Voices from the Hills

This last Saturday I attended an event I had been looking forward to for a very very long time; Voices from the Hills, held at my alma mater, Northern Kentucky University. It was an event focused around the future of Appalachian and Kentucky writing, but more importantly to me, was put together in honor of Danny Miller, the former chair of the English department who passed away very recently, and to raise money for an endowment in his honor.

Danny was an amazing man, who very directly affected the direction of my life. It was through great effort, on his part, that Frank X. Walker was hired as writer-in-residence, which of course directly lead to my induction into the Affrilachian poets, which has had an immeasurable effect on my writing.

I had previously won the under-graduate (at the time of the contest) non-fiction contest for my essay “Folk Traditions as a Conduit for Healing in Gurney Norman’s Kinfolks,” and my family was there to cheer me on as I accepted my award. It marks the first, and possibly only time in my life that I'll be have such a personal investment in an essay. I was writing the essay in a one-on-one class with Danny, who passed away before the essay or the class was complete.

Among the writers at the event were Laura Sutton, Richard Hague, Chris Holbrook, Jeff Mann, Frank X Walker, Marianne Worthington, Gurney Norman (current poet laureate of Kentucky), Crystal Wilkinson, and Wendell Berry. I spent every cent of a check I won for my essay on books at the event, so I'm both inspired and poor.

Story of my life.

In other news, I think I may throw myself into sonnets. Not only because Gary Copeland Lilley, who was suggested to me as someone who I should study, does, but because I've for some time suspected I should study form, specifically something that would force me to think about iambs. I have a side-project tentatively planned about rap and iambic structure, but I have never been very good at it, and I'm not sure I know a single other person in the world who would be interested in both formal poetry structure, and rap.

An orgy of sound, but not poets.

You really should read this Poetry and Popular Culture entry if you're at all interested in the very weirdest side of language. And if you're in a place where you can listen to NSFW (not safe for work) material.

Essentially, the blog links to The 60 Second Anthology of American Poetry, a compilation of the sounds between the words of recorded poetry. The ums, the ahs, the hms, but more intriguingly, the hisses and slurps.

Poetry and Popular culture says the following:

In other words, there are no words in this poetry collection, and this absence provokes some provocative questions: Can poetry exist without its words? If so, what then is poetry?

Now, I'm normally not one to stomp on an idea, because the moment you do that, some upstart shows you what's what. It happens every few generations, within any art form (Rock? It'll never last, it has no staying power. Rap? It can't even be considered music. The Beats? They're not saying anything.)

But come on. Can poetry exist outside of words? No. And I would love to be proven wrong on this. Not because I'm cocky, but because I feel like it'd be something like finding out that there's some 8th color of the rainbow I only need to know about to see. And I'm all about seeing more colors.

What's interesting about the recording is not what it says about poetry at all. Because let's face it, that could be a recording of politicians speaking at Congressional Hearings. It may very well be, as you'll find that Language Removal Services is standing by the very fishy decision not to release the names of any of the poets, citing the personal nature of the poets to the creator of the mp3. And anything rhythmic about this collection would be attributed to the editing process, something like scratching a record.

No, what I find interesting about the Anthology is the erotic-sounding nature of language itself, and I say language and not English, because again, this could be any language. It's a reminder that however passionately we aspire to raise language to the highest planes of thought, however much we, as poets or appreciators of poetry, like to think that words have power, that really what we deal with very often are calculated collections of sounds, some of the same sounds that connect us to our primitive origins. As a people, as a culture, and as a language.

Says P&P:

"Removing language becomes an opportunity to reclaim the physical, erotic pleasure surrounding it. “There is that kinky side to LRS,” says Kubick, “so in a sense, you could hear ‘The 60 Second Anthology’ as an orgy of poets. And I hope, also, that there’s something natural in it, something like the ocean, when you get swallowed by a wave. Swallowed by a sea of saliva.”

When we critically examine a text, we might note that the author uses alliteration, and it achieves this effect. Or that the sound of this word brings to mind some emotion or action. We might ask "Why?" a thousand times in trying to understand how our favorite poet achieves the emotional impact they've garnered in us, but it's important to ask, in a sense, a why of the why. To pull ourselves back to the very beginnings of poetry and language, and to look at what the sounds themselves evoke in us.

Because there's power in that. It is the truest sense of evocation.

Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour: "At Night, The Dead" by Lisa Ciccarello

“At night, the dead,” is a chapbook which concerns itself with the dead, which is literally everywhere, "in our throats when we sing" as well as within the pages of the book itself. But don't mistake what may initially sound like George A. Romero's book of poetry for anything like the gory, shambling dead we have come to expect from our dark media. And thank goodness for that. I have never understood the obsession with zombies and zombie killing. Spilled viscera isn’t scary. It’s disgusting.

Instead, the dead in Lisa Ciccarello's chapbook are more akin to those remembered in the practices of Mexico's Day of the Dead, or in the stories I have heard from Puerto Rican culture. They are everywhere, a part of our every day lives.

"the dead are sitting up in their narrow huts. At night they moan & try to uncross their legs. In the day they pretend they chose this position."

At night, the dead is not so much a story as it is a long running chant or benediction with many repetitions of imagery in its terse lines. Different forms of water, diamonds, salt, things burned, and especially the dead repeat themselves throughout the book.

Fourteen of the sixteen poems share the same title: "At night, the dead:" which serves the dual purpose of giving the poems a connectedness that hints at a single running poem, but separates them from one another, an essential thing for a series with no underlying literal narrative.


These are poems with pressing images, and short lines that give a sense of urgency to getting to the next line. As I've said, it reads to me very much like a sort of protection spell. Ever see the Charmed sisters frantically read a spell as something malevolent comes their way? It's something like that. Except not corny. Perhaps an entirely different example is in order…

In any case, the images themselves, and the mood that such short poems portray—blanketed as they are on the page with whiteness—are what this book seems to be all about. Not with understanding the who/what/when/where/why, but with sharing in a feeling:

"A moon is a plug. Someone stoppers the dark & I was waiting for it.

The moon is a coin on the dead eye of the dead. The dead are dead. Rearrange the letters."

There are many references to primal symbols and words that surely affect us all in similar ways. The word dead immediately sets a mood, and its repetition disallows our escaping that mood. The moon too, and even coins, associated with Chiron on the river Styx, all drive home an idea not of an abject terror, but of a dull one, a constant struggle between acceptance and fear of the dead.

It is not the complete peace of Native-American spirituality. One where ancestors, are welcomed to guide and protect us. Instead, it is a kind encroaching and pervasive dead. A perversion of that innate human feeling that the dead are with us coupled with a modern fear of death, and refusal of acceptance.

I would at first be inclined to say that I don't share these feelings about the dead, but then I realize that perhaps how I deal with the dead is to push them fully out of my mind, to 'move on,' as we might put it, and never spend any time to think of those who have passed, if it can be avoided. Enjoy the memory of them, but never think about them being dead. And this is precisely what the struggle this book seems about.

There are some things that I don’t understand, even coming to terms with the fact that this work is not necessarily a literal narrative. Sometimes Ciccarello writes out the word ‘your,’ and other times abbreviates it as ‘yr.’ There doesn’t seem to be any consistency in that, though, and sometimes both appear in the same poem. The word ‘and,’ on the other hand, is always abbreviated as an ampersand (&), and so it seems as if there is some sort of purposeful choice between ‘your’ and ‘yr.’ One which I was never able to discern. There are also inconsistencies with the capitalization of sentences.

And since the form of this chapbook seems to be used at times to its fullest effect (the decision to run on sentences instead of breaking lines, or to print a single line on an otherwise blank page) it made me wonder if the fact that only the first half of my book’s pages had frayed edges was a conscious decision, a technical necessity, or a mistake. And if it was a conscious decision, if it had anything at all to do with the poetry itself.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys in their poetry mood and imagery above all else, or who likes their dark forays into art properly dark, instead of what passes for dark these days: the gruesome, the startling, and the demented.

Oh. This is one stop of many on the Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour. Check out some of the others, if you get a chance.

The Gyspy Poetry Slam

Just got home from Gypsy Poetry Slam in Victorian Square (Lexington, KY), which is an event within the Kentucky Women's Writer's Conference, now in its 30th year. It was organized and emceed by fellow Appalachian Poet and good friend of mine, Bianca Spriggs (And now I will see if mentioning her name will draw her to my blog via Google Alerts. Haha).

It was awesome. Really, any female poet living in or around Kentucky has absolutely no excuse not to attend at least one of these events. I mean, I was able to make it, and I'm a guy. One of like 10 guys in the giant crowd, actually. And I'd tell you just how many people were there, but I am an astoundingly miserable estimator. Somewhere between 100 and a million people were there. Give or take.

I was there to support Lisa Cabaret, a friend I invited to compete, and she did great. She didn't win, but she beat me (and won!) at the Covington City Lights poetry slam a while back, so she's got that under her belt. Now she just needs a website. Or a blog.

One of my favorite things about this event, besides the talent itself, was the range of topics. From time to time I go to a local poetry event in Cincinnati which sometimes ends up being made up predominantly of women in their mid-twenties, and it becomes a man-bash. I can deal with that. But tonight, it was nice to see poetry that seemed simultaneously to embrace and 'transcend' its gender. Women writers have enough obstacles to deal with than to feel forced to write about their sexuality or motherhood, even if they ultimately choose to write about those things.

Afterwards, I ate dinner (hamburger, fries, and fried banana peppers!!) with some of the poets, including the feature performer, and Def Poet Rachel McKibbens, who was absolutely hilarious. I think she won the "things I did when I was poor" contest. Not with the "ate ramen noodles out of an upside down Frisbee," but I think I will forever consider Frisbees as bowls from now on.

Big book seller poetry selections suck. The oldest tale in a poet's book.

My Aunt Shawn read me much of my first poetry. And she didn't pull any punches. It wasn't Shel Silverstein, (which is good stuff, don't get me wrong). It was the poetry that she was still interested in as an adult.

She read, and still reads, better than almost anyone I know, and that is extremely important when introducing poetry to a skeptical or impatient audience. I can't say that the first time I heard Gunga Din that I understood with certainty what the story was about, but I felt the rhythm, and I was entranced by the exotic-sounding turns of phrases. And I'd go back to read it again.

So when my Aunt Shawn told me she had sent my poetry to a friend, and that she trusted this friend who had in return sent a list of poets I should read, I immediately wrote the names down, and drove to the bookstore.

Claudia Rankine, A. Van Jordan, Gary Lilley, and Sherwin Bitsui. And I have read A. Van Jordan, loaned to me by Frank X. Walker, but maybe not with discerning enough eye.

The closest bookstore to where I live is a Barnes and Noble. It's a decent sized bookstore, not the smallest one around these parts, but not one of the bigger ones either; it's just one floor. I spent some time scouring the two book shelves confusedly before realizing that the store had apparently given Poetry slightly more significance than essays, and had allowed them to run well into the Essay shelf as well.

But it didn't matter. They didn't have any of my four poets, not a single book by any of them. I wasn't surprised by Sherwin Bitsui, who is a Native-American author, and one I suspected might be easier to find in Arizona, where my Aunt Shawn is from, than here in Northern Kentucky. But I hadn't given up. On to the newer, bigger, bookstore: Borders.

Borders was a huge disappointment. A single row of shelves for poetry, and when you fill up the space with the inevitable poetry reads such as The Aenid, Edgar Allan Poe, and Langston Hughes, that leaves very little room for anything else. But here, the rest of the space was filled with anthologies of poetry.

Where would we be, those small tribes of us wandering around in the dark reading our poetry, without the advent of the internet? There is only one more bookstore that is within a reasonable distance to where I live. I really don't think that A. Van Jordan is so obscure as to be so difficult to find.

I understand that I can order these books at any of the bookstores I visited, but that's also asking quite a bit of commitment from a patron, isn't it? I happen to be interested in buying these books, but with nothing new on the shelf that isn't by a US Poet Laureate, how am I to decide if I want to drop 15-25 dollars on a book that isn't even 100 pages long?

Making your own poetry chapbooks: Everything you need to know

I'll try to keep the personal anecdotes to a minimum on this one and mention them only as they pertain to Chapbook making, with the hope that this post helps anyone out there who has never made a Chapbook. With easy to follow headings!

Why Should I Make a Chapbook?

If you're a poet, and you don't have a published book to sell, you need a chapbook. And if you already have a published book, it's not a bad idea to have one either. A chapbook is a poet's business card. But why not just actually print a business card? Because your 'business' is a strange one. After a reading, it is unlikely that the woman in the back who was so inspired by your words actually wants your business. What is she going to do, have you read at her kid's birthday party?

Of course, it might do well to have business cards as well, because maybe that woman is an English professor, or an agent. But the great majority of people in an audience aren't interested in hiring you, they're interested in your work, so it's a good idea to have a small book of some of your poems (preferably some of the ones you read) to take home with them. Maybe only as a souvenir, but maybe as something they really will go back and read sometimes.

And if you're already published, a chapbook is a good way of sharing some of your new work, as well as something for those people in the audience who can't shell out 20 books for a book. Or don't want to. If my brother and I were in the audience of a poetry reading 6 years ago, I might buy a chapbook because I was a poor student who wished he could afford the book, and my brother might buy it because he has no real interest in reading 60+ poems, but was actually moved enough to want to walk away with something.

So What are my Options?

You basically have three options, after you've decided that yes, you want a chapbook. There is the do-it-yourself option, the do-most-of-it-yourself option (hereafter called the Kinko’s option), and then there's the expensive option. More on that later.

I will, in each section, go over some of the same things over and over again. Not because I think you, the intrepid chapbook crafter is irretentive, but because I want those of you who are going to skip right to the option you want to not have to jump back and forth in this blog entry to figure out what I'm talking about.

1. The Do-It-Yourself Option

This is by far the most inexpensive way to go about making a chapbook, but don't let that stop you. This affords the greatest customization. Cheap is what it will cost you, it's not necessarily what it will look like. Although if you're not very crafty, it could end up looking that way too. But who knows. It may come across as endearing.

First, decide how many pages you want your book to be. Keep in mind that the number must be divisible by four. If you're not great with math, you're just going to have to trust me on this one, but basically, one 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, folded in half, is going to yield 4 pages. You could of course use smaller, or larger paper, but your printer is going to keep to handle that.

Things to keep in mind. You're doing this yourself. That means that you have to fold these things. It means that your stapler has to go through that many pages. And lastly, unless you have professional equipment, at a certain point, the pages in the middle are going to stick out noticeably further than the ones on the outside edge (near the covers). I would say 5 pages, including the cover, is a good amount for this option, but in any case, you're going to want to take some paper before you've even started and have a test run.

Speaking of test runs, if you want an especially nice touch, you'll want to use card stock as the cover, which comes in a variety of colors at your local Staples or other office supply store. But don't make the mistake I made, and never think to test your printer with card stock until the week before you need a chapbook. My laser printer is incapable of printing to cardstock; it just will not go through the machine. This may be true of all laser printers. I don't know.

Another thing you're going to probably want to get is what seems to be called a long stapler, a long reach stapler or a long arm stapler. It seems that this contraption goes by many names. This is going to be one of the more expensive investments for this option; it costs about $30 for a fairly nice one. You can get it at any office supply store, I'd imagine, but I got mine at Office Depot, I believe. Here you can see it, being lorded over by my cat, Alice. Dusty, because, as I said, my printer can not print card stock. If you don't have or don't want one of these staplers, you can just staple very close to the edge with the book closed (that is, not directly in the center of the spine, with the book open, the way a book is normally threaded or glued). But you'll be stapling through even more paper this way.

Now, for the smoothest ride, you're going to want to print a test run, still without poetry, to see where your poems are going to go. Basically, you're going to open your publishing program of choice. I used word. Make a number of pages with the only writing on the page the corresponding page number. You can see what I mean on the right.

Now is the most frustrating part of this process. Figuring out how to print double sided, in landscape. It's going to be different for every printer. Perhaps your printer is physically capable of printing on two sides. But more than likely, it is not, and you'll just have to remember which way to put paper back in the printer, and what side up, to print double sided. REMEMBER THIS. Write it down. You're going to think you can remember it. But you can't. Just trust me.

Note: In Word, I believe you can achieve this by going to File>Print, and under the section Zoom, choosing 2 pages per sheet. I think choosing A4 scaling will ensure the pages fit just right, but you may have to fiddle with that.

Now that you have a bunch of double sided paper with every number on it once, fold it down the middle, and staple it. This is what your book will look like, more or less. Any troubles you've had doing this are not going to get much easier.

The rest of this process is a breeze. Now that you know where the numbers fall, you can paste your poems into the appropriate page numbers and know where they will go. Keep in mind that a couple of the 'pages' will be the back cover or inside covers, if you don't want to print on those. Also keep in mind that anything you write will be half the size that you're used to. That is, if you type something in 10 font, it will be cut in half on the paper. I am not sure if that literally translates to 5 or not. You'll probably want, at the end of this, to print one final test copy to see if everything looks good.

Here's a photo of two hand-made chapbooks. The one on the left shows a chapbook that doesn't follow the conventional size of a chapbook; an example of some of the freedom allowed. And it's very nice, it's called The Bones of Saints Under Glass, by Jeff Fleming. The one on the right is a chapbook by Bianca Spriggs, Constella and the 7-Layer Skin. Bianca hand-drew all the art on her covers, and each one was a little different. It made buying her book special. And of course, the possibilities are endless. Paint your covers, cut things out of them, glue things to them. And the list goes on.

2. The Kinko’s Option

I have done this a few times, and I must say, the Kinko’s option yields nice results, but man is it hell to get just the way you want. It depends entirely on who you're speaking to whether or not they seem to have any idea what you're talking about. And the odds never seem to be in your favor. If you're doing this option, make sure you're doing it well enough in advance that they can reprint the books for you if they mess up. Yes, it can happen. The first time I went, despite what I thought was very clear instructions that I wanted regular computer paper folded in half, I received chapbooks that were CD sized. It wasn't unreadable, but it was awkward and not what I wanted, at all. Kinko’s is supposed to print you a test copy that you okay, but this doesn't guarantee anything, it just raises the chances that your book will turn out okay.

The hardest part of this is going to be figuring out how Kinko’s orders its pages. What I finally did this last time (I went to Kinko’s 4 times in one day trying to explain what I wanted) was number a word document, each page a single number from 1-20 (I wanted a 20 page book) and have them print that as if it were a booklet I was making. That way, I could put the poems exactly where I wanted them. Note: You'll probably want to insert blank pages on the inside and back cover. But also keep in mind that you're paying for this, and each page adds quite a bit of cost to the final product, so you may actually want to consolidate your pages so that the inside back cover has your contact info, for instance.

Kinko’s can read most file formats, but they ultimately use .PDF (Adobe Acrobat's format), so if you have something that saves to that, you might want to save to that format as well as word and any other format you think they might read. You can of course call and ask, but I always bring several copies of the same file, on more than one media if possible, just in case.

Also keep in mind that at Kinko’s, much of the time you're using is being paid for. I think Kinko’s will charge you if you ask them to reorder your pages ($20, I believe it was), and if you want to do it yourself on one of their computers, you'll be paying per-minute charges. And if your Kinko’s is like mine, you'll be paying for 5 minutes worth of time just waiting for your file to load. Also, remember that since this book is a regular sized sheet of paper folded in half, all the fonts will appear smaller than normal. Try to remember what size half a piece of paper is, ignore the font number, and make your font a size relative to the page itself.

At the end, you'll be asking for a booklet, double sided. Ask them to see the final product, and make sure to sit there and make sure everything looks the way you want it. Page order, alignment, everything. They can wait.

All my trashing aside, in the end, you have a lot of options with Kinko’s. You have a number of really nice cardstock covers to choose from. They trim the edges of your books which means even a really thick chapbook will have smooth edges (no middle pages sticking out in a V). And if you want to go all out, you could even choose to print in color, or on glossy paper, although that can get very expensive.

An example: At my Kinko’s, I had 25 chapbooks made. Each was a total of 1 sheet of cardstock, and 4 sheets of paper (that's 20 pages, counting the inside and back covers, 16 not counting them). I printed my books on the cheapest paper, in black and white, and had them staple them twice. I don't believe they trimmed my chapbooks, because they were so small. My final cost plus tax was $37.37. Which isn't bad, but each addition of a page or any other frill would compound that, as well as any more copies I would want to get. Also, $30 is what it would cost to buy a long arm stapler, so you can see why making these yourself can save you a ton of money, since you'll never need to buy another one of those again after buying it.

3. The Expensive Option

I have never taken this option. But there are also sites like blurb.com or lulu.com where you can have professionally bound and produced books. The production is very professional, although dependent upon your own skill at designing. In fact, in this respect, it can be dangerous to use these services, because nothing stands out more than a well printed, and yet very ugly or poorly designed, book.

There are a ton of options, including hardcover books, and extremely nice glossy pages. There really is no better option if you want to sell something that looks outstanding. But keep in mind how many times you've walked past a book you thought looked really nice. Your poetry coming in a nice package won't make anyone buy something they wouldn't have bought in the first place, and let's face it, it's a feat to get someone to buy poetry in the first place. Keep in mind, also, that this does not count as being published, or even as publishing a chapbook, to any of the places that you are going to want to say this to (competitions, etc).

These sites have their own walkthroughs, so I won't walk you through a walkthrough. But be prepared. A set of 25 books comparable to the ones I got done at Kinko’s for $37.37 (about the same size, about the same page count) would cost me over $150 at lulu.com. And unless you want to eat that cost, you're going to have to try to sell them for that much more as well.

Final Word

Wow. That's some writing. I decided to go through all this because of how much trouble I had in doing it myself, and how hard it was for me to find any info anywhere online. I hope it was informative. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, and if you can link to this article, that'd be great, because it doesn't help for the information to now be out there, but floating just outside of everyone's vision.

Edit/Update: Brian Campbell has let me know about an easy to use chapbook template for anyone who has a copy of Microsoft Publisher. The file is hosted at The League of Canadian Poets.

My most recent reading: Holler Series 16

Occasionally, this blog must take the form of a sort of journal (that's a diary for guys), no matter how much I want to stay away from that. I tend to think of poems as word Poleroids, so I remember events just fine without a journal. And yet, here I go.

Yesterday was my feature at Holler Series 16. For those of you not living in or around Lexington, KY, this is a poetry series run by Eric Sutherland, and is very popular in part because of the sheer number of literary luminaries that live in Lexington, as well as the sheer determination of the activist and writing community, which unsurprisingly, have their colors run into one another quite frequently.

It went great. I read entirely out of a chapbook (my third self produced 'volume'), in an attempt to encourage people to buy it, as well as to keep myself from changing my set a hundred times during the reading. It also allowed me to focus on what I thought the audience would dig (something I didn't know to do during the Affrilachian Tour that this blog was started for) and to practice reading them some. That's a no-brainer for reading in front of a crowd, but I write a new poem a day. This year I have close to 200 new poems. So no, I don't get to practice all my poems.

It's a chore to decide what poems to read. I was being exposed to an entirely new crowd of listeners than I am normally around, so I wanted to keep them happy, of course. But I also wanted to show the scope of my poetry. That I write about race, and manhood, and activism, as well as humorous poetry. Which, incidentally, people tend to enjoy the most from my readings, although that may be more because it's easier to hear a laugh than a nod of approval. haha.

But speaking of the chapbooks? My next blog will be a how-to for chapbook making, as well as a censure of Kinkos and their ridiculous unproductive process. Keep an eye out.