At a reading a few weeks ago, an undergraduate creative writing major who had been turning my chapbook over in his hands for about five minutes came over and asked me about the format. He wanted to know if "[the poems in a chapbook] all have to be connected together like this." I told him what I'd read while researching to submit manuscripts and what I'd learned from reading chapbooks myself: they don't have to be, but a lot of presses like when they are. And that made me think about why I like the chapbook format so much. I'm a big fan of the music album as a work of art, and while I don't necessarily think an album has to have a 'concept,' like, say, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, to be great, I do think it has to have some kind of thematic and aesthetic cohesion. I think about this a lot. I listen to an enormous amount of music, and I'm always constructing playlists, organizing by different themes or motifs, thinking about how songs play off of one another to create a larger effect.
To me, the chapbook is the poetic equivalent of an album. Sit down and read a chapbook aloud all the way through. The approximate read time is probably similar to (or maybe just a bit shorter than) the run time of an album. So it makes sense that the chapbook could be structured in the same way as an album, and when I was arranging the poems in Illinois, My Apologies, the point at which I finally figured out a cohesive arrangement was the same point that I began thinking in terms of albums and playlists.
Fast forward to the last couple of months. I've been tweaking a new chapbook manuscript for fall submissions (and soliciting the opinions of a few generous souls along the way). Structure has again been a battle. But as I was thinking about what I told that student, and about how chapbooks operate so much like albums, the answer sort of jumped out at me. This new chapbook wants to be an album. Every poem references music or sound in one way or another and it is deeply indepted to my love of music and musicians.
Only problem is I can't sing. Or play anything, besides "Hey, Jude," badly, on the harmonica. Then I remembered a copy of American Poetry Journal that was published face-to-face with The National Poetry Review, and it dawned on me. There's no reason the chapbook couldn't recreate the physical act of listening to a record. So I've structured it with a Side One and a Side Two, just as an album would have a Side One and a Side Two. Each side is organized the way albums used to be, when the artist had to consider the fact the listener would be flipping the record (or maybe just stopping after one side), meaning the opening, closing, and cohesion of each side had to be carefully considered in addition to how it fit into the whole record.
The idea is that if a chapbook press picks this thing up, they'll print Side One going from page one to page 11 one way and Side Two going from page one to page 13 going the other. So the reader will have to "flip" the chapbook over to start a fresh side. The break between sides (hopefully) reinforces the thematic cohesion within each side without downplaying the fact that both sides are of a whole.
I'm sure this is how the chapbook was meant to be done. But my fear is that an editor or contest judge is going to read my note on how the assembly/printing/presentation and think I'm an idiot. Which I may well be, but I'd rather it not get around.
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