This past weekend, as the sidewalks and the streets of midtown Manhattan once again began to fill with urban dwellers lingering in the first warmth of spring, some of New York City’s writers and publishers found pause indoors, creating, investigating, and celebrating the little sibling of the poetry collection: the chapbook. The Festival of the Chapbook was a movable feast, from a book fair and reading in a brightly lit recital hall at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center to a roundtable and panel discussion in the warm, homey loft space of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) in Koreatown, with the Center for Book Arts (CBA) in SoHo hosting bookmaking sessions in between.

On Thursday evening, poets Lytton Smith, Gerald Stern, Judith Vollmer, and Kevin Young, each with his or her own connection to the publication and dissemination of chapbooks, gathered in the Graduate Center for the festival’s keynote reading. Smith commenced the reading with poems from Monster Theory, which was selected by Young for the 2007 New York City Chapbook Fellowship, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America (PSA). [In the interest of full disclosure, my chapbook, Ave, Materia, was selected for the award in 2008.] Smith’s little book is saddle-stapled with a matte cover patterned in wood grain, a design for which he thanked book artist Gabriele Wilson in absentia. As Smith was reading, just as he uttered the line, “Leave your instruments at the entrance,” my cell phone began to vibrate audibly against the floor beneath my seat and, in a way, I thought, against the small, quiet moment of poetry that encompasses the spirit of the chapbook.

Phone switched off, I and the other listeners sat in quiet anticipation as Stern unpacked his papers from a canvas bag and slowly, carefully arranged his things on stage, the scene resembling “an old silent movie,” he quipped. Stern’s chapbook Last Blue was published by festival sponsor and chapbook champion CBA in 1998, as he was a judge for that year’s competition. (He selected James Haug’s Fox Luck for the award.) After instructing the audience, in the interest of time, to “start booing a little past ten of seven,” Stern began reading from his many “poems about shoes,” but not before explaining the fascination: “It’s the lower world I’m interested in.” It was an apt comment, considering the chapbook form’s traditionally underground appeal and mode of production. (Although the chapbooks being celebrated were published by relatively sleek and professional processes.)

Vollmer, winner of the CBA award in 1998, followed. Like Smith, she commented on the design of her book, a deep blue cover that mirrored the poetry in the book. “I was trying to write about water,” she said, explaining that as a writer living in Pittsburgh her work has been affected by the three “untouchable” rivers there. Because of the chapbook form’s diminutive nature, the relationship between their design and content is significant, and a beautifully designed little book is a thing treasured by author and reader.

Young closed the set by reading a poem on Johnny Cash called “I Walk the Line.” As he introduced the poem, correcting himself after referring to the musician as “Johnny” and revising his address to “Mr. Cash,” a bit of phone interference hopped across the speaker system. Acknowledging another tiny moment of cellular-poetry synchronicity, someone from the small but attentive audience whispered, “It’s Johnny.”

I revisited the festival on Saturday at the AAWW, where historian and marketing director Patricia Wakida of Kaya Press, a publisher of literature from the Asian diaspora, was moderating a roundtable called “The Collector’s Show-and-Tell: The Secret History of Asian American Literature.” She had spread out on a low table an array of handmade and professionally printed little books. A volume that immediately caught my eye was a long, rectangular book bound a few inches left of center with two short screws that resembled the rivets on a pair of jeans. If opened on the right side, the book appeared to contain only a collection of poems, but to the left of the binding, where one might not be inclined to look for content, were hidden a series of black-and-white photographs. Several of us responded with a delighted “oh” when Wakida held the book up and flipped open what I had assumed was a blank margin. Another compelling book featured an embossed print of a girl’s silhouette on the cover, and the pages, so pleasing to touch and leaf through, were of a sort of brown-bag stock that felt worn like fine leather.

While many of the books were single-author collections, some featured the work of several authors, much like literary journals. Wakida talked a bit about how the chapbook—in its early incarnations, dating to the seventeen hundreds—often functioned as a forum for all kinds of work: some essentially a hodgepodge of songs, stories, history, and visual elements, kind of like zines. She also discussed distribution, a topic that arose again in the panel discussion that followed, with poet Kimiko Hahn and others in the group adding their thoughts. Since the chapbook’s inception, when they were circulated by door-to-door peddlers known as chapmen, chapbooks have been distributed most efficiently by hand, person to person. (Poet Tan Lin mentioned during the panel that chapbooks “function in a gift economy,” where their value is expressed not in monetary terms, but determined by something more personal: the value of the human exchange.)

The discussion closed with those in the group, which was comprised of Asian American history students, a book collector, two publishers—one commercial, one book-arts—and poets, stating briefly what drew each of them to the event that afternoon. One participant said she was inspired to create chapbooks of her friends’ work, poet Bushra Rehman showed us her own handmade book and described the experience of making it, and another poet mentioned that she was drawn to the chapbook as a form for her work because she couldn’t yet envision her poems making up a larger collection.

A similar question opened the panel with Dawn Lundy Martin, Tan Lin, and Rehman, which was moderated by Wakida, who asked each poet what brought them to the world of the chapbook. Rehman said that she chose to produce her own little books (laid out in QuarkXPress and printed at Kinko’s) because she was performing a lot and wanted to have “a little work of art” to give to people, and her do-it-yourself method seemed the fastest way to get that gift into the hands of others.

Lundy Martin, who lightheartedly said she fell into chapbook publication because she didn’t have enough poems for a book-length collection, won the 2003 PSA New York City Chapbook Fellowship. Her chapbook, The Morning Hour, was selected by C. D. Wright. She also talked about the longevity and mutability of chapbook poems, which have the capacity to live on in a larger collection, and how that offers the appealing opportunity for their continued revision. Lundy Martin echoed Rehman’s remark that chapbooks are a fast way to get your words into the world. She mentioned another type of chapbook she’d produced that was born out of her involvement in the Black Took Collective, a group of “young Black post-theorists who perform and write in hybrid experimental forms.” The collective published their manifesto, “Call for Dissonance,” as a chapbook-pamphlet that included a blank “participatory last page” for readers’ ruminations, and distributed it at performances. (The document was also printed in Fence in 2002 and will appear in A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, forthcoming in July.)

For Lin, the publication of a chapbook came only after he had published the full-length books Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (Sun & Moon Press, 1996) and BlipSoak01 (Atelos, 2003). Seeking a space where he could experiment “below the legal radar” with photographs and text by multiple authors, culled from blogs, text messages, Twitter feeds, and news stories related to the death in 2008 of actor Heath Ledger (a sort of “post book reading environment”), Lin first printed his chapbook Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) using the self-publishing platform Lulu. DIY publishing proved a fast way to establish a body of work, and the product was “careless in an interesting way,” Lin said. The edition of the chapbook that was sold at the event, published by Zasterle Press in January, was slimmer than the Lulu edition he was carrying—with many items excised in the interest of efficiency and reprint permissions.

After the panel, the AAWW hosted an informal reception, and I had a chance to talk to Wakida, Rehman, and others about forthcoming books and chapbooks, project ideas, upcoming events, and literary travels. A poet distributed flyers promoting his book, and fellows from the AAWW enthusiastically sold packs of postcards featuring artwork and poetry produced by participants in one of the center’s workshops. The chapbook, an accessible, grassroots, treasured form for not only poetry but also fiction and art and manifesto and essay, invites community—and as the afternoon grew balmy and guests lounged and conversed, free wine in hand, the relevance and value of the little book was more evident than ever.