Chapbooks and Their Aura

Kina and I are in the middle of production on Ginger Ko’s chapbook, How glossy the plastic. (Which by the way, you should purchase. She’s a brilliant fucking poet and this book is great.) Like most of the recent books we’ve published through Garden-Door Press, it has a letterpressed cover. Our process goes something like this: Order the paper. Design the cover. Get a plate made through Boxcar Press. Finagle our way into using the Vandercook in the basement of Risley Hall at Cornell, and do all the cover printing in a two-hour window at the end of our workdays, when we’re both often hungry and tired. Print a bunch of interiors on our laserjet printer at home, and lay them all out on the floor of our office. Cut them down to size. Bribe friends with wine and pizza to help us sew them. Put them in envelopes and take them to the P.O., where the employees will ask, “What’s in here? Is it a book?” and I find myself wondering how much our definition of “book” is wrapped up with ISBNs, barcodes, and spines. Is it a book indeed!

But mostly, working on chapbooks brings me back to the most basic element of writing and textuality: inscription. We tend to associate this word, perhaps, with chisels and tablets, but all writing is oriented towards some form of inscribing, the shaping or impressing of language onto a surface. This doesn’t go away with the advent of digital computing, either—as the scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum shows, computing is contingent upon its own form of material inscription – of writing – even if its mechanisms conceal the process. So: writing. Disturbing the surface!

In momentary flashes – particularly during the arduous process of production – I sometimes feel like letterpressing is a waste of time. What’s the substantial difference, really, between the physical act of setting type or arranging a plate, and say, inkjet printing? Is it worth the effort to merely have the text sunk a bit deeper into the paper, rather than just having it impressed upon it?

Then we bring the covers home, have a glass of wine and some dinner, and start getting really excited. Yes, the text is inscribed with a depth, however slight, into the paper­—and this form of inscription is deeply intoxicating. Is it merely nostalgia, a fetishism for earlier forms of printing? Or, perhaps, it’s about the material trace: the foregrounding of the inscriptive, labored act of producing text that this capitalist society – and its accordant philosophies of labor, technology, and cultural production – aims to conceal. Is the letterpress chapbook, ultimately, a fetish object? Or, in its disclosing of the material process of inscription, is it a resistance to the book as commodity form?

Of relevance, here, is Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production,” Benjamin suggests that pre-industrial artworks – Renaissance paintings, for example – have an auratic quality, a sense of value wrapped up with their “parasitical dependence on ritual,” or, as it may be, their status as a commodity. The advent of reproducible aesthetic forms, he argued, in media such as photography, would liberate art from its commodity status. Art would refuse the category of “authenticity” altogether, and would have a necessarily political, liberatory function.

As history has made clear, Benjamin was wrong. But this notion of “aura” still strikes me as a vital aspect of what art is and how it affects people, even if I’m not conceiving of it in precisely the same terms as Benjamin. The “aura” of poetry is what drew me to it, and in my mind, it’s wrapped up with its performativity. By performativity, I mean literal, live readings that have blown my fucking mind, but also, “performance” in the broader sense of poetry as iteration, of marking its own presence within time and space. In this sense, I think of chapbooks as a deeply performative literary form. The chapbook is not an inert container for the text it contains; it’s a malleable, complex mode that has very few agreed-upon formal tendencies.

How do we define chapbooks? The only thing I can think of, really, is length: a chapbook is shorter than a full-length book. Then again, there’s Carrie Lorig’s excellent The Blood Barn (Inside the Castle, 2019), which – despite the fact that it’s longer than many (most) full-length poetry books – Carrie refers to as a chapbook—a gesture, perhaps, towards the difficulty of assimilating trauma and intensity to a static form like the “poetry collection.”

When I think about chapbooks, I usually think of a spectrum. On one end is the cheaply made, Xeroxed and stapled chapbook, often self-published (closer, perhaps, to the zine in its formal characteristics). On the other end of the spectrum is the chapbook as a labored-over “art object,” in the vein of what presses like DoubleCross, Projective Industries, and Delete Press do (closer, perhaps, to the artist’s book). Both of these approaches, I think, are necessary, and vital to the broad formal possibilities of what a chapbook can be. To interpret this binary through a crude reading of Benjamin, though, we might see the stapled/xeroxed variety as the more “liberatory” approach—it is, in any case, probably the most accessible way to produce and distribute print texts. Along the lines of this interpretation, the “art object” chapbook, then, is the insidiously capitalist entity: it can be financially and logistically prohibitive to make, and it’s obsessed with authenticity (these kinds of chapbooks are often published in short runs, and individually numbered).

As someone who makes chapbooks that, generally, are closer to the latter category, I obviously don’t think this interpretation is true. While letterpressed chapbooks aren’t cheap to make by any means, they’re still far less expensive than publishing full-length books. Generally, bookstores don’t want to sell them, and they’re not legible enough as “art” for galleries to want to showcase them, either. They’re collectible, certainly, but they’re also difficult to archive: though we love them, the chapbooks that Kina and I own – letterpressed or otherwise – are currently stacked in a box sitting at the bottom of our bookshelf. Even when they’re the product of many labor hours, chapbooks still always feel somewhat disposable and ephemeral to me. And this is what I love about them.

The letterpressed chapbook does have an aura. It’s one that might engage with the formal or aesthetic values of art in the capitalist marketplace, but ultimately, I’d argue that it underlines the countercultural, formally excessive attributes of small press poetry: it almost obsessively marks the process of its own production (and, moreover, the technologies and institutions that make it possible); it requires creative collaboration between the poet and bookmaker; and, perhaps most importantly, it exists for fun and communal possibility. Within the capitalist framework of publishing in the U.S., the chapbook resists assimilation: chapbooks aren’t going to get reviewed in The New York Times, and if you’re an academic, a chapbook is not going to be the reason you do or don’t get a job. However they’re made, I love chapbooks. They’re essential to the D.I.Y. ethos of small press poetry, and to the facets of the poetry world that don’t merely embody another corporate scam. Fuck yeah!