Chapbooks -- Handcrafted Home Brew

by Kent Chadwick

Chapbooks are the handcrafted home brew of literature -- yeasty, unstable, and full of surprises. There is no business in their creation, only love, whimsy, or madness. Chapbooks are America's samizdat: the unofficial, uncommercial, unrecognized "barbaric yawp," in Walt Whitman's phrase (he the patron saint of chapbook printers and writers), of art and hope and ego being raised over the roofs of our country. One test of a great bookstore is if it has a separate section for local chapbooks. Elliott Bay Book's chapbook rack is in its poetry section, and that's where you can find some of the following work.

John Olson is a thesaural poet mad for words. Unlike the ascetic language poets who keep words at a distance because of their intoxicating power, Olson is a language hedonist. He never met an alliteration he didn't like. He writes that as a student he "gorged" himself on the romantic and metaphysical English poets. That intellectual appetite, combined with a good ear and a wry wit, has given Olson a talent for creating smart and funny prose poems that can make an audience laugh and groan while also entertaining the solitary reader. In "The Alchemy of Art," the best poem in his chapbook Eggs & Mirrors, Olson transmutes his humor into the gold of insight:

... Look
what photography did to art circa 1850 or so
& you will find a plate teeming with chestnuts

attain a startling vividness in a tray of fixative
like the smell of reality
in the human imagination. What is a sky

without a little dirt
below it, or a fuzzy bright planet
without a piece of infinity banging behind the ribs

Tamara Madison-Shaw is a powerful performance poet. Her chapbook, Sistuh's Sermon on the Mount: The Blood Still Boils ..., lays claim for the right to speak, to cry out, to testify:

i
am
the last bit o' soul
america has left
am her collard greens
cacklin' cracklin's
am her shame
am her "we" that "the people"
left out
am her honey-eyed
milk chocolate baby
made with curdled cream

--from "Poem for the Other Americans"

In phrases like "hips, haunch and hide heaving" Madison-Shaw shows sensitivity to the song in speech. She builds her short, lean lines into effective poetic rhythms, as in this selection from her hymn to pregnancy "Womb Tune:"

wombing strong
in places that i did not know
existed
i am a womb song
with notes missing
unable to explain
my smell
making no excuses
simply existing
in spits of moments
i pray to remember
waiting

Madison-Shaw's "womanish" sermon is angry, affirming, and sexy. It hums "strong / like metal screwin' metal / with no grease between."

Willie Smith's chapbook of stories, Execution Style, is true to its title. He takes no prisoners among his readers; he'll either slay you or offend you with his kafkaesque, and often obscene satires. In "Which Translation" a preternaturally wise cabbie sets our hero straight on deconstructionism -- "that ... crap is no more incisive than a marshmallow in the fist of a mongoloid. Just another limp prick in the knot hole of Western Syphilization;" and Indian metaphysics -- "This is the age of Cully.... Cully means the lousiest dice throw. We sorta live in the Age of Craps."

In "Hyperactive Before My Time" Smith very effectively parodies the idiotic obsessions that pre-pubescent boys so easily succumb to, in this case a great hatred of Commies, perfectly in keeping with the lessons the school-aged narrator was learning in the Kennedy years. To beat out the Russkies, who had created a two-headed dog, the boy becomes intent on creating multi-tailed dogs when he sees Mrs. Bernstein's dachshund stuck together with the Sinclair's shelty.

But Smith's most outrageous story is "Spider Fuck," which opens, "The horniest picture I ever saw was in National Geographic. It was a spider's asshole magnified fifty times." Imagine Henry Miller writing "Metamorphosis" and you'll get a sense of how wickedly Smith plays out that fantasy.

The twenty-five poems in Lynn Martin's Where the Yellow Field Widened: Elegies for a Lost Child are gravely beautiful. They are a sequence of grief, each in the same form, three four-line stanzas, untitled except through the elegant capitalization of a few of the words in each poem's first line.

I WENT TO THE SEA and said sea.
I went to the sky and said sky.
I went to the green leaping trees
and said I'm nothing but rags inside.

Martin has that marvelous poetic gift, which distinguishes the poetry of say Pablo Neruda or Robert Frost, of finding in the objects around her, curls of wood scraps, clocks, eggplant, one dry leaf, exact correlations to inexpressible emotions.

I SHAKE SPARROWS out of my heart.
I give rivers from my two eyes.
My shoulders hold all the ancient
dreams that try to answer whiteness.

Great art articulates what in life is so hard to say or even understand. John Olson is right, it is alchemy. Martin has made from the grief of a miscarriage a work that feeds our strange need for tragedy. Where the Yellow Field Widened is a cathartic work. It is a perfect chapbook. It is a perfect book.