Chapbooks IV

A symbol places the intangible vision of the individual into the material reality of the public realm. The writer evokes experience in names that are symbols; while the publisher takes the writers’ work and goes beyond the naming of things. Publishing brings out the work in print and on line.

For more than thirty years, while printing books of student writing and curriculum for NYC schools and programs, Ten Penny Players continued to publish Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, a monthly poetry magazine, and the BardPress poetry chapbooks. Among the poets we published both in the magazine and in their own chapbooks were Ida Fasel, Joanne Seltzer, Joy Hewitt Mann, and Albert Huffstickler.

Though we're uncomfortable with the fact that Scribd.com carries advertising, the site gives us an opportunity to bring our poetry archive to a larger audience. At this writing there have been more than 230,000 reads of Ten Penny Players’ publications on Scribd.com.

Once their chapbooks were published, students could walk away, write another book, or stay to consider the effects of their published words upon other writers and other communities: How did the rhythm of the author’s voice echo in the reader’s response? What ideas or phrases were repeated? How did it shape contemporary consciousness among other students?

Ten Penny Players online archive of chapbooks provided data to describe reading trends that shifted like the wind. Clouds of chapbooks (the textual embodiments of student voices) passed across cyber-sky.

Poems exist in the consciousness streaming between authors and readers. Ancient poets sought inspiration in the words of the muse carried by whispering mists rising up through fissures in the earth.

To publish poetry is to make manifest a pattern of human communication that asks the reader to respond. The influence that moves poets to make poems leads publishers to put in print books that animate the blood and bones of every day existence.