2012 Program

Wed, Mar 28: at the Center for Book Arts

10am-1pm and 2-5pm: Hands-on Chapbook Workshops: Binding and Printing*
With Susan Mills and Karen Randall
6:30pm: Panel Discussion: Community and Publishing
MC Hyland (Minnesota Center for Book Arts)
Guy Pettit (Flying Object)
Chuck Stebelton (Woodland Pattern)

Thu, Mar 29: at The Graduate Center, CUNY

12-7pm: Book Fair
12-3pm: Lunch Poems – marathon poetry reading
3pm: Digital Chapbooks workshop*
5pm: Nuts and Bolts for Writers workshop*
7pm: Panel Discussion: Translation & Alternative Publishing
Ammiel Alcalay (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Esther Allen (Baruch College)
Anna Moschovakis (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Damir Šodan (POEZIJA Magazine, Croatia)
And others

Fri, Mar 30: at The Graduate Center, CUNY

12-7pm: Book Fair
12-3pm: Lunch Poems – marathon poetry reading
3pm: Nuts and Bolts for Publishers workshop*
5pm: Chapbooks Saved My Life workshop*
7pm: PSA Chapbook Fellowship Reading, followed by reception

*RSVP required for all workshops. 

Save the Date

The next Chapbook Festival will take place Wednesday through Friday, March 28 through 30, 2012. Save the Date!

Chapbooks…store them in the freezer along with your passport, cash, and family photos

An exhaustive report on the Chapbook Festival on Bookslut with many lovely interviews with and photos of publishers & roving poets!

Suddenly I see Christian Hawkey, author of Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). I ask if he’ll comment on the chapbook’s place in our contemporary world. “Chapbooks,” Christian muses. “They’re small, they’re portable. You can read them anywhere. And you should store them in the freezer along with your passport, cash, and family photos.”

Being smaller, an eclogue is like a selection.

Robert Mueller reports On Roving the Chapbook Festival in The Gathering of Tribes:

Talk of the chapbook brings to mind the arch flattery by which the ancient poets defend what they like.  Suppose they choose to write in shorter forms.  They might try the eclogue, or some other suitable form.  Whatever their liking, to take to these hills they will accept attention given, but they must duck onerous demands on their resources:  “Though you are so wonderful, my patron, please do not ask me to write an epic poem.  My wings, poor things, cannot encompass the weight, and besides, smaller poems can be good, too, good to please and good for the soul.”

a Pandora’s Box of subject and form

The Interstitial Arts Foundation reports from the Chapbook Festival:

What does the future hold for this refreshingly cooperative human form? The unique nature and inherent limits of fine-press, handmade production makes it an unlikely market conglomerate, but in an increasingly wired, mass produced society, poet and CUNY professor Kimiko Hahn suggests the chapbook will provide “a place where established writers can experiment.”

The sun is a stand-in for YOU. You are a reader of chapbooks!

A very long and wonderful report from the Festival by Lily Ladewing in Faster Times includes interviews with publishers!

The design of the book always comes from the poems. When we read a manuscript we try to enter the imagined space in which they were created. Then it’s up to us to create a physical world for the poems to live in.

-Betsy Wheeler (Pilot Books)

Poets are so D.I.Y.

Coldfront Magazine reports from the Chapbook Festival!

It’s important to note:

“In addition to selling chapbooks, representatives from Belladonna Books accepted donations that will be used to reprint Akilah Oliver’s chapbook The Putterer’s Notebook. Anyone interested in donating can contact Belladonna Books here.”

And keep in mind:

Zachary Schomburg of Octopus Books said it was sort of like an AWP “aftershock.” “In poetry, geography doesn’t matter,” said Schomburg.

Chapbooks are the vinyl of literature

We love our physical media. Chapbooks are the vinyl of literature. That we can print books on acid free paper, bound with waxed thread (in lieu of staples that will eventually rust) wrapped in thick covers that protect the more delicate pages allows us to make objects that unlike the vast majority of the original chapbooks will have a chance at lasting hundreds of years in physical form. I think if a publisher believes in a work strongly enough to bring a book to form they should take aims to produce an object that the readership will want to protect and preserve.

-from Chapbook Festival Notes by Andrew Kenower, presenter at the “Nuts and Bolts for Publishers” workshop

read & download the piece here:

View this document on Scribd

Spoils of the Chapbook Festival

(c) Greying Ghost Press

Greying Ghost Press documents the flora & fauna of the Chapbook Festival.

And Lily Ladewig photographs the books on display!

Chapbooks in Manhattan: March 2-5

The Chapbook Festival begins today! See the schedule, sign up for lunchtime and evening workshops, and come for the bookfair and the readings. The bookfair will be open until 7p on Thursday and Friday this week.