In the fall of 1969 and the spring of 1970, while living in Manhattan he attended workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.
Kornblum edited a mimeo poetry magazine called Toothpaste, inspired by large scale Jim Dine paintings of toothbrushes he had seen at the Whitney Museum.
Anselm Hollo, who taught some of these writers at the Workshop and had befriended them, suggested "You know, I think you guys have a poetry movement going on.
[3]" Gray named the movement Actualism, and wrote a manifesto in December 1972,[4] which was published in Morice's magazine Gum.
The Actualists still in Iowa City conducted several poetry reading series, including one at Alandoni's (later Jim's) book store.
[6] During the years Kornblum ran the Toothpaste Press it published books by Carl Rakosi, Robert Creeley, Anselm Hollo, Alice Notley, Dick Gallup, Joseph Ceravolo, Jonis Agee, Tony Hoagland, and Anne Waldman among others.
As Mary Peterson wrote in The North American Review: "The press uses classic Renaissance typefaces, papers that are textured and often handmade, and the books are hand-printed and -bound.
.In design their bias is toward modest, slightly old-fashioned elegance; in writing they specialize in idiosyncratic but highly accessible work.'
'"[7] Eventually, however, the inherent conflict between, on the one hand, letterpress's exacting craft and the limitation in edition size it entailed, and Kornblum's desire to make conditions right for his writers to reach a larger audience, led him to rethink the idea of the press.
Coffee House Press continued to produce letterpress chapbooks and broadsides and even some higher-priced limited edition publications, including Allen Ginsberg's Honorable Courtship, a selection from the poet's early diaries that was chosen for the American Institute of Graphic Arts Fifty Best Books for 1994.
Kornblum often published the work of young writers, both poets and fiction writers, with a special focus on the work of Asian-American authors, including Karen Tei Yamashita[11] (whose I Hotel was an NBA fiction finalist in 2010), Wang Ping, Kao Kalia Yang, and Bao Phi.