Fold, staple, repeat:

above/ground press at thirty (part one of two,

Poetics of the Handmade
April 2018 – November 2022

My small chapbook press, above/ground, has produced more than twelve hundred items since July, 1993; should I just begin with that?

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For most of the past decade, as I predominantly fold and staple during evenings in front of the television, once the children asleep, and address and fill envelopes during similar periods. Mailings are large, and often take longer than I would prefer, given cash-flow.

There are a number of considerations I’ve consciously or unconsciously woven together to develop what has become nearly thirty years of continuous chapbook (broadside, journal, ephemera, etcetera) publication via above/ground press. For example: the late Toronto poet, editor, concrete poet, sound poet, fiction writer and publisher bpNichol wrote of the “gift economy” of small and micro press, existing as a network of exchange between creators. The late Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch repeatedly referred to literature as a “conversation.” These are lessons I absorbed during my early twenties, while roaming the stacks of contemporary Canadian Literature at the University of Ottawa’s Morisset Library. This became clear: we speak to each other through the items we produce. We speak to each other as part of a community, with each member utilizing and providing what skills they are able. Some host and organize readings, others produce magazines, journals or run presses, or write reviews and conduct interviews. Still others might do little bits of multiple things, each task feeding into a larger body of literary production.

The gift economy: between exchange and my status as a reviewer, it means I receive an enormous amount of material—books, chapbooks, journals and other ephemera—through the mail.