Some never publish books. Some never submit to magazines. Magazines can be trailers for books.
I seem to have 3 routes for sending out poetry to the world: Magazines, Chapbooks and Books.
In theory poems are gathered and sent to magazines. Those that land successfully are gathered into chapbooks. Chapbooks that land well are collated into books.
However I mostly send different poems to magazines than chapbooks than books, without a lot of overlap. Partly because magazines want a theme, and chapbooks are that unit of thought long. I still have chapbooks left so don’t want to undercut sales by putting them in books and I want to give people new poems in books.
Canadian poetry book/chapbook/ephemera publishers!
The Nelson Ball Prize has extended its deadline by two weeks. This $1,000 prize goes to a Canadian poet for a publication of any length featuring “poetry of observation,” as chosen by our two judges.
Been reading, editing, gardening, sewing, cleaning.
I have a backlog of books read that I’d like to summarize, note, review.
Eventually they’ll be too many and I’ll skip and start where I’m at again.
I’ve been thinking that a chapbook can be as dextrous as a bicycle, moving nimbly among items of a meditation. Single poems in magazines often feel fragmentary, as if a bicycle part, if you will. What does that make a 97 page poetry collection? A panel truck full of bicycles and parts.
Maybe the analogy misleads, or overgeneralizes. But it seems there’s often a driving necessity in a chapbook that gets diluted when book form packages up many. Maybe an individual book overextends its natural length. Some small poems can be their right length in a short minimalist poem.
You suppose I’ll scare anyone off with a title like that? Is it a pejorative phrase?
It niggles at my that the workshop on the history of women’s tanka and haiku, while it attracted a good number, all were female. There was a proportional to population representation who showed up for a senryu workshop, albeit, skewed towards the average age of 70 demographic.
In the discussion Terry Ann Carter reminded we don’t want to make false sweeping generalizations about gendered writing. Women have traditionally done housework and fit writing into the corners and edges. Claire Pratt who she wrote about in Moonflowers, chose small forms because her spoons were few and her health chronically poor. TA said “kitchen sink writing” was not traditionally thought of as high poetry or profound but who gets to say what is profound.
For months I’ve been wondering at the lack of life maintenance in poetry by men. Surely men who live alone must do laundry and dishes. Is it taboo because poets of the 1800s never wrote about it, because they had a lower class of maids to serve them? Is is a function of class prejudice?
Clearly the nag at the back of my mind is from a reading 1- or 15 years ago where I was an invited reader and after my set, including a poem of longing for a lover while doing laundry, the host stood silent at the mic, opened and closed his mouth looking confused then said, um, well, thank you for those, um, housewife poems. Big breath. And the next reader, I’m really excited about as I’m sure you are….
Rule 1 of hosting, don’t make your invited reader feel dismissed as crap. That’s only happened three times in 11 years but why once.
And why are most minimalist poems by males. Are the women doing such tiny precise work not getting work out there in the public/published realm or not doing it?
Or rather, that’s where it started recently, re-staging the radish in the fridge, circa 2011, that became the title poem of the collection the pet radish, shrunken.
The closer you get, with fewer distractions, the more you have a chance to isolate the key elements. What’s verbal vignette? Repetition? Is it repetition?
As with photography, finding the right vantage point for a poem is the art, not the information. The why behind the information matters. And the how.
Some people could narrate paint drying and I’d pay them. (But probably only once.)
Audience and writer overlap, the Venn diagram of viewpoints, inform who can hear whom. Maybe coming from a comparable place or headed towards a comparable place.
Who is the audience is less key than what is necessary to say and move past? And stay and hover around.
