1.
I was nineteen when I printed my first chapbook on the photocopier at my campus job. During a break between setting up audio/video for events, I folded and stacked about fifteen of them. I had a show the next evening on the other side of Washington state, and selling a handful of these chapbooks, along with the feature fee, would hopefully pay for the gas to get me there and back.
I started my poetry life in slam—a form already rooted in the ephemeral, the fleeting, the essentially human problem of having invested time—even in three-minute doses—in a creative pursuit and, in the end, having nothing to show for it. I encountered my first chapbook at a poetry slam: seven or eight letter-sized paper sheets stacked, folded in half (hamburger-style), stapled twice along the spine. Title and author on the outer cover. Poems on each leaf thereafter. No images. No page numbers. It was pure text.
For my own chapbook, I wanted a cover image. I chose a photo of a whiteboard drawing, illustrated live, by my then Drawing-101 classmate and now the award-winning cartoonist Sam Alden, in response to a poem I had read at one of my college’s open mics the week prior. I recall a tree stump and an obscured, maybe seated figure. I loved the elegant lines. I thought it made for good merch.
It is only as I started writing this essay, that I recognized my impulse as a teen to doubly capture a temporary thing: 1) choosing an image that should have been wiped away as well as 2) producing a chapbook out of spoken word. Before the chapbook, I performed poems for years but never wrote them down to be encountered without my voice and corporeal self to mediate the experience.
2.
The chapbook is the length around which my obsessions get exhausted. That is the real reason I write them. It’s less about craft and more about discipline. I have three published chapbooks and another three chapbook-length manuscripts sitting on my laptop; all of them revolve around a central theme or form.
Salat and Balikbayan (published by Tupelo and New Michigan Press, respectively) were both exhaustive exercises in wringing every ounce of creative expression I could out of their respective invented forms. It turns out I can get about fifty poems out of any given form, about thirty-five to forty-nine of which are no good.
In Salat, each poem is structured around the physical motions [cued in brackets like a movie script] of Muslim prayer [standing, bowing, prostration, etc.]. And in Balikbayan, each poem is shaped like a perfect square, about three-and-a-half inches across by thirteen lines of twelve-point Times New Roman font. The Salat poems play with how ritual is made out of stitching together fragments. Through writing them (and with thanks to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and Jake Skeets’s “Poetry as Field”), I sharpened my sensibilities, developing my understanding that sectioning a poem foregrounds the field of physical white space through which the poem asks the reader to stay, promising that what’s on the other side is worth the voyage. On the other hand, the physical tightness of the Balikbayan poems begged to be stuffed—with everything, anything, all of it—chocolates, ancestors, swim trunks. In choosing dimensions, I resisted the impulse to write sonnets because, like their namesakes, I wanted to stuff these balikbayans as full of as many feet and voltas as I could. The poems were claustrophobic, inescapable, and so, I think, funnier.
My first official chapbook (which you know by now is actually my second chapbook), Here I Am O My God (published by the Poetry Society of America), differs from the other two because it doesn’t have a consistent form; rather, it began with a conceptual obsession. The chapbook is what remains of a deluge of poems I wrote while figuring out how to be a dad to three young kids in the wake of a divorce that dissolved any legal claim I had on a stable immigration status in a country that [you can fill in the rest]. Which is to say, HIAOMG’s formal obsession is formlessness. Which is also to say, I probably could have kept going. But, in the real world, I had fallen madly in love, gotten a new job, and was still raising kids. And so the poetic obsession ended around the length of a chapbook.
3.
I think it’s generally acknowledged that fewer pages and smaller print runs are what allow for a fairly robust economy of chapbooks; the lower cost per unit in design, production, and marketing allows more publishers to print more titles and take relative risks in terms of who gets published and what kind of project. Add to that the submission fees for a seemingly endless supply of poets that outpace demand, and the chapbook business is, frankly, much more manageable than the full-length poetry collection business.
To be clear: we are talking about business. Even if it is not run for profit—either by design or ineptitude—business is, too, a kind of form. It has its own rules, structures, incentives, and exclusions. Revenue must exceed expenses. Risks are to be avoided. Known poets sell—if they’re dead, even better.
Online, my chapbooks sell for eight to fourteen dollars directly or through a bookseller. I’ve given many of mine away at readings. I don’t remember how much I sold my first chapbook for, but I remember, sometimes, people would give me more than I had asked simply because they wanted to. If there is a purer form of arts patronage than being handed a twenty in the dim light of a dive bar by a stranger who wants nothing in return, who will charitably take your poorly stapled handful of wobbly poems that they will never look at or remember again, I don’t want to know about it.
Both back then and today, these chapbooks have not made me enough money to feed my kids—and that is exactly the point. There is freedom in writing and creating outside of the market. All the best art is made outside any perceived market, after all. That sentence feels good to type because it satisfies and reinforces my aesthetic and moral tastes; however, the market is not theoretical. There are matrices of very real economic and cultural markets within which my children eat, sleep, play, fall in love, lose friends, and, if they are lucky, grow up.
4.
Though chapbooks make publishing more accessible for marginalized authors, they don’t make money. Therefore, ours is a world in which more marginalized authors can be published than ever before but not be paid meaningfully for it. Whatever value chapbooks have, it is not economic. Chapbooks formalize, commemorate, and memorialize an occasion, a process, a stage in a poet’s development; it is important work that attends to one’s tradition, lineage, and people. The work is the work even if you aren’t being paid for it. Without adequate pay, fewer people can afford to do the work. The chapbook makes the work material, yet the scale of production, relative to the industry, keeps the thing small, fleeting, provisional.
Whereas full-length collections imply a kind of permanent record—directly tied to the amount of capital spent in the production of them—the temporary nature of chapbooks will be why they endure. The purpose of them and how they move through the world will be determined by the economic structures of the book publishing industry and the broader economic and social safety net that fosters and cultivates artists. My greatest hope, of course, is for a thriving chapbook business for any publisher who wants it because we all have healthcare, housing, and I don’t have to worry about a war, or being unemployed, or my children’s health and safety. My greatest hope when it comes to chapbooks is that the only thing a poet ever has to think about is the formal consideration behind writing a short book versus a long one.