dam Davis specializes in harmonic and anecdotal mayhem. In plainer words, he is a narrative poet. And he is one of many who enlarged his portfolio with a self-published chapbook.

Choosing writing as a career, especially choosing to be a poet, is not always considered one of the most practical professions. First and foremost, you have to have the talent and the ambition that it takes, and second, you have to be willing to accept the risks and all the rejection that come with the territory.

As a writer, it can be beyond frustrating to find a way to get your work out there. Many of us try the grueling “please publish something of mine” gambit with the literary journals and others throw in the towel and go the self-publication route. Davis has done both. He was first published in MOSAIC, a literary journal out of the University of California at Riverside, where he was honored with the title of Poet Laureate for 2003. He has also been published in England, where he spent a year at the University of Canterbury. This, however, wasn’t enough. Having been bit by that legendary publishing bug, Davis felt that he should be doing more to share his work. He set out to write a collection that he could self-publish in a chapbook.

The purpose of a chapbook is to increase a poet’s output. Chapbooks grew out of an early tradition of ballad literature. In the 18th and 19th centuries, chapbooks became more popular and were sold to the poorer literate classes as short collections of songs, poems, political treatises, folk stories or religious writings. These collections were sold by the door-to-door salesmen of their day called chapmen, often looked at as dubious fellows. Many chapbooks of this time were also dedicated to children’s literature. The size and content lent itself perfectly to young people learning to read. Chapbooks were typically printed on large sheets of paper and then folded into eight, 16, or 24 pages. The form of chapbooks today is more or less the same, although the collections within them seem to be a tad more concurrent. Many of them follow suit with chapbooks of old by not only including verse, but also visual art. It’s a medium where the two can be mixed together to create a greater statement.

It’s not so hard to make your own chapbook, as far as the folding and typing goes. All you really need is a few sheets of paper, a good idea for a cover, some publishing software and a nearby Kinko’s— or if you’re lucky, a publisher that will do that part for you. It isn’t that expensive, either. The price of printing your own chapbook will run you about $1.50 to $5 per book, depending on how fancy you make it. If you’re smart enough, you might be able to recoup some of your expenses by selling your chapbook to people instead of just donating it to them. That being said, the payoff of making or publishing a chapbook isn’t necessarily monetary. It’s more about expanding as a writer. The hardest part is writing something good and following with something better. It’s best if the small collection relates to a unifying theme and, due to space being somewhat limited, each poem must pack a punch in order to keep the reader’s attention.

The process of writing a chapbook can be taxing for a poet. There is a lot of staring at a blank page waiting for something to happen, then there is the point at which something has happened and a do-over is declared.

A lot of time and revision is put into a chapbook, but it can be a very rewarding experience. Davis didn’t use a streamlined process for the poems in his chapbook.

Most of my work starts with a line. I love describing things and can easily go on for pages writing about a rusted tin can or bullet-riddled road sign, until I eventually drown the reader in words. I was writing 23 lines when two would do. That was the hardest part for me— weaning myself off over-explicating. With that, you have to ax some lines you may love but that ultimately don’t work in the poem— something one of my professors is keen to refer to as ‘killing my darlings.’ Some things work right off the bat, while some take bloody forever to fashion. For example, yesterday I was sitting in the tub and had an idea for a piece when it occurred to me this line I had wanted to use for more than a year would fit perfectly. I’ve finally found it a home. Sometimes I feel like each line is an orphan and I’m charged with its successful placement in a functional poem. Man, how lame was that? I sound like more of a semantic adoption agency than burgeoning poet.”

	The Chapman’s Scribblings

Davis keeps an optimistic view of his future as a writer. “One of the things that always grates me is when I meet someone on a plane or in the laundromat and they ask what I do and I tell them. They tend to respond one of two ways: (a) high-five me and tell me ‘that’s awesome’ or (b) ask, rather condescendingly, what I plan on doing with that. I understand that writing is a tough thing to make a living at, but quite simply, that’s what I want to do. Perhaps it’s naive on my part, but I’d like to give it a shot,” he said. Chapbooks are part of the way he is honing his craft.

Of his poetry, Davis says, “I like to tell a story, but that doesn’t keep me from also being concerned with sound and language. I’m very interested in the sonic nature of poetry. I think the thing that is so great about poetry is that it gives the opportunity to fuse language and story in a very focused and dynamic way. You don’t have as much room to work with as you do in prose, so I think the ante is upped— you have to deliver in a few lines what a story does in 200 pages.”

Davis wrote his first poem at age 7 and claims that it’s the only one he has memorized. “I was always writing stories for school and they got a good response. Until I quit cold-turkey at 13, I was obsessed with comic books. For a long time, I planned on becoming a cartoonist. Then I discovered the video camera and decided on filmmaking, but regardless of what medium I was working in, I was always interested in telling a story. In retrospect, I had always been heading toward writing.”

Davis had his first creative writing class in high school and continued with introductory courses at the University of Utah until he transferred to UC-Riverside. “Transferring to UC-Riverside was so important to me— the idea of having creative writing as my actual major was too tempting to resist. And then came graduate school en lieu of Club Med.”

From Riverside, Davis found his way to New York City, where he is currently attending the MFA poetry program at Columbia University. “Besides perhaps San Francisco or Paris, New York City is any writer’s Mecca. It’s this fabled land of literary adventures where we go to earn our wings. You can’t help but feel inspired walking around, thinking of all those amazing people that wrote here before. And New York really holds tight to its champions of the written word, not to mention all the readings and lectures. Those are always going on around town. New York is great because it seems to understand how important artists are, how much they give to society, and in that, the city does a fair amount to give back to them, if only in the form of free wine and cheese at galleries.”

	Honoring Storytelling Traditions

In the tradition of the great storytellers, Davis’ chapbook Spook Alley is full of narrative poetry that bases itself on subjects taken from Americana. Reading it is like walking through a ghost town and then talking to the one stranger who stayed behind because he thought there would be a lifetime supply of whiskey in the abandoned saloon. “I’m very influenced by stories I’ve heard or imagined. Urban legends, folk tales, ghost stories— they all have an impossibly strong grip on my consciousness and tend to resonate loudly within my writing. I titled my chapbook Spook Alley simply because that was the feeling I got from it— strange and unsettling happenings in everyday America. I always felt the poems had some kind of “Twilight Zone” quality to them, as if reality itself can be continually flipped like a coin. I like that what’s-behind-the-corner kind of stuff. I really feel drawn to the fictional history we’ve fabricated as a nation— the Pecos Bills and John Henrys and Paul Bunyans. We have these amazing stories, but I feel everyone but Johnny Cash neglects them.”

Now that he’s got a few publications and his own chapbook inside his poet pocket, Davis is moving on to even bigger things. “I’ve got a couple of things on the proverbial burner right now. But really, the one thing I’m focused on currently is a magazine my best friend and I are starting up. It’s called Boobytrap. It’s going to be a literary journal hybrid— like Ploughshares crossed with Mad Magazine. The first issue will be out this summer. It isn’t just poetry. It’s a journal of literary land mines. It’s so frustrating as a young writer to have so many magazines to read and never finding one that speaks you. My friend and I really want to create something young writers are going to find interesting and entertaining— something that reflects what we’re working on. We need something to give us hope and humor in the world of the future.”

To read more of Adam Davis, go to http://www.mosaic.ucr.edu/archives.php and click on the 2003 issue of MOSAIC. Contact hayley@red-mag.com if you’d like to get a copy of Spook Alley.
hayley@red-mag.com