Chapbook Project 1: Riddles in the Dark

I’m making a chapbook this year. It’s January, the traditional time for new projects, and I’ve decided that this is as good an occasion as any to finally finish something. And I’ve been looking for a way get back to posting, so I’ve committed to documenting the process here.

Now, this may prompt several questions from readers who have stumbled upon this. Questions like, “What’s a chapbook?” and, “Who the hell are you?” and, “It’s 2020, why would anyone bother writing poetry – much less a blog about poetry?”

These are excellent and worthy questions. As per my usual, I’ll offer opinions overstated as fact and then arrive at the end of this post more confused than when I began. Do come along, won’t you?

  “What is a chapbook?”

In no particular order: a chapbook is a calling card, a guessing game, a brass ring, an appetizer, an entrance fee, and a hat thrown over a wall. It’s also a short book of poems typically printed in small runs. Some of them are handmade, some involve elaborate material design, some are by obscure writers, some are inexpensive. Like poems themselves, chapbooks tend to break as many rules as they follow.

What I currently aim to make is a physically small volume of 24 or so pages, made up of poems I’ve written over the last ten years or so, that address some element or other of a single theme. (All of the websites I’ve consulted tell me this is not a bad way to start.) Now to the questions:

  “Who the hell are you?”

If you’re one of the few readers to find this who doesn’t know me personally… I’m a near-middle-aged guy in the Pacific Northwest who writes poems and songs, as well as blog posts once every couple of years. A natural follow-up question would be, “So… why should I care?” 

You’ll have to supply your own answer, but I can tell you that I’m at a loss for any particularly compelling or persuasive reason you should.

  “It’s 2020, why would anyone bother writing poetry – much less a blog about poetry?”

Yep. I get it. Plenty of folks have the same feelings about poetry as they do about accordion music or creating an actual-play Warhammer 40K podcast: there’s probably SOME idiot out there who enjoys this, but it’s not for me.

Plenty of poets and teachers of poetry haven’t helped. We can get clique-ish or cult-ish, pretending there’s some arcane wisdom we possess, enacting elaborate rites to welcome novitiates. If your primary experience of poetry came from a classroom where you were lectured at about why the plum in the icebox is a yonic symbol of repressed desire… Ugh, I don’t blame you.

For me, both reading and writing poetry are games: there are puzzles and mysteries, there’s amazement and excitement, you can attempt challenges and unlock achievements, you can play solo or head-to-head (there can even be trash talk if you’re into that sort of thing). 

The equipment and training required are almost nothing. If you have pen and paper that’s great, but whatever device you’re reading this on will do just fine. There is a near-zero cost of entry to make your own art with creative use of language. It’s actually kind of bonkers that any widespread human activity has been so little commodified, marketed or incentivized!

Poetry famously “makes nothing happen”, has next to no economic profit, is incredibly niche and nerdy, and is generally derided by society at large. It’s basically LARP-ing with line breaks. (No offense intended to my fellow nerds who also happen to love live-action role-playing, all the best to you.)

So given all that, the people who “do poetry” frequently tend to get… a little obsessed with it. I figure that lovers of poetry (who are almost inevitably also writers of poetry) are a lot like fans of other cultural products and activities most folks have never heard of. Fans of obscure stuff like The Teardrop Explodes or “Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea” have simultaneously conflicting impulses. We want to share our love of this obscure artifact with the universe at large. But we also hold onto it desperately, cherishing the precious and fearing the ignorant, uninformed reactions of outsiders.

This is a way I can do both: rave to anyone who cares to listen all about the things that poetry does (and does to me), and do it in one of the most obscure and ineffectual formats 2020 can offer: a poetry blog.

  “What now?”

I’m going to be working my way through the process of making a chapbook of poems. I’ll talk through the research, selecting pieces, organizing and editing poems, submitting the final product to a few contests, as well as why I wanted to do any of this in the first place. 

So join me in this quest, fellow rogues, clerics and paladins. Hail and well met!

Recommended for: 

• Adventurous souls fascinated by the obscure and arcane

• Friends and family members glancing through this to humor me

• Poets seeking a shortcut to wealth and glory

• Poets seeking schadenfreude or how to make every chapbook mistake

• Spambots copy/pasting atypical verbiage to throw off malware filters