Flash forward to the 1960s, the decade when Merriam-Webster first recognized the term “zine,” which can be considered a form of chapbook (although there’s debate over whether they’re the same or simply creative cousins). The dictionary’s website now describes a zine as “a noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter.” The new definition acknowledges the role of the web in the evolving zine format - while some underground publications that gained attention in the ‘60s maintained their original easy-to-publish form, others, such as feminist zine Bitch Magazine, parlayed their way into online formats in which videos, blogs and Flash presentations supplement their print content.
Likewise, some of the chapbook poets strayed from those roots to a more widely attainable online format. This is the case of Belinda Subraman, whose last chapbook release was the award-winning 1998 release Notes of a Human Warehouse Engineer. She had used her website to garner interest for her past works and works from others, produce podcasts and audio links of her spoken word poetry, and post videos of visual interpretations of her poetry from YouTube.
While that was sufficient for most of the aughts, a decade defined by its rampant multimedia junkiehood, Subraman recognized the importance of having a tangible collection of print work. “I needed something to hand out to people, something to point to,” she says.
The importance of having her work published in a chapbook went beyond having physical representations of her work rather than solely digital. “If you don’t have a collection, you don’t have something that can be reviewed. Otherwise, its just a piece here and a piece there,” she says. “I needed something coherent, a better view of what [I’m] all about.”
In her latest chapbook titled Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights, Subraman drew from her life experiences as a hospice nurse going to care for her father as he was dying. The poems read as attainable pieces, offering vivid embodiment to intangible sensations of grief. Some pieces tend toward the abstract, making a suitable creative union between Subraman and artist Cesar Ivan, who submitted his existing work to her and Jonathan Penton, the manager for local chapbook publisher Make It New Media. Ivan vetted the selection process for which artwork would appropriately correspond with the poetry, but left it largely in their hands. “If there was something that I didn’t think would fit, I would tell them,” he says.
Ivan’s artwork had been featured in calendars and in public murals, but this is the first work to be featured in a chapbook. He sees the Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights as an opportunity to open the door for more future collaboration with writers and other artists. “It’s good for adding visuals for writing; it’s good exposure also.”
Ivan had previously submitted work to Subraman’s online publication Gypsy Literary Magazine, which was launched while she was living in Germany.
Now based in Ruidoso as an Apache Indian Reservation charge nurse, she found herself collaborating with Ivan, recognizing: “It’s important to work with a local artist.”
Subraman’s return to chapbooks is fittingly coordinated with Penton’s latest development, creating a chapbook and alternative literature venture that is its maiden year. He is no stranger to the medium; he has been running the 11-year-old Unlikely Stories, which he describes as “the first media pulp literary website” accruing a worldwide audience.
From a production standpoint, the chapbook is defined as much by efficiency as content: “The whole thing about this technology is that you can print them as they are sold…not to have an overstock,” says Penton.
The tangibility of this work, versus the prospect of “cuddling with your computer,” and the relative permanence of print versus online work is the intimacy and immediacy that Subraman valued in her return to chapbooks. Noting the potential for website crashes and lost archives, she pointed out: “That thing that you thought was permanent is gone. If it’s in print, it could go on for centuries.”
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This story was originally published in the May 2009 issue of El Paso Magazine available on newsstands at area Barnes & Noble stores.
