Reading, Writing, Publishing
An Interview with Kelli Russell Agodon, Allison Blevins, and Victoria Chang
by Anna Leahy
The first chapbook I ever read was probably Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison, when I was in college and he visited for a reading. Though his poems were not like mine, the form of the staple-bound chapbook got me thinking about what some of the parameters might be. Now, the chapbook seems to be having a fascinating resurgence. Do you remember the first chapbook you read or your first inklings of how you came to understand what a chapbook is?
Kelli Russell Agodon: Molly Tenenbaum’s Blue Willow. It was 1998, and Floating Bridge Press, an indie publisher in Seattle, had just begun their new chapbook series prize. I remember the cover being absolutely stunning, and I so loved the poems.
Victoria Chang: I don’t know if this was the first chapbook I read, but I remember reading Cecily Parks’s Cold Work, which was a part of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Prize Series.
Allison Blevins: I can’t remember the first chapbook I read, but I assume it was during my M.F.A. I know this was when I started thinking about how a book could be focused thematically, and I became interested in writing a book rather than writing a poem.
We each come to this conversation about chapbooks with different reference points, then, as readers and poets but also as editors and judges. Let’s talk about the editorial side. From your perspective, why chapbooks? What are you looking for in this form?
AB: While we do publish one full-length book a year at Harbor Editions, I decided to focus on chapbooks because they are more fun. Chapbooks are able to focus intensely on a cohesive theme or idea. If a poem is prose distilled to its most essential nature, then a chapbook also exhibits that same distillation. Chapbooks can often be read in one sitting, and I think this makes them more accessible. I just love the intimacy of a chapbook. If you have only twenty poems or twenty-five poems to show who you are, those will be the poems that sing. I think intimacy is created from the accessibility of the length of a chapbook and the intensity of the poems. The best chapbooks put forth not only the author’s best work, but the author’s deep exploration of theme, image, or experience. Readers are invited into a cohesive world rather than a collection.
I love writing chapbooks, too, and this did influence my desire to publish them. I love the constraint of a chapbook and how it can succinctly explore a topic. I had three chapbooks published in 2019. I also have a collaborative chapbook forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press.
KRA: My partner and I at Two Sylvias Press had both written and published chapbooks before we had full-lengths collections, so we have an appreciation for chapbooks as compact works of art. Chapbooks are a good way to help poets learn about publication, focus on a more specific theme, and for publishers, they are much easier to publish than a full-length collection.
VC: While I haven’t written a chapbook, I’m judging the Two Sylvias Press chapbook contest. I can’t recall how many of these contests I’ve judged, but I recently judged the Omnidawn chapbook prize, selecting Mary Wilson’s Both, Apollo. I’ve also juried a lot of other book prizes, ranging from the Jake Adam York Prize to recently the Sarabande Poetry Prize, as well as individual poem prizes such as the Palette Poetry prize. Chapbook judging for me, at least, is no different than full-length collection judging, but the manuscripts are shorter and my expectations are a little different in that maybe it’s like reading a short story versus a novel? I’m still looking for all the things that are important to me as a juror—language, surprise, etc.—but I also understand chapbooks are a shorter medium, so my expectations of scope might be more limited.
That’s a good analogy, Victoria. I want to say that the chapbook is like a novella, that in-between form that’s too long for a literary journal, but I do think there’s a short story feel to the chapbook, and the page counts are similar and maybe the scope too.
Kelli, you say that chapbooks are “easier” for publishers to put out into the world, and that may be related to the limited scope as well. The term “chapbook” comes not from the poetry world per se but from a tradition of the cheaply produced pamphlet or booklet meant for easy distribution, with pages merely folded or perhaps stapled or saddle-stitched together. How does this history relate to present-day ideas of what a chapbook is, particularly now when literary production is both in print and online?
KRA: Because of technology, chapbooks are relatively easy to publish, and many of the platforms publishers use can immediately create an eBook version from the print proof. Print-on-demand can allow smaller presses to save money as they do not need to buy a huge inventory of the chapbook at once, but they can purchase as needed. Publishers who are more old school and sew chapbooks by hand (and there are some of these!), or use more standard publishing traditions, are less likely to move the chapbook into an eBook, and I think that is actually wonderful because the printed paper book is the work of art. I like that there are still things that don’t exist online and are only in the material offline world—if you want to read the poems in these chapbooks, you have to buy a copy, hold it in your hands, and turn the pages.
AB: Absolutely! Many presses still print saddle-stitched chapbooks. I know Ron Mohring at Seven Kitchens Press stitches every book he sends out. There is something lovely and attentive about all of his chapbooks because you know you’re holding something crafted rather than something mechanical. Online publishing has given chapbooks new life, and online publishing has given authors more opportunity for hybridity with images, sound, or movement. I’m particularly interested in micro chapbooks, and micro chaps take distillation even further.
I’m fascinated by the ways in which design and technology—and cost—have always shaped what gets published and, in the case of the chapbook, might encourage the sort of experimentation or distillation you’re suggesting, Allison. The chapbook and now the micro chapbook, hybrid chapbook, and multimedia chapbook—each form offers ways to see what groupings of poems can do. If chapbooks are easier for publishers, are they also easier for writers and more accessible for readers?
KRA: For readers, they could be easier due to the size—a quicker read as far as content. For poets, it can be easier to create because of the smaller size, but that doesn’t mean it’s less challenging. Especially if a poet wants to create a unique, focused, and concentrated work of art, chapbooks are a way to go deep into the details of a specific form, topic, or subject.
AB: Chapbooks might be harder for writers. I enjoy the small space, the constraint. Like certain poetic forms, the chapbook has rules, and writers are limited in scope. This may be daunting to some writers who enjoy the openness of a full-length book. I hope chapbooks make readers feel invited in rather than constrained. Chapbooks could function as a doorway, for readers, to the rest of a poet’s work.
VC: While I did go through this exercise once as an undergraduate, I’ve never put together a chapbook because I think it’s just as hard to put together a chapbook as a full-length collection of poems and because I’m so time-limited, I’ve always chosen to put my energies into working on full-length collections. But if I’d had more time, I may have been more interested in working on chapbooks because they seem like they’d be a great way to try new things within a smaller number of pages. I do think one of the challenges of chapbooks is that you can reveal your work earlier than you might want to (if that work becomes a part of a full-length book). Sometimes, depending on the poems or work, you might want to hold that work closer to your chest before you publish it as a chapbook. Publishing a chapbook may impact whether people are interested in reading your full-length or not, meaning it might pique someone’s interest in reading a full collection, but I have to admit that in some cases, after reading a chapbook, and then seeing all the poems in the full-length book again (that take up a lot of space in a book), that element of surprise for me was more limited.
I’m glad you brought up the relationship of a chapbook and a full-length book to each other in a writer’s creative practice and also publication history or career. That’s interesting to consider whether a chapbook might inhibit interest in a full-length because I’ve also, at times, figured the opposite might be the case. At some level, I used to think of the chapbook as an intermediate step, maybe a part of growing or growing up as a poet. Admittedly, that thinking may have spilled over from academia’s delineations of career steps in addition to my actual development as a poet. The order of my first chapbook and full-length reinforced that notion of the chapbook as a stepping stone, even though only one poem overlapped between them. Of course, the chapbook and the full-length are different ways to approach what a group of poems can do. In fact, I was consciously trying to figure out in my most recent full-length whether a larger book could have a chapbook sensibility and did include most of an earlier chapbook as one section. How do you see the relationship between chapbook and a full-length collection?
VC: I think that a chapbook can be an intermediate step, but I know some poets who have published a bunch of books already who like publishing chapbooks. More than a dozen years after his selected poems were published, Carl Phillips published the chapbook Star Map with Action Figures. So I think it depends, but it can be a good place to start for poets who might have only 20-25 pages of poems.
AB: Chapbooks can teach a poet so much about how to shape a book or how to prune, but even experienced poets can love the process of writing a chapbook. But yes, I can write twenty poems far more easily than fifty!
KRA: Chapbooks do not have to be a stepping stone, but can be a good way to dip your foot into the pond of crafting a book. I would think it offers growth in craft. I don’t tend to think in terms of “career,” but it can be a step on a poet’s journey. And if you are a newer poet coming into poetry, it does teach a lot in both the creation and publication of a book.
One way we might try to define the chapbook is through examples. For me, Robin Becker’s Venetian Blue, a limited edition of ekphrastic work, was important to my understanding the chapbook as both form and content, as a work of art on two levels. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read Dustin Brookshire’s Love Most of You Too, which Allison’s Harbor Editions published this year; Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, which is her third chapbook; and Jenny Xie’s Nowhere to Arrive, which appeared a year before her full-length book. These three chapbooks have me thinking about how a point of view works across a group of poems in ways that may be possible because of the chapbook’s length and structure. What chapbooks have you read recently that might contribute to a working definition of what a chapbook is or can be?
AB: I recently read Alyse Knorr’s Ballast from Seven Kitchens Press. I loved her other work, especially Annotated Glass. What I loved about Ballast, in particular, is what I look for in any book or chapbook. I love theme or narrative. I love language and surprise. I want to read books that ask me to dive into the text.
As a publisher, I read hundreds of chapbooks a year. The most effective books have some similarities. The best chapbooks are cohesive in some way. Some utilize repetition of images or words. Anna, your chapbook What Happened Was: is a good example of this. The title of the book repeats in poem titles throughout the chapbook. Arden Levine’s Ladies Abecedary expands a form from a poem into a book. My chapbook Letters to Joan contains ekphrastic poems based on the painting of Joan Mitchell. Some books simply focus on a specific topic. Whatever the impulse, the cohesion of the chapbook invites the reader and holds them.
KRA: How Light Leaves by James Crews. Crews’s poems mix everyday life with tenderness and the natural world. They are so in the moment and I adore his observations and voice. The chapbook form allowed me to be part of this world and I felt closer to the speaker, like being part of a short but extremely meaningful conversation.
VC: Like Allison, the same things that might interest me about any book of poems draw me into a chapbook. I’m interested in reading poems that pay attention to language and that feel like nothing else I’ve read before. The PSA chapbooks I’ve read were interesting. I already mentioned Parks’s Cold Work, which then became part of her full-length collection. Analica Sotelo’s Nonstop Godhead and William Brewer’s Oxyana were also recent ones I remember. Dujie Tahat’s Here I Am O My God as well. And Kaveh Akbar published a chapbook, Portrait of an Alcoholic, Sibling Rivalry Press. I think a chapbook reading experience can be like an appetizer before a meal. It’s just a small taste of what’s possibly to come. It’s a more focused reading experience for the reader and in that way can be nice if you don’t have a lot of time to read.
Indeed, chapbooks are an enactment of a particular kind of poetic and readerly attention. They allow us to attend—as a writer or as a reader—to something in particular, to ease into observation and pondering. Maybe a chapbook asks the right amount of patience from both poet and reader in a world where we don’t feel as if there’s ever enough time. Maybe chapbooks are a sort of poetic proof of something in between fleeting and forever.
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Anna Leahy is the author of What Happened Was:, Aperture, Constituents of Matter, and Tumor. Her poems have appeared at Atlanta Review, Poetry, Scientific American, and elsewhere, and her essays have won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood.
Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of four collections of poetry. Her newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides published by Copper Canyon Press. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res M.F.A. program, the Rainier Writing Workshop.
Allison Blevins is the author of three chapbooks. Her books Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2022) are forthcoming. She is the director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana.
Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is OBIT, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the NBCC Book Prize and shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, as well as long-listed for the National Book Award. She has a book of nonfiction, Dear Memory, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions, as well as a book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything, from Copper Canyon Press.