Twenty years of blogging about poetry chapbooks
It just dawned on me this morning that I started writing about these “tiny slivers of nothing” 20 years ago. I had been collecting them long before I decided to write about them. In part, of course, because I was also publishing them (as Plan B Press) but also because I felt that they represented those fragile - hopeful beginnings that every writer, every poet needs to “put themselves out there” in the literature flow of our culture, of our consciousness.
I just started because I felt the poets and the presses and the printers involved needed to be remembered - because they made the effort, because they created the work, because they mattered. As informative as A Secret Location on the Lower East Side was when it was published in 1998 it was not all inclusive, nor did it claim to be.
What I have learned through my own investigation into small presses and their corresponding chapbooks is that they existed across the country. Because there was a need. Because the big publishing houses could not and would not publish every collection of poetry that came their way, nor should they have. But if a poet or a printer or a publisher be determined to bring something to fruition; the better for all of us.
Some of it was technologically driven; the less expensive the process of producing a book became - the more books appeared. The more imprints appeared. The more small presses there were. Some of the small presses grew into mid-sized presses. Toothpaste Press became Coffee House Press, for example. But many of the smallest presses remained so. Some on purpose.
That’s the reality as much as there is one. Another reality is that even with the advent of e-books, there is a certain portion of the reading public that prefers to hold something physical. And more than that : something tactile. Something that feels like something. Not a Print-on-Demand machine products wigget (they may as well be) but something made by hand, made with care, craftsmenship, and dare I say - with love.
That’s why I continue to blog about poetry chapbooks; because I love what they are. I love the effort put into the creation of them. I may not always love the poetry itself. But I love the effort and the process, and get terribly excited when I find a gem that was lost in the mass market world of slicky produced schlock that sometimes passes as “art” or “literature” in our commerical-based society that favors availabiliy and cost over quality and panache.
And you know it when you feel it.
