Fellow poet over at Dear Outer Space has had her first chapbook accepted by Finishing Line Press and so has been blogging about promoting the chapbook. When I started graduate school, one of my first questions was, How do you put a chapbook together? It seemed mysterious. I began reading chapbooks, a lot of them, maybe 100+. Here then, is, PART ONE of my own, idiosyncratic process of putting a chapbook together: studying the genre.

1. Read chapbooks. Borrowing chapbooks from friends or colleagues who’ve collected their own personal libraries of the things is a great way to start. However, one of the things I loved about entering chapbook contests was receiving the winner. Often to me, I cared less that I might win (though I certainly hoped I might get lucky), but rather I liked that my $10 or $15 or $20 contest fee included a copy of the winner. The chapbook would arrive in my mailbox, often in my SASE, and I would get to read a small collection from an often emerging poet, study the the press’s design, layout, and aesthetic, and consider the choices made by the poet (bio, photo, blurbs, title, cover art, etc.). When I first started reading chapbooks, that was what I thought about: What constitutes the genre that is called the chapbook? What is the overall package ? What should be “on” or “in” a chapbook?
2. Buy chapbooks. After I’d done my fair share of reading contest winners, I started buying the chapbooks of friends and colleagues, poets I admired, or recent releases from small, indie, established, or new chapbook presses. I started thinking about story, about narrative arc, about ordering poems. I began to think beyond individual poem (though powerful and stand alone they might well be), but rather to focus on the bigger picture that was in a given chapbook. And because a chapbook is small, usually between 20-26 pages, I felt it was easy to hold each poem in my mind and consider how they were working together, how each poem was tied to the next and the next, until there was a final poem that ended the story, the narrative, the overall situation that was there in the given poems.
3. Spend $$ on chapbooks. Though this is clearly already implied, I don’t think I have to be the one to say that small presses don’t make buckets of $$$ on producing chapbooks. Nor do I have to be the one to say that it is unlikely that chapbooks sales will be the cushion a poet lives on for a year. I believe it is important to invest in a press to learn about the poets and the types of poems that press publishes by ordering their collections and to invest in the poets you admire by ordering their collections. I’ve discovered wonderful poets this way, ones I may never have read in literary journals or heard giving a reading in Nebraska.
4. Sit back and reflect. Okay, so once you do all that (reading winners, reading poets from a given press, buying chapbooks at local readings, and borrowing chapbooks from friends), now you can lean back in your office chair or stretch out on your couch and ponder all this knowledge you’ve gathered about what a chapbook is. Now the question is, do you want your stuff to be in a chapbook? And do you have anything that might work together as a chapbook?

If the answer is yes and yes, stay tuned for the next installment….Part II.