1.
It’s almost fifty years that I have been writing and publishing books of poetry. My first three published works, in essence, were chapbooks.
The
first book, Vegetables (Vehicule
Press,1975), was a glorified chapbook. It had nineteen poems in it. The book
was fleshed out with illustrations by visual artist Jill Smith. So it managed
to be perfect bound, with a package of vegetable seeds affixed to the front
cover. It was a chapbook of poetry hiding inside of a book format.
The second publication was the chapbook Under The Skin (CrossCountry Press,1976), which was a brief experiment in neo-Surrealism.
My third publication was Report On The Second
Half Of The Twentieth Century (CrossCountry Press, 1977), which wound up
being the first book in a twenty-two book long poem. That first installment was
something like thirty-two pages long.
My first full collection of poems was The Perfect Accident, which was published by Vehicule Press in 1978. It had fifty poems in it, and served as an early greatest hits.
In the early days, the time between writing and publication just wasn’t that long. The poems in Vegetables had been written in the two years prior to publication. Under The Skin was written maybe two to four months before publication. The first book of Report was written and published in a similar time frame.
In those early days, what chapbooks had was immediacy. You didn’t have to build a book. You didn’t have to wait around for publishers to find the money and/or a publication slot. Chapbooks could capture the eagerness of young poets. Chapbooks were fast, and they were fun.
2.
When do writers enter mid-career? It’s probably four proper books in or age forty, whichever comes first. In my case, it was five books in and thirty-five years of age. Many Canadian poets like to publish a new full-length book every four or five years. In the early days, I was more productive than that.
We all learn with the first few books. Then the switch gets flipped, and we become ourselves, writing the poems or novels that only we can write.
The
middle can take up a lot of space. It is often disproportionate to the
beginning and the
end. In a fifty year career the middle can be thirty years.
In
mid-career I was writing a lot of big books. My books then had lots and lots of
pages. There
was so much that I had to say.
3.
For
me, the middle started evaporating around the time I was turning sixty-five.
The year would
have been 2016. By then I had been teaching university for thirty-one years. I
had two
years to go before retirement.
When I entered retirement in 2018, I finally got a good chance to look back over my writing of the previous decade. In brief, I found that I had had two extra manuscripts. Where there should have been three potential books there were five. Publishing those extra two as full-length books was going to swallow up five years, and put a delay on my other/future work that was going to be equal to a decade. I had no desire to send my recent work into suspended animation or to be running so far behind. And so I put those two somewhat more eccentric manuscripts to the side.
The first of those manuscripts was called Dedicated. It had eight sections, each one dedicated to a close friend. Six of those friends were living, and two of those friends were gone.
The manuscript was pretty unrelenting in its focus on time and mortality. Some readers were guaranteed to find it as being way too dark.
What to do. I thought about it for a while, then came to the conclusion that the work would be better served by dividing it up into four chapbooks. Each chapbook would have two of the dedicated sections. There would be lots of breathing room between the chapbooks, and many readers would probably read only one or two of them anyway. Sending the work out into a random order universe really appealed to me. Only the dedicated would take the time to track down all four chapbooks.
They were published as Midnight Hour Blues (Poets & Painters Press, 2022), False Narratives (above/ground press, 2022), History & Secrecy (Poets & Painters Press, 2023) and Echoes (above/ground press, 2023).
I
was a bit surprised. Going back to publishing poetry in chapbooks afforded me a
lovely freedom. I was no longer tied to that haunting epigram from Callimachus:
A big book is big trouble.
Also, chapbooks often travel a different route than full-length books and collections. It is more of a situation of being passed from hand to hand. I started getting emails from far-flung corners written by people I hadn’t heard from in thirty years. As in my youth, publishing poetry was fun again.
4.
The
second manuscript had a series of working titles that never stuck around for very long.
Maybe the work was telling me something: that it didn’t want to all be
shovelled into
the same book.
I took a long, hard look at it. It was another long book of poetry—140 pages—and maybe there was too much of a repetition of themes. Maybe I could make it shorter and punchier.
Once I got going, half of the manuscript fell away. I was now down to 70 pages. And then those 70 pages split in half, and I had two 35 page chapbooks.
It is very true that sometimes the work has a mind of its own. I have learned to always respect that. Now, in the place of a sprawling tome of poetry, there were two chapbooks—their names were Afar and Broken River.
I tend to always follow chronology, and then to cheat when necessary. Nobody ever knows the difference anyway. Though Afar was written before Broken River, my intention was to publish it second. A few poems bounced between them until they finally settled down.
I added a couple of poems written especially for Broken River (above/ground press, 2024). Something required rounding, amplification. I dug back into the past, and found what I was looking for.
In New Zealand, on South Island, there’s a Broken River.
Toronto
June
2-4, 2024
Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. Norris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. He currently resides in Toronto.