Welcome to Lit Review, where columnist Dominiq Wilson will take apart a series of chapbooks to figure out what works and what doesn’t for the modern reader of poetry.
Before reviewing the medium of chapbooks, I think it’s important that it is understood what a chapbook is, and how they came to be.
Poetry chapbooks in the 21st century are recognized as a small collection of poetry. Though similar to an anthology, chapbooks are typically no longer than 40 pages and can have just as many poems. Often times, a page consists of one poem with all of the content being connected by a common theme of the author’s choice.
These small books originated as single sheets of print often posted to public forums between the 16th and 19th centuries, better known as broadsides. Though they had a civic function, the most popular broadsides were ballads, poetry, folk tales, and imaginative stories. They often reflected the oral history of the areas they originated and included woodcut illustrations due to the illiteracy rates of the time.
Broadsides transformed into chapbooks when the single sheet was folded into fourths, eighths, or sixteenths, then bound together by the purchaser. The woodcut illustrations remained now combined with a few memorable lines. The authors of chapbooks were often unknown, but their subject matter expanded to children’s stories, religious texts, and gossips. These pieces of literature acted as short-lived enjoyment and were often thrown out, reused, or deteriorated from frequent use.
Chapbooks get their name after the nomadic merchants who sold them: chapmen. These merchants, with a less than respectable reputation, were known for selling whatever they could and were important in spreading chapbooks to those without access to printed books.
As the production of chapbooks continued, their subject matter grew to include fiction and non-fiction that captured the politics, stories, and revolutionary ideas of the time. In England, chapbooks had been beaten out as the popularity of newspapers increased, but they continued thriving in Scotland and the United States.
Beginning in the 18th century, chapbooks began to take a political or religious nature; if any were fictitious at all, they were directed towards children. Through the 19th century and into the 20th century, chapbooks became published within toy companies and included ads.
The need for chapbooks declined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, though they survived as small collections of poetry. They weren’t revived until the 1970s and ’80s in Britain. At this time, chapbooks, zines, and other non-mainstream publications circulated in an attempt to spread punk culture and other niche and sometimes counter-cultural groups. The structure of these chapbooks was sturdier: creators used the Xerox process at home, then bound the pages with staples in a saddle-stitch fashion.
In the 21st century, chapbooks are often used in literary groups. They are typically published by self-publishing writers with letterpress printers or home-printed and hand-bound by the writer themselves. The number of chapbooks printed is often limited, making the artistic quality more concentrated than the average book. However, because the small publication doesn’t qualify as a true publication, chapbooks can be used to showcase skill for possible publications in the future.
The use of chapbooks have drastically changed since their original appearance in the 15th century, but they have survived their transformation and the last seven centuries. Now, small collections of poetry can be found in our library or purchased in a publisher’s library. To find a list of chapbook publishers, please visit the website of the Poetry Society of America. This same site also offers a more extended history of chapbooks, as well as a guide to make your own chapbook. Happy reading!
Lit Reveiw: The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat
Welcome to Lit Review, where columnist Dominiq Wilson will take apart a series of chapbooks to figure out what works and what doesn’t for the modern reader of poetry.
The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat is a collection of prose poetry by Amelia Martens. The summary on the inside of the cover describes the 54-page collection as an “encounter with a world at once familiar and strange,” which I interpreted to have a theme surrounding the before, during, or aftermath of a disaster, natural or man-made. This theme was portrayed through multiple narrative perspectives.
My overall interpretation of the collection can be viewed by the book’s title alone. It has a child-like nature to it, but the action of digging a moat vaguely alludes to the trenches used in warfare. I found that many of the poems, especially those that included a recurring daughter character, switched back and forth between an innocent, childlike perspective and a more blunt and realistic, adult perspective. This can be observed in the poem “Postcard from the End”:
I found the daughter character, who I assume to be Martens’s daughter, very interesting, and found myself rereading the poems that surrounded her train of thought the most. I don’t see being stumped by a poem as a bad thing, because interpretation comes in actively seeking to understand it. In understanding some of these poems, I find that the childlike perspective in them is more present, which leads me to assume that the meaning lies within innocent references. “Bedtime” and “Pink Pigs and Orange Horses” showcases this excellently.
Jesus appeared as a character of sorts throughout the collection, and I enjoyed reading these particular poems—he’s portrayed doing very mundane things. My favorite poem of this type, “In God’s Country,” portrays this perfectly:
I am biased in saying that this is my favorite poem because I’ve worked in a drive-thru before. But, I also think that it relates back to the heavenly power Jesus is viewed to have and how he attempts to use it to help us. However, the bleakness of the last sentence deviates from what I know Jesus’s character to be, which I think comes in part from the theme of disaster in this book, as well as the nonplussed attitude of drive-thru employees.
My observation of characters and narrators is heavily reliant on the form of these poems. All of the poems are written in prose style, meaning that they’re formatted to resemble paragraphs and sentences instead of stanzas and lines. As a fan of fiction, it’s almost instinctual to read them as such, but the syntactical difference between standard prose pieces and prose poetry signals the difference in literature. These sentences don’t follow the typical noun-verb rule we were all taught and often reads in a more rhythmic way compared to the average sentence in an essay or young adult fiction novel.
The description of events is almost narrative as well. There are a few poems that address memorable events, such as “Newtown,” which references the Sandy Hook shooting; “Heartwood,” with it’s allusions to the end of the Mayan Calendar (Dec. 26, 2012); “Marathon,” with its semi-obvious references to the Boston Marathon Bombing; and “The Robin Pulls a Thread” which references the clothing factory fire of 2012 in Bangladesh, India.
This collection of poems really makes you think, especially with the difference in perspectives and the recount of notable events. This may not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially if you’re reading poetry at night like me, but I do strongly recommend this book. It’s prose form really helps unfamiliar readers read poetry in a familiar way. In addition to that, I believe that it’s thought-provoking, yet completely enjoyable.
If you’re lucky, you may get a little stumped, but don’t worry too much about it. The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat is available in our campus’s library and is also available for purchase online and digitally for under $20. Both options give you plenty of time to work through it.