about the archives,” says Kathleen Dow, exhibit curator, “is that we see not only the finished products of the artists’ work, but we see how a poem gets written, a work of art gets created, and how they both get published and distributed. We can see a poem by Gary Snyder as it was first submitted. Next we can see how Ken and Ann printed it in a couple of different ways, and then how Snyder revised the printing, and finally how it appeared in its finished form.”