In that last post, I mentioned the 20 year birthday of that very first fledgling chapbook I put together in the spring of 2004. Part of it was trial run for the chapbook series I would eventually launch, to see how expensive and difficult producing a slender pamphlet could possibly be. Part of it was that I had my first chap, The Archaeologists Daughter, accepted in 2002, but it would not be out until the fall of 2005. Meaning that I really wanted/needed something to bring with me to readings, which I was staring to do more and more often. People (somehow!) started asking me if I had a book and where could they get it? Like WHAT? I was riding high on new poet vibes then, so wanted to make it happen.
There was a a lot happening in those year on the micro-press front, with lots of small presses originating in what was a much smaller, but strangely more lively, community among those publishing in online journals and writing poetry blogs. And while the internet as a venue for verse was just getting rolling, there was still this desire for the printed object. For the heft and papery-ness of it. I sat in a panel in one of the tiny jewel box rooms of the Palmer House at AWP 2004 and listened as people talked about how physical books were likely to move away from merely being vehicles for content and more toward being looked at as objects and artifacts. Another where they lauded sites like Poetry Daily for making poetry available to everyone and others expounding the virtues of HTML and web poetry. Another where Stephanie Strickland (who would later be a visiting poet in my program and one of the only useful workshop experiences while there) talked about starting and running Slapering Hol Press. In another panel, showed off her, at the time, revolutionary html projects. Everyone, including her and me, posed between these two media. One, thousands of years old, the other barely in its infancy.
I left that conference thinking of ways to bridge the online poetry community, of which wicked alice, the web journal I started in 2001, was a part, and the more tactile world of paper and print. Mind you this was before booklet format printers, so the layout was very crude in the same format I would use for the first few years of the chapbook series that allowed me to print duplex on one-sided printers. I was already in that small press publishing class and working on a print annual for the journal, learning the ins and out of budgeting and planning. So when that was done in later spring, I turned my eye to this.
Granted she's a little rough. That first version probably had typos galore, formatting errors, and was wrapped in parchment resume paper from Staples that really didn't even have any heartiness to it. When I had given away, traded or sold, those initial copies, I made a second run that was even smaller but more polished (see photo above.) In which, I added a couple of poems, and used heavy watercolor paper I picked up at Utrecht as a cover. The cover phot was courtesy of Alaina Burri-Weir, who would also provide other artwork to dgp publications later, as well as the eventual cover for THE FEVER ALMANAC.
There are poems that never quite made it into the longer manuscript, which I was beginning to send around that same year. In it, there's a poem about Little Red Riding Hood that would later be expanded and become the book of red project. There's another about Daphne changing into the laurel tree, and another about a missing twin. The title comes from a poem I later included in the first full-length about urban legends and childhood games and family trauma, much of the same soup I would be drawing on for years in terms of subject matter (and probably still am.) The booklet begins with some lines of Anne Sexton from "The Breast":
I am unbalanced - but I am not mad with snow.
I am mad the way young girls are mad,
with an offering, an offering…
I burn the way money burns.
I took my crude little chapbook everywhere I was reading, which was suddenly everywhere after winning a local prize with a hefty cash prize that April from the Poetry Center of Chicago ( funds which helped produce more books and start the chapbook series that fall.). I even took them to the fancy SAIC ballroom when I read as part of their regular series, and it was the first time I ever not only sold books(I had been trading and giving them away all summer) but the first time I got to do the very authorly thing and sign them. Funnily enough, you can actually still listen to that reading here--it's like the ghost of baby poet me speaking across the last two decades.)
