The chapbook, a thin, stapled-together and sometimes home-made pamphlet, is coming into its own again. For this generation of poets the publishing vehicle may well be the equivalent of the mimeographed magazine of the 1950s and '60s, and for much the same reason: economy. The chapbook has answered that call before. By the 17th century, when new printing technology made cheap production of chapbooks possible, they were used to distribute Christian exhortations, ballads and naughty tales among the increasingly literate masses of England. The tinkers who sold the booklets were known as chapmen.
Today the big book publishers have succumbed to the desperate venality of our times. Poetry lists, rarely lucrative, are being eliminated. Smaller, more-idealistic presses try to compensate, but with creative writing classes churning out ever-more poets, these frequently strapped publishers are falling behind. When poetry is published in regular-book format, it is often priced out of reach of all but the tenured. When I was starting out in the 1960s, I could buy volumes of poetry by the stack. Most of the struggling young poets I know now borrow from one another or the library, or invest in seats at public readings, and chapbooks. . . a matter of a few dollars rather than $20. As well, a $5-investment can give a prospective book purchaser a clue as to whether they want to invest in full-length collections or not.
Chapbooks do serve other necessary functions. If the weaknesses in a poem slipped past the poet while it is in manuscript form, it is almost certain those flawed lines will surface glaringly once their author knows they are out in the world being read and resented. Preparing work for a chapbook presents one more layer of thoughtful revision before the final submission of a manuscript to a larger publisher.
Chapbooks are often not very attractive. What would be the point in saving money on other aspects of production and distribution and then investing heavily in a cover? One sometimes has to pick chapbooks up on faith. Such is the case with Mark Abley's Dissolving Bedrock (Over the Moon, Montreal, 2001). This dull-green production could almost be military issueł Canadian military issue. But get past that and poetry takes over and off in images that leap from a mountain landscape. The first poem, "Kootenai", comes to this memorable conclusion: "verbs in a language without relatives,/ a relic on a ripped map,/ mouths that possessed a word for ęstarving, though/ having a fish-trap."
Abley has left the more common cataloguers of wilderness wonders behind to accomplish a more rewarding feat of allowing a place to express its own virtue. To succeed at that requires a very sensitive ear, something desperately lacking among Canadians. Witness the opening lines of "Flight":
in the free sky above
a combe, a coulee,
a wadi at dawn
a song is fluttering, taking
wing, hunting for breath,
the spendthrift
melody. . .
There is only one somewhat flat poem in the collection, "Sentinel Pass: A Letter" and I suspect it was subtitled "a letter" in order to earn it some leeway, in order to excuse the failure of ear: "ąleft the postcard-friendly lake for a path/ through the pine forests, climbing/ hard until I crossed a young river/ at a two-planked bridge near the treeline."
But "Sentinel Pass" is an exception and Dissolving Bedrock has ensured that I will be watching for subsequent work by Abley, and seeking out his earlier volumes Glasburyon (Quarry) and Blue Sand, Blue Moon (Cormorant).
Arrival: Twenty poems on aging by Claudia Morrison (League of Canadian Poets, Toronto, 2000) is the fourth of the Canadian Poetry Chapbook Competition Winners. Morrison does something many poets strive for, many are extolled for, and few actually carry off. She filters the everyday life through her own experiences and comes up with memorable art. Far too often that "remarkable grasp of the quotidian" turns out to be so much solipsism indulged in by someone who hasn't strayed very far from a writing workshop. In fact, I suspect that capturing the commonalities in our condition, because of the subtleties, can be more challenging than writing a moving poem about a cavalry charge.
Only once in this chapbook does Morrison fail at her task. In only one poem, "Sister", does the "everyday" overwhelm: "You seemed stricken, dazed, oblivious to the urine bagą" It is not that the humiliation is too much for me, or the earthiness. The line is simply out of tune with the more hard-won cadences and images in her work.
This chapbook is not just a sampling, but an integrated series. It begins, appropriately, with "Foretaste":
August, Caesar's month,
starts royally enough,
the sun blazing down,
the water of the lake like silk
By the end of the penultimate poem, "Self-Portraits", it has reached:
Now a clam revelling in my own juices
a walrus basking on sun-bleached rocks
a wasp nestled in my paper house
The collection ends with "Haiku" an ars poetica for the aged, a statement on craft that reveals to me that Morrison, master of the spare, of the direct, has met the challenge she set herself in Arrival:
Age needs a spare aesthetic,
poems that whisper
live next door to silence
This advice serves me better as I pass into middle age than an exhortation to "rage against the dying of the light."
A Pen in my Hand, is a collection drawn together from the estate of Josefa Kropp, who passed away in April, 2001. Friends and relatives prepared this chapbook as a private memorial to the visionary poet, but I believe that privacy is to be regretted; there is no publisher or distributor identified within these pages and Kropp deserves a wider audience.
One of the reasons so much contemporary poetry is flat is that few poets read the Old Testament anymore. The stories within it are intimidating, often uncomfortable, sometimes frightening and always necessary, like a sky full of stars or a hurricane-force wind. They keep our brief lives in due perspective. Kropp finds her footing in the Old Testament through rhythm, and occasionally through content as in the opening lines of "Transgression and Reconciliation": A bull calf?
Moses, weeping for the people,
peeked at his own sister's
elderly sexpot makeup.
He turned toward the mountain
(in his famous self-effacement)
and laughed until he bellowed.
I had never heard of Kropp before Books in Canada mailed me a copy of A Pen in my Hand. I know nothing about her save what is in its pages. But I like to imagine her as a solitary, like Emily Dickinson, deeply religious, though not superficially comforted, woman who knew how to pursue her isolation into insights that would be missed by more professional, better-connected and less-naive writer.
No, that last adjective is wrong. It's not quite the word I'm seeking. She was not naive:
Guard my bed from scholarship,
my love from metaphors.
Leave me not to a higher charity
but keep the brothel of psychology far off.
Save my body from believers,
me from the undivided.
The one failing of a chapbook is that when the author is a skilled seer it can contain too few poems. One can only hope that more manuscript pages surface in Kropp's estate. I eagerly await the tinker who might bring us a new collection of her work.
Erling Friis-Baastad is the author of four chapbooks. His full-length collection of poetry The Exile House was released by Salmon Publishing of Ireland last spring. He lives in Whitehorse, Yukon.
