Column100 — July/August 2010
The Dan Waber Explosion
Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2010
this is visual poetry
by Marton Koppany
chapbookpublisher.com
443 Main Street, 2nd FL | Kingston, PA 18704 | USA
1-570-762-6140 and [email protected]
$10 plus postage. 2010. Pa; 16 pp.
You creeps who skip my column because it treats weird stuff will miss out badly if you skip this one, for it’s about a set of chapbooks opportunities Dan Waber is making available. Dan, in partnership with Jennifer Hill, runs Paper Kite Press (http://wordpainting.com), which has been publishing books of poetry for going on 8 years. “When we first started Paper Kite Press we published trade paperbacks and chapbooks,” he says. But the press gradually got away from chapbooks due to the comparatively high costs of publishing them, along with the generally low returns that resulted.
Just last fall, though, he happened to have three manuscripts by friends on hand that he thought ideal for chapbooks but not for longer books. In hunting via the Internet for chapbook publishers, he learned to his surprise that there was just about none around, anymore.
That led to his founding a completely separate little company that does three things: 1) publishes chapbooks under the Naissance imprint; 2) does file conversion for people who want to self-publish or publish their own imprint; 3) does the file conversion and the printing for people who just want finished books delivered to them.
Naissance generally publishes what I call linguexpressive poetry (poetry in words alone, as opposed to “plurexpressive poetry,” like visual poetry, which is words and graphics and/or some other mode of expression). A published author in this series is paid ten copies of his work. So: NON-EXPERIODDICAL WRITERS ARE WELCOME!!!
One feature of Naissance is that if you do your own layout and submit it to Dan by e.mail, with a $10 payment, you will get a guaranteed response in 24 hours. Either he will accept your submission or send back your files, converted to files that are ready for conventional double-sided signature printing–wich means re-ordering the pages, for example. This seems a good deal to me, but if you don’t like it, you can submit via regular mail at no charge. Dan will also print books for a reasonable fee. Visit his site for details.
Because I’m mainly a visual poet, Dan’s most recent venture, the this is visual poetry series, is more up my alley. About it, he says, “Having solved all of the other problems in the world, I set myself to the last remaining task of importance: affordable short run color printing so that visual poetry can achieve the audience it deserves.” It would appear he’s publishing a dozen new titles in this series daily. Go to http://thisisvisualpoetry.com to see whose work he’s done chapbooks of. Among them, as of this writing, are John Martone, Ruggero Maggi, Carol Stetser, K. S. Ernst, Marilyn Rosenberg, Marton Koppany, Kaz Maslanka, Scott Helmes–and, of course, ME! Otherwise, why would I be writing about it, right?
I found my experience with this line of titles close to amazing. After consulting the easy-to-follow guidelines one can click to from thisisvisualpoetry.com, I gathered 15 of my visual poems, all but one or two in color–which wasn’t easy, for I’m not prolific. I needed 17 pieces, 16 for the body of the book and one for the cover, so I added a couple of textual designs. I e.mailed jpg copies of these and a photograph and bio to Dan (yes, one drawback is that you have to have a computer and access to the Internet to get published). My submission was accepted within an hour. A week later, with only one day of back&forth to get my back-cover photograph right, five copies of my book arrived at my house as my payment. (I can also order more copies at half price.) If ten million copies of the thing are sold, it won’t put anything in my pocket, but that’s a little unlikely. And, of course, if that happened, I’d be able to sell my originals for fabulous prices, and get on tv.
The collections in the series vary widely. Most consist of works without words, or without meaningful words that I call textual designage–and not poetry. My impression, though, is that they are all first-rate. One that is, for sure (and is visual poetry, most of it), is Marton Koppany’s One of my favorites in it I like mainly because I saw it wrong. To me it was a floating hat in an empty blue sky above ocean. Title: “Vacation.” The idea of a person having a vacation that’s so relaxing he turns into air–but keeps his hat on–for some reason very much appeals to me, both as a wry joke and as a lyrical celebration of Pure Serenity. Leaving oneself.
But it seems there is a question mark under the hat. Once Marton pointed out its presence, I could see it, but it’s faint. It shows up much better in his recent Otoliths collection, which I expect to cover in a later column. So, a question mark is on vacation. That’s probably as pleasantly anti-stress an idea as my misreading–a question freed from all forms of questionability, jauntily afloat above tides lazily coming and going. . . .
There are many other serene explorations of various punctuation marks and related typographical symbols in Marton’s haiku-deep collection. Pretty pictures of clouds and ocean, too.
To date, Dan is pleased with his new ventures. They are, as a group, in the black, something that can’t be said for most such small press endeavors–and near-miraculous for any such endeavor involved with visual poetry. Also near-miraculous to me is that Dan only needs to spend a half hour or so a day, a couple of days a week tending to said ventures. Most of what he does, he says, “is either well automated or made very efficient by it.” Or he doesn’t do it.. His day job, incidentally, is Sales & Marketing manager for a company that makes diamond tools for a variety of hobby markets, which no doubt accounts more than a little for his high level of competence in his second occupation. (Or third, as he’s also an excellent poet.)
Next up for him as publisher, he hopes, is a series called “sixteen thousand words”. Like the this is my visual poetry series, this will also consist of 16 page full-color chapbooks but they’ll include pictures that string together to tell narratives. “Visfiction,” he dubs it. I eagerly await the day he decides a series of visual poetry criticism is in order–although he may already be open to that.